The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance 9780415492973, 9780415461016, 9780415380829, 9780415811682, 9780415582551, 9780415636308, 9780415636315, 9781315779010

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I People and companies
Abramović, Marina
Anderson, Laurie
Artaud, Antonin
Athey, Ron
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Barba, Eugenio
Bausch, Pina and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre
Benjamin, Walter
Bharucha, Rustom
Boal, Augusto
Bread and Puppet Theatre Company
Brecht, Bertold
Brook, Peter
Butler, Judith
Cage, John
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Cixous, Hélène
Copeau, Jacques
Craig, Edward Gordon
Cunningham, Merce
Forsythe, William
Goffman, Erving
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo
Grotowski, Jerzy
Hijikata, Tatsumi
Kantor, Tadeusz
Laban, Rudolf Von
Lecoq, Jacques
Lepage, Robert
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Las
Market Theatre
Meyerhold, Vsevolod
Orlan
Phelan, Peggy
Rancière, Jacques
Schechner, Richard
Sistren Theatre Collective
Soyinka, Wole
Split Britches
Sprinkle, Annie
Stanislavsky, Konstantin
Stelarc
Suzuki, Tadashi
Turner, Victor
Wilson, Robert
Wooster Group
Zeami, Motokiyo
Part II Events
4’ 33”
Arab Spring
Balinese Dance-Theatre
Cabaret Voltaire
Cherry Orchard, The
Constant Prince, The
Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me
Dead Class, The
Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men
Dionysus in 69
Einstein on the Beach
Government Inspector, The
Haka
Holocaust memorials and museums
Mahabharata, The
Mother Courage and her Children
Olympics
Paradise Now
Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The
Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act)
Shoot
Sports
Temple of Confessions, The
Tiananmen Square demonstrations
Trio A
Ubu Roi
Waiting for Godot
Yaqui Lent and Easter Ceremonies
Part III Concepts and Practices
Acting
Affect, feeling and emotion
Animals
Applied theatre and socially-engaged performance
Asian performance
Audience and spectator
Body art
Butoh
Camp
Carnival
Circus
Cultural materialism
Dada and surrealism
Dance
Devising
Directing
Documentation
Dramaturgy
Environmental theatre and site-specifi c performance
Everyday life
Expressionism
Feminism
Festivals
Futurism
Happenings
Historiography
Immersive theatre and one-to-one performance
Improvisation
Installation art
Interculturalism
Internet
Lighting and sound
Liveness
Masking/body adornment
Megamusicals
Mise en scène
Movement
Multimedia performance
Museum display
Music, theatre and performance
Naturalism and realism
Paratheatre
Performance/performing
Performance art/live art
Performative/performativity
Phenomenology
Physical theatre
Play
Popular theatre
Postdramatic theatre
Postmodernism
Practice as research
Presence
Protests, demonstrations and parades
Psychoanalysis
Puppetry
Rehearsal
Ritual
Scenography
Semiotics
Space
Theatre
Theatre anthropology
Theatre of the absurd
Theatre of the oppressed
Training
Visual theatre and theatre of images
Appendix: A chronology of world/performance events, births and deaths
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

What is theatre? What is performance? What connects them and how are they different? How have they been shaped by events, people, companies, practices and ideas in the twentieth century and after? And where are they heading next? The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to these big questions. It provides an accessible, informative and engaging introduction to important people and companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. Three easy-to-use alphabetized sections include more than 140 entries on topics and people ranging from performance artist Marina Abramović, to directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Robert Wilson, theorists Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, the haka, cultural materialism, political protest and physical theatre. Each entry includes important historical and contextual information, extensive crossreferencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference guide for the keen student and the passionate theatre-goer alike. Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent, has published extensively on Jerzy Grotowski, Polish and Russian theatre and intercultural performer training processes. Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London, has published widely on relationships between contemporary performance and cultural identities, including in Theatre & the City (2009) and Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013).

Also available from Routledge Stanislavski The Basics Rose Whyman 978-0-415-49297-3 Acting The Basics Bella Merlin 978-0-415-46101-6 Fifty Contemporary Choreographers Edited by Martha Bremser and Lorna Sanders 978-0-415-38082-9 Theatre Studies The Basics Robert Leach 978-0-415-81168-2 Dance Studies The Basics Jo Butterworth 978-0-415-58255-1

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE Second Edition

Paul Allain and Jen Harvie

Second Edition published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006, 2014 Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The rights of Paul Allain and Jen Harvie to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published 2006 by Routledge British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-63630-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-63631-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77901-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

For Joanna Labon, and for my mother, Judy Harvie, and in memory of my father, Eric A. Harvie

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CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

xi xiii 1

Part I People and companies Abramović, Marina Anderson, Laurie Artaud, Antonin Athey, Ron Bakhtin, Mikhail Barba, Eugenio Bausch, Pina and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre Benjamin, Walter Bharucha, Rustom Boal, Augusto Bread and Puppet Theatre Company Brecht, Bertold Brook, Peter Butler, Judith Cage, John Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cixous, Hélène Copeau, Jacques Craig, Edward Gordon Cunningham, Merce Forsythe, William Goffman, Erving Gómez-Peña, Guillermo Grotowski, Jerzy Hijikata, Tatsumi Kantor, Tadeusz Laban, Rudolf Von Lecoq, Jacques Lepage, Robert

13 15 17 19 22 24 25 27 30 31 33 34 36 38 40 41 43 45 46 48 49 50 52 53 54 56 57 59 60 61

vii

CONTENTS

Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Las Market Theatre Meyerhold, Vsevolod Orlan Phelan, Peggy Rancière, Jacques Schechner, Richard Sistren Theatre Collective Soyinka, Wole Split Britches Sprinkle, Annie Stanislavsky, Konstantin Stelarc Suzuki, Tadashi Turner, Victor Wilson, Robert Wooster Group Zeami, Motokiyo

64 65 67 69 71 73 74 76 78 80 81 83 85 86 88 89 92 94

Part II Events 4’ 33” Arab Spring Balinese Dance-Theatre Cabaret Voltaire Cherry Orchard, The Constant Prince, The Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me Dead Class, The Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men Dionysus in 69 Einstein on the Beach Government Inspector, The Haka Holocaust memorials and museums Mahabharata, The Mother Courage and her Children Olympics Paradise Now Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) Shoot Sports Temple of Confessions, The viii

97 99 100 102 103 104 106 107 108 110 112 113 116 117 118 121 123 125 127 129 130 132 134 136

CONTENTS

Tiananmen Square demonstrations Trio A Ubu Roi Waiting for Godot Yaqui Lent and Easter Ceremonies

137 138 140 141 142

Part III Concepts and Practices Acting Affect, feeling and emotion Animals Applied theatre and socially-engaged performance Asian performance Audience and spectator Body art Butoh Camp Carnival Circus Cultural materialism Dada and surrealism Dance Devising Directing Documentation Dramaturgy Environmental theatre and site-specific performance Everyday life Expressionism Feminism Festivals Futurism Happenings Historiography Immersive theatre and one-to-one performance Improvisation Installation art Interculturalism Internet Lighting and sound Liveness Masking/body adornment Megamusicals Mise en scène

145 147 149 151 152 154 156 158 160 161 163 164 166 168 169 172 173 176 178 179 181 183 184 187 188 189 191 192 195 196 198 199 201 203 204 206 208

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CONTENTS

Movement Multimedia performance Museum display Music, theatre and performance Naturalism and realism Paratheatre Performance/performing Performance art/live art Performative/performativity Phenomenology Physical theatre Play Popular theatre Postdramatic theatre Postmodernism Practice as research Presence Protests, demonstrations and parades Psychoanalysis Puppetry Rehearsal Ritual Scenography Semiotics Space Theatre Theatre anthropology Theatre of the absurd Theatre of the oppressed Training Visual theatre and theatre of images

209 210 212 213 215 217 218 220 222 224 225 227 228 230 231 233 235 236 238 239 241 243 245 247 248 250 252 254 255 256 258

Appendix: A chronology of world/performance events, births and deaths Bibliography Index

261 269 281

x

LIST OF FIGURES

1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9

Bread and Puppet Theatre march in protest on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, 2004 © Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA/Corbis Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995). Photo by Wolfgang Kumm/AFP/Getty Images Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 3 December, 1986. Photo by Rafael WOLLMANN/GammaRapho via Getty Images Einstein on the Beach (1976) directed by Robert Wilson, music by Philip Glass; performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, Avignon Festival, 1976. Photo Philippe Gras/Haytham Pictures/ ArenaPAL The haka performed by the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks (2012). Photo ‘Action Plus Sports Images’ Helene Weigel as Mother Courage in Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1949). Photo akg-images A poster for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Olympia Part I: Fest der Völker (Festival of the Nations). (Germany 1936; directed and written by Leni Riefenstahl; documentary of the Olympic Games in Berlin 1936). Photo: akg-images Chris Burden, Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, CA, November 19, 1971: ‘At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’ Sankai Juku perform HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away (1998) © Angel Medina G./epa/Corbis

xi

35 43

64

114 117 124

126

132 160

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to warmly thank the following: Talia Rodgers who commissioned the book, Rosie Waters who steered it patiently towards initial production, and David Avital and Andrea Hartill for the final delivery of the first edition. We would like to thank Iram Satti for assisting us so attentively in preparing the second edition. We are grateful to Ellen Grace, Rob Brown, Sunja Redies and Diane Parker for their eager readiness to help, and to all the marketing team at Taylor & Francis working behind the scenes. We are especially indebted to the many anonymous readers whose reports shaped our entries and selection of contents for the first and second editions and who often helped our task beyond the call of duty. For giving us the time needed to research and write this book, we would both formally like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as our respective institutions, past and present: the University of Kent, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Roehampton. For reading and commenting on specific entries we are grateful to Jason Arcari, Christopher Baugh, Peter Boenisch, Honor Ford-Smith, Adrian Heathfield, Dominic Johnson, Peggy Phelan, Duska Radosavljevic and John Rudlin. We thank Maggie B. Gale, Patrice Pavis, Simon Shepherd and Heather Smyth for their help in diverse ways, as well as colleagues and students at Queen Mary University of London, Kent and Roehampton. Paul is also grateful to Ken Pickering for his friendly discussions. We would like to thank Sumaya Partner for her help with the illustrations. Finally, though not least, we are immensely grateful to Joanna Labon and Deb Kilbride for their patience and support throughout.

xiii

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INTRODUCTION

This second edition provides accessible and updated critical description and analysis of important people and companies, events, concepts and practices in the fields of twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance. It aims to be useful for students, theatre-goers, scholars, teachers, theatre-makers and artists. But it is also for anybody who is interested in engaging with these fields of cultural practice at a time when theatre and other forms of live performance continue to thrive and expand – both despite and because of the proliferation of recorded media – and when performance has become one of the most influential contemporary paradigms for understanding identities and how we interact with and in the world. For this second edition, as well as updating the whole book, we have taken out three entries whose moments have passed and introduced eighteen new ones, across the book’s three sections. This companion is organized primarily into three A–Z lists of entries on people and companies, events and concepts and practices. Entry topics are selected to reflect a broad-based intercultural interdisciplinarity and they focus largely, though not exclusively, on Western performance from the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The entries aim to provide information and to answer questions, but they also raise new questions, pointing out the critical issues that each topic raises within the academic disciplines and artistic practices of theatre and performance, and suggesting where readers could pursue further research. Each entry thus includes important historical and contextual information but also extensive crossreferencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. Part I, People and companies, includes entries on theorists, performers, directors, designers, artists, teachers, writers and groups who have made a defining contribution to the fields of theatre and performance. Part II, Events, selects a small sample of theatre performances and other events that are either important in themselves or exemplify the ways particular kinds of activities have shaped theatre and performance and their significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The third and largest part, Concepts and practices, introduces practices and ideas that are central to these fields, both in theatre- and performance-making and in their analysis. Throughout, the book integrates practice, theory and history, framing these areas as necessarily complementary rather than exclusive and separate. This introduction develops two important frameworks for understanding what we have aimed to do in this book and the critical issues we have had to address. First, it considers why we have written the book the way we have: why we have selected 1

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certain topics and omitted others, made choices about structure, and included a chronology and bibliography. Second, it explores some of the issues that we have had to attend to in writing the book, such as canon formation, critical bias, disciplinary boundaries and, as the twenty-first century progresses, where the practices of theatre and performance and the fields of theatre and performance studies are now going.

THE ENTRIES Before we began writing this book, we proposed notional word lengths for each entry, both to contain them and to help us project how many entries we could include and how they should be balanced. Entries then expanded or contracted, largely as we responded to the interest different topics have elicited among scholars, practitioners and audiences, but also as we developed a sense of dialogue with – and within – the book. An entry’s length should not, therefore, be equated with its importance as some kind of objective rule, though we recognize that entry length does articulate at least one of the book’s structural logics. In content, each entry is designed to provide both description and analysis. In practice, we have also tried to let each entry dictate its own particular needs and shape. The entries in Part I, People and companies, provide basic biographical data, list some key productions, practices, achievements, or writings where relevant, and mention antecedents, influences, collaborators and followers. More importantly, they try to present the main debates, ideas and practices that have gathered around each of the people, plotting how these have evolved with time (or not) and tracking their subsequent influence. The list of people in this section includes a range of mostly twentieth-century theatre and performance practitioners, artists and theorists. The prominence and influence of directors in theatre from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth and after compelled us to include many of them. In response both to the rise of performance art in the twentieth century and to the distinctiveness of its practices – within theatre and fine art – we also include many performance artists. Closely following are the writers and theorists, though we have largely omitted those who are known predominantly as playwrights, another large area of influence which we could not address in these pages. Those playwrights we have included, like Hélène Cixous and Wole Soyinka, are acclaimed as much for their ideas on the theatre or on the social role and function of writing as for their works and craft. This is not to deny the impact and importance of many playwrights and their plays, but we wanted to focus on the live event and those who have somehow commented on or inspired it, rather than considering the theatre as a primarily literary domain. Those theorists we have selected have analysed theatre practice, performance, performance studies, and more. Some people to whom we have given space – like Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler, to cite five examples – were or are not principally theatre or performance scholars. We have included them because their ideas have had profound influence on theatre and performance studies and have even affected theatre practice, although this may be less immediately 2

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apparent. Many of the people chosen for inclusion in this section are the usual suspects, but we hope we have also included some surprises. Our participants hail from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, though the nature of their acclaim means nearly all of them have travelled widely and often relocated from their birthplace or been educated elsewhere, like Rustom Bharucha and Wole Soyinka. In this section, we also include companies whose work is recognized collectively rather than simply through individual figureheads. Finally, we have included las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who are united not by their artistic vision or theatrical practice but by their desire to make known – through their actions – the terrible and often uncertain fate of their own families. As well as illustrating their own tragic case, las Madres demonstrate the ascendance of performative protest throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as a form now ‘practised’ by people worldwide, including participants in the Occupy movement and in events such as the Arab Spring, a new entry in this second edition. The list of entries across this section is diverse, indicating the broad range of activities encompassed by the theatre – and especially performance. Each entry in Part II, Events, briefly introduces the event itself and its documentation (if any exists), and charts the impact the event has had by explaining its significance, be it for other practitioners, theories of performance, or communities of audiences and the public or particular participants. As history reveals, some events pass by and are paid scant attention, while others are important partly because of the attention given to them at the time. It is interesting to note that the only three entries we deleted from the first edition of the book were all events – ones which we believe have much less resonance in 2014 than when we constructed the first edition between 2000 and 2006. Other events still, like the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, have gained importance by being considered subsequently as defining moments in theatre and performance. Performance is extended and elaborated by its aftermath and context, its writings and reflections, as well as its subsequent provocations to action or to thought. This helps to explain why so many practices of performance analysis are derived from other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and increasingly the hard sciences, most recently cognitive science. We need to consider so much more than just the event itself in its own narrow time frame – the study of any performance needs to account for what happened prior to and after the event as much as during it, something the new entry Shoot clearly demonstrates, for as a performance it was actually over and done with in seconds. Some events stay with us all our lives, shaping our personalities and even our daily reflexes, impacting well beyond the specialist discourses of academia. Others are forgotten the moment we leave the auditorium. But while theatre has fairly clear parameters, performance also includes how we play, rest, interact, present ourselves to each other or strive to change our society and surroundings. Accordingly, some of the events entries in this book deal with one moment in time, others reflect on ongoing processes and some are concerned with manifestations of human behaviour that are culturally, politically or socially highly charged. We refer to theatrical events – including plays that have been particularly influential, usually exploring them through première performances. 3

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But we also look at real-life expressions and activities that might be informed by political or social imperatives. And we look at cultural or social events (sports meetings such as the Olympics and protests such as at Tiananmen Square) that function also as public spectacles, many on a global scale. The range of work we might have included in this section is of course vast. But the parameters of the book as a companion rather than a dictionary were a given, and this set some limits. We felt that some events had to be included because they have become central to discourses on performance and the theatre. Others are well-recognized landmarks in theatre or performance history. Others still, we believe, exemplify the kinds of activities that are increasingly important to theatre and performance scholarship and help us indicate broader trends in interest and critical approach. As well as being wary about trying to include too much, we were also concerned not to present a list of events as definitively ‘the most important’. This kind of canon formation raises questions about the bias of any given selection and the risks of devaluing things simply by excluding them. We therefore include in our selection of what we consider to be influential moments and practices, both past and continuing, some which are firmly established and some which lie on the periphery of both academic and public consciousness of theatre and performance. Interestingly, we have seen live, witnessed or participated in hardly any of the chosen events ourselves. But live experience of given events is not essential to analysing them in our field (as demonstrated by the extensive subdiscipline of theatre history); though many scholars are vitally concerned with this very issue and the question of what it means to be present at a work live rather than experiencing it through mediation. This very presence or ‘liveness’ is also crucial because it distinguishes our discipline from film, media, television or literary studies. The complexities of liveness aside, the twenty-eight events selected represent for us those occasions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have partly defined our fields, their questions and their practices. We include nothing from the twenty-first century other than the Arab Spring, perhaps because, just over a decade into it, we cannot yet see, or have not yet experienced, what will shape or is shaping it. Obviously ‘9/11’, as it is known in the United States and many other places, was a serious contender for inclusion and has been much discussed in academic and social circles. Its influence has been monumental. But it is not yet clear how it has altered the ways we do and think about performance and theatre. There are nascent signs of a renewed politicization of practice, and of playwriting especially but at the time of writing, it is hard to gauge the long-term significance of this development. Putting aside the difficulty of prophecy, clearly mass public protests and demonstrations have revealed the continuing efficacy of performance and performative actions now accelerated and augmented by new technologies. These events have often taken place in squares such as Tiananmen in Beijing, Tahrir in Cairo and Independence in Kiev, and their images, speeches and actions have spread both globally and instantly, facilitated by social media. At the time of writing, these have erupted most recently across the Middle East, as well as in Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Quebec and Ukraine. Even without being present at these marches and protests it is possible to feel somehow close to 4

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them, highly engaged, an affect which in turn can increase the likelihood of protests emerging elsewhere or can sustain them, and not least increase their impact. In such a way, the whole notion of what it means to be a spectator and what spectatorship involves is changing. In the largest section of the book, Part III, Concepts and practices, there is even more variability in content and format. Some terms, such as presence or puppetry, are only briefly discussed because they are also addressed within more complex entries on liveness or masking. Some entries are necessarily largely pragmatic, like lighting and sound, though we never approach practical issues without exploring contextual ones. Other entries are more abstract and try to clarify thinking or extrapolate central concerns. With many entries in this part – like theatre, performance, acting and dance – the vast field opened up before us as we attempted definitions and tried to rein them in. The terms theatre and performance are so embedded throughout this book that we decided not to include them in bold for cross-referencing. It is, though, through the complexity of cross-referencing, as well as in the specific context of these terms’ usage, that these words start to build real value and meaning. Throughout, the book treats performance mostly as it relates to theatre, though it also refers at times to dance, performance art and fine art. It was often impossible to separate these disciplines completely, particularly in the section Concepts and practices. The same argument can also be made about music, though not to the same degree. The category of music as music is not something we particularly engage with here, however central it is to the range of practices that constitute performance. For example, we exclude pieces that may have defined or pushed back the parameters of musical performance, like Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918) or his Rite of Spring (1913). There is no space to analyse such innovations here, despite their influence and significance. But we have included music-based practitioners like John Cage and Laurie Anderson, whose works have stimulated and introduced issues and techniques of performing that cut right across disciplinary boundaries. Anderson’s cross-media work shifts into acting with her construction of multiple stage personas. The beguiling ‘silence’ of Cage’s 4' 33" (1952) articulates as much about the acts of playing, performing, listening, the audience, liveness and presence as it says something about music itself.

OUR SELECTIONS, PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES We realize that readers will be drawn to consider what we have left out as much as what we have included. This Companion is neither an encyclopedia nor a dictionary and makes no claims to be comprehensive. Due to restricted space, we have included a selective and limited range of entries in an expanding field of activities and theories. This is necessarily partial and suggestive, a way of mapping the main trajectories. We avoided the word ‘key’ to clarify that we do not aim to present a canonical selection. Performance is about play and fluidity more than fixity of terms; canons soon become out of date or at least set themselves up to be challenged; and most importantly, theatre and performance are both living practices that are in process, 5

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evolving. We aim to convey this sense of our fields’ dynamism by including entries that are both recognized as important and ones which might be seen as emergent or indicative, and by acknowledging the limits and selectivity of our coverage. This book invites the reader to examine theatre and performance through ideas, through people, and by describing the significance of certain events that have shaped these fields. But we emphasize the limits of what we have included here and encourage the reader to see our entries as only a portion of what might be considered. We also appreciate that those included did not work alone. More than most disciplines and arts, theatre and performance are truly collaborative. We have not tried to mask or ignore our biases, which have been made highly evident to us throughout the process, especially through anonymous readers’ responses and their suggestions regarding what else we might include as we have drafted the Companion at first and second edition stages – across a span of fourteen years. We acknowledge that we are writing from particular positions and with particular interests and we have tried to capitalize on these to produce a book that benefits from the enthusiasms, commitments and knowledge we can bring to it. However, we have also tried to acknowledge and explore our own prejudices and subjective interests and to go beyond them: through our collaboration, through responding to readers’ reports and editors’ insightful suggestions and through our university teaching, which keeps us aware of developing curricula as well as students’ interests. To further offset the limitations of our biases, we would encourage readers to actively search for our prejudices and positions, take issue with our emphases, challenge our synopses, and form your own opinions about the main components that comprise our fields. Write between the lines and the entries in the white spaces that surround them. Fill in the gaps in the chronology and bibliography. This Companion has been designed to travel with you rather than to sit idly on the reference shelf. While the selection process was one challenge, another was to synthesize without oversimplifying. We wanted to limit jargon but still articulate the specificities, complexities and contradictions of our fields. We also acknowledge this complexity by marking cross-references in bold, widening each individual entry beyond its own narrow terms. The annotated bibliographies suggest further reading and explain briefly why we consider certain texts useful or important. Our bibliographies focus largely on books rather than articles, primarily to prioritize material that is most widely available. Again, these are highly selective and suggestive, hopefully encouraging further reading and research. The final bibliography mainly collates texts from individual entries that have general rather than specific application but also adds some more interest while still maintaining the Companion’s focus. The Chronology is drawn from the entries and materials mentioned in the book but also includes major world events. These additions should therefore be seen not as serving theatre and performance in general, but as providing another way of approaching the book’s content. Reading the chronological timeline in one sweep rebuilds the linear shape of a history that we have broken into three categories and disorganized by alphabetization. Through the Chronology’s mapping you can read clusters of activity, strange conjunctions of births and deaths, and feel the sweep of change in the twentieth century and after. 6

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The Companion is inevitably informed by the fact that it was written in Britain in the first decades of the twenty-first century. We thought hard about the geographical scope of the book and its historical focus. Restrictions needed to be set, though these did not necessarily reflect our own personal tastes or desires. As theatre and performance scholars, our research has drawn us frequently to other countries’ practices, especially in Canada, Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia, as much as to practices in Britain. Our choices and writing are inevitably informed, though, by living and working in Britain, even if this is not explicit in the content of our selections. Our own interests in international work aside, performance practice and study in Britain have been wide-ranging and cross-cultural for decades, even if the language to describe such interculturalism only developed fully as late as the 1990s. The primacy of the playtext and the playwright has shifted with the growing interest in postdramatic theatre, devising and visual approaches to performance-making. Dance has continued to encroach on theatre’s territory. The technologies of multimedia performance have eroded the mimetic tradition that dominated for so long, overtly showing representation as multiple and fractured and revealing the processes by which performance is made. Similarly, performance art has laid bare the theatre’s tools and techniques, discarding many of them on the way and inventing its own. In the light of such developments in theatre and its practices, it is alarming that British theatre is still rarely identified as European. Quite why this is so is seldom discussed, but is clearly problematic and tied into complex questions of national identity, cultural histories and cultural investments. There is no denying British theatre’s impact on mainland European theatre, through interest in the plays of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Simon Stephens and directors like Katie Mitchell. The backward flow into Britain is equally evident in the influence of Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Copeau and Jerzy Grotowski. Festivals like the Edinburgh International Festival, BITE at London’s Barbican Centre and the London International Festival of Theatre have opened up British theatre thinking and practice by bringing the best of world performance to Britain. One result is that the study of plays as the primary focus of theatre or drama studies has been increasingly challenged as being far too limited. However, we still need to articulate more accurately these national and cultural differences and similarities, as well as focusing on rich cross-currents. The vexed questions about European theatre and the United Kingdom’s place in it are only implicit in these entries and their selection, but they have been present throughout the book’s process. We have attempted to speak from our own locales and preoccupations without being parochial, while honouring the trajectories of the past and anticipating the potentials of the future. Our book might be founded on Western practices, principles and theories, even if we ourselves are caught somewhere between Europe and North America. But just as our histories are inseparable from North American and continental European practices and concepts, it is impossible to isolate ourselves from African, Asian or Australasian performance, even if we wanted to. We have not had space to focus specifically on non-Western practices per se, but we have occasionally stepped outside our declared focus – in the entries on Motokiyo Zeami, Wole Soyinka and 7

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the haka, for example – to question the hegemonies and priorities we are reproducing. Tadashi Suzuki is a world director as much as a Japanese one, partly because of the widespread influence of his training method and his writings as they are published in English. Where, too, does Wole Soyinka belong? Our small provocations are a reminder that the frames this book uses are only a structure we have created, driven by the demands of such a publication. Such rigidity must not carry over into the freer domain of thinking. We welcome the new eclecticism of our fields and their much wider cultural, geographical and disciplinary purview, while recognizing the (particularly academic?) need to limit, catalogue, archive, document and list. We also had to limit our historical parameters. Writing in the first decades of a new century made the process of retrospection neater and logical. The scope of the twentieth century also allowed us to explore the great changes wrought by the movement from modern to postmodern ways of thinking and the impact this had on making performance. The process of returning to the book for the second edition, over a decade after writing began, has been both revealing and challenging. Routledge kindly allowed us to expand the Companion, so the removal of three Events entries was our choice alone, as mentioned above. Our four new People entries are two theorists (Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière) and two practitioner/theorists, one from dance (William Forsythe) and one from performance art (Ron Athey). We have only three new entries for Events, representing everyday events, dance theatre and performance art. The main additions therefore are in Concepts and practices, for it is here where things have moved on, both within the profession and the academy. Whilst our selection of people, companies and events was always, by its nature, more arbitrary and dependent on our own tastes, experiences and knowledge, the Concepts and practices section is constrained by more objectively-defined parameters. The inclusion now of entries such as Affect, feeling and emotion, Applied and sociallyengaged performance and Physical theatre shows the growth of new areas of study and practice, or at least of newly-established taxonomies and terminologies. Inevitably these follow on from the practices that feed such theorising and naming. But they can also be prompted by specific academic works. The inclusion of the entry Postdramatic theatre shows a certain vulnerability regarding publications, in that our Companion was first published also by Routledge in the same year (2006) as Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal work of that title, seven years after its German publication. It is clear in such a case to see how a publication can begin to define a field as much as it documents, analyses and describes it. The inclusion now of Documentation and Practice as research as separate entries is also quite telling, indicating not only a shift towards recognizing the significance and value of practical research within the academy but also indicating how new – and mostly digital – technologies have enabled and supported this. The ubiquitous recording of everyday life as well as performance and theatre events is transforming the way we teach, research and learn in our field, making the object of study much more accessible and retrievable, whatever else is revealed in discussions about 8

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liveness that are still unfolding around us. We are delighted therefore that as part of this evolution this Companion now exists as an ebook. But we are also very pleased that it has been selected by Routledge to provide the main framework for their online Routledge Performance Archive (www.routledgeperformancearchive.com). On this archive, as well as being able to read several of this Companion’s entries, curious readers can find audio-visual materials that back up many of our discussions here as well as specially commissioned writing and previously published articles. In order to benefit from this link to the archive, we have included in the annotated bibliographies the initials ‘RPA’ wherever specific materials link to an individual entry that can be discovered in the online archive.

THEATRE STUDIES AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES Given some of the changes outlined here and reiterated in this new edition, there is no denying that the field of theatre studies has undergone a paradigm shift. The advent of theatre studies was already an innovation beyond the study of drama because it emphasized that theatre’s meaning is produced not just through its texts but through all its significations and practices – including training, uses of space and technology, performance style and scenography, for example. Beginning in the United States in the 1970s – but burgeoning in the 1980s and 1990s and moving well beyond the US – performance studies began to explore non-theatrical cultural practices that shared performance characteristics with theatre. This was partly motivated by expanding interdisciplinary links that proposed new ways of understanding things, and by growing interest in redressing theatre studies’ potential focus on cultural practice that was both elite and Western. In one direction, led by Richard Schechner at New York University, this new scholarship explored links with anthropology in particular; examined such activities as religious and other social rituals, including rites of passage and sporting events; and observed performance practices in Asia and in Native communities in the Americas. In another direction, led by scholars at Northwestern University in Chicago, performance studies developed out of speech communication studies to examine such things as rhetoric and graffiti. Performance studies also responded to the increasing diversification of performance practices, especially the rise of performance art and body art and the growth of installation art and site-specific performance. In this context, again, performance studies was interdisciplinary, overlapping with fine art and various critical fields such as feminism, sociology and philosophy. Finally, performance studies introduced new critical concerns that were shared by new forms of performance as well as more traditional theatre forms. These concerns include liveness and the ephemerality of performance, the politics of protest, and innovative critical practices such as performative writing. Performance studies has received much criticism – for proposing too vast a field, for dehistoricizing and taking things out of their social context, and for being amateur in its efforts to practise interdisciplinarity. But it has also demonstrated the profound resonance of thinking of a huge range of cultural practices as

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performance, and it has greatly expanded the strategies through which we can think about performance. Whether the paradigm shift from theatre to performance studies has ended or is still just beginning is hard to tell. In Britain, performance studies appears to be in its infancy in relation to the large family of drama and theatre departments that exist. Yet, whatever the titles of the courses we teach, there is no denying the substantial impact of this shift from theatre to performance – to put it at its most basic. In this book, the ‘broad spectrum’ approach of performance studies has encouraged us to include such entries as Holocaust memorials and museums, Sports, and the Olympics within Part II, Events. Concepts and practices includes numerous terms derived from the study of performance, rather than the theatre as such. Since the commissioning of this book’s first edition in 2000, its working title has changed, from a Companion to Performance to a Companion to Theatre and Performance. This might seem to argue against the increasing dominance of performance just outlined. But paradoxically, in fact it attests to the deepening entrenchment of performance and performance studies in Britain which is continuing in the second decade of this century. The extent of this swing has meant that we wanted to reinstate the theatre at the centre of our Companion, to locate the book within a practice of theatre history in which performance studies’ development is deeply embedded. Even if our writing is located in a field that at present is increasingly hybridized and all the more exciting for that, we can ignore neither the theatre’s history before performance studies nor performance studies’ practical and conceptual links to theatre. Finally, because we wanted this Companion to be as useful as possible for its readers, we felt it must recognize and demonstrate the current co-dependence of theatre studies and performance studies. We have also not ignored the professional context in which we and our students now operate. Almost as striking as the paradigm shift from theatre to performance studies is the fact that the boundary between theatre and performance’s makers and thinkers has become increasingly thin in British higher education. Residencies, artists’ fellowships, the growth of practice as research and the very practical nature of many university programmes have all eroded mutual suspicions and doubts. We wanted to address a range of audiences in this Companion, and we also needed to present together theatre and performance’s thinkers and doers; the two are inextricably linked. With a growing university-level student body in Britain, in spite of rapidly rising higher education fees, and the quick expansion of our subject fields, there has recently been a fervent publication of readers, dictionaries, sourcebooks and guides to theatre and performance. It is important to ask why there have been so many such books of this sort. The growth and change in the discipline sketched here have resulted in a greater need for orientation. And no two books are the same when they try to cover wide ground. Many of the books that already exist are either theatre dictionaries or edited collections of theoretical texts. Few have attempted to make such an overt bridge between the two fields of theatre and performance studies, or have embraced practice and theory as closely as we do here, combining the pragmatic and the analytical. 10

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It might be tempting to try to define what performance and theatre are, to close down. This is not a book of definitions, however, but a guidebook. Our subject is currently too open and its practices too dynamic to be best served by prescriptive statements. We want the entries, the networks and links these create, and the map they draw to be a topography to guide you through a quickly shifting and enlarging field which now has a well-established and well-documented history and has not only come of age as an academic subject, but is also moving on.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Words that have their own entry are normally indicated in bold in their first reference in any individual entry. There are exceptions to this rule. As mentioned above, because the words theatre or performance occur so frequently throughout the book, we have decided not to put them in bold, except where they are part of a composite term. We also do not put entry words in bold when we are using them in ways not implied by the entry. Finally, we have chosen to put in bold words which are variations on entry titles; for example, we sometimes put the word devised in bold although the actual entry is titled devising. Paul Allain and Jen Harvie Canterbury and London April 2014

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Part I PEOPLE AND COMPANIES

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ABRAM OVI Ć , M ARI N A

ABRAMOVIĆ, MARINA (SERBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST/TEACHER, 1946–) Calling herself the grandmother of performance art, since the 1970s Abramović has been making work that is intimate, physically and emotionally exposing, dangerous, and which extrapolates such practices of everyday life as walking, screaming and simply being to explore their latent power. In work that bears some resemblance to that of fellow body artists Orlan and Stelarc, she has pushed the limits of her body’s endurance, art practice, and the relationship between performer and audience, consistently investigating the social responsibilities of art, artist and audience. Some of her earliest work was probably the most dangerous because it invited not only audience participation but potential violence as well. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she invited her audience to do what they wanted to her using a selection of seventy-two available objects, ranging from the relatively benign (a feather, lipstick, honey), to the potentially harmful (matches, scissors, knives, a whip, a saw, an axe), to the potentially lethal (a bullet, a gun). Concerned spectators halted the performance after six hours, by which point all of Abramović’s clothes had been cut off, she had been painted, cleaned, cut and decorated, and a loaded gun had been held to her head. As Richard Schechner’s Performance Group discovered in Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), breaking conventional performer/audience boundaries can produce exciting, unexpected outcomes, but it can also expose the performer to uncontrollable risks. In subsequent performances, Abramović reduced her audience’s potentially sadistic access to her, but she continued to explore the limits of her endurance as well as her own masochism, her audience’s relationship to it, and the powers of endurance to transform herself and her audiences, physically, emotionally and psychically. Throughout 1975, she performed several body art pieces that tested physical limits: screaming until she lost her voice in Freeing the Voice; running repeatedly into a wall until she collapsed in Interruption in Space; and using a razor to cut a fivepointed star into her stomach, whipping herself, and lying on a cross of ice for thirty minutes in Lips of Thomas. Clearly these works staged violent physical transformations, but they also explored the potential for these somewhat ritualized acts to effect less visible psychic transformation, both for Abramović as performer and for her audience as witness. From 1976 to 1988, in one of contemporary art’s most famous long-term collaborations, Abramović continued to test the limits of endurance with her partner, the East German artist known as Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). After a long series of works that continued to explore the endurance of pain, the couple shifted to making pieces that required them more obviously to endure time. In Night Sea Crossing (1981), performed in various locations around the world, they sat still, silent, and without eating, facing each other across a table for seven to twelve hours at a time over several days. The culmination of their collaborative endurance art was The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall (1988, China). Over ninety days, she walked approximately 2,500 kilometres from the eastern end of the wall, he from the western end, to meet in the middle, where they ended their relationship. Here, they staged endurance in 15

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time and space, literally and metaphorically enacting their journey/life together as at once shared, separate and separating. In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Abramović continues to make durational work but often with a much more explicitly social reference than in her earlier work. Balkan Baroque (1997) referred directly to the ethnic cleansing of then-recent wars in her homeland. The installation juxtaposed a triptych of videos showing her parents and herself, three copper vessels, and a pile of 1,500 beef bones. For six hours a day over five days she sat on the bones and scrubbed them with disinfectant. As in her earlier work, Abramović’s enactment explored physical and emotional pain as well as feelings of shame, using video to contextualize her live actions and religious references to suggest confession and the potential of forgiveness. Again, Balkan Baroque challenged her audience to witness and take responsibility for the violence she committed against herself. In a shift from the predominantly personal references of her earlier work, however, Balkan Baroque also challenged her audience to take responsibility for the larger political contexts to which it referred. In 2002, she performed The House with the Ocean View, living without talking or eating for twelve days in a New York gallery installation of three exposed rooms elevated 1.5m above the floor and ‘approached’ only by ladders with butchers’ knives for rungs. (The piece gained notoriety not least because it featured in the popular HBO television programme Sex and the City in 2003.) Audiences were asked to keep silent but to participate in what Abramović called an ‘energy dialogue’, in which she engaged the gaze of individual audience members one at a time. At the end of the work, she explained that it was a response to the events of 11 September 2001, and was dedicated to the people of New York. Again, she used personally depriving durational work to stage presence as well as personal and social contemplation, reflection and – possibly – transformation. She reiterated these features of intense performer/audience presence and engagement in the very high-profile 2010 retrospective of her work, The Artist Is Present at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art – MoMA’s very first retrospective on performance. Here, daily for three months, for a total of 700 hours, she sat at a table with individual gallery visitors sitting across from her, one by one, engaging her gaze. While Abramović’s media, strategies and profile may have shifted over the years, she has remained relentlessly committed to exploring art and performance as means for expressing and encountering violence and pain, as media for challenging the limits of conventional performer/audience – or human – boundaries and possibilities of communication, and as ritual acts that can effect personal and social psychic transformation. In the twenty-first century, she has formalized her commitment to preserving and documenting live and durational art. In 2005, she presented Seven Easy Pieces at New York’s prestigious Guggenheim Museum, in which she re-enacted her own and others’ live artworks principally from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2013, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) which will open a large premises in Hudson, New York in 2015 dedicated to presenting and preserving long durational art work. This ‘institutionalization’ of live art and of Abramović herself coincides with her ascendance as an icon of live art: she was the focus of Robert 16

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Wilson’s spectacular show The Life and Death of Marina Abramović presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2011. It also coincides with her approach to pop cultural household-name status: in 2013, she collaborated with the likes of pop musicians Lady Gaga and Jay-Z who supported her crowd-funding campaign to raise funds for MAI. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramović’s Artist Body briefly describes her works, illustrates them with photos and provides commentary and biography. Richards’ book is a detailed illustrated review of Abramović’s career. Goldberg and Warr’s books provide useful context. Iles’s book collects several critical articles and is extensively illustrated. The collection, edited by Orrell, documents plans for the MAI premises and Seven Easy Pieces (2005). Abramović, Marina (1998) Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998, Milan: Charta. —— (2003) Marina Abramović: The House with the Ocean View, Milan: Charta. —— and Dobrila De Negri (1998) Performing Body, Milan: Charta. —— Germano Celant and Sergio Troisi (2001) Public Body, Milan: Charta. Goldberg, RoseLee (1998) Performance: Live Art Since the 60s, London: Thames and Hudson. Iles, Chrissie (ed.) (1995) Marina Abramović: Objects, Performance, Video, Sound, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Orrell, Paula (ed.) (2010) Marina Abramović + the Future of Performance Art, Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag. Richards, Mary (2010) Marina Abramović, Abingdon: Routledge. Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.

ANDERSON, LAURIE (AMERICAN MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE ARTIST/ COMPOSER/MUSICIAN/WRITER/VISUAL ARTIST/FILMMAKER, 1947–) Laurie Anderson works across a range of media to tell stories in which she observes society and makes social critiques – gently and with humour, but pointedly. She consistently challenges performance’s conventional forms, combining and juxtaposing its media to make theatre/concerts, ‘talking books’ and technological body art. She rejects realism to produce dreamlike disembodied voices, androgynous bodies, large-scale, surreal stage pictures, and postmodern non-linear series of observations, thereby provoking her audiences to look and listen anew. From within her strange but generally calm, even languid, performances, she subtly explores themes of power, gender relations, communication and technological development, often focusing on apparent social contradictions such as her own impulses to be both private (for example, to whisper) and public (to perform), and American culture’s simultaneous propensity for both puritanism and violence. Although her initial training was in sculpture, Anderson quickly shifted into performance art when she began incorporating sound and herself into her work. In the happening Duets on Ice (1974–75), performed in a variety of public settings, 17

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Anderson wore skates embedded in blocks of ice and, until the ice melted, she ran her bow over her self-playing violin, which was fitted with a speaker to play recordings of cowboy songs. Minimalist works like this explored properties of sound, time, sitespecificity, balance and contrast, and challenged the autonomy of the art object and artist by opening the piece up to chance and outside influences, like John Cage’s 4' 33". It also deliberately placed Anderson outside of the institutions and economies of fine art. Although her subsequent work moved indoors and onstage and took on a larger scale and more technology, it retained the surprise of her early work because it pioneered multimedia performance, combining live performance, video and slide projections, synthesized music, and amplified and/or sonically altered monologues. Her stock of signature eerie and disembodied sounds includes her own voice, deepened an octave, slowed and amplified through a vocoder to produce what she has called ‘the voice of authority’ (subversively mimicking a male voice). Along with sound, her performances characteristically distort space (especially scale), often by placing her as the tiny and lone live performer in an oversized suit on a large stage dominated by outsized furniture or gigantic rear-projected silhouettes or videos. Through sonic and spatial juxtapositions like this, Anderson happily explores technology’s pleasures and potentials but she does not sell out to it, because she simultaneously scrutinizes its dominance over humans, especially in contemporary American culture. She also explores the performativity of identity, speaking and appearing as male and female, human and cyborg. And she simultaneously exploits and challenges the apparent value of liveness by technologically mediating her own performance. Anderson’s ongoing sonic and spatial experiments further indicate her dedication to exploring new ways of communicating with audiences. While her early small gallery exhibitions and handmade books used intimacy and contact to effect communication, subsequent live shows such as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999) use altered instruments, songs such as ‘O Superman’ (1981) tap into popular music markets, and her internet and CD-ROM work uses electronic and cyberspatial interactivity (for example, the CD-ROM Puppet Motel, 1994). Her foray into popular musical performance probably garnered her biggest audience but nevertheless remained experimental. ‘O Superman’, which she first performed in an early version of the performance United States (1980), reached the Number 2 spot in British pop music charts but was – atypically for the charts – eight minutes long. Her dual commitment to experimentation and communication has led her to collaborate with some of the twentieth century’s most famous innovative artists. For example, she has produced sound for choreographer Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), Robert Wilson’s production of Alcestis (1986) and Robert Lepage’s solo show The Far Side of the Moon (2000), and she has co-written songs about their respective superpower nations with dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (2013). Much of her earliest work was predominantly autobiographical and often explicitly feminist. Throughout her work, Anderson advocates the expression of personal feelings, dreams and aspirations even as she appraises society (for example, American politics and culture from the era of Reagan to that of George W. Bush). Although, as 18

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she claims in Stories from the Nerve Bible, she ‘ran out of stories’ and switched from talking about ‘I’ to talking about ‘you’, her work maintains an ethereal, dreamlike quality and intimacy (see psychoanalysis). For example, her famous ‘performance portrait of the country’, the eight-hour United States, I–IV (1983), coupled social critique with observations of everyday events, autobiographical material and personal expression. Anderson continues to perform internationally and to explore innovative means of expressing personal feelings as well as social analysis. In particular, she continues her strongly ambivalent relationship with technology, having accepted a position as NASA’s first artist-in-residence in 2003. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stories from the Nerve Bible idiosyncratically documents Anderson’s artwork from the 1970s into the 1990s. Howell, Jestrovic and McKenzie all provide suggestive analyses of her work. Goldberg’s book gathers numerous photographs, long sections of performance text, commentary, biography and a bibliography. Anderson, Laurie (1984) United States, New York: Harper and Row. —— (1994) Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–1992, New York: Harper Perennial. —— Online www.laurieanderson.com/home.shtml (accessed 11 October 2013). Goldberg, RoseLee (2000) Laurie Anderson, London: Thames and Hudson. Howell, John (1992) Laurie Anderson, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Jestrovic, Silvija (2004) ‘From the Ice Cube Stage to Simulated Reality: Place and Displacement in Laurie Anderson’s Performances’, Contemporary Theatre Review 14.1: 25–37. McKenzie, Jon (1997) ‘Laurie Anderson for Dummies’, The Drama Review 41.2: 30–50.

ARTAUD, ANTONIN (FRENCH ACTOR/THEORIST/WRITER, 1896–1948) There is no denying how central Artaud has been to the development of twentiethcentury performance, with his advocacy of physical, visual and non-verbal aspects of theatre. Artaud’s main theoretical investigations concentrate on his notions of ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and theatre as a ‘plague’, contained within his writings in The Theatre and Its Double, published in 1938. Though an actor, Artaud’s actual practice is minimally articulated and offers few concrete techniques. The essay ‘An Affective Athleticism’ depicts a systematic training of breathing, based partly on theories from the Jewish Cabala, through which an actor can supposedly tap into emotional memories rooted in the body. But beyond this rather esoteric hypothesis there are few indications of what the performer might actually do in Artaud’s theatre, though he did chart some basic staging scenarios as well as scenographic and aural possibilities. It is predominantly his theories, therefore, that have driven forward later investigations. Many of his ideas were visionary and ahead of their time and only posthumously has Artaud achieved great acclaim.

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Artaud worked at a time of economic hardship between the two world wars as he witnessed the departure of mass audiences from theatres into cinemas and the music hall. He therefore championed the theatre’s role as providing a liberating and purgatory experience that could cleanse society of its violent excesses through a kind of ‘soul therapy’. Operating almost as a contagion or plague that subconsciously passes out into the world through mass audiences, theatre could reveal society’s hidden side. Artaud believed that performance could tap into the kinds of energies and unconstrained behaviour that a plague unleashes, as people struggle for survival against all odds. The physicality of the theatre event should wake audiences up, sensitize them and penetrate beneath the skin, enlivening their ‘hearts and nerves’ by attacking and stirring their unconscious. Artaud was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories about the unconscious as well as the surrealists, with whose philosophies and aesthetics he identified. Another important inspiration was Alfred Jarry, the author of Ubu Roi (1896) – in 1926, Artaud co-founded the Alfred Jarry Theatre, with which he worked for three years. Artaud berated the limitations of naturalism for appealing only to our rational verbal side. Instead he argued for a ritualistic form of communication where words could operate as incantation rather than meaning. The Cambodian and then Balinese dance-theatre that he saw in 1922 and 1931 respectively provided a model for this, though he mistakenly conceived the very precise symbolic gestures and mudras (or hand gestures) of the Balinese dancers as non-specific communication with their gods. But the synthesis of music, dance, elaborate costuming and mask all helped Artaud to forge his vision of a total theatre. Artaud advocated seating the audience in revolving chairs so that they could take in the action surrounding them as the actors moved throughout the auditorium. They would then also witness their fellow audience’s responses rather than just seeing the backs of heads (as in proscenium arch theatre), endorsing his notion of contagion. Giant puppets were to appear alongside the actors in a mise en scène that emphasized rhythm, movement and complex theatre technologies based on lighting and sound effects. This interest in current technology was inspired in part by Artaud’s acting in films such as Abel Gance’s epic Napoléon (1927). The subject matter of the performances he described was to be drawn from real-life events (tales of love, crime, invasions and war), with actors and puppets enacting violent actions or murders. These stories of grand historical figures should become as vivid as dreams or visions, so that the stage event has a sort of hyperrealism. This is Artaud’s ‘double’: theatre should recall those moments when we wake from dreams unsure whether the dream’s content or the bed we are lying in is our reality. The theatre could mirror life but also move on from naturalism’s mimetic representation to appeal also to our unconscious, thus revealing life in its totality. In a response to Artaud, eminent critical theorist Jacques Derrida developed this concept in relation to deconstruction in his much-discussed essay ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ (1978). He extended Artaud’s attack on the facile and passive mimesis of naturalism, questioning whether representation in the theatre is actually possible. 20

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Artaud’s understanding of cruelty must not be oversimplified. He is referring as much to rigour, precision and the demands made on the actors and audience – questions of process – as to the style or content of performance. He stated that people had forgotten how to scream, and that the actor had an imperative to use his or her entire physical resources to make contact with a hidden ‘ur-self’ in order to express primal emotions and touch the spectator. His desire to reconfigure the theatre event necessitated redefining the spectator’s as much as the performer’s role. Although he directed few productions himself, he did put his ideas into practice in productions of August Strindberg’s The Dream Play (1928) and much more emphatically in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1935). His theories can also be read through his short plays such as A Spurt of Blood (1925). Following the failure of The Cenci, in 1936 and 1937 Artaud made journeys to Mexico, Brussels and the Aran Islands in Ireland, after which he was confined as a patient in a Paris mental institution for several years. Poor mental health afflicted him for much of his life. He then became a heavy drug user (including opium and heroin), which further destabilized him. Many of his written statements, manifestos and letters are couched in a complex and meandering language, which is undeniably passionate, if at times frustrating in its abstraction. His ideas have most tangibly been put into practice by those who came after him. This influence was particularly strong in the 1950s and 1960s in happenings, in the dedicated work of Jerzy Grotowski’s actors, in the spatial and experiential experiments of the Living Theatre and pieces like Paradise Now (1968), and in Peter Brook’s 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season in London. Aspects of an Artaudian vision have persisted with subsequent physical theatre pieces such as DV8’s 1988 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. Following on from these theatrical or dance-based experiments, performance and body artists including Chris Burden with Shoot, Stelarc, Ron Athey and Marina Abramović and Ulay have, with their extreme physical plundering of the body’s resources and limitations, explored what cruelty means on quite a personal and embodied level. These practitioners have often cited Artaud as a direct influence with Orlan even reading his texts during her surgical operations (Reincarnation, 1990–93). Even if not ‘Artaudian’ per se, spectacular events and multimedia performances by groups like La Fura dels Baus, as well as immersive theatre performances by companies such as Punchdrunk, show how pervasive and persuasive Artaud’s vision of a total theatre still is. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artaud’s writings appear in various places in English, from The Theatre and Its Double to Sontag’s collection. Barber and Esslin introduce his life in accessible ways, and the 2001 collection has a very helpful commentary. Artaud, Antonin (1970) The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London: Calder and Boyars Ltd. Barber, Stephen (1993) Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs, London: Faber and Faber. 21

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Derrida, Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Esslin, Martin (1976) Antonin Artaud, the Man and His Work, London: John Calder. Schumacher, Claude and Brian Singleton (eds) (2001) Artaud on Theatre, London: Methuen. Sontag, Susan (ed.) (1988) Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, Berkeley: University of California Press.

ATHEY, RON (AMERICAN BODY AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1961–) Ron Athey makes uncompromising body art and is one of the most influential performance artists since the early 1990s. Whether performed solo or in collaboration, his works feature bodies in situations of acute physical extremity, consistently provoking questions about sexuality, desire, homophobia, disease, resilience, affect, the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS, death and the death drive, queer culture, representation, witnessing, consent and more. Athey presents his solo and collaborative art and theatre projects mostly at festivals, in galleries and in clubs in the USA, the UK and elsewhere across Europe. His work is usually composed of a series of tableaux and rituals featuring a range of repeating images, acts and figures. Chief amongst these is his own pierced, tattooed, naked or near-naked body engaged in acts of physical extremity and endurance. In a collaboration with Juliana Snapper, Judas Cradle (2004), he is impaled or ‘seated’ on a wooden, pyramid-shaped, Spanish Inquisition-age torture apparatus. In Solar Anus (1999/2006), his face is stretched taut by hooks. Again and again, he bleeds profusely, for example, in Self-Obliteration I (2008). His ecstatic imagery and rituals reference religion, SM and death and draw directly on his background. Raised a Pentecostal Christian who learned to revere ecstatic speaking-in-tongues, he became a prominent member of the queer, punk and SM club scenes in Los Angeles in the 1980s. He was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985, over a decade before antiretroviral treatment was widely introduced in the West, ending HIV/AIDS being seen (and, for many, experienced) as a terminal illness here. Athey’s work is developed not only from autobiography and intuition but also from complex research sources, particularly in literature (for example, Georges Bataille), theatre (Jean Genet, Reza Abdoh, Antonin Artaud), film, music and visual art (Pierre Molinier, David Wojnarowicz). The extremity of Athey’s acts is not designed gratuitously to shock or titillate. However, as a form of uncompromisingly difficult socially-engaged performance, it does explicitly provoke, compelling audiences to explore things they might find disturbing, including social issues such as homophobia, and important but sometimes challenging human experiences like ecstasy, desire and death. Composed of live acts such as cutting and bleeding, his performances are emphatically real, rather than merely representational, as in so much theatre and other arts and media. This realness obliges audiences literally to face acts and images that are queer, frequently painful and not only usually culturally marginalized but often explicitly or implicitly censored, sometimes violently so. His exploration of his own body as a site of atrocity forces audiences to gaze on cultural homophobia – a homophobia that both 22

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stigmatized male homosexuals and fatally delayed the development and distribution of treatments in the first decade at least of HIV/AIDS. His exploration also requires audiences, as witnesses to genuine acts of violence, to confront their relationship to and potential complicity with such violence. His performances frequently focus in comparatively celebratory ways on his own anus – as a source of metres-long banners in Deliverance (1995) and strings of pearls in Trojan Whore (1995) and Solar Anus, for which he had his anus spectacularly tattooed. This focus insists that audiences pay attention to a part of the body usually attributed derogatory cultural meaning and that they witness the celebration, plenitude, wonder and magic with which Athey presents it. Acts in his performances are often resonantly both devastating and beautiful. The ensemble show 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994), for example, was staged in what Athey has called his ‘plague years’ before the introduction of antiretroviral therapies, and it portrayed a landscape marked by tragic, violent and catastrophic loss but also extraordinary gestures of mutual care and compassion. For both supporters and detractors, Athey’s performances provoke strong feelings, ranging from disgust to desire, distress, concern and more. For his supporters, this is part of the profound social and aesthetic work of his practice, compelling engagement and response. Athey performs at and tests limits of the body, art, taboos, morality and more. These provocations have drawn the attention and censure of some observers on the liberal left, for example parts of the gay press, who perceive his work as too nihilistic and destabilizing to strategies of cultural assimilation. But his work – or misrepresentations of it – has been most violently condemned by some observers on the far right – most famously, US Senator Jesse Helms – for whom it provokes moral panic and who have used it to legitimate calls to rescind American federal arts funding through the National Endowment for the Arts. For many audiences and fellow artists though, Athey’s practice offers a profound and appropriately challenging engagement with the catastrophic times and effects of the era of AIDS, with the consequences of survival, and with the acutely affective powers of performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson’s interview in Contemporary Theatre Review provides a succinct introduction to Athey’s work; his edited collection offers a magnificent range of images and critical commentary as well as an extensive bibliography. Califia, Doyle and Jones all offer analysis of key works by Athey and/or issues relevant to his practice. Califia, Patrick (2002) ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, in Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, San Francisco: Cleis Press, pp. 357–64. Doyle, Jennifer (2013) Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, Dominic (2008) ‘Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey’, Contemporary Theatre Review 18: 4, 503–13.

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—— (ed.) (2013) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London and Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect. Jones, Amelia (2006) ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, The Drama Review 50: 159–69.

BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL (RUSSIAN LITERARY CRITIC, 1885–1975) Bakhtin is best known in the West for his theories of dialogism, polyphony and carnival. All of these are concerned with literary, linguistic and cultural forms and their ideological effects, especially the potential resistance they offer to authoritarian control. Bakhtin argued that one of the ways official culture attempts to assert its control is through monologic discourse – language and expression that appear to be coherent, unified in voice, and ‘the last word’. Dialogism, on the other hand, admits and articulates differences, combining a number of independent voices, consciousnesses and styles, and incorporating laughter, irony and indeterminacy. Polyphony, similarly, describes the inclusion – but not assimilation – of many voices or, literally, many sounds. Although this many-voiced-ness might seem to be most characteristic of drama with its numerous characters, Bakhtin claimed that drama assumes a monologic authorial voice, which quells difference. He argued that the quintessential dialogic form was the novel, with its contradictory, contesting, overlapping voices, and its author’s and characters’ discourses interacting on equal terms (apparent most impressively, for Bakhtin, in the novels of Dostoyevsky). Despite his dismissal of drama, Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism have been recuperated for drama and performance, particularly as a means of exploring the anti-authoritarian impulses and variegated forms of much modernist, postmodernist and postdramatic performance (in, for example, Dada and the work of Bertold Brecht, the Wooster Group, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Laurie Anderson). Probably more influential in performance studies, however, is Bakhtin’s theory of carnival developed in his book on early Renaissance writing, Rabelais and His World. For Bakhtin, the term ‘carnival’ could describe the fair, its environment and its participants’ behaviours, but also unconventional or lowbrow behaviour more broadly: colloquial language, bawdy humour and scatological references to bodily functions, whether these were experienced in real life or through fiction like Rabelais’. Bakhtin’s central concern with carnival was with its social function, especially its relationship to dominant cultures. On one hand, carnival could be seen to disrupt and challenge authority by being other – unruly, indecorous and transgressive. On the other hand, because carnival was socially sanctioned or allowed to happen – through the granting of official permits for carnivals proper, for example – its ability to break and challenge rules was always contained and, therefore, ultimately ineffectual. For Bakhtin, carnival’s social role was ambivalent, both transgressive and contained, something that challenged cultural limits and simultaneously enforced them. It is this dynamic, ambivalent social effect of carnival that many have used to think about the

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social function of theatre and performance, from the official (for example, ‘national’ theatre and state parades) to the subcultural (street festivals and protests). Bakhtin wrote many of his most influential texts in the 1920s and 1930s. However, their influence was delayed initially because of censorship in Stalin-era Russia (in 1929, Bakhtin was sentenced to six years’ exile in Soviet Central Asia). His work was only rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and translated into English in the 1980s. Since then, however, critics across a range of disciplines – from linguistic and literary studies, to philosophy, ethics, cultural studies and feminist and postcolonial studies – have found in his writings excellent tools for exploring the social production of meaning and the political potential of expressive activities, including performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. —— (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Holquist, Michael (1990) Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London: Routledge. Lechte, John (1994) Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity, London: Routledge.

BARBA, EUGENIO (ITALIAN DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1936–) Since the mid 1960s, Barba has directed numerous performances while simultaneously developing sophisticated theoretical models for analysing processes of performing, performer training and dramaturgy. Barba’s theatrical explorations began in Opole, Poland, where he worked as assistant director to Jerzy Grotowski from 1960 to 1964. Barba’s apprenticeship with Grotowski led to a rich relationship that Barba has described as being akin to that between a master and his disciple. In 1968, Barba edited Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre under the auspices of his own company, Odin Teatret, which he founded in Oslo in 1964 with actors rejected from Oslo’s drama schools. Since 1966 Odin has been based in the small town of Holstebro, Denmark. Barba was instrumental in introducing the work of Grotowski to an international public and his practices drew closely on the Laboratory Theatre’s approach. This can be seen explicitly in early performances such as Kaspariana (1967), My Father’s House (1972), but even in later pieces like The Castle of Holstebro (1990). Odin’s productions have toured to great acclaim, praised in particular for the immense technical ability of the highly-trained actors. Some of these, like Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Elsa Marie Laukvik, have worked with Barba from the beginning. As well as touring performances at international theatre festivals, Barba has taken his work to south Italian villages and to the Yanomami Native Indians in the Amazon, leading what he calls ‘barters’. These involve the cultural exchange of training 25

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exercises, songs and performances. For Barba, it is not the quality or value of the goods exchanged that counts, but the action of exchange itself. Although the interaction is always performance-based, outcomes might be more concrete or permanent: in one Italian village the audience gained access to Odin’s performance not with tickets but by bringing books, thereby starting a local community library which the village desperately needed. Barba has frequently led exchanges with ‘third theatre’ groups, whom he defines as those working on the margins of society, often with minimal infrastructure and high artistic ideals, and whose primary motivation is experimentation. Odin Teatret’s own emphasis on research and a broad notion of collaboration has enabled company members to develop solo pieces and specialisms, be they documentary filmmaking, vocal training, or organizing the large company archive. In addition, Odin work closely with their local community of Holstebro, not least on the Festuge week which comprises both professional and amateur activities, and which has taken over the Danish town at irregular intervals since 1989. Company members have also established their own international networks and festivals, including with the Magdalena Project and Transit Festival. Barba has attempted to create a working vocabulary to discuss performance (and especially performing), under the umbrella of theatre anthropology. He invented this term to examine what lies behind performance and performer techniques from a broad international spectrum of performance modes and cultures. He has articulated the findings of his research through regular meetings of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded in 1979. These events have hosted performers from a range of disciplines and from East and West, to demonstrate and share the principles that underlie their work. Barba has considered such techniques to be preexpressive, focusing on that which is happening before (but also at the same time as) a performer expresses herself in a particular role. Pre-expressivity emphasizes how the performer stands, the space the body occupies, and even involuntary physical processes such as the pulse rate, which all affect the performer’s communication. It concerns the energy (or bios as Barba prefers to call it) that exists even before the performer has any intention to express herself. Pre-expressive principles are thus part of a panoply of techniques that might be called pre-cultural, or which are at least not culturally encoded or located. Barba has shown numerous performances at ISTA events, sometimes as barters. ISTA productions have included the multicultural performance sequence Theatrum Mundi (1982), which places performers from different countries alongside each other in an integrated cross-cultural practice and attempts to apply techniques and principles from diverse disciplines in performance. These pieces demonstrate Barba’s ability to negotiate new terrains and terminologies for examining the nature and craft of performance as well as pre-performance techniques. Many of his practices and ideas have had a substantial influence on physical theatre companies and artists. With his emphasis on the pre-cultural, interest in intercultural and cross-cultural theatre, seen in his invention of terms like ‘Eurasian theatre’, Barba has frequently been attacked by critics like Rustom Bharucha for ignoring cultural and social conditions. Barba maintains that his perspective is only one way of deconstructing 26

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performance and in his numerous articles and books he has argued that his approach has pragmatic value for performers. It is also an antidote to the distance with which Asian performance is often viewed and, importantly, has shown what performing arts across cultures have in common – what unites rather than separates them. Through his range of practices, Barba has made a significant contribution to broadening the parameters of Western performance and experimentation, helping to refine not only performance craft but also studies of performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner and Watson provide useful background and contextual information, including on Odin Teatret, supplemented by Ledger’s particular focus on Odin’s community work. Several videos are commercially available about the company’s different modes of work, especially from the 1970s. Details of these can be found on their website. RPA Barba, Eugenio (1979) The Floating Islands: Reflections with Odin Teatret, Denmark: Thomsens Bogtrykheri. —— (1985) Beyond the Floating Islands, Denmark: H. M. Bergs Forlag. —— (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler, London: Routledge. —— (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge. —— and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge. Ledger, Adam J. (2012) Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Odin Teatret. Online. Available www.odinteatret.dk (accessed 26 June 2013). Turner, Jane (2004) Eugenio Barba, London: Routledge. Watson, Ian (1993) Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, London: Routledge. —— and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

BAUSCH, PINA AND THE WUPPERTAL DANCE THEATRE (GERMAN CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER, 1940–2009) Although she was principally a dance choreographer, Bausch was also profoundly influential in theatre through her pioneering work in the hybrid form of dance theatre. Her choreography’s emphasis on social experience and emotional expression successfully challenged the formalism, abstraction and aestheticism typical of much ballet and contemporary dance. In the way that she has theatricalized dance and responded to classical forms and techniques such as ballet – by questioning and updating them – she has something in common with William Forsythe, even if their performance aesthetics are very different. And her demonstration that performing bodies (and not just voices) can be acutely expressive, both emotionally and socially, has provoked 27

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theatre-makers to develop their use of performers’ bodies and movement to produce both emotional expression and social critique. Bausch’s fundamental interest in the expressive potential of the body was established early through training with expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss in Germany. Following further training in New York at the Juilliard School of Music, Bausch returned to Germany in 1962 to work as a solo dancer and, later, a choreographer. The Wuppertal Opera Company, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, invited her to choreograph for them in 1972 and appointed her director in 1973. She promptly changed the company name to Wuppertaler Tanztheater (Wuppertal Dance Theatre) and, soon after, to Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. In making these name changes, Bausch signalled the company’s movement away from the conservative classical dance – whether ballet or modern – that was predominant in Germany at the time. What she was moving towards was both a different kind of dance – or content – and a different kind of performance event – or form. She revived German traditions of expressionism, notably Ausdruckstanz, or expressive dance, which had been popular in the interwar years and had influenced her early training, and she sought in everyday movement a physical vocabulary for expressing personal experience. Using performers’ autobiographical material, her dances are devised through improvisation. Sequences within each dance may appear elegant, heroic and extraordinary, but they are just as likely to appear fatigued, defeated and ordinary, expanding the emotional range of dance movement. She also aimed to develop dance’s theatrical potential, most importantly scenographic and costume design, ‘non-dance’ movement, and the use of the spoken word, sometimes in direct address. Often, the ‘theatricalization’ of the event facilitates the expressiveness of the dance. For example, Bausch’s settings in real elemental materials, with floor coverings of a layer of earth in Rite of Spring (1975), dead leaves in Blue Beard (1977), carnations in Nelken (1982), and ankle-deep water in Arien (1985), provoked different (including everyday) movements from her dancers as well as emotional responses from her audiences. Norbert Servos has called Bausch’s sets like these ‘poetic playgrounds’ (see visual theatre). Bausch’s shows characteristically use montage and repetition and are several hours long, circling around themes of love, loneliness, fear and exploitation in a style reminiscent of dreams, everyday life, popular theatre and cultural forms such as music hall. In these and many other respects, Bausch’s dance aims to be democratic, using material devised by her international dancers, many of whom are long-time collaborators, and developing a form and a physical vocabulary that is not elite, like ballet’s, but is inspired by everyday contexts, movements and music. Her familiar costumes of satin evening gowns and tuxedos are reminiscent of social dance as distinct from theatrical dance, and she sources music from 1930s and 1940s popular culture. While Bausch’s dance aims to explore democratic expressiveness, however, part of what it demonstrates is that individual expression is profoundly controlled – or, more precisely, produced – by material conditions (physical obstacles), social expectations (taboos and codes of dress and behaviour) and social contexts (the group). Movement may be expressive but, because it is socially conditioned, it is 28

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rarely genuinely spontaneous. Identity, likewise, is shown to be ‘accumulated’ through the performative repetition of patterns of social movement, play and games, rituals and – in this context, of course – dance sequences (see Judith Butler). Bausch’s dance has aesthetic appeal – being by turns beautiful, harrowing, kinetically exciting, eccentric and funny. But she was not satisfied with providing attractive, escapist illusions, and her work was designed more precisely to provoke emotional reactions. She admitted she was less interested in how people move than in what moves them. Thus she aimed to articulate and challenge some of the problems of daily life, especially those arising from gender relations. By repeatedly costuming her female performers in stereotypical social costumes of high heels and cocktail dresses and her male performers in suits, for example, her work evoked the oppressions of gender categories even as it stimulated nostalgia for them (see feminism). Further, she challenged her audience to engage with and respond to her work by provoking them out of their passivity, whether by using iconoclastic movements, sets, costumes or music and sometimes surreal compositions, or by making her shows overlong or open-ended (see postdramatic theatre and postmodernism). By constantly invoking the dress and music of the 1930s and staging her work in landscapes that frequently ended up devastated, she also invited her audiences to think about historical events and transitions, especially in Germany. Bausch’s demonstration of dance theatre’s potential has inspired many other choreographers and companies – including London-based DV8 Physical Theatre – to adopt and develop the form, and has inspired many theatre directors to enhance their use of the body in performance. Her work is known and celebrated internationally, not least through her company’s long-time touring to major world festivals. Following her death in 2009, the Wuppertal Dance Theatre continues to present Bausch’s choreography, led by long-term members Dominique Mercy and Robert Sturm. BIBLIOGRAPHY

For analysis, see Cody, Fernandes, Gradinger and Mulrooney. Servos provides lavish photographic illustration in both books cited here and Gradinger offers an extensive bibliography. Climenhaga has compiled a comprehensive, international and up-todate collection of essays on Bausch and the company (2013) and written a shorter overview (2009). Climenhaga, Royd (2009) Pina Bausch, Oxon: Routledge. —— (ed.) (2013), The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, London: Routledge. Cody, Gabrielle (1998) ‘Woman, Man, Dog, Tree: Two Decades of Intimate and Monumental Bodies in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater’, TDR: The Drama Review 42.2 (TDR 158): 115–31. Reprinted in Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge, pp.193–205.

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Fernandes, Ciane (2001) Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation, New York: Peter Lang. Gradinger, Malve (1999) ‘Pina Bausch’, in Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, Martha Bremser (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 25–29. Mulrooney, Deirdre (2002) Orientalism, Orientation and the Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch, New York: Peter Lang. Pina Bausch. Online. Available www.pina-bausch.de (accessed 1 July 2013). Servos, Norbert (1984) Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater, or, The Art of Training a Goldfish: Excursions into Dance, trans. Patricia Stadié, Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen Verlag Rolf Garske. —— (2008) Pina Bausch Dance Theatre, photographs Gert Weigelt, trans. Stephen Morris, Munich: K. Kieser Verlag.

BENJAMIN, WALTER (GERMAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITIC, 1892–1940) Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish literary and cultural critic whose work ranged formidably and eclectically across a huge variety of subjects, from German tragic drama to film, translation, capitalism, allegory, book collecting and the role of criticism. His writings, recordings and discourses with other important twentieth-century artists and thinkers including his friend Bertold Brecht have made him one of the most influential modern critics. Three sets of his ideas have had the most impact within theatre and performance studies for their conceptualization and advocacy of the political effects of art and culture. They relate specifically to art’s technological reproduction, Brecht’s epic theatre and theories of urban life. Benjamin’s most influential essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, published in a variety of versions between 1935 and 1939, examines how the social function of art changes with the introduction of mass technological reproduction, especially through photography and film. Before this era, individual artworks held what Benjamin calls ‘aura’; they required individual contemplation and therefore supported a bourgeois capitalist economy as well as, potentially, fascism, since they cultivated elitism. With mass reproduction and distribution, art became available to mass audiences, undermining the auratic artwork’s elitism and recognizing everyone as a ‘quasi-expert’. Benjamin’s arguments about auratic and technologically reproduced artworks resonate with more recent debates about the comparative value of performance’s liveness set against its multimedia transformation and its documentation. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin expresses an appreciation for film montage which chimes with his advocacy of epic theatre in ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’; both film montage and epic theatre interrupt attention in ways that shock audiences into recognizing political meaning and taking political action. While Benjamin’s theory was deeply influenced by the work of other philosophers such as T. W. Adorno, it was also influenced by the cultural materialist practice of Brecht. For example, Benjamin admired how Brecht’s epic theatre demonstrated the ways that forces produce history (and the present), but might also 30

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be acted on by human agents and changed. Benjamin investigates the social and cultural history of urban life in such works as the massive Arcades Project (incomplete and unpublished in his lifetime) and various writings on the nineteenth-century poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He explores the kinds of social life that are made possible – or inhibited – as urban circumstances change through the advance of consumer capitalism. One of his principle focuses is the flâneur, a leisured urban wanderer who features in Baudelaire’s poetry as well as Paris’s famous covered shopping arcades and who observes his fellow citizens and the city. For Benjamin, the flâneur is a magnificent urban explorer whose leisure betrays his (sic) privilege but who nevertheless is not compelled or distracted by consumerism. He presents an everyday urban creativity endangered, for Benjamin, by the rise of consumerism and its imperative to buy, rather than simply to observe. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin examines the glass-covered shopping arcades that proliferated in Paris in the early nineteenth century, suggesting they create a sort of scenographic playground for the display and fetishization of commodities. Benjamin was writing during a period of enormous social, economic and political transformation and of critical scepticism about the potential of art to bring about positive social change. He investigated art’s limitations, such as the problem of the flâneur’s privilege. But he also advocated for a committed, materialist – not ‘just’ intellectual – engagement with art’s effects, and he championed art’s potential to make constructive social interventions. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Understanding Brecht gathers several texts related to Brecht and epic theatre, including ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’, which is also included in Illuminations. Hannah Arendt’s ‘Introduction’ to Illuminations provides helpful biographical, historical and intellectual contextualization and excellent critical analysis. Arendt, Hannah (1970) ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 1–55. Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University. —— (1973) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn and Quintin Hoare, London: NLB. —— (1970) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 219–53. —— (1973) Understanding Brecht, London: New Left Books. —— (1970) Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape.

BHARUCHA, RUSTOM (INDIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1946–) Bharucha has had an influential impact on intercultural theories and practices, questioning the motives and processes of the likes of directors Jerzy Grotowski, 31

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Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook. He has harshly exposed misrepresentations and mystifications of Asian performance and culture in their practice and research processes, particularly in Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985). His views have been strongly criticized. He has also decried what he considers the biases and shortcomings in Western (though not exclusively) scholars’ and practitioners’ attempts to mix cultures or develop theories based on cross-cultural principles and methodologies. His materialist approach has led him to refute the acultural thinking and claims for universalism of many intercultural projects, and he has turned his attention to the problematics of work by Singaporean company Theatreworks. Too much theorizing and too many performances, he has argued, are apolitical and ignore the specificity of local culture, local interests and needs, as well as overriding the specific traditions in which performers might be based. Bharucha takes issue with Barba’s notion of Eurasian theatre, arguing that Barba misleadingly conflates culturally- and socially-specific processes in a way that ignores historical and gender difference, for example. His most notable condemnation of Western thinkers and practitioners appeared in his collection of essays Theatre and the World (published in 1990 in India and three years later by Routledge). This book also describes an Indian intracultural project that looked to local grassroots sources and influences as a model of good practice. Social activism has been central to Bharucha’s work. A product of cultural mixing, Bharucha taught for several years in New York, though he has worked and lived predominantly in India, where he has led his own dramaturgical and creative projects. He has often directed classical Western and Indian plays, searching for Asian and especially Indian traditions of acting that can be used in the performance of European texts, like his realization of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Concert (1986–89). Interestingly, these performances have received little critical attention in Western circles, and nothing like that he has paid to others’ work. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bharucha has written several books and articles about Indian theatre and cultural traditions and politics, the complexities of Asian cultures (e.g. 2009’s Another Asia), as well as works including Theatre and the World that are known more widely in the West. Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge. —— (1997) ‘Somebody’s Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of our Times’, in The Intercultural Performance Reader, Patrice Pavis (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 196–212. —— (1999) In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India, Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. —— (2000) The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, London: Athlone.

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—— (2004) ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’, Theatre Journal 56: 1–28. —— (2009) Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BOAL, AUGUSTO (BRAZILIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/TEACHER, 1931–2009) Throughout his life Boal consistently attempted to demonstrate that theatrical action has the potential to make a social and political impact. His work catalysed the theatre’s struggle to maintain a political focus in what has been called a postmodern age, after the fervent agitation of the 1960s. Boal was initially a director at the Arena Theatre in São Paulo, Brazil, where he produced international classic plays, but he soon became concerned to find a theatre language that was accessible to the illiterate and poor masses in the Latin American countries where he worked. He argued that Aristotle’s system, based on the three unities of time, space and action as well as catharsis, was ‘coercive’. He believed that catharsis, like carnival, is a device that maintains the status quo and keeps the oppressed passive by encouraging a controlled dispersal of ‘steam’ or tension. Inspired by the educationalist Paolo de Freire and his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Boal drew on Bertold Brecht’s theories and practices, especially when his work moved out of theatre buildings and away from traditional performance structures. Under the umbrella of the theatre of the oppressed, he developed several techniques and modes of performance that can operate in theatrical and non-theatrical milieus as applied and socially-engaged performance. For political reasons he was exiled from Brazil and then Argentina in 1971. Boal then moved to Europe and settled in Paris, where he invented the idea of the ‘cop-inthe-head’. This term was meant to denote the oppression of self-censorship and social control which was more familiar in the West and was very different from the more overt forms of demagogy found in Latin America at that time. After his return to Brazil in 1986, Boal became a Member of the City Council for Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where he began encouraging groups to suggest the implementation of new laws through his ‘Legislative Theatre’ practice. This involved the use of forum techniques with active ‘spectactor’ participation to pinpoint, discuss, and refine potential legislation to support local communities. Boal published books in several languages documenting both his techniques and his theories. Partly as a consequence of this wide dissemination of his ideas, his practices have been adopted by many groups, ranging from homeless people in London to communities of First Nations people in Canada who have explored issues of sexual abuse. His paratheatrical work bordered on therapy, though the emphasis was on communal rather than individual healing. For him the theatre had to question and engage with real, often external, issues and situations and attempt to help resolve them, thereby endeavouring to empower people. While his utopianism was inspirational for many, his detractors have questioned the relevance of his approach in a 33

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European (rather than Latin American) context, where political and social polarities and oppressions are less clearly defined. Detractors aside, his work has been fundamental in breaking down notions of where and with whom theatre can happen, in investigating the boundaries between art and everyday life, and in maintaining a politicized theatre practice. Today many groups and individuals still work both explicitly and implicitly in the spirit of his aims. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The best access to Boal’s work is through his own texts, which illustrate the development of his theories with practical examples. The Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz collection illuminates the wider application of his ideas. Babbage presents a good introduction to Boal and his practices as well as ways to apply his techniques. Babbage, Frances (2004) Augusto Boal, London: Routledge. Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, London: Pluto Press. —— (1995) The Rainbow of Desire, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. —— (1998) Legislative Theatre, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. —— (2001) Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics, trans. Adrian Jackson and Candia Blaker, London: Routledge. —— (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. —— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and Activism, London: Routledge.

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATRE COMPANY (AMERICAN VISUAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL THEATRE GROUP, 1963–) Bread and Puppet came to the fore of American experimental theatre in the late 1960s and 1970s with protest and demonstration performances such as A Monument for Ishi (1975) that utilized giant puppets, parades and symbolic masks, amongst other popular theatre devices and forms (see Figure 1). Many early works were protests against the Vietnam War – for example, Fire (1966) – but they also addressed other social issues including the growth of materialism and increasing technological mechanization. Founded by German Peter Schumann in New York in 1963, the group’s name refers to the company’s practice of inviting audiences after performances to share bread baked by the company. Schumann’s premise was that theatre should be as essential to life as bread. Such symbolism and the use of simple allegorical narratives have given his work what many have perceived as a ritual and spiritual dimension. The collective is still active today, based on a farm in Vermont, USA, and leads workshops and creates performances, such as the annual local piece The Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant, which ran from 1970 to 1998. Their 34

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Figure 1 Bread and Puppet Theatre march in protest on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, 2004 performances happen on a vast scale often on outdoor sites, utilizing simple but bold expressionistic designs and community participation, either in the making and manipulation of the puppets and objects, through wearing masks, or through the communal eating of bread. Bread and Puppet’s performances have a strong ideological basis (Schumann is a pacifist) and often address regional or topical issues such as environmental waste or nuclear power, as well as the impact of global problems on local groups. These alter in order to address ongoing or new social concerns as they arise. Bread and Puppet’s visual and environmental theatre practice epitomizes a politically and socially-engaged mode of carnivalesque street presentation and demonstration as well as aesthetic outdoor performance that has attracted many imitators. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht’s two-volume title provides a wealth of information on the company. Shank places their work in the broader context of American theatre experimentation, while Simon and Estrin have collated a vivid collection of essays and photographs, a vital introduction to the work. Bread and Puppet. Online. Available http://breadandpuppet.org (accessed 21 July 2013). Brecht, Stefan (1988) The Bread and Puppet Theatre, 2 vols, London: Methuen. 35

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Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Simon, Ronald T. and Marc Estrin (2004) Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Vermont: Chelsea Green Books.

BRECHT, BERTOLD (GERMAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/WRITER/THEORIST, 1898–1956) Brecht was a major reformer of several aspects of twentieth-century theatre. He created an acting process, theories of dramaturgy and performance, a performance style, and wrote hundreds of plays and poems, many informed by his strong belief in Marxism. His works were meant to instruct as well as move, a defining principle of his creative output, and they promoted a Marxist vision. Over time, this conviction relaxed a little as he shifted from a didactic stance to a more open socially-engaged investigation of possibilities. Early plays such as The Mother (1932) were starkly polemical in their presentation of political crises and potential solutions. This approach was epitomized in his Lehrstücke, or learning plays, such as The Measures Taken (1930), several of which were targeted at theatre workers to instruct them in the aesthetics and techniques of Brecht’s theatre as well as ways of thinking. His later and better-known plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954) and Mother Courage and Her Children (1949; see Figure 6) presented dilemmas for the audience to consider, putting the onus on the spectator to question and evaluate potential means to make redress for the characters’ plights. Brecht demanded a critical response from the spectator, an active intellectual engagement which he found lacking in the closed cycle of naturalism. In naturalism, the audience is expected to empathize with the characters on stage but is not necessarily expected to think how their situation might be altered. The process therefore ends as the play closes. Brecht wanted to break down the ‘fourth wall’ through various devices: revealing decisions his characters made and the context in which they did so; making narrative techniques overt; and exposing the processes by which performances are constructed, even showing the actor to be aware on stage of the artifice of his or her role. These notions of public participation in change and an emphasis on process rather than product are as fundamental to Brecht’s aesthetic vision as they are to Marxism. Brecht was aware of the increasing danger of his position as a Marxist and public figure and so fled Germany in 1933. He left Europe in 1941 and went into exile in the United States. He continued to write there, including a first draft of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Life of Galileo in 1947, the year when he was famously questioned about his Communist connections by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to a Communist East Germany in 1948 and a year later, with his wife, Helene Weigel, founded the still-extant Berliner Ensemble. Under his charge this became one of the most influential theatre groups in Europe, contributing to the politicization of writers and theatre artists worldwide. The development of poetic

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plays by the likes of British playwright John Arden, for example, followed the ensemble’s visit to the United Kingdom and London’s Palace Theatre in 1955. Of all Brecht’s theatrical strategies, the most widely known is ‘alienation’ or the Verfremdungseffekt. This is more appropriately translated as ‘distancing’ or ‘distantiation’, alluding primarily to the critical perspective with which an audience should engage with the production as well as the attitude an actor might have towards his or her role. It was inspired in part by the non-illusionistic nature of Chinese theatre and especially Beijing Opera, to which Brecht was introduced when he met the actor Mei Lan Fang (1894–1961) in 1935 in Moscow. The Verfremdungseffekt was made possible by many techniques, most notably Gestus. Actors should recognize a play’s key Gestus, or those actions which have social-political resonance and implications. Such awareness should help make visible the central dilemma of any one moment within a production. An example is Helene Weigel’s silent scream in Mother Courage and Her Children when she hears of her son’s death but must hide her response for her own safety. Such techniques might seem at first sight overcomplicated and difficult to embody, but Brecht wanted his plays also to exude a sense of fun (Spass), inspired in part by his contact with the thriving world of German cabaret in the 1920s and 1930s. Frequent assumptions about Brecht’s work include the misunderstanding that he did not want his audience to feel any emotion. Rather, Brecht wanted the spectators to rationalize their emotional responses and to evaluate the stage action objectively in order to ascertain the social foundation of the characters’ motivations and their own reactions to these. To further separate the actors from their textual material and encourage objectivity, Brecht wrote parts for narrators or storytellers, and used Sprachgesang, or half-spoken, half-sung text. Many of the songs in his plays were written by the celebrated composer Kurt Weill. Such popular theatre devices made his work accessible, thereby replacing the bourgeoisie as the dominant audience in the theatre in pre-Second World War Weimar Germany with a more representative cross section of society and especially the working class. Brecht also collaborated with the designer Caspar Neher to create a scenography with functional rather than decorative props, which showed realistically how people worked and lived. Neher constructed simple locations for each scene and emblematic (even Gestus-like) scenographic items such as Mother Courage’s cart. His style integrated a spartan playing space – a boxing ring of sorts – with appropriate and telling gestic detail. Brecht’s reflections on and theories of performance are most clearly expressed in the essay ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’ (1948) and in short pieces such as The Street Scene (1938), which describes how different witnesses at an accident narrate the same event from alternative perspectives that combine to make up the whole picture. He differentiated between his Epic Theatre and naturalism’s Dramatic Theatre. Epic Theatre relies on narrative rather than plot, the action unfolding in selfcontained scenes that make up the total story, each of which might be introduced by a slogan or a sign. Epic Theatre depicts social and political processes, whereas naturalism shows people governed by apparently natural laws and evolutionary determinism, unalterable and beyond the sway of reason. Brecht’s ability to articulate his playwriting and directing practice succinctly and with passion, his production of 37

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model books (Modellbücher) which document in photographs and text his stagings and their mises en scène, and his importance to other influential artists and thinkers including Walter Benjamin have meant that his ideas have been, and will continue to be, for a long time to come, at the centre of politically-motivated theatre practices, like those of the late Augusto Boal. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are numerous books on Brecht, including useful edited works like the Thomson and Sacks Companion, Wright’s recontextualization, and the Routledge sourcebook edited by Martin and Bial, as well as the controversial Fuegi biography. Willett’s translations and analyses have become the authoritative texts on Brecht’s life and works. RPA Brecht, Bertold (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, London: Methuen. —— (1970–present) Collected Plays, 10 vols, London: Eyre Methuen. Fuegi, John (1994) Life and Lies of Bertold Brecht, London: HarperCollins. Martin, Carol and Henry Bial (eds) (1999) Brecht Sourcebook, London: Routledge. Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks (eds) (1994) The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willett, John (1959) The Theatre of Bertold Brecht, London: Methuen. —— (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen. Wright, Elizabeth (1989) Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, London: Routledge.

BROOK, PETER (ENGLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1925–) Peter Brook has combined successful international productions of classical texts with experimental devised pieces, as well as lectures and writing. He worked initially as a director in Britain where, in a short space of time and at an early age, he directed a large body of work, including classical European plays, Shakespeare and opera. He was dubbed a ‘boy wonder’ after successful productions including King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Company with Paul Scofield (1962). During the1960s his work became more experimental, and in collaboration with director Charles Marowitz he produced the 1964 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Aldwych Theatre in London. This was an attempt to put Antonin Artaud’s theories into practice, an important research project even if some of the results were considered disastrous. Other notable productions from this period include Peter Weiss’s Marat-Sade (1964) and the devised piece US (1966), both of which showed influences from Bertold Brecht. The latter production (ambivalently titled either ‘us’ or ‘US’, as in the United States) questioned the Vietnam War and interrogated the individual’s responsibility in the face of such devastation. For this production, Brook invited Jerzy Grotowski and his lead actor Ryszard Cieślak to work briefly with his actors. Their close relationship founded on mutual support and interest in research processes lasted until Grotowski’s death in 1999. 38

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In 1968, Brook wrote The Empty Space. This book launched a scathing attack on ‘deadly theatre’, or moribund commercial productions and received ways of directing Shakespeare, balanced against the commendation of theatre that unites the rough, the immediate and the invisible (or an otherworldly metaphysical dimension). The Empty Space was influenced partly by the Polish critic Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), which argued for the possibility of bringing classical works up to date. This notion was embodied in Brook’s highly influential 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a white box – as opposed to the more familiar black studio-theatre – and designed in part like a circus or playground. This production was critically acclaimed for its inventiveness and playfulness, though, ironically, it heralded Brook’s departure from Britain to Paris. There, he first set up the CIRT (Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) and then CICT (Centre International de Créations Théâtrales), as he shifted his focus away from laboratory work, replacing ‘Recherche’ with ‘Créations’. In Paris, with more support for experimentation than he felt he could muster in Britain, he employed a multicultural group of performers and musicians to research the universality of performance, not only through their own sharing of techniques in rehearsal and workshop but also through their productions. Notable among these were: Orghast at Persepolis (1971), which utilized sounds ‘written’ (or rather scored) by British poet Ted Hughes, in part based on the ancient Persian language Avesta; the African project, which was a tour to tiny, rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa in 1972 with improvised presentations; and a performance based on a Sufi poem, both titled The Conference of the Birds (1979). As well as his opera productions, Brook directed innovative, simply staged productions of classics like The Tempest (1983), and films like Lord of the Flies (1961). He also directed the Indian epic The Mahabharata (1985), which aroused controversy for supposedly exploiting Indian culture, mythology and practitioners, a charge levelled most notably by Rustom Bharucha. Others such as Una Chaudhuri presented a more balanced view, and critics in the press were mostly highly positive about the piece. Brook has attracted similar criticisms for what many have considered his eclectic cultural ‘piracy’ and minimal recognition of cultural difference in his intercultural projects, which he strongly refutes. As well as this extensive practice, Brook has elaborated on the art of the performer through lectures and writing, attempting to define how the ‘invisible can be made visible’. He has frequently attempted to reveal his processes and debunk myths, claiming – as in the title of one of his books – that ‘There are no secrets’. His performances are recognized for their simplicity of staging and what he calls (disingenuously, for some critics) an ‘absence of style’. He often uses the central scenographic device of a carpet, laid down in an African village or more often in the middle of his Paris theatre Les Bouffes du Nord, its simplicity compatible with the few representative props, a low-key mode of speaking and understated performances. Critics (notably Kenneth Tynan) have found this simplicity uninspiring, though such complaints detract only marginally from his status as a theatre innovator of international renown. Since the 1990s, Brook has been exploring the intricacies of the human psyche in The Man Who (1993), based on neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book The 39

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Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), and in The Tragedy of Hamlet (2000). Brook’s beginnings in classical European theatre have always provided his textual base and he repeatedly returns to the vitality of Shakespeare’s language and the Elizabethan theatre event as points of departure. Although he no longer runs the Bouffes du Nord theatre he continues as an independent director of productions and writer of theatre books. Brook has pushed at the borders of twentieth and twenty-first-century theatre, trying to find a performance aesthetic that transcends cultures, attracting controversy but more frequently acclaim. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brook’s own writings have an accessible style, often drawing on examples from his own productions. Williams has collated many of these and has also commented on much of Brook’s oeuvre, especially post-1970. Croyden and Reeves and Hunt give useful ways into Brook’s praxis. Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: McGibbon and Kee. —— (1988) The Shifting Point, London: Methuen. —— (1993) There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, London: Methuen. —— (1993) The Open Door, New York: Theatre Communications Group. —— (1998) Threads of Time: Recollections, London: Methuen. —— (1999) Evoking Shakespeare, London: Nick Hern Books. —— (2013) The Quality of Mercy, London: Nick Hern Books. Chaudhuri, Una (1998) ‘Working out (of) Place: Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and the Problematics of Intercultural Performance’, in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 77–97. Croyden, Margaret (2004) Conversations with Peter Brook, London: Faber and Faber. Reeves, Geoffrey and Albert Hunt (1993) Peter Brook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, David (ed.) (1988) Peter Brook – A Theatrical Casebook, London: Methuen. —— (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge.

BUTLER, JUDITH (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/PHILOSOPHER, 1956–) Butler is a philosopher, feminist and queer theorist whose ideas have been groundbreaking and hotly debated across a broad range of disciplines, from performance and literary theory to law, sociology, film and cultural studies. A prolific writer, her most influential work for performance studies is Gender Trouble (1990). Here she argues that gender identity is not biologically given but socially constructed through repeated performed acts. Thus, although most cultures explicitly and implicitly enforce very strict definitions of what is female and what is male, individuals can nevertheless be understood to have at least some control over how they enact their gender identities. By disrupting the sets of repeated acts which are usually taken to 40

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signify male or female, enactments of gender which are parodic or simply unusual can subvert dominant understandings of gender, sex and sexuality as well as the oppressions those normative understandings can produce. Butler’s theorization of gender as performative was extremely influential – it enabled gender and queer theorists and activists to pose identity as something that is actively chosen rather than passively suffered or naturally attributed and to reclaim formerly pejorative characterizations such as ‘queer’. Many critics felt that Gender Trouble’s theory bore little relation to actual, material bodies. Butler responded to this criticism in Bodies that Matter (1993), arguing that, while the body may be material and given (if not unchanging), its meanings are nevertheless discursively or performatively constructed and understood. Sex as well as gender, therefore, is a performative act. In Excitable Speech (1997), Butler explores various acts of speaking and what their potential legal and social effects for identity have been and might be. She continues to publish extensively on theories of the subject, gender identity, social oppression, violence and political agency, notably – for theatre and performance studies – through a sustained reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in Antigone’s Claim (2000). Her work is indicative of a 1990s trend for theorists from a range of disciplines to use ideas of performing and performativity to help articulate understandings of the subject’s political agency. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Though Butler is a prolific writer, her earlier work on gender performativity has been most influential in theatre and performance studies which is why this select bibliography focuses mostly on works from the 1990s and the first several years of the twenty-first century. Butler, Judith ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. —— (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. —— (2000) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (2004) The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2004) Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. Salih, Sara (2002) Judith Butler, London: Routledge.

CAGE, JOHN (AMERICAN MUSICIAN/COMPOSER/THEORIST 1912–92) John Cage is a founding father of performance art, a figure of enormous imagination and influence. Working predominantly in the field of experimental music and performance, Cage studied with composer Arnold Schoenberg before the Second World War, after which he embarked as a composer on the pieces that made his name, many of which have gained mythological status. While a tutor at Black 41

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Mountain College, North Carolina, just after the Second World War, Cage devised the ‘prepared piano’. He placed objects inside a piano that interfered with the sound of the strings, creating additional percussion when the piano was played. Works like this were influenced deeply by Marcel Duchamp, whom Cage knew and admired, and whose hallmark surrealist work of a urinal titled Fountain (1917) had questioned what art is. Although there was an interventionist approach in Cage’s piano, this later gave way to the concept of chance in artistic processes of which he was a primary proponent. Cage argued that intention got in the way of the creative act and that the artist should merely divert the spectator/auditor’s attention to what already exists in nature. By this, he did not mean nature in a purist sense but as in encompassing human and technological developments too, such as the sounds of raindrops, an audience breathing, a car horn, or tuning in twelve radios, as in Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 (1951). This non-intentionality evolved from a fascination with Buddhism and Zen that Cage sustained throughout his long life. Perhaps the best example of this approach is his musical piece 4' 33" (1952), whose impact was enormous. The scandal it sparked helped broaden notions both of what constitutes performing and what music can be. Cage’s work was entirely non-representational and arhythmical, as well as being conceptually demanding, leaving the audience to construct meaning and significance if this was their wont – a truly collaborative act. Although his early explorations saw him tossing coins in order to randomly construct his notation and orchestration, Cage also wrote music in a more orthodox sense, though often for an unorthodox mix of instruments, using synthesizers and other modes of technological mediation or prerecorded sounds. His career centred on an enduring fifty-year collaboration with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Together they created many performances, espousing the importance of collaboration (his music was always conceived to be performed with a significant theatrical dimension), while stressing the need for their respective art forms to remain autonomous. In one case, Cage wrote music for a dance piece by Cunningham (Points in Space, 1986, subsequently filmed), of which he knew nothing in advance about the content except its duration. Music and choreography came together for the first time in the première performance, conjoined by the dancers. It was a device they used frequently and that helped to keep their collaboration alive. Cage inspired many artists working in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, including Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, the choreographer of Trio A (1966) Yvonne Rainer, and other members of the Judson Church Group, who were exploring the boundary between dance and everyday movement. He listed among his friends and collaborators the prominent visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as pianist David Tudor, names that show the breadth of Cage’s practice and ideas. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cage articulated many of his complex and controversial ideas in writing, both creative and theoretical. These have offered great scope for academic analyses like those 42

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listed below, which are just a small sample of the many available studies. Kaye and Zurbrugg show the impact of Cage’s ideas on postmodern thinking and practice. Cage, John (1967) A Year from Monday; New Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press. —— Online. Available http://johncage.org (accessed 1 July 2013). —— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars. Fetterman, William (1997) John Cage’s Theater Pieces, Amsterdam: Harwood. Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan. —— (1996) ‘John Cage’, in Art into Theatre, Nick Kaye (ed.), Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 14–24. Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1993) Writings About John Cage, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zurbrugg, Nicholas (1993) The Parameters of Postmodernism, London: Routledge.

CHRISTO (BULGARIAN/AMERICAN ARTIST, 1935–) AND JEANNE-CLAUDE (FRENCH/AMERICAN ARTIST AND PRODUCER, 1935–) Husband-and-wife artistic team Christo and Jeanne-Claude are most famous for their wrappings: site-specific buildings, objects and environments which they temporarily enclose, surround or cover for a period of days or weeks in enormous quantities of fabric. Some of their most famous works include: Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970–1972 (first planned in 1970 and realized in 1972), a 417-metre-wide orange

Figure 2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995) 43

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nylon curtain suspended across a valley; Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980–1983, where they framed eleven islands with 600,000 square metres of bright-pink fabric; The Umbrellas, Japan – USA, 1984–1991, where they erected more than 3,000 six-metre-high umbrellas in the countryside of Japan and California; and Wrapped Reichstag, 1971–1995, where they wrapped Berlin’s famous government building in 100,000 square metres of high-strength polypropylene aluminium-coated fabric (see Figure 2). Their work is monumental, in both planning and execution: Wrapped Reichstag was planned over twenty-four years, and The Umbrellas cost US$26 million and required the permission of forty-four government authorities and approximately 450 farmers and landowners. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings compel us to look anew at our everyday surroundings and to reconsider relationships between what is natural and what is made by humans, commercial or packaged. They turn functional buildings into luminous, ghostly spectres, suggestively haunting urban and rural sites. Their use of fabric evokes classical art’s fascination with drapery’s lightness, darkness, form and volume. It also recalls conventions of packaging gifts and of wrapping bodies in fabrics, whether to conceal or enhance, in simple daily dressing or, more emotively, in swaddling babies, shrouding corpses or veiling girls, women, brides and widows. Their work raises issues about art’s commodification. Christo’s preparatory drawings, collages and books illustrating the installations are portable, durable, saleable as commodities, and raise millions of dollars for the couple’s CVJ Corporation. The installations, however, resist commodification. Paid for by the CVJ Corporation, they offer free access to the public, are temporary, and their materials are recycled, not sold. Although the work is generally attributed to a single artist (Christo) its actual requirement of often many hundreds of people’s labour, commitment and campaigning, not least the work of Jeanne-Claude, testifies to its social functions. Its reliance on technical expertise and skill, for example, in engineering, carefully tests the boundaries of art. It can stimulate international collaboration (The Umbrellas), provoke thought about borders (Valley Curtain) and facilitate a community’s efforts to redefine itself. In the context of German reunification after 1989, supporters of Wrapped Reichstag argued that the German government’s agreement to the project demonstrated the country’s renewed open-mindedness to the international media audience attracted by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. This work is performance not least because it combines scenography, space and event. Its monumental scenography uses objects and lighting to produce aweinspiring visual effects and to alter environments and landscapes radically. It is an event as its fabrics are unfurled, as long as it lasts, and as it is dismantled – in all of the contexts in which passers-by engage with it, whether by helping to construct it, moving around or through it, viewing it or witnessing it through the media. It becomes performance by compelling passers-by to perform differently in its presence than they probably would do in the same space were it ‘unwrapped’.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1995 book documents Wrapped Reichstag, The Gates project for New York’s Central Park and Over the River for the western USA; their 2011 book documents forty years’ work. Baal-Teshuva includes analysis and extensive photographic illustration. Vaizey’s book is mostly a picture catalogue. Baal-Teshuva, Jacob (1995) Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Köln: Benedikt Taschen. Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1995) Three Works in Progress, London: Annely Juda Fine Art. —— (2011) 40 Years; 12 Exhibitions, London: Annely Juda Fine Art. —— Online. Available www.christojeanneclaude.net/ (accessed 15 October 2013). Vaizey, Marina (1991) Christo, London: Academy Editions.

CIXOUS, HÉLÈNE (FRENCH ACADEMIC/WRITER OF CRITICISM, PLAYS, FICTION AND MEMOIR, 1937–) Cixous is a pioneer of feminist thought, artistic practice and activism. A prolific writer across a range of genres (which she playfully combines), she is probably best known in English translation for her theorization and practice of écriture féminine (feminine writing). Because she believes patriarchal writing functions to contain its subjects, she does not precisely define this term but attempts, instead, to enact it. Thus her writing is characterized by poetry, excess, repetition, word play, and an emphasis on affect or feeling, including sexual feeling. In her writing for theatre, Cixous experiments with these features and also with the apparent linearity of time and the truth of narrative. For example, in Portrait of Dora (1976), her revision of a Freudian psychoanalytic case study, she gives equal import to memory, fantasy and dream as well as ‘real’ present-time action. In early theoretical writing such as ‘Aller à la mer’ and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, she argued that dominant classical theatre objectifies and victimizes not only its heroines – such as Electra and Ophelia – but also its female audiences, and she has experimented in freeing her female characters and audiences alike from these positions. Her more recent work in theatre has shifted from an emphasis on the personal and the unconscious to an emphasis on public history, focusing more explicitly on issues of race, colonialism and migration while maintaining a commitment to feminism. Born a Jew in colonial Algeria, she has explored the links between patriarchal and colonial oppression especially through the epic history plays she has written since 1980 for the Paris-based collective theatre company, the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine (for example, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia [1985], The Indiad, or the India of their Dreams [1987], and Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir [The Survivors of the Mad Hope, 2010] which she co-wrote). She has also explored the challenges of global economic migration in the collaboratively devised Théâtre du Soleil production Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravan Stop, 2003) which toured internationally.

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Importantly, the distinctions made above between Cixous’ theoretical and fictional writing are probably not ones she would make herself, because she abjures conventional writing categories, combining, like Peggy Phelan, theory with fiction and autobiography in a performative writing practice. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cixous and Calle-Gruber’s book includes a long interview, biographical information and an extensive bibliography. Sellers’ collection includes several writings on theatre. Penrod, Shiach and Dobson all discuss Cixous’ writing for theatre. Cixous, Hélène ([1975] 1980) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. and P. Cohen, in New French Feminisms, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), Brighton: Harvester, pp. 245–64. —— ([1977] 1984) ‘Aller à la mer’, trans. Barbara Kerslake, Modern Drama 27.4: 546–48. —— (2003) The Plays of Hélène Cixous, London: Routledge. —— and Mireille Calle-Gruber (1997) Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge. Dobson, Julia (2002) Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing, Oxford: Peter Lang. Penrod, Lynn Kettler (1996) Hélène Cixous, New York: Twayne Publishers. Sellers, Susan (ed.) (1994) The Hélène Cixous Reader, London: Routledge. Shiach, Morag (1991) Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, London: Routledge.

COPEAU, JACQUES (FRENCH THEATRE DIRECTOR/TEACHER, 1879–1949) Copeau’s approach to making theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century was exploratory and consistently challenging to established models. It became the bedrock for later innovations in mime, physical theatre and body-based performance. But before becoming a director, Copeau was for many years a theatre critic, and throughout his career he continually supported new writing, translated plays into French, and adapted a range of materials, equally at home with Molière or Aeschylus as well as Noh-inspired plays. His nephew Michel Saint-Denis brought such ideas and practices to the United Kingdom through what became the Old Vic Theatre School and as an early director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1961). In spite of this avid support and interest in playwrighting and the text, the primary focus of many of Copeau’s productions and his training processes was acting. He was critical of the theatre’s conventions and stylistic tricks and advocated simple staging over decorous scenography. This emphasis on corporeal training inspired several people who collaborated directly with him, including Charles Dullin, Jean Dasté, Louis Jouvet and Etienne Decroux. His teaching was also formative for practitioners like Jacques Lecoq and Jean-Louis Barrault, who did not have direct contact with Copeau himself, but worked with his students or colleagues. Through such broad transmission, Copeau achieved widespread recognition in France and beyond. 46

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Copeau founded the Vieux Colombier theatre in Paris in 1913 as a site to produce his own plays. He was never happy in Paris, though, and was vehemently opposed to what he considered the artifice of its theatre, a view shared by Edward Gordon Craig, whom he met in 1915. Having established a reputation as a director, in 1921 Copeau founded a school for his actors, to give them the additional skills and resources needed to work in an exploratory way. In 1924, he boldly closed down the Vieux Colombier and relocated the school to Burgundy in rural France with co-teacher Suzanne Bing (who did most of the coaching) and other collaborators. Here his training focused on simplicity, improvisation, play and honesty in performance, notions which he had also investigated during rehearsals on an earlier retreat in rural France in 1913. To achieve these qualities he attempted to strip his actors of any pretensions or assumed conventions, using noble masks (later termed ‘neutral’ masks by Lecoq), and working with a bare stage without decor. The local natural environment played a large role in this process, with much work conducted outdoors and in the community. In Burgundy, Copeau turned to what might be considered popular theatre forms such as commedia dell’arte, Greek tragedy and medieval theatre as theatrical sources for his new works. His company Les Copiaus performed in village squares and at festivals in outdoor spaces, using inspiration gathered from the area, its people and the rural culture. He looked to rituals to help establish theatre’s place in French society, fuelled partly by his conversion to Catholicism in 1925. He balanced his belief in training the body with cultural, moral and social education of his troupe, who lived communally in what Copeau described as a ‘brotherhood’. For some, his approach was too prescriptive and his devout faith and discipline led to tensions within the school. Les Copiaus disbanded in 1929 and reformed as La Compagnie des Quinze, without Copeau. Copeau worked continually as a freelance director until 1940, when for a few months he was made director of France’s most prominent and long-established national theatre, the Comédie Française. Copeau’s research with popular performance, choral and mask work, his emphasis on physicality in performance and training, and his belief in establishing alternative ways of making theatre have all left an influential legacy in European theatre, impacting as much on textual as well as body-based approaches to performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rudlin and Paul have collated primary sources. The other texts adopt biographicallybased analyses and Kurtz’s book focuses on personal acquaintance with Copeau. Evans gives a short overview whilst Rudlin’s book is much more comprehensive. Evans, Mark (2006) Jacques Copeau, London: Routledge. Kurtz, Maurice (1999) Jacques Copeau: Biography of a Theater, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Rudlin, John (1986) Jacques Copeau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 47

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—— (2000) ‘Jacques Copeau: The Quest for Sincerity’, in Twentieth Century Actor Training, Alison Hodge (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 55–78. —— and Norman H. Paul (ed. and trans.) (1990) Copeau: Texts on Theatre, London: Routledge.

CRAIG, EDWARD GORDON (ENGLISH DESIGNER/PRODUCER/ACTOR/ THEORIST, 1872–1966) Gordon Craig has been instrumental in shaping the trajectory of twentieth and twentyfirst-century performance through his imaginative championing of scenographic innovation and his rejection of the naturalistic actor, focusing rather on the actor’s movement and bodies in space. His vivid and sweeping simple stage designs rejected naturalism’s detail and representational illusionism, creating environments and moods through various devices, most notably the play of light and shadow, large painted flats or cloth hangings and bold constructions such as stairways. These provided spaces in which the actor and large massed choruses could move, illuminated by swathes of demarcating light or spotlights. Craig’s hallmark was symbolism and he pared his designs to the bone as in his 1912 Hamlet for Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, where large screens suggestively hinted at the metaphysical dimension of the play. In one of his many treatises, Craig promulgated the idea that mimetic actors were prey to their emotions, often vain and lacking in creativity, and that the ‘Übermarionette’, or giant puppet, should replace them. He suggested that this godlike figure would be able to work with more control and without the intrusion of the ego, and would remind the audience of the power and mystery of ancient ritual performances. Craig championed a demagogic director/scenographer figure in order to oversee this actor-less vision. His ideas and techniques have influenced Tadeusz Kantor and Bread and Puppet Theatre amongst many others. Following the path laid before him by his famous theatrical lineage (his mother was the celebrated actress Ellen Terry and his father the architect and theatre enthusiast Edward William Godwin), Craig is one of the twentieth century’s first theoretical practitioners and innovators. As well as setting up his own theatre school in Florence, he published many of his views in books and in the long-running journal, the Mask, which he founded and edited, and whose motto was ‘After the practice, the theory’. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The amount of writing about Craig is not commensurate with the influence he has had and the volume of writing he himself produced, of which the most notable texts are in his 1911 collection. Bablet and Innes offer general overviews on Craig’s life and work, while Walton focuses more on Craig’s theatrical principles. Bablet, Denis (1966) The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, London: Heinemann Educational Books. 48

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Craig, Edward Gordon (1911) On the Art of the Theatre, New York: Theater Arts Books (reissued in 2009 by Routledge, ed. Franc Chamberlain). Innes, Christopher (1983) Edward Gordon Craig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Michael J. (1983) Craig on Theatre, London: Methuen.

CUNNINGHAM, MERCE (AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER/ TEACHER, 1919–2009) Cunningham has made a lasting impact on contemporary dance, creating pieces that have expanded the boundaries of form in modern choreography and question how dance is made, especially through his collaboration with composer John Cage. Cage was Cunningham’s principal collaborator, and together they created many pieces that tested the limits of each other’s disciplines. Their cooperation was exemplary, revealing how collaboration works best not as compromise but when two autonomous forms and approaches maintain and also enhance their own values and strengths. This notion of the autonomy of artistic elements has underpinned all Cunningham’s work, even though he has consistently collaborated with other artists, too. These include American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, who designed several early dance pieces like Summerspace (1958), and Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan, both filmmakers. With these two, Cunningham shot several innovative works for film and television, notably Walkaround Time (1973) with Atlas and Points in Space (1986) with Caplan, which also had music by Cage. Most of Cunningham’s output was with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which he founded in 1953, initially with John Cage and David Tudor as musicians. This was after a six-year spell as a lead dancer in Martha Graham’s company. He then spent time pursuing his own experiments at Black Mountain and Bennington Colleges. According to his wishes his company disbanded in 2011, two years after his death. In his work, Cunningham expressed the importance of dance for dance’s sake and rarely choreographed for pre-existing music. This shifted emphasis away from the expressivity and intention of movement and the idea that dance has to be thematic or generate meaning, to focus on the form and practice itself. Such a strategy pushed responsibility on to the audience, suggesting that it is up to them to find meaning in his works. This was furthered as he explored (like, and with, Cage) chance processes for choreographic purposes, most notably early on in his career in Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951). In common with William Forsythe, Cunningham kept abreast of technological developments, as a pioneer of integrating electronic music into dance, and by leading explorations with Motion Capture and LifeForms software, which allows the choreographer to manipulate 3D human forms on computer and thus choreograph in virtual space. He exploited the differences and discrepancies between animated and live movement as he transferred his choreography from screen to the studio. Cunningham also taught extensively, including what has become known as ‘Cunningham technique’, which (in spite of its name) emphasizes personal expression over technical precision. He received numerous awards and has an almost legendary status as a 49

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pioneer in contemporary dance. Cunningham’s works have been danced by companies all over the world and his technique is still practised and taught widely. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast body of works on Cunningham’s decades of practice (many gathered on his official website), from articles to videos to interviews to books, a very small sample of which is listed below. These range from Vaughan’s (the Cunningham company’s archivist) beautifully illustrated insider perspective, to the more objective analyses of Klosty and Kostelanetz. Cunningham, Merce with Frances Starr (1968) Changes: Notes on Choreography, New York: Something Else Press. —— Online. Available www.mercecunningham.org/newwebsite/ (accessed 1 July 2013). Klosty, James (ed.) (1975) Merce Cunningham, New York: Dutton. Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1992) Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time, New York: A Capella Books. Vaughan, David (ed.) (1997) Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, New York: Aperture Foundation.

FORSYTHE, WILLIAM (AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER 1949–) William Forsythe is a highly-acclaimed choreographer and pedagogue, celebrated not least for his contemporary deconstruction and reinvention of ballet. Born in the US yet living and practising primarily in Europe and mostly Germany, he worked initially with Stuttgart Ballet, with Ballett Frankfurt (1984–2004) and then with his own group The Forsythe Company (2005–). With these troupes he has created numerous dance pieces that have established his reputation as one of the world’s leading choreographers. Most of these have been made with what he calls a ‘choreographic ensemble’ in a very collaborative process that extends beyond the core team of dancers – an example is company member and composer Thom Willems who creates original musical scores for the choreography. Forsythe’s practice has explored and embraced interdisciplinary and multimedia projects, not least in film and with architecture, and it frequently makes extensive use of sets, costumes, texts, sounds, lighting, complex staging arrangements and, increasingly, digital technologies. A concern with and exploration of rhythm and musicality, and how different media relate temporally to the dancing body, is at the heart of all his works, with elements often working in counterpoint. Forsythe has also been pioneering in developing teaching and educational tools for dance, including initially CD-ROM-based products and more recently online materials, such as that related to One Flat Thing (2000). In some ways these look back to and build on Rudolf von Laban’s early attempts at documentation of dance and in particular its spatial dynamics, but now using highly sophisticated media. These are not just technical ‘how to’ guides but go much further in revealing Forsythe’s aesthetic and creative approach, discernible as much through their media as their content, through their interactivity and complexity as well as the works and 50

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processes they reveal. They offer an exemplary model not just of documentation of a kind (mostly of his creative and technical process), but also of practice as research as it might be described, in the way that they reveal fundamental aspects of his dancemaking process and performances. This interaction with current technologies as both tool and aesthetic is a hallmark of Forsythe’s approach. He is an avowedly intellectual choreographer, evident both in the sophisticated movement vocabulary of his dances and the way he theorises his practice and pushes it in so many different directions, not least pedagogically. Central to his teaching practice is the notion of selfstudy enabled by the many technical tools and methods of analysis he has devised. The range of Forsythe’s performance work is remarkable. He has created several installations, including Tight Roaring Circle (1997), a large bouncy castle designed for London’s Roundhouse building that invited the audience to enter into the vast space to generate the piece’s movement themselves. Even his onstage choreographies fragment and play with formal or classical notions of dance: his 1992 ALIE/N A(C)TION quoted from other forms such as rap and the Alien series of films amongst its many other eccentricities; Kammer/Kammer (2000) revealed to the audience some parts of the stage action but through film; and in his 2003 Decreation, all action was somehow mediated. Stylistically, his choreography demonstrates particular strength and dynamism, attributable partly to his dancers’ training and daily classes in ballet, which allows him to push the body to its limits, physically and artistically. His work is creatively free rather than tightly choreographed in that often the dancers respond to impulses within parameters given as set tasks. Forsythe and other members of the creative team also ‘mix’ technical elements live at performances, forcing the dancers to respond in the moment to the live edit. Most recently his practice has explored the body’s interior, including the breath and voice, moving the locus of his spatial investigations from the exterior stage and auditorium to within the body. With aesthetics that are typically postmodern and postdramatic, Forsythe’s work challenges spectators as much as performers, asking them to suspend expectations about what dance and, in particular, ballet might look, feel or sound like. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Driver’s special journal edition is a collection of essays, as is Spier’s, who introduces and then updates Forysthe’s work with a broad spectrum of contributors. The Forsythe Company website provides an excellent introduction to all aspects of their practice. As well as introducing pedagogical and technical aspects of Forsythe’s dance, brought up to date in the online analysis of One Flat Thing, the Improvisation technologies CD-ROM contains a comprehensive chronology of Forsythe’s choreographies from 1976–2003. Analysis of Forsythe’s One Flat Thing (2000). Online. Available http://synchronousobjects. osu.edu/ (accessed 25 April 2013). Driver, Senta (ed.) (2000) William Forsythe, Amsterdam: Harwood.

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Forsythe, William (2003) Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye (2nd ed.), Köln: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie. (CD-ROM and booklet) Spier, Steven (ed.) (2011) William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography, London: Routledge. William Forsythe Company. Online. Available www.theforsythecompany.com/ (accessed 25 April 2013).

GOFFMAN, ERVING (CANADIAN SOCIOLOGIST/SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, 1922–82) Although not involved directly in performance as either a practitioner or thinker, Goffman has made a deep and long-lasting contribution to theoretical debates in performance studies through his sociological investigations into the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’. This phrase is also the title of one of his major books, published in 1959, which analyses social interactions using terminology derived from theatrical performance, such as ‘character’, ‘props’ and ‘setting’. Although the model of theatre with which he illustrates his theories seems to derive from naturalism (he refers to ‘settings’ rather than scenography, for example), the broad application of these theories allows us to go beyond models of behaviour and character enshrined in mimesis. His ideas have gained currency for their appreciation of the power dynamics of social interactions, particularly focusing on how people present a ‘front’ or mask and adopt roles within particular social groupings and situations. In defining this performative behaviour as a ‘front’, Goffman demonstrates how specific modes of self-organization and presentation (or traits) might be agreed amongst a group or within an institution either implicitly or explicitly. This front also impacts of course on an audience or the person with whom the ‘performer’ is interacting, as it is read by them. Their behaviour might be seen as being in character or in keeping with someone’s profession, or it might be construed that it in fact masks an alternative reality. This response to and the effect of one’s daily ‘theatrical’ self-presentation is the focus of much of Goffman’s work. While he is careful to note that theatre is not the same as real life, observing that it is so much more planned, rehearsed and intentional, he asserts that theatre provides a vital conceptual model for revealing that how we are perceived does not always tally with what we are attempting to show. He thus articulated in an original way the gap in reception between the performer and the spectator which occurs in real life as much as in performance. Goffman has looked at other performative aspects of daily human behaviour in his celebrated works Stigma (1963), Behaviour in Public Places (1963) and Encounters (1961), which have expanded on his performative analysis of human interaction. Stigma considers how those whom society might conceive as marginal figures manage their positions as outsiders and resist the oppression of that position through seeking and performing new identity traits that consolidate an otherwise obscure characterization. Camp behaviour is one example. Goffman has also written about the framing of performance, in an attempt to ascertain at what point human behaviour becomes performance. These questions and Goffman’s fieldwork and analyses still provide a 52

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firm and authoritative base for theoretical investigations into what performance and performing are. BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are just three of the key texts by Goffman and are perhaps most relevant to our field. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday. —— (1963) Stigma, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. —— (1974) Frame Analysis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

GÓMEZ-PEÑA, GUILLERMO (MEXICAN WRITER/PERFORMANCE ARTIST/CULTURAL ACTIVIST, 1955–) Born in Mexico and living and working primarily in the USA since 1978, Gómez-Peña is a prolific writer and performance artist whose work examines and interrogates the experience of being a migrant and living in culturally-hybrid communities. Describing himself as ‘a migrant provocateur’, he explores the marginalized and oftentimes oppressed status of the immigrant and provokes his audiences to confess and address – verbally, in writing or via the internet – the feelings of fear that produce cultural and racial stereotypes (for example, in The Temple of Confessions, 1994– 97). He also works to promote alternative understandings of cultural differences that do not seek to contain those differences, and it is in this spirit that his work celebrates hybridity, particularly hybrid art forms and identities. He works across media – in print, installation, radio, film and the internet – but most often makes live performances. These frequently take the form of living dioramas, interactive performances/ installations which display him and his collaborators – in a cage in Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94), in Plexiglas boxes in The Temple of Confessions – wearing hybrid costumes and surrounded by pseudo-ethnic artefacts, soundscapes and backdrops. The complexity and apparent confusion of the material in these dioramas (including their live human ‘specimens’) work to question the efforts of traditional anthropology to classify identity into discrete categories. Identity – be it national, racial, sexual, religious or otherwise – is not presented as unified and static, as it might be in a conventional museum display, but rather as hybrid, dynamic and performative. These living dioramas also challenge the benevolence often assumed by anthropological display by showing what museums often exclude (such as expressions of racism) and by directly returning the potentially voyeuristic gaze of the spectator. The self-consciously presentational form of Gómez-Peña’s intercultural displays also problematizes global culture’s commodification of identities – especially ethnic identities. Other hybrid aspects of Gómez-Peña’s performances include: their languages, which are usually at least bilingual; their ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural sources, which range from religious iconography to popular films in order to create characters like 53

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the immigrant superhero El Mad Mex; their authorship, as Gómez-Peña frequently collaborates with other artists, including Roberto Sifuentes, Coco Fusco and choreographer Sara Shelton Mann; their sites, both within conventional performance and art venues and in outside spaces, in public plazas or on a beach; and their borderland relationship to art, ritual and activism. Committed to a politically and sociallyengaged performance, Gómez-Peña problematizes borders, be they territorial, disciplinary, artistic or between performers and audiences. His work is well-known within performance studies partly because he has been working for many years pioneering a postmodern performance activism and teaching that activism in the ‘rebel artist’ workshops he runs with his company La Pocha Nostra. He has performed, exhibited and led workshops across the Americas and worldwide, and has published profusely, in books, in journals and online. BIBLIOGRAPHY

All of Gómez-Peña’s writing and films demonstrate his activist, interventionist politics. For examples of artists influenced by Gómez-Peña, see Fusco. RPA Fusco, Coco (ed.) (2000) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, London: Routledge. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (1993) A Binational Performance Pilgrimage, Manchester: Cornerhouse. —— (1996) The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems and Loqueras for the End of the Century, San Francisco: City Lights Books. —— (2000) Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, London: Routledge. —— La Pocha Nostra and associates (2004) Ethno-Techno: Los Video Graffitis, vol.1. DVD. —— (2005) Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, ed. Elaine Peña, London: Routledge. —— and Roberto Sifuentes (2011) Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy, Oxon: Routledge. La Pocha Nostra. Online. Available www.pochanostra.com (accessed 1 July 2013).

GROTOWSKI, JERZY (POLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1933–99) Jerzy Grotowski is recognized as one of the major theatre directors of the twentieth century who has continually challenged and extended what theatrical activity comprises through a rigorous focus on acting and investigations into performance space and the actor–audience relationship. His most influential period was the ‘production phase’, based in Opole and then Wrocław in Poland during the 1950s and 1960s. During these years he created internationally-acclaimed productions, such as: Akropolis (1962), set in a concentration camp and designed by Auschwitz survivor Józef Szajna; Dr Faustus (1963), based on Christopher Marlowe’s text; The Constant Prince (1965); and Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968), drawing on a range of sources including works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Simone Weil, and the Bible. His architecture-trained collaborator Jerzy Gurawski designed several scenographic 54

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environments for the Theatre Laboratory – from Faustus’ table for his ‘last supper’ at which the audience sat, to a construction reminiscent of an operating theatre where the spectators peered down on the Constant Prince being tortured. All attempted to draw the spectator deeper into the performance event and were in some ways precursors to immersive theatre. Grotowski’s work has also been cited as a leading influence on physical theatre, though Grotowski himself disliked the term, fearing that it focused on virtuosity and effect, external factors, rather than feeling and the actor’s ‘inner life’. As well as his imaginative directorial and interpretative approaches and his rigorous vocal and physical actor training exercises, Grotowski developed several influential concepts expounded in his often allusive and abstract writings and statements. Key notions include: the ‘poor theatre’ that is stripped of all that is extraneous like lighting and sound to focus on the actor–audience relationship as an encounter or meeting; the ‘via negativa’, whereby actors attempt to ‘eradicate their blocks’ and remove habits rather than accumulate skills; a ‘laboratory’ structure for investigating the nature of performing; ‘holy actors’, who somehow transcend their material, ‘earthly’ presence in ‘giving’ themselves to the audience; a ‘score’ or precisely defined set of physical actions, drawing in part from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s later work; and the ‘total act’, a moment of self-sacrifice by individual actors where they offer themselves to the audience with total vulnerability and honesty, to incite the spectator to reciprocate. A ‘total act’ was said by Grotowski and critics to have been achieved by Ryszard Cieślak, Grotowski’s central actor, in The Constant Prince. The difficulty of arousing an equivalent reaction in the spectator, however carefully the scenographic arrangement was defined, led Grotowski to develop his work into ‘active culture’ during his paratheatre period in the 1970s, when all participants became creative and there were no observers or spectators. This involved long exploratory workshops led by former actors and new collaborators in rural areas of Poland and later other countries, including France, Australia and the United States. Paratheatre took place beyond formal theatre structures and buildings, and explored natural sites outside the artifice of the constructed theatre space. During martial law in 1982, Grotowski left Poland for the US to continue his work on Theatre of Sources, a search for common or shared principles and techniques in songs and movement from the world’s ancient rituals and performance-related practices. Like Peter Brook in Paris a decade before, his work became increasingly research-based and less public as he focused more closely on the personal processes of the performer in Objective Drama – an attempt to derive objective material from subjective experiences – and Art as Vehicle, with which he was engaged in Pontedera in Italy when he died. This last Art as Vehicle phase from 1986 onwards explored ancient vibratory songs and the work of the performer as ‘doer’. It was closed to audiences and was therefore considered by Grotowski to be quite distinct from ‘art as presentation’, which is how he dubbed the theatre work he had left behind decades before, though many have ‘witnessed’ Art as Vehicle opuses, even if they are not intended overtly 55

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for an audience. Many theatre groups have also now been involved in process-based exchanges with Grotowski’s ‘doers’ or ‘people of action’, as he described his performers in this phase. The ‘master’ Grotowski officially handed on his mantle to his student and final collaborator Thomas Richards before he died. His legacy is also disseminated through companies who have spun off from his investigations and was celebrated internationally in 2009 in the UNESCO-designated Year of Grotowski. Eugenio Barba worked as assistant director to Jerzy Grotowski from 1960 to 1964, and his Odin Teatret in some ways still continues this Grotowskian tradition. Barba’s important collection of early texts in Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) helped establish the significance of Grotowski’s thinking and practices, which were soon considered fundamental influences on twentieth-century performance, with their specific challenge to those contemplating the wider possibilities of theatre research, the origins of drama, the craft of acting, or potential spaces for performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

A wealth of texts were generated both by Grotowski in various languages and in response to his work, many of which (in English) are collected in the Schechner and Wolford sourcebook. The other texts relate to specific periods of Grotowski’s work: the laboratory period (Grotowski), the beginning up to Theatre of Sources (Kumiega) and Art as Vehicle (Richards). RPA Flaszen, Ludwik (2013) Grotowski and Company, trans. and ed. by Paul Allain and Andrzej Wojtasik, London: Routledge. Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre, Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag. Grotowski Institute, Poland. Online. Available www.grotowski-institute.art.pl/index.php (accessed 5 July 2013). Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. Richards, Thomas (1995) At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, London: Routledge. —— (2008) Heart of Practice: Within the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge.

HIJIKATA, TATSUMI (JAPANESE DANCER/CHOREOGRAPHER, 1928–86) Hijikata created a very dark style of dance that was inspired as much by European influences from Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet as by Japanese forms like Bunraku puppetry. He developed an extensive repertoire of solo as well as collaborative pieces, most notably with Kazuo Ohno, with whom he is credited as being the co-founder of butoh. After gaining initial experience in modern dance in Tokyo, Hijikata’s first independent work was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours, 1959), inspired by the nationalist Yukio Mishima’s writing. This is considered (though not unquestioningly) to be one of the pioneering butoh pieces, even though it preceded the actual 56

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naming of this form by a year or so. Kinjiki involved a chicken’s neck being broken during the performance as well as scenes of bestiality and homosexuality. Not surprisingly, it created a great stir and the Japanese Dance Association banned Hijikata temporarily from membership. Undeterred, Hijikata relentlessly pursued his exploration of the more emotionally painful and suppressed aspects of the human psyche, including sadomasochistic sexuality and homoeroticism in works like Butoh Genet (1967). This was a ‘dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth’, as he vividly described it. His direction of Admiring La Argentina, performed by a 71-year-old Ohno in 1977 and inspired by renowned Spanish dancer La Argentina, has become recognized as butoh’s signature piece. It also clearly demonstrates the symbiotic potential of these two figures – Hijikata has been described as the ‘architect’ of butoh in relation to Ohno, who is its soul, with Hijikata’s darkness complementing Ohno’s lightness. This emphasis on form recalls Hijikata’s committed use of extreme physical techniques to transform his body and surpass the habitual, resulting in forceful, often perverse, performance rituals. Together they have created a form that has spread well beyond the shores of Japan and which has endured long past the protest culture of the 1960s in which it was spawned, not least in its influence on physical theatre. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Information on Hijikata can be found in these general texts on butoh, such as Blackwood’s film, but much more specifically in Mikami’s book and Baird’s monograph which is the first comprehensive and widely available study of Hijikata. Baird, Bruce (2012) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Blackwood, Michael (1990) Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, New York: Michael Blackwood Productions. Film. Fraleigh, Sondra (1999) Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mikami, Kayo (1993) The Body as Vessel: Tatsumi Hijikata – An Approach to the Techniques of Ankoku-Butoh, Tokyo: ANZ-Do Publications. Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo: Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.

KANTOR, TADEUSZ (POLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/VISUAL ARTIST, 1915–90) Kantor was one of the dominant theatre directors in what can be called visual theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, recognized mostly for work with his company Cricot 2. Developing the theories and practices of Edward Gordon Craig with his quest for the Übermarionette, Kantor used his actors to create complex visual scenes, most notably in The Dead Class (1975) and Wielopole Wielopole 57

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(1982). Trained primarily as a visual artist, he had a surreal and at times catastrophic vision, fostered partly by his profoundly affecting experiences of destruction and brutality in the Second World War. Kantor moved from creating happenings in the cellars of old buildings in Poland to structured theatre pieces based – in the exemplar performances named above – on his memories of his schooldays and the very different life that existed prewar in his small hometown of Wielopole. His work always began with sketches that would be brought to life by his actors, who would sometimes merge with movable props or furniture to create what Kantor called ‘bio-objects’. Like many visual artists, Kantor wrote manifestos at different stages of his working life, most significantly on ‘The Theatre of Death’ (1975), which developed Craig’s belief that the actor could not replicate real life and should rather exploit the deadliness or artifice of representation. His actors, none of whom were professionally trained, consequently moved like mannequins with repetitive actions and deadpan delivery, representing figures from Kantor’s depiction of his past. This notion was extended through Kantor’s own appearance in his performances, dressed always in a dark suit and acting almost as a conductor, occasionally correcting a pose or speeding up the action before returning to his chair stage right. After his death, Cricot 2 briefly toured the piece Today Is My Birthday, which Kantor was still rehearsing when he died, placing an empty chair stage right to represent the now absent director. Kantor will be remembered for his interdisciplinary approach, distilled through a very personal, eccentric theatrical vision. He typifies the director as auteur, taking total responsibility for staging and scenography, even within the live performance itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kobialka has written extensively on Kantor in English and published a collection of difficult texts by Kantor. Drozdowski provides specific material on The Dead Class. The two translations from Polish offer overviews of Kantor’s life and work. Witts provides a helpful introduction. The website has a useful bibliography and selected information about Kantor’s work. Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor. Online. Available www. cricoteka.pl/en/ (accessed 5 July 2013). Drozdowski, Bohdan (ed.) (1979) Twentieth Century Polish Theatre, London: John Calder. Kobialka, Michal (1993) A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos by Tadeusz Kantor, Berkeley: University of California Press. Miklaszewski, Krzysztof (2002) Encounters with Kantor, George Hyde (ed.), London: Routledge Harwood. Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof (1994) The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, Krakow: Cricoteka. Witts, Noel (2010) Tadeusz Kantor, Oxon: Routledge.

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LABAN, RUDOLF VON (HUNGARIAN CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER/ TEACHER/THEORIST, 1879–1958) Laban was a central figure in twentieth-century dance, recognized now mostly for his system of movement notation which he first published in German in 1926. Labanotation, or kinetography, is a process of ‘scoring’ or annotating movements in space and time that has the capacity to define energy or force as well as the weight and direction of movement. This ‘script’ also provides detail about the flow and speed of each movement. Using ideogrammatic symbols, lines, shadings to denote level, and minimal text, Labanotation enables the detailed reconstruction of dances and has therefore become the dominant mode of passing on choreography by means other than live imitation. To qualify these objective elements of the dance, Laban also articulated eight basic effort actions that verbally describe the qualities of movement. These include pressing, flicking, slashing and thrusting, and range rhythmically from ‘sustained’ through to ‘sudden’. The visual drawing of these in specific dimensions and in relation to certain parts of the body, applied with differing sensations of weight, all build a total picture of the human in motion. Throughout his life Laban investigated a range of potential applications of such analyses, considering the body as an integrated holistic entity with mental, physical and spiritual impulses and desires, which are all made manifest through motion. His work encompassed theatre, dance, physiotherapy and factory labour, in which he helped workers streamline and make their repetitive actions ergonomic. To teach his dance students how to rediscover their natural predisposition for harmony, balance and flow, he called attention to the rhythms and geometries found in nature and the organic structures found in crystals, for example, or the ease and careful attention to themselves that hunting animals demonstrate. Early in his career as a choreographer, Laban worked closely with students such as Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss, who themselves subsequently became influential dancers and choreographers. They were recognized as part of the Ausdruckstanz or Expressionist movement that influenced, for example, Pina Bausch and butoh. Laban’s reputation was such that he was named principal choreographer for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, though his work was later banned, and after a period of house arrest he sought exile in England. At Dartington Hall in Devon, Jooss became his closest collaborator, followed by former pupils Lisa Ullmann and Jean Newlove. These two championed his pioneering approach globally through the Art of Movement Studio, which Laban founded in Manchester in 1943. Newlove applied Laban’s systematic categorization of movement and efforts with actors, notably in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London. The effort actions were used to help give physical life to a psychological characterization. Laban’s method of recording dance provides an international language of dance notation that through transcription has sustained the life of some performances for many decades and has ensured his place in dance history.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

These range from primary sources and collections like McCaw’s outlining Laban’s key theories and experiences to Newlove’s practical guides. Newlove and Hodgson are informed by their experience working with, or studying under, Laban himself. Bradley, Karen K. (2009) Rudolf Laban, Routledge Performance Practitioners, Oxon: Routledge. Hodgson, John (2001) Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban, London: Methuen. —— and Valerie Preston-Dunlop (1990) Rudolf Laban: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Plymouth: Northcote House. Laban, Rudolf (1960) A Life for Dance, trans. Lisa Ullman, New York: Theatre Arts Books. —— (1974) Effort: Economy of Human Movement, London: MacDonald and Evans. —— (1975) The Mastery of Movement, London: MacDonald and Evans. —— (1975) Modern Educational Dance, London: MacDonald and Evans. —— (2011) Choreutics, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd. McCaw, Dick (ed.) (2011) The Laban Sourcebook, Oxon: Routledge. Newlove, Jean (1993) Laban for Actors and Dancers, London: Nick Hern Books. —— and John Dalby (2004) Laban for All, London: Nick Hern Books.

LECOQ, JACQUES (FRENCH TEACHER, 1921–99) Known principally as a teacher rather than a performer or director, even though his very early career included directing and teaching, Lecoq has influenced many artists specializing in comic and physically exaggerated styles of performance often within physical theatre. His reputation has spread throughout the world mostly through collaborators like Dario Fo and his students rather than through his theories, for he was a reluctant author. His students include Ariane Mnouchkine from France (a collaborator of Hélène Cixous), Julie Taymor from the USA, and in Great Britain Steven Berkoff and founder members of Théâtre de Complicité, who met at Lecoq’s Paris school, the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. He founded this school in 1956 in a former boxing hall and it became the hub for his training programmes. It is still operative today under the command of his Scottish wife, Fay Lecoq. Lecoq’s and the school’s educational programme focuses on encouraging performers to work with simplicity and to use their bodies as the primary source of expression. In broad terms, it begins with finding a state of neutrality through the neutral mask, progressing to the exploration of rhythm and movement in space, before the practical study of popular theatre genres such as Greek tragedy, melodrama, mime, clowning, commedia dell’arte and buffoonery, often using choral work and masks. All creativity centres on the actor’s ability to play. Lecoq also led a separate wing of the school, the Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement, which focuses on scenography, space and the visual dynamics of performance. Although he published his views on performing and performance, his impact has been felt most 60

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keenly through the continuing work of his many students, who have become directors and creators of performance in their own right. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works on Lecoq in all languages are limited: the two main translations by Bradby into English were published posthumously. Lecoq’s death perhaps spurred other retrospective analyses, which have endeavoured to emphasize the significance of his teachings. RPA Bradby, David and Maria M. Delgado (2002) ‘Jacques Lecoq and his “Ecole Internationale de Théâtre” in Paris’, in The Paris Jigsaw – Internationalism and the City’s Stages, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 83–112. Chamberlain, Franc and Ralph Yarrow (eds) (2001) Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, Amsterdam: Harwood. Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Online. Available www.ecole-jacqueslecoq. com/ (accessed 11 July 2013). Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body, Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London: Methuen. —— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. David Bradby, London: Routledge. Murray, Simon (2003) Jacques Lecoq, London: Routledge.

LEPAGE, ROBERT (CANADIAN DIRECTOR/DEVISER, 1957–) Lepage’s directorial practice emphasizes that theatre is a multidisciplinary artistic activity, created by artists who work not only with words but also with space, objects, lighting and sound, movement, media and time. As a result of this emphasis, his theatre aims to be democratic in its processes of conception and development, and is scenographically ambitious in execution. Lepage trained at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique (Quebec City) from 1975 to 1978, and then briefly in Paris with Swiss director Alain Knapp, who stressed the director’s role as a multifaceted maker, director, writer and performer. Returning to Quebec, Lepage performed and directed with a number of companies, including the Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation, where he developed his improvisation skills, and Théâtre Repère. Here, he learned a version of the RSVP Cycles, a method of collaborative creation devised by choreographer–architect team Anna and Lawrence Halprin in San Francisco in the late 1960s. ‘RSVP’ stands for ‘Resource, Score, Valuaction and Performance’. In devising theatre, the Resource is a stimulus for the performance – an object, place, piece of music or memory. The Score is the material that arises from research, discussion and improvisations – settings, characters, images and events. Valuaction is the process of evaluating, selecting and organizing the collected material, and Performance is the testing out in practice of the resulting performance draft. As the acronym ‘RSVP’ suggests, the method aims to facilitate continuous feedback amongst participating makers and audiences. The designation 61

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‘Cycles’ indicates that the creative process is ongoing, the performance always open to revision. Lepage’s methods show a commitment to the RSVP’s principles of creativity, collaboration and process, as well as a development of their terms. For him, a resource provokes not only literal associations but also metaphors and ways of structuring scenic space and dramatic time. In The Dragons’ Trilogy (1985), the simple resource of a shoebox inspired a chain of associations – a shoe shop, shoes and the characters to wear them – and a row of shoeboxes inverted on the stage floor produced an aerial view of the street where those characters lived. The title of The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) provided a setting – Hiroshima, where those streams meet – but also a seven-scene structure. Lepage’s use of a collaborative method of composition means that his performances show the influence of many makers: they are frequently multilingual, usually episodic and often generate meaning by accumulating associations rather than telling a linear story. Lepage’s dedication to reworking his performances cyclically means they sometimes evolve over years of public presentation, often taking on extremely different forms, contents and meanings. The Seven Streams of the River Ota, for example, ran for two hours in 1994, eight hours in 1996, and was partially developed into his third feature film, Nô, by 1998. By evolving performance, Lepage creates work that is dynamic and adaptable to changing circumstances of production, and he allows his collaborators to continue working creatively, throughout a show’s devising and during its performance. Lepage’s commitment to an organic process of making theatre might suggest the amount of technical, multimedia innovation his performance can accommodate is limited. On the contrary, he is technically ambitious, exploring the technical potential of theatre as well as the thematic significance of technology for contemporary audiences. In 1994, he founded the production company, Ex Machina, its name indicating his commitment to using technology to create theatrical trickery and innovation. In 1997, in Quebec City, he opened the Caserne Dalhousie, a converted fire station incorporating two well-equipped studio theatre spaces and a range of technical workshops and offices. He now makes all his performances in this laboratory, as well as renting out facilities to other artists. He also exports his technological experiments: for his 2012 production of Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, New York’s Metropolitan Opera had to reinforce its stage to accommodate his complex scenography. Lepage’s is a visual theatre that plays with images and explores themes visually as well as through text. Justly renowned for its apparently magical ability to perform visual tricks, it transforms everyday objects through the subtle alteration of perspective, lighting or a performer’s movements: a grand piano becomes a gondola, then a trapdoor (Tectonic Plates, 1988); a dinner table becomes a car in a collision (Geometry of Miracles, 1997); and the door to a washing machine becomes an aquarium and then the window on a rocket ship, through which the audience looks both out and in (The Far Side of the Moon, 2000). From 2008–13, he transformed a wall of grain silos in Quebec City’s harbour into a gigantic screen on which to project 62

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images celebrating Quebec’s history in The Image Mill. Thematically, Lepage’s work consistently explores the effects of intercultural exchange, the fluidity of identities (national, ethnic and sexual), the cultural significance of historic events (Hiroshima’s bombing in The Seven Streams of the River Ota, the space race in The Far Side of the Moon, Quebec history in The Image Mill), and the function of art as well as the lives of artists – the eponymous artist of Vinci (1986), Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis in Needles and Opium (1991), Frank Lloyd Wright in The Geometry of Miracles and Hans Christian Andersen in The Andersen Project (2005). A dedicated multidisciplinary artist, Lepage has directed theatre, opera, circus, including the Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ in Las Vegas (2005) and Totem (2010), and feature films, including The Confessional (1995), Polygraph (1996) and Possible Worlds (2000). One of the leading directors of his generation, he has directed auspicious productions around the world, including: Strindberg’s A Dream Play for Sweden’s National Theatre (1995); Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Britain’s National Theatre (1992); Michael Nyman’s opera version of The Tempest, Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, at the Globe in Tokyo (1994); and Wagner’s The Ring Cycle for the New York Met. Some critics suggest that Lepage’s peripatetic, organic and postmodern style of directing engenders a lack of cultural specificity and a thematic superficiality in his productions. He is certainly aiming to limit his own travel by working from his base at the Caserne Dalhousie, but he remains committed to a collaborative style which, whatever its detractions, continues to produce a theatre rich in opportunities for its makers and visual pleasures for its audiences. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charest’s book is based on interviews with Lepage. Bunzli provides a detailed critical introduction to Lepage’s work, the essays collected in Donohoe and Koustas develop this critical context, and Harvie analyses his work in relation to postmodernism. Dundjerović offers a range of approaches to analysing Lepage’s work. Bunzli, James (1999) ‘The Geography of Creation: Décalage as Impulse, Process, and Outcome in the Theatre of Robert Lepage’, TDR: The Drama Review 43.1 (T161): 79–103. Charest, Rémy ([1995] 1997) Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, trans. Wanda Romer Taylor, London: Methuen. Donohoe, Joseph I. and Jane M. Koustas (eds) (2000) Theater sans Frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Dundjerović, Aleksandar Saša (2003) The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory, London/New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press. —— (2007) The Theatricality of Robert Lepage, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. —— (2009) Robert Lepage, Oxon: Routledge. Ex Machina/La Caserne. Online. Available. http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/ (accessed 13 October, 2013).

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Harvie, Jennifer (2002) ‘Robert Lepage’, in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (eds), Oxford: Blackwell. Lepage, Robert and Marie Brassard (1997) Polygraph, London: Methuen. —— and Ex Machina (1996) The Seven Streams of the River Ota, London: Methuen.

MADRES DE LA PLAZA DE MAYO, LAS (THE MOTHERS OF THE PLAZA DE MAYO, ARGENTINEAN PROTESTORS ACTIVE, 1977–) Since 1977, these women have protested publicly against the ‘disappearance’ of their adult children during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, commonly known as the ‘Dirty War’ (1976–83). Through their protests, the Madres have brought international attention to the human rights violations committed in Argentina during this time, won retribution against some of those who committed the crimes, and pioneered a form of community organization and action that has since been imitated by feminist and women’s groups around the world.

Figure 3 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 3 December, 1986 The Madres’ movement began in April 1977, when fourteen women met publicly to demand information. They had encountered each other previously in government offices and courts while searching in vain for their children. Now they gathered in the Plaza de Mayo – the central square in Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace and in the heart of the capital’s financial and political district. Gradually the women began to identify as a group, calling themselves the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ 64

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and wearing white headscarves in order to recognize one another and to be recognized (see Figure 3). Within three months, 150 mostly elderly women had joined the Madres. They met weekly to walk slowly, arm in arm, around the Plaza, carrying placards with information about the ‘disappeared’, wearing their children’s photographs on cards around their necks, and sometimes stopping at a microphone to address questions concerning their children to the presidential palace. Like the Chinese who gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Egyptians who gathered in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, the Madres occupied and altered a site of state authority in order to challenge the State’s claim to that power. By successfully garnering national and international attention for the 30,000 ‘disappeared’, the Madres’ protest threatened the Argentine authorities. In response, the authorities made twelve of the Madres themselves ‘disappear’ and intermittently banned the women from the Plaza. Despite these circumstances, and despite the fact the dictatorship eventually ended, the Madres continued to protest, seeking information, compensation and retribution and challenging the military’s dominance of the public sphere and its ‘forgetting’ of the Madres’ children by presenting an alternative narrative of both the Argentine nation and of gender. In their protests, the Madres remember, record and make visible the names and faces of the ‘disappeared’ and challenge oppressive patriarchal definitions of motherhood that would have them stay at home and keep silent. In the first decade of the twenty-first century they recognized the radically changed government in Argentina and its efforts to protect civil rights but they continue to advocate broadly for human rights. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taylor has written most extensively about this group from a performance studies perspective, especially in her publications of 1997 and 1998. For further resources, see the Madres’ Spanish-language website. Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Online. Available www.madres.org/navegar/nav.php (accessed 13 October 2013). Taylor, Diana (1997) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Durham and London: Duke University Press. —— (1998) ‘Making a Spectacle: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’, in Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 74–85. —— (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

MARKET THEATRE (FOUNDED JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, 1976) The Market Theatre was founded in the apartheid era by Barney Simon and Mannie Manim and has come to be recognized by many as South Africa’s unofficial ‘national’ theatre as well as a crucible for political critique and engagement. In the wake of the 65

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Soweto riots in June 1976, the Market aimed first to produce and host European and African theatre that would raise the consciousness of white South Africans about the inequities of apartheid – inequities the State tried to mask through social segregation and media control. Second, the Market aimed to produce theatre that would eventually offer black South African artists opportunities for performing in politically meaningful contexts, rather than the commercially-driven, white-produced, ‘traditional’ (exoticizing) musicals they were otherwise often contained within and exploited by (compare with interculturalism). Third, it aimed to attract and address both white and black audiences, a revolutionary objective in an era when segregation was still legally enforced. Throughout its first decade and a half, the company focused on producing new South African performances that provided social and political critique, especially of apartheid and its related effects of racial and class discrimination. The predominant production aesthetic was ‘poor’, evoking the aesthetics, conditions and traditions of black township performance, and seeking – in the traditions of both Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ and Peter Brook’s ‘rough theatre’ – to foreground the energies of its performers. Performances were sometimes scripted; indeed, the Market has premièred many of the plays of pre-eminent South African playwright Athol Fugard, as well as plays by Zakes Mda and Mbongeni Ngema, among others. But the Market is better known for the workshop style of its most famous productions, including Born in the RSA (1985) and Woza Albert! (1986). The practice of collectively devising productions was developed by Simon following his work with Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in East London in the 1950s and it has, in turn, influenced not only Market productions but contemporary theatre production in South Africa more broadly. Thanks to its liberal practices, the Market was one of the only South African theatre companies of the apartheid era to bypass other nations’ anti-apartheid boycotts and to tour successfully on the international circuit, garnering an international acclaim which may in turn have protected it from domestic prosecution and allowed it to continue its liberal practices. Nevertheless, and despite its ostensibly liberal politics, the Market has been criticized both during and after apartheid for reinforcing South Africa’s deeply entrenched internal imperial relations. Some argue that the Market’s commercial priorities reinforce economic apartheid: it accepts private sponsorship and is keen to maintain an audience that is wealthy (and, given the demographics of wealth in South Africa, mostly white). Others argue the theatre is fundamentally Eurocentric: it emphasizes literary textual production, its audience is predominantly educated and white, it often imports European plays and directors, and it relies on bringing black audiences to it, rather than going to them. In the context of South Africa’s difficult transition out of apartheid, the Market Theatre illustrates some of the potentials and pitfalls of a history spent balanced precariously on the boundaries of what was and is legal, socially challenging but not overly antagonistic, and economically viable.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fuchs and Schwartz provide historical information. Solberg includes an interview with Market co-founder, Mannie Manim. Fuchs, Anne (2002) Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, revised and updated edition, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Market Theatre. Online. Available www.markettheatre.co.za (accessed 13 October 2013). Schwartz, Pat (1988) The Best of Company: The Story of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, Craighall, South Africa: Donker. Solberg, Rolf (1999) Alternative Theatre in South Africa: Talks with Prime Movers since the 1970s, Scottsville, South Africa: University of Natal Press.

MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD (RUSSIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/ACTOR/ TEACHER, 1874–1940) Meyerhold is remembered predominantly for his radically stylized theatre productions and his invention of biomechanics for performer training, both of which have helped to displace the dominance of naturalism in Western theatre. His style focused on the performer’s physicality or plasticity rather than psychological realism or the play text. Meyerhold began by directing and acting very successfully in some of the earliest productions of Anton Chekhov in Russia, including those directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky was his teacher, director and mentor, and helped Meyerhold by founding and letting him run the Moscow Art Theatre Studio. Later though – especially after the 1917 Revolution – Meyerhold became convinced that naturalism was an elitist form, so he more doggedly pursued other ways to draw the masses into the theatre. This, he believed, could be done using performance techniques from commedia dell’arte, circus and gymnastics, turning the actor into a minstrel or jongleur figure. His biomechanical exercises helped him put into practice this clear vision of a non-naturalistic, popular theatre. His belief that the director and actor should construct the mise en scène together and that this collaboration was central to the production process itself and should override the director as interpreter of the playwright’s text, was at odds with Stanislavsky’s own vision. His rejection of naturalism, which he had begun as early as 1903 in experiments with symbolism, finally led to a split from Stanislavsky as patron. Recent interest in Meyerhold’s work, promulgated in part by Eugenio Barba, has focused extensively on his biomechanics. Meyerhold devised these exercises partly in response to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion studies and his investigation into ergonomic efficiency at work. Similar to Rudolf von Laban’s later research into efficiency of movement in factories, Taylor attempted to raise workers’ output by streamlining their physical labour. Biomechanics also attempted to encourage the performer’s awareness of ‘excitation’, based on his belief that the theatre event comprises a series of physical, visceral interactions that take place between the performer and the spectator – the physical action of the former exciting 67

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an embodied response in the latter. The twenty or so exercises Meyerhold developed, such as ‘Shooting the arrow’ or ‘The jump on the shoulder’, were broken down into their constituent elements as a cycle of actions and responses, testing the performer’s reflexes by building muscular strength and dexterity, and refining spatial awareness, in particular in relation to other performers. All the exercises begin with the dactyl, a short energizing and focusing movement. Biomechanics helped Meyerhold instill, in the spirit of the Revolution, his vision of the theatre as a spectacular event with popular appeal, using precise rhythms and vibrant musicality. He nurtured a great interest in music and performance and directed many operas. Meyerhold’s most celebrated and challenging productions were his versions of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe (1918) and The Government Inspector (1926) by Nikolai Gogol. The latter piece implicitly praised the Revolution in its critique of the bourgeoisie under Tsar Nicholas II. His Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), the first production to use biomechanics, typified his work with Constructivist sets, reflecting the aspirations of a movement that championed the use of ‘real space and real materials’. This ethos carried through into several productions, whose scenography included ramps, scaffolding, wheels and ladders that enhanced and dynamized the performers’ movement and provided frames for mass choral groupings. Meyerhold also developed a style that he labelled ‘grotesque’, a combination of the exalted and the base, the comic and the tragic, in an incongruous and exaggerated mix of performance modes, characters and events. Meyerhold’s relations with the Russian authorities were often fraught, and in 1940, a year after his wife had been officially executed and after years of public attacks of his work, he was imprisoned and then shot dead. Ironically, his work was labelled anti-Communist, even though he had strongly supported the Revolution. Meyerhold was officially rehabilitated in 1956 after Stalin was denounced. He is now considered one of the twentieth century’s most important directors and has belatedly achieved rightful recognition in the West as well as Russia, following growing interest in stylized and physical theatre, as well as physical methods of performer training. He is celebrated not just for his personal fight for innovation but as much for his realization of a system for preparing the actor for stylized work. Meyerhold demonstrates the artfulness and stamina needed to invent a new theatre performance style, to challenge accepted conventions, and to question the works and thinking of predecessors and mentors. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braun, Leach and Pitches are all well-recognized British scholars who have written key texts on Meyerhold’s life, theories and practice. The Gladkov and Rudnitsky books are important texts amongst an increasing number of translations (from Russian) of books on Meyerhold. The Arts Archives videos focus on biomechanics as does the Law and Gordon book. RPA Arts Archives. Online. Available www.arts-archives.org (accessed 1 July 2013). 68

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Braun, Edward ([1979] 1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, revised edition, London: Methuen. Gladkov, Aleksandr (1997) Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses, Amsterdam: Harwood. Law, Alma and Mel Gordon (2012) Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia, Jefferson: Macfarland & Co. Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyerhold Centre, Moscow. Online. Available www.meyerhold.ru/en/biography/ (accessed 4 July 2013). Pitches, Jonathan (2003) Vsevolod Meyerhold, London: Routledge. Rudnitsky, Konstantin (1981) Meyerhold the Director, Ann Arbor: Ardis.

ORLAN (FRENCH MULTIMEDIA AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1947–) Orlan is best known for her series of operation-performances, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93), but she has been making performance art for much longer – arguably since 1962, when she first ‘reincarnated’ herself by changing her name to the sexually ambiguous Orlan. Her work is consistently feminist, questioning traditional definitions of femininity and challenging the institutions – from art historiography, to the Catholic Church, the plastic surgery industry and the fashion industry – that produce and enforce those definitions. From her earliest work in the 1960s, Orlan, like Annie Sprinkle, has challenged cultural taboos that enforce female propriety and domesticity. In an inversion of the patriarchal mythology surrounding the fantasy of the virgin bride and the ‘proof’ of her virginity signified by blood-stained honeymoon sheets, Orlan invited male artists and gallery workers to provide her with sperm, with which she stained the sheets from her trousseau (the domestic linens collected by her mother for when Orlan married). In Chiaroscuro Sewing (1968), she did sloppy embroidery around the stains, confounding the expectation that she should be competent at this traditionally ‘feminine’ craft. Since 1971, when she adopted the persona of St Orlan, her work has increasingly made reference to religious iconography and its fetishization of female figures, especially the Madonna (compare with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Temple of Confessions, 1994–97). In One-Off Striptease with Trousseau Sheets (1975) she stripped but adopted poses from religious paintings and sculpture, thus combining high and low cultural references, challenging their social esteem as respectively worthy and contemptible, and testing binary definitions of the female as exclusively either virgin or whore. In other body art pieces and/or living sculptures, Orlan appeared draped in sheets, black vinyl or white leatherette, testing the sanctity of the religious icon, irreverently portraying the saint as fetish object, and demonstrating that fine art’s proclivity to make various individual parts of a woman’s body iconic – the hand, the face, the breast – has literally chopped women up (compare with Ron Athey). Orlan’s work explores the female subject of art and religious history not only as object of the gaze but also as economic commodity. Her photo-sculpture The Kiss of 69

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the Artist (1976) combined the torso of a naked woman (Orlan) with a slot at the throat inviting the audience to insert five francs and a container at the crotch to catch the money. When money dropped into the container, Orlan would leap out to kiss the person who had paid. In a gesture that Reincarnation would enhance, The Kiss commented on the art market’s economy of commodifying the female nude, partially subverting that economy by making Orlan both active rather than passive and the beneficiary of the financial transaction. From 1976 to 1984, Orlan’s work concentrated on challenging the male dominance of space as well as the dominance of certain masculine art practices. In a series of site-specific Measurings, she used her own body to take the measure of various environments, offering a female – or gynometric – assessment of male-designed churches, museums and streets, including the rue Victor Hugo. She continues to make Measurings, for example at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum in 2012. She also responded to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries (1958–60), paintings in which the fully dressed male artist daubed naked women’s bodies in paint and verbally and physically directed their movements on a canvas. After her Measurings, Orlan would wash her trousseau sheet costume and preserve the dirty washing water as a relic – a practice of preserving and celebrating the abject residue which she would later develop in her Reincarnation. Orlan continues to make performance art and images that challenge received notions of gender identity and gendered mythologies, frequently recycling – or reincarnating – her own previous work. Her Self-Hybridizations (1999), for example, use digital technologies to produce hybrid intercultural images that combine her face with faces from African and pre-Columbian Central American art. In her Shot at a Movie series (2001), she makes posters for movies in which she is putatively starring but which do not actually exist. Like her fellow performance artist Stelarc, she alters her own body and uses multimedia technology to explore and create new mediated and performative definitions of identity. The focus of Orlan’s work, though, remains firmly on exploring gender and (in particular) femininity. BIBLIOGRAPHY

For critical analysis of Orlan’s work, see Augsburg, Auslander, Donger et al, Ince, Kauffman and Orlan: Carnal Art; for images, see Buci-Glucksmann and the Orlan entries. Orlan’s website includes detailed information on artwork, biography, bibliography and exhibitions. Augsburg, Tanya (1998) ‘Orlan’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity’, in The Ends of Performance, Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), New York: New York University Press, pp. 285–314. Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (2000) Orlan: Triomphe du baroque, Marseille: Images En Manoeuvres Editions. Includes French and English texts. 70

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Donger, Simon, with Simon Shepherd and Orlan (2010) ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks, Oxon: Routledge. Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg. Kauffman, Linda S. (2002) ‘Cutups in Beauty School – and Postscripts, January 2000 and December 2001’, in Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 103–31. Orlan (1996) This Is My Body . . . This Is My Software, London: Black Dog. —— (2004) Orlan: Carnal Art, trans. Deke Dusinberre, Paris: Editions Flammarion. Orlan. Online. Available www.orlan.eu/ (accessed 13 October 2013). ORLAN, Carnal Art (2001), produced and directed by Stephan Oriach, Myriapodus Films.

PHELAN, PEGGY (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/WRITER/PERFORMER) In her theoretical and practical explorations of performance, both enacted through writing, Phelan asserts that performance’s liveness – its fleeting, ephemeral nature – is psychically, politically and ethically significant. Combining politicized psychoanalytic, feminist and queer theories, she argues that because performance is ephemeral, it stages loss. Because loss is something everyone has to deal with emotionally and psychologically throughout their lives, examining performance as a staging of loss, absence or trauma can be suggestive, instructive, therapeutic and politically enabling. In Unmarked (1993), she proposes that performance is liminal – between being live and present and immediately over and absent. Because of this liminality, performance is a particularly valuable medium to practise and analyse for those who are themselves made to feel liminal or marginal by dominant culture, whether because of their race, sexuality, gender, politics, ability or class. She challenges the contention that visibility equals power, a logic that informed many marginalized groups’ rights advocacy activities in the visibility politics of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She argues instead that being ‘unmarked’, a blind spot in the purview of dominant culture, can allow one to evade surveillance and control. It is therefore worthwhile, she suggests, to explore being unmarked – or, as in the case of performance, ephemeral – as a radical aesthetic strategy for empowering liminal subjectivities. Phelan is an extremely influential practitioner of performance studies. Her work is typical of the field in that it is multidisciplinary, addressing the performative politics of media as diverse as theatre, performance art, public events and trials, psychoanalytic case histories, acts of grief and mourning, dance, literature, and many visual arts, including film, video, photography and painting. Importantly, her work is also distinctive within performance studies, both in content and form. Where Richard Schechner, for example, emphasizes anthropology and ritual, she focuses on feminism and psychoanalysis. Perhaps more importantly, because she is interested in the performative politics of writing, she has developed performance studies’ forms by advocating ‘performative writing’. This is a dynamic, hybrid fusion of critical and creative thinking that combines commentary, analysis, story, anecdote, reflection and fantasy and aims to emulate the ephemeral nature of performance (compare with Hélène Cixous’ practice of écriture féminine). For Phelan, performative writing is 71

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importantly distinct from more conventional performance criticism, which risks fixing and potentially rendering conservative what might have been elusive and radical in the live event. In Mourning Sex (1997), a kind of elegy to loss and the injured body, she argues that performative writing aims to enact the affective force of the performance event, including its sense of loss, and to make performance criticism itself subjective, partial and active in the present, not trying to copy and capture the past. Phelan’s radical and pioneering practice of performance studies has provoked criticism of her own work and crystallized criticism of the field more broadly. The multidisciplinary nature of performance studies that is apparently evidenced by her work, for example, has been accused of neglecting and denigrating theatre and drama as sites of study. Further, performance studies has also been accused of being ahistorical (for example, by David Savran), adopting a renegade attitude to history alongside an emphasis on liveness and the present. In Liveness (1999), Philip Auslander specifically takes issue with Phelan’s arguments about live performance, arguing against the politically oppositional claims she makes for liveness. As well as garnering detractors, however, Phelan’s work has accumulated many admirers and emulators, its influence arising not only through her writing but also her editing and teaching. With Lynda Hart, she co-edited Acting Out (1993), a collection of essays on feminism and performance; and with Jill Lane, she co-edited The Ends of Performance (1998), which reflects cogently on the discipline through a selection of essays first delivered at the Performance Studies international conference which Phelan organized in New York in 1995 and which led to the establishment of PSi (Performance Studies international), which holds annual conferences. From 1985, she taught in (and later headed) the Department of Performance Studies, co-founded by Schechner, at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Since 2003, she has been a professor at Stanford University in California. This West coast location facilitated her production of the history, Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983 (2012). BIBLIOGRAPHY Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Hart, Lynda and Peggy Phelan (eds) (1993) Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London: Routledge. —— (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, New York: Routledge. —— and Jill Lane (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press. Reckitt, Helena (ed.), survey by Peggy Phelan (2001) Art and Feminism, London: Phaidon. Savran, David (2001) ‘Choices Made and Unmade’, Theater 31.2: 89–95.

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RANCIÈRE, JACQUES (FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, 1940–) Born in Algeria, French philosopher Jacques Rancière theorizes understandings of radical equality and democracy which recognize everyone’s intelligence and seek everyone’s emancipation, particularly from hierarchies of class. He publishes prolifically across a range of topics from pedagogy to history, but with a particular emphasis on the visual politics of aesthetics and spectatorship in film, theatre and contemporary art. He credits everyone as bearers of authority, for example, spectators are understood as active rather than passive. And he explores the ways that many people are potentially excluded from exercising that authority because their views are de-legitimated, suppressed or ignored in what he calls ‘distributions of the sensible’ (or patterns of attention and inattention) that are divisive, elitist and prejudiced. He seeks ways of understanding how people might be emancipated from this kind of exclusion and oppression and properly perceived as equal. Especially influential in theatre and performance studies have been his arguments about the distribution of the sensible (in The Politics of Aesthetics) and the ‘emancipated spectator’ (in several texts published since 2004). To understand the emancipated spectator it is useful to know more about some of Rancière’s earlier ideas, particularly in pedagogy. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, he argues that everyone has equal intelligence. Therefore, the role of the ‘schoolmaster’ is not masterfully to instruct but to recognize and channel everyone’s equal intelligence. (Similar thinking in the work of educational theorist Paulo Freire influenced applied theatre practitioner Augusto Boal.) Where other post-Marxist critics may speak for the masses and see them as bearers of a deluded false consciousness, Rancière credits everyone as not only able to speak for him or herself but also not deluded. In his understanding, by speaking for themselves, people force a ‘redistribution of the sensible’, command attention and claim public space, visibility, legitimacy and power. Rancière’s pedagogic theories about intelligence and learning map directly onto his theories about spectatorship. Many theorists and makers of theatre and performance – from Bertold Brecht, to Antonin Artaud, Boal and creators of happenings – have considered audiences passive and in need of political awakening. Rancière refutes the simple oppositional terms on which such perspectives are based. As the schoolmaster is not the only one with intelligence, the literally moving performer is not the only one who is active; active too are acts of listening, looking and being a spectator. A ‘distribution of the sensible’ (or way of understanding the world) which denigrates as passive acts of looking, listening and being a spectator is responsible for dominating and subjecting those activities. Changing understanding and enabling emancipation and democracy requires a shift in understanding that recognizes looking and hearing as active because they involve observation, selection, comparison and interpretation – intelligence and learning, in other words. Though Rancière credits theatre spectators as creators of meaning, he does not cast them as a utopian community, as theatre makers and analysts are sometimes tempted to do, crediting theatre’s liveness for producing something ostensibly better 73

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for its audiences than do other media such as television and film. What theatre spectators have in common, Rancière argues, is intelligence; but they may not share the same understanding of or engagement with the performance. What is politically valuable about this analysis is the ways it preserves understanding of individual differences in intelligence and interpretation, resists homogenizing audiences and maintains a healthy suspicion about the romanticism of claiming audiences are necessarily homogeneous communities. Rancière is occasionally criticized for being obscure and sometimes given to ‘motifs’ more than clear arguments and proposals for real-world political acts which would extend democracy. Such criticisms aside, his theory is important for all arts because it regards art practices as nothing more than the means of achieving equality and democracy through a re-distribution of the sensible. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rancière is a prolific writer. Listed below is a selection of his texts with particular relevance in this context. Though not discussed above, readers might be interested in his essay on a popular theatre in France, ‘The People’s Theatre: A Long, Drawn-out Affair’. Rancière, Jacques (1991 [1987]) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— ([2000] 2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum. —— ([2005] 2006) Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran, London and New York: Verso. —— ([2003] 2007) ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, ArtForum International 45:7 (March): 270–81. —— (2007) The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso. —— (2010) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso. —— (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Continuum. —— ([2011] 2013) Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul, London and New York: Verso. —— (2012) ‘The People’s Theatre: A Long, Drawn-out Affair’, in Jacques Rancière, The Intellectual and His People; Staging the People, Volume 2, trans. David Fernbach, London: Verso, pp. 1–40.

SCHECHNER, RICHARD (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/EDITOR/WRITER/ DIRECTOR, 1934–) Since the 1960s, Schechner has pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to defining what performance is and does, broadening those definitions and allowing new critical connections to be made across and between them. The approach Schechner advocates – and to a large degree founded – has come to be known as ‘performance 74

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studies’. It combines knowledge and practices from anthropology, sociology, psychology, art history, folklore, and cultural studies as well as theatre and dance studies to examine a broad range of practices and events, including: religious and social ritual, amateur and professional sport, games, popular entertainment, performance in everyday life, secular public events like carnivals, festivals, parades and political demonstrations, as well as conventional theatre performance. One outcome of performance studies’ critical innovations is an increased focus on the social, spiritual and political effects of performance, alongside the aesthetic or formal qualities that the study of drama had generally previously emphasized. Another is the international, intercultural and generic expansion of Euro-American theatre scholarship to pay greater attention to Asian performance forms such as Indian Kathakali and Japanese Noh theatre as well as to non-text-based events like Native, Jewish and Indian festivals and rituals (such as the Māori haka and the Yaqui Lent and Easter ceremonies). Schechner has practised and promoted performance studies as a director, editor, writer and teacher. As the founding director of The Performance Group (New York, 1967–80), Schechner was a primary exponent in the experimental American theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, working especially to enhance theatre’s social and spiritual effects as ritual for participating makers and audiences. Using the Performing Garage as a flexible environmental theatre, Schechner and The Performance Group sought to increase the interactivity of the performance event by mobilizing both audiences and performers and encouraging them to interact directly, as in such productions as Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), Commune (1971) and The Balcony (1980), all of which Schechner directed. When The Performance Group folded due to difficult internal dynamics, the Wooster Group absorbed several of its artists, remained in the Performing Garage, and carried on many of its innovations. Schechner too continues his theatrical experimentation as a freelance director (of, for example, a Chineselanguage Oresteia in Taiwan, 1995) and as founding artistic director of East Coast Artists (1991–) which has produced a highly physical version of Goethe’s Faust in Faust/Gastronome (1993), an intercultural Hamlet (1999) that eclectically borrowed visual and musical styles from a host of different cultures and periods and a response to Ophelia’s story and the erotic novel by Anne Desclos (pen name, Pauline Réage) The Story of O in Imagining O (2012), produced and staged at the University of Kent, UK. From 1962 to 1969, and again since 1986, Schechner has edited the influential journal TDR: The Drama Review (formerly Tulane Drama Review), first when he taught at Tulane University in New Orleans, and subsequently since his move to the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in 1967. Having accrued the subtitle The Journal of Performance Studies in 1986, TDR has pioneered research into emerging artists, practices and critical paradigms, including Jerzy Grotowski, Fluxus and approaches to understanding performance as ritual, aspects of which were elaborated with his friend Victor Turner. As a book editor, Schechner continues to work to expand the discipline, for example as Editor of Routledge’s Worlds of Performance series. In his numerous publications, 75

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Schechner consistently explores the social function of theatre and ritual performance. He published Performance Studies, his textbook on the subject, in 2002 which is now in its third edition and is enhanced by online content. His often polemical views on the field and his championing of Performance Studies have attracted criticism, not least for what they ignore as much as what they welcome. Responses to Schechner’s practical work have also not always been positive. Some, like Rustom Bharucha, have seen his (and others’) incursions into Eastern forms of theatre and ritual as romanticizing and imperialist in ways typical of much intercultural exploration. (In many of his writings, Schechner himself acknowledges this potential problem.) Several of his experiments with The Performance Group have been criticized for the ways they failed to achieve a more democratic performance event. Critics argue that his experiments in using nudity in performance and breaking audience–performer boundaries, for example, were compromised because they did not take adequate precautions to protect performers from exploitative groping by audiences. While there may remain areas where Schechner’s practice focuses on one ideological aspect of production at the expense of another, he has nevertheless produced and overseen a radical transformation in the study of theatre and performance and has in many ways forced the field to become more politically accountable. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The range of Schechner’s publications shows just how prolific he is. Harding and Rosenthal’s collection is a good place to begin with analysing his achievements and potential weaknesses. Harding, James M. and Cindy Rosenthal (2011) The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause. —— ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge. —— (1983) Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila, Calcutta: Seagull. —— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. —— ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge. —— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge.

SISTREN THEATRE COLLECTIVE (WOMEN’S THEATRE COLLECTIVE, FOUNDED KINGSTON, JAMAICA, 1977) Taking as its name the female counterpart of the word ‘brethren’, Sistren is a theatre collective founded by working-class women with initial artistic director Honor FordSmith. Since its beginnings, it has aimed to advance audience awareness about issues affecting Caribbean women especially through the combined effects of racial, 76

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sexual and class oppression (see feminism). Initially, Sistren worked almost wholly through the medium of theatre, but by 1982 it had expanded to run a programme of drama-based workshops with both urban and rural community groups, was producing silk-screened textiles, had popularized Jamaican research on women, and was publishing a quarterly magazine. Across its activities, it aimed to empower its participants and audiences by analysing and commenting on gender roles in Jamaican society, organizing itself as an autonomous collective, and taking performance, education and other opportunities to a wide variety of audiences in Jamaica, the Caribbean region and beyond. Sistren’s activist practices also included bringing together women of different races and classes and participating in campaigns criticizing Jamaica’s debt and violence against women. Sistren’s performance work was both particular to Jamaica in its use of specific Jamaican stories, oral histories, languages, rituals and aspects of carnival, for example – and typically postcolonial, in its reclamation of indigenous stories, languages and performance practices. Sistren’s performances were collectively devised using games and improvisation to combine participants’ own stories with other research materials, especially interviews. Its shows included features typical of a community-based popular theatre of political advocacy, combining song, stories and monologues, and dealing consistently with social issues. They were also, however, very particular to their specific contexts, using Jamaican Creole, stories from Jamaican popular culture and history, traditional and current popular songs, and addressing Caribbean women’s history and experiences, both domestic and public. Sistren has produced over a dozen plays. One recurring thematic concern has been with women’s experiences as labourers. Downpression Get a Blow, Sistren’s first show, devised for performance at Jamaica’s 1977 Workers’ Week celebrations, dealt with the unionization of women in the garment industry; Domesticks (1981–83) focused on women’s abuse as domestic servants; and the documentary film Sweet Sugar Rage (1985) looked at women in the Jamaican sugar industry. The company explored Caribbean women’s history in Nana Yah (1980), about a seventeenthcentury Maroon warrior woman who fought the British, and in QPH (1981), a memorial to more than a hundred women who died in a fire in the Kingston Alms House in 1980. Women’s relationships were the focus of several shows, including Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), about women’s sexuality and mothering, Muffet Inna All a We (1985), a reggae musical partly about global capitalism in which three women try to enter a dancehall DJ competition, and Buss Out (1989), which investigated questions of colour and shade and women’s interclass relations. Sistren have demonstrated theatre’s community-building potential in tours throughout the Caribbean (including to rural Jamaica) and to the USA, Canada and Europe. The company’s socially-engaged work, like that of Augusto Boal, demonstrates the potential of theatre and performance to build skills and confidence and to empower communities that may otherwise be marginalized by economics, gender and geography. The trajectory of the company’s history – from relatively modest beginnings, through quick and extensive expansion, to reduction in the 1990s – points to the ways many collectives (like Bread and Puppet Theatre) established in 77

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the 1960s and 1970s in a climate of democratic ‘grassroots’ empowerment, political protest and political possibility flourished in the 1980s, but thereafter retrenched as political conditions changed. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Sistren has been funded principally by the Jamaican government and has turned its focus to addressing inner-city violence through drama workshops and counselling. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The collective’s work is described in Sistren’s 1983 article and in introductions to the published plays. Lionheart Gal is a Sistren project that documented Jamaican women’s lives. Ford-Smith analyses in detail the interlinked political, financial and historical conditions for the collective’s decline. Green examines the positive and negative effects of globalization on the company’s efficacy, and Smith assesses shifts in the collective’s work since it became effectively subcontracted by the Jamaican government around 2001. Ford-Smith, Honor (1997) ‘Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: Sistren, Collective Democracy, and the Organization of Cultural Production’, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds), London: Routledge, pp. 213–58, 390–92. Green, Sharon L. (2006) ‘On a Knife Edge: Sistren Theatre Collective, Grassroots Theatre, and Globalization’, Small Axe 10.3 (no. 21): 111–24. Sistren Theatre Collective (1983) ‘Women’s Theatre in Jamaica’, Grassroots Development 7.2. Reprinted in Charles David Kleymeyer (ed.) (1994) Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development: Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, pp.71–82. —— (2001) Introduction and Bellywoman Bangarang, in Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean, Erika J. Waters and David Edgecombe (eds), Kingshill, St Croix: The Caribbean Writer, pp. 77–131. —— (2001) Introduction and QPH, in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, Helen Gilbert (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 153–78. —— with Honor Ford-Smith (1986) Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women, London: The Women’s Press. Smith, Karina (2013) ‘From Politics to Therapy: Sistren Theatre Collective’s Theatre and Outreach Work in Jamaica’, New Theatre Quarterly 29.1: 87–97.

SOYINKA, WOLE (NIGERIAN WRITER/ACADEMIC/POET/ESSAYIST/ NOVELIST/EDITOR/SOCIAL COMMENTATOR, 1934–) A prolific writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, Soyinka is best known for his playwriting. His oeuvre of over twenty plays includes The Swamp Dwellers (1958), Madmen and Specialists (1970), and Death and the King’s Horseman (1976). Throughout his writings, he has observed and offered critiques of his changing Nigerian culture and its history of colonial and postcolonial oppression. His commitment to speaking out against social injustice in this context is 78

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indisputable; indeed, it was ‘rewarded’ by detention by the Federal Military Government from 1967 to 1969 during the Nigerian Civil War and has since, at times, required him to live in exile for his own safety. However, some critics from both Africa and the West have debated whether Soyinka chooses the most appropriate methods for speaking out. Some postcolonial African writers have argued against using colonial languages (for example, English and French), colonial myths and colonial literary structures and symbols, in favour of using, respecting and celebrating indigenous African ones. Soyinka considers this approach atavistic, calling its proponents ‘Neo-Tarzanists’, and advocates an intercultural strategy of combining colonial and indigenous languages, myths, symbols and structures. His own work is particularly well-known for its exploration and comparison of classical Greek dramatic form and Yoruba myth. While some Western critics have complained that this approach is discordant, Soyinka has pursued it to create a drama which he sees as not only internationally accessible, but – through the English language – accessible within his own multilingual and multicultural country as well. Thus, he pioneers a new dramaturgy that acknowledges the hybridity of postcolonial cultural expression and experience like his own. Born and educated in both Christian and Yoruba traditions in Nigeria, Soyinka completed a BA at the University of Leeds and worked at the Royal Court Theatre, London, from 1957 to 1959. Soyinka’s writing strategies – and responses to them – demonstrate some of the issues at stake in postcolonial cultural practice. He continues to speak out about political corruption in Nigeria and was particularly fierce in his condemnation of the 1995 execution of fellow Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. He himself received a death sentence from Nigeria’s then-military dictator General Sani Abacha in 1997 and therefore lived in exile. With the restoration of civilian rule in Nigeria in 1998, Soyinka was able to return in 1999. He has also had a significant influence as a teacher and has been employed by universities worldwide, including in Nigeria, the UK and the USA. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jeyifo includes a full list of Soyinka’s books to 1999, a chronology of his life, and numerous interviews. Art, Dialogue and Outrage collects some of Soyinka’s critical writing. Jeyifo, Biodun (ed.) (2001) Conversations with Wole Soyinka, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Soyinka, Wole (1984) Six Plays, London: Methuen. —— (1988) Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, London: Methuen. —— (1999) Plays 2, London: Methuen.

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SPLIT BRITCHES (LESBIAN AND FEMINIST THEATRE COMPANY, FOUNDED NEW YORK, 1980) Since its inaugural performance of Split Britches in New York in 1980, the eponymous company has performed throughout the USA and Europe, particularly the UK, and has become the most influential (mostly) lesbian performance group of its time. The company’s central members are Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin, although they often work in collaboration with other groups, solo and sometimes in pairs (especially Weaver and Shaw). Split Britches have pioneered organizational and aesthetic models for lesbian and feminist theatre and performance art as well as other forms of socially-engaged performance, and provided some of the most important performance material for the growing feminist critical discourse on theatre throughout the 1980s, into the 1990s and beyond. They founded a theatre festival called Women’s One World (WOW) in 1980 and opened the WOW Café in New York in 1982. These provided a festival and then a space for women’s performance, as well as a home for New York’s lesbian and feminist communities and, in the analysis of critic Jill Dolan, a site for specifically feminist spectatorship. Aesthetically, they developed a postmodern style to articulate postmodernity’s split subjectivity and to interrogate the patriarchal and heterosexist assumptions of much dominant theatre and culture. As performers, they play both themselves and characters, often blurring the distinction between the two and drawing attention to the performativity of identity. Their shows are typically satirical and episodic and combine lip-synching (familiar from gay and drag cabaret), self-conscious butch–femme role-playing, and sequences of popular song and movement. The shows present generically unconventional, camp approaches to canonical texts, including a vaudeville Beauty and the Beast (1982), Little Women, subtitled The Tragedy (1988) and a comic Streetcar Named Desire in Belle Reprieve (with Bloolips, 1991). Their plays explore issues of economics (Upwardly Mobile Home, 1984), personal relationships (Anniversary Waltz, 1989), sex roles (Lust and Comfort, with Gay Sweatshop, 1995), class and gender violence (Lesbians Who Kill, 1992), urban change (Miss America, 2008; Lost Lounge, 2009), and aging (RUFF, 2012). Split Britches’ shows are irreverent in their humorous and playful subversion of both canonical texts and elitist theatre-making practices and they resolutely retain a rough theatre style – sometimes by force of economic circumstance, certainly, but also to interrogate the economics of theatre and patriarchal capitalism and, through a Brechtian aesthetic, to defamiliarize the myths of gender and culture they present. The company’s efforts to develop forms for effective public engagement have led to their creation of formats which are increasingly interactive. In Weaver’s performance as Tammy Whynot, a ‘failed’ country-and-western-singer-turned-lesbianperformance-artist, Tammy’s professed ignorance about her chosen career (and much else) allows her to request (and receive) audiences’ expertise in the shows What Tammy Needs to Know (2004–). This interactive, non-hierarchical format is extended in Long Table events which have been developed and disseminated 80

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worldwide by Weaver since the turn of the millennium and which welcome discussion from all participants in order to address important social issues, both local and global. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Case collects the company’s plays, Dolan examines their work in detail, and Jenkins provides an introduction, including a brief interview with Split Britches’ members. The company’s website offers good access to their history of performance and to further resources including archival materials. The Public Address Systems website provides details on this line of Weaver’s work in particular. Case, Sue-Ellen (ed.) (1996) Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, London: Routledge. Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jenkins, Linda Walsh (1987) ‘Split Britches’, in Women in American Theatre, revised and expanded edition, Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Public Address Systems. Online. Available http://publicaddresssystems.org/ (accessed 14 October 2013. Split Britches. Online. Available http://splitbritches.wordpress.com/ (accessed 14 October 2013).

SPRINKLE, ANNIE (AMERICAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST/SEXUAL ACTIVIST/ WRITER/PHOTOGRAPHER/ECOLOGICAL ACTIVIST, 1954–) A former prostitute and hardcore porn film star and director, since the early1980s Sprinkle has been making films, videos, and live performances that are, to use her term, ‘post-porn’, that is, critically and playfully self-reflexive about pornography. Her socially-engaged live performances are autobiographical multimedia hybrid performance art/body art ‘herstories’, detailing her transition from prostitute to porn actress to sexual and ecological activist. They include Post-Porn Modernist and Post-Post Porn Modernist (1990–95), Hardcore from the Heart (1996–97) and Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn, from Reel to Real (1997). These performances critically acknowledge that women are vulnerable to exploitation within the sex industry, for example, by abusive clients or film directors. But they also actively celebrate porn’s potential for exploring and expressing sexuality (especially safer sex practices in an age of HIV/AIDS), and female sexuality in particular, which Sprinkle believes is violently oppressed within the sex-negative culture of the West. Sprinkle’s work has been a challenge and an inspiration to feminism. For some feminists, her work has the negative effect of both objectifying the female body and essentializing female identity by locating it in its biological contexts rather than the social ones, which feminism might then act to change. For others, however, her work has several positive effects. Sprinkle’s body may be an object in her shows, but she is also a subject: she is self-authoring and self-pleasuring; she addresses her 81

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audiences directly; she returns their gaze; and she actively invites them to explore her body beyond the limits that porn normally adopts in order to preserve the female body as a strictly sexual object. In ‘A Public Cervix Announcement’, a scene in Post-Porn Modernist (and viewable in part on Sprinkle’s website), Sprinkle inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited audience members to come forward and view her cervix (compare with Ron Athey’s staging of his anus in several of his works). Where much Anglo-American academic feminism of the late 1980s and 1990s concentrated on language and discourse (see, for example, Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan), Sprinkle’s work reasserts the body as an important site of (and for) feminist campaigning without arguing that a single body necessarily houses a unified identity. For many critics, this irreverence towards feminist pieties is typical of the postmodernism of Sprinkle’s shows. Other recognizably postmodern features include the shows’ pastiche of non-linear scenes, the ambiguity of their ironic and celebratory attitudes towards pornography, and their acknowledgement of Sprinkle’s own split subjectivity as commodity and seller, as object and subject, and as unresolved into a unified sexuality (with past sexual partners including men, women and transsexuals, Sprinkle refers to herself as metamorphosexual; in 2007, she married her long-term partner and artistic collaborator Elizabeth Stephens). Debates about the effects of her work aside, Sprinkle’s motivations are clear. She aims to help women to explore and express their sexuality, whether through conventional or alternative sexual practices, including ‘ecstasy breathing’ and erotic meditation, and she campaigns to spread safer sex practices, especially within the sex industry. She completed a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco with a dissertation entitled ‘Providing Educational Opportunities for Adult Industry Workers’, and she continues to offer sex workshops, to write and publish, and to perform internationally. Increasingly, she and Stephens have combined sex-positive activism with ecological activism in what they call ecosexual activism, drawing links between care for and about women, sexuality and the earth. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sprinkle’s website and books offer detailed information on, and images of, her work. Schneider provides broader context and analysis. Annie Sprinkle. Online. Available http://anniesprinkle.org/ (accessed 14 October 2013). Schneider, Rebecca (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge. Sprinkle, Annie (1998) Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My Twenty-Five Years as a Multimedia Whore, revised and updated edition, San Francisco: Cleis Press. —— (2001) Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance: Annie Sprinkle: Solo, ed. Gabrielle Cody, London: Continuum.

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STANISLAVSKY, KONSTANTIN (RUSSIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/ACTOR/ TEACHER, 1863–1938) With his insights into the processes of acting and directing, Stanislavsky forged a definitive position in the development of twentieth-century theatre, laying the groundwork for many innovators. With Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897, through which he developed and documented a system of acting as a way of creating believable roles on stage. This process depends on the concept of the actor seeming to transform into another being before the spectator, who observes from ‘behind’ (or literally in front of) the fourth wall. Like naturalism, these notions of verisimilitude and believability were innovative at the time. They were a reaction to the star system and the Romantic drama that existed before Stanislavsky, which highlighted individual actors and their melodramatic techniques while simultaneously marginalizing the text and other cast members. The acting process of recreating a fictional character outlined by Stanislavsky begins with the self. The actor has to search in his or her subconscious, through a technique called emotion memory for a personal experience equivalent to that which the character must depict on stage. The actor uses the ‘magic if’ to suspend disbelief and to ask what he or she would do in such a situation. Beyond the self, Stanislavsky’s meticulous attention to text gives the actor a method of dissecting and compartmentalizing text into units and objectives. Actors must find their character’s own aim, desire or objective for each unit, to ascertain what he or she wants at any given moment. This segmentation must then be reconstituted and overridden by the character’s total desire or superobjective, that is, the principal aim or desire in his or her fictional life, ultimately providing the performer with a consistent through-line. Alongside these very specific skills, the actor has to understand the character’s tempo-rhythms (the rhythm of actions and thoughts) and search for an organic fluidity in all his or her reconstructed behaviour. This sense of truthfulness to everyday life has to pervade the actors’ interactions, their speaking of text (including the unspoken subtext which the actor has to assiduously ascertain and imagine), and their physical actions. Stanislavsky envisaged the actor as a naturally creative, imaginative being, rather than a director’s sop or physical acrobat, though he also stressed that actors must train the body as much as the mind through gymnastics, fencing and other physical elements of training. Stanislavsky researched, questioned and documented his own processes through the fictional actor/student Tortsov, who appears in his writings as a willing, though questioning, subject. Stanislavsky’s discoveries are partly significant, if at times confusing, for his later admission and redress of previous failings and limitations, exacerbated no doubt by the longevity of his working life and the radical changes in Russian society and culture during this time. Stanislavsky’s ideas evolved to place more emphasis on the actor’s physical actions rather than on his or her emotional life, a system known as the Method of Physical Actions, or MOPA for short, though he never completed research into this to his satisfaction. What was important for him in this emphasis was that actions can be fixed, whereas emotions are temperamental 83

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and unreliable. Stanislavsky also recognized the introversion on stage that his psychological processes were creating in his actors. The work of Jerzy Grotowski (who cited Stanislavsky as his ‘master’), as well as a recent general growing interest in physical approaches to performing led by exponents like Eugenio Barba, have all confirmed the significance of this shift in Stanislavsky’s later years. As a director, Stanislavsky was the central proponent in the new movement of naturalism in the theatre. In spite of their disagreements, he championed Anton Chekhov’s writing, acting in and directing several of the première productions of his major plays like The Seagull (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov cursed Stanislavsky’s tendency to fill the stage with overdetailed scenography, both visual and aural, rather than relying on the stripped-back symbolism he desired. But Stanislavsky’s meticulous explanation of the performance processes required for naturalistic acting and the success and ambition of his productions still command immense respect, however much questioning there has been of naturalism itself. His techniques are taught in acting schools throughout the world and used widely in rehearsals, though only in a few places are they followed through with such detail and over such time scales of a year or more, as Stanislavsky proposed and practised. His writings and exercises continue to be utilized extensively, if somewhat randomly, with scant regard for their value as a total system. His work provided a systematic base for students such as Evgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevolod Meyerhold to depart from, and for Lee Strasberg to develop (though many would say misconstrue) into the Method via students of Stanislavsky like Richard Boleslavsky, who went to work in the United States of America. Stanislavsky weathered the great changes in Russian society in the first two decades of the twentieth century and was in the State’s and Stalin’s favour until his death, however much Meyerhold and others decried his work as elitist and out of touch. At the other end of the twentieth century, Perestroika in the Soviet Union meant a further revision and embellishment of Stanislavsky’s theories. This has encouraged new translations of his writings to replace Elizabeth Hapgood’s 1930s and 1950s versions, which have been shown to be partial and highly selective. Benedetti’s translations testify to the ongoing significance and continued re-evaluation of Stanislavsky’s achievements and will reinvigorate ongoing research into Stanislavsky’s work and related acting and directing practices. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast amount of published material on Stanislavsky by recognized authorities like Benedetti and Whyman. Merlin has usefully updated thinking by drawing on her own work as an actor in Britain and Russia. The Gorchakov and Toporkov translations provide illuminating insights into Stanislavsky’s methods of work. RPA Benedetti, Jean (1982) Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen. Carnicke, Sharon M. (1998) Stanislavsky in Focus, Amsterdam: Harwood.

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Gorchakov, Nikolai M. (1954) Stanislavski Directs, trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Merlin, Bella (2001) Beyond Stanislavski: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books. —— (2003) Konstantin Stanislavsky, London: Routledge. Stanislavski, Konstantin (1924) My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins, London: Geoffrey Bles. —— (2008) An Actor’s Work, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge; this includes An Actor Prepares, [1937] and Building a Character, [1950]. —— (2009) An Actor’s Work on a Role, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge; this includes Creating a Role [1957]. Toporkov, Vasily (1979) Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years, trans. Christine Edwards, New York: Theatre Arts Books. Whyman, Rose (2008) The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

STELARC (AUSTRALIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1946–) Stelarc (or Stelios Arcadiou, as he was formerly known) has extensively explored notions of what it is to be human, frequently through solo performance works and in both artistic and academic roles, the most recent of which is as Professor of Performance Art at Brunel University outside London. This has led him to state that the body is redundant, obsolete, and needs to be replaced or at least enhanced by technological developments. In practice, he has demonstrated this shift towards artificial intelligence, cyborgs, robots and advanced prosthetics through performance projects that include the attachment of a robotic arm to his body to make a third hand, and the connection of his body to the internet. For some of his early internet-based performances (for example, Muscle Stimulator System, 1994), Stelarc used Stimbod software that made electrical impulses activate him. His involuntary movements – the disjointed jumpy dance of his wired-up limbs – were caused by electrical charges stimulating selected muscles, programmed directly either by spectators present at his events or by those thousands of kilometres away, moving him electronically via the internet. His image was then relayed on to the internet through a ‘live’ website, creating a dynamic cycle of Stelarc’s reactions and spectators’ stimuli. Stelarc has also worked with external machinery and robots, ‘dancing’ with an industrial robot of the kind found in car factories (various projects between 1991 and 1994). His and the robot’s movements were programmed to modify each other’s patterns in a random interactive sequence. In his various writings, many of his statements may seem hyperbolic but they perhaps anticipate the not-too-distant reality of extensive medical and technological enhancement of the human body, reflected also in the performance work of Orlan. Increasingly accessible plastic surgery and surgical enhancements make his work with prosthetic robotic limbs and a third ear seem less and less experimental. The irony is that even though he now uses sophisticated medical, computer-based and engineering technologies, Stelarc’s performance art practice began with very simple mechanisms, though with comparable risk – he famously suspended himself 85

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on meathooks above a New York street as part of his body suspension work (1976– 88). As well as showing body art performances and pictures from these events on the internet, including his ‘stomach sculptures’ or images filmed by an internal probe, he presents live work in numerous galleries and non-theatre spaces and has extensively explored both the interior and exterior dimensions of the body. Through these events he continues to test and question the parameters of acceptable exploitation of the human form in a typically postmodern way. However serious the issues and the potential consequences of his practice, it is inflected with a playful sensibility. He appeals to the spectators’ voyeurism, opening himself up to their direct intervention and whim as well as to life-threatening danger, be it from meathooks or power surges. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Writings about Stelarc range across collections like those listed below, which deal generally with technology and human interactions. Smith’s more comprehensive collection of essays solely on Stelarc also contains numerous photographs and an interview with the artist. The Marsh text concerns the earlier period of Stelarc’s work. Stelarc’s website is an excellent primary source including extensive film material. Geary, James (2002) The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New Bionic Senses, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hungate, Claire, Ian Farr and Sholto Ramsay (eds) (1996) Totally Wired: Science, Technology and the Human Form, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Marsh, Anne (1993) Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969–92, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Murphie, Andrew (1998) ‘Negotiating Presence: Performance and the New Technologies’, in Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, Philip Hayward (ed.), London: John Libbery, pp. 209–26. Smith, Marquard (ed.) (2007) Stelarc: The Monograph, Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Stelarc. Online. Available http://stelarc.org/?catID=20247 (accessed 4 July 2013). Stelarc (2005) Stelarc: The Body is Obsolete, Melbourne: Contemporary Arts Media. DVD and CD-ROM.

SUZUKI, TADASHI (JAPANESE THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1939–) Suzuki has a composite identity as director, trainer, designer of theatre spaces, intercultural theorist and practitioner, and writer. He has directed a large number of performances, many of which have attracted acclaim around the world, especially The Trojan Women (1977), with Kayoko Shiraishi in the lead role, and The Bacchae (1978). His creation and theorization of his training system – the Suzuki method – is perhaps his most notable contribution to twentieth and twenty-first century performance. It has transformed comprehension of the performer’s vocation and what performing is, and is now taught in several universities and drama schools in North America, as well as through regular training sessions in London and Australia. As 86

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well as working regularly with SCOT, the Suzuki Company of Toga, Suzuki has also directed productions with just Australian and American actors, as well as with Japanese and American actors combined in a production of Dionysus (1992), performed in both English and Japanese. Through such projects and as an Asian director he has made a significant and original contribution to intercultural debates, initially through his book The Way of Acting (1986), a translation of one of the twelve books he has published in Japanese. As part of his cross-cultural vision, he collaborated with American director Anne Bogart, with whom he co-founded SITI, the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (1992). Though now separate from Suzuki, Bogart’s group is today one of the USA’s leading experimental companies, who still use his training method. Suzuki has developed a range of performance work, from intimate classical pieces to outdoor celebratory spectacles with fireworks. One dominant form has been collages of European texts, creating surprising conjunctions and juxtapositions. This integration of multiple Eastern and Western sources applies to the music and scenography he employs, as well as the spaces he has developed. For an outdoor theatre in the village of Toga he mixed ancient Greek theatre architecture with elements from a Noh stage, for example. In his performances, extracts of texts by Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov sit alongside contemporary Japanese pop songs. His is an eclectic postmodern directorial style that is rooted in his strict training method, centred on the ‘grammar of the feet’. Derived in part from the traditional Japanese forms of Noh and Kabuki, this ‘grammar’ uses ways of walking and movements centred on the lower half of the body to challenge and ground the performer. It tests the performer’s stamina and concentration as well as physical flexibility, muscular strength and spatial sensitivity, generating what Suzuki calls ‘animal energy’ in the performer. Suzuki believes actors need to rediscover the body’s potential, which has been neglected in the name of progress and civilization. The theatre should return to non-electricity-dependent resources, as in premodern forms such as Noh or the Elizabethan stage. Suzuki has followed this idea through in locating his practice outside of the metropolis of Tokyo. From 1976 he was based in the tiny village of Toga in the remote Japanese alps, where he founded Japan’s first international theatre festival in 1982. The Toga Arts Park contains a mixture of theatre spaces, including a Noh-like farmhouse theatre and an outdoor amphitheatre overlooking a lake. Crucially, it has also provided a ‘home’ for SCOT. In the 1990s, his empire expanded, when (with architectural collaborator Arata Isozaki) he oversaw the building and management of a theatre in a newly built arts centre in the city of Mito, and then developed a multi-million-pound arts park in hills outside the city of Shizuoka, an hour from Tokyo. Since the late 1990s Suzuki has been touring the world under the auspices of the Theatre Olympics Festival, which he co-founded, and of which the fifth festival took place in South Korea in 2010. He has energized and experimented with contemporary Japanese theatre as much as he has challenged the dominance of naturalist and psychologically-based acting processes in the West.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Only one of Suzuki’s many books has been published in English. Both Allain and Carruthers and Takahashi introduce all aspects of Suzuki’s work, with Allain’s second edition text also comprising a DVD demonstrating the Suzuki method. SCOT’s website is quite limited but has some basic information in English. Allain, Paul (2009) The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, London: Methuen. Carruthers, Ian and Yasunari Takahashi (2004) The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. Online. Available www.spac.or.jp (accessed 4 July 2013). Suzuki Company of Toga. Online. Available www.scot-suzukicompany.com/en/ (accessed 4 July 2013). Suzuki, Tadashi (1986) The Way of Acting, New York: Theatre Communications Group.

TURNER, VICTOR (BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGIST/THEORIST/TEACHER, 1920–83) Turner embraced connections between anthropology and performance, most notably through his collaboration and friendship with Richard Schechner. After his initial fieldwork with the Ndembu tribe of Central Africa, he researched the nature of symbols, play, pilgrimages and the dramatic properties inherent in social rituals in various contexts, both tribal and industrial. Building on the pioneering ideas of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who attempted to classify the liminal structure of rituals, Turner further defined a distinction between the liminal and liminoid. He saw the former term as an essential element of play or rituals, denoting how participants enter into a ‘betwixt-and-between’ field of behaviour outside social rules of space and time, where symbols might suggest links to the sacred. The liminal is familiar to tribal societies where rituals do not tend to have a subversive agenda, but rather endorse the status quo. The liminoid refers to more complex modes of play found in modern societies, in which people might choose to participate or not, and which often have transgressive potential. One example Turner gives is radical performance, a connection that brought him into contact with theatre-makers like Schechner. Turner’s thinking has offered anthropological models to reflect on performance but has also reversed this process using dramatic forms and practices both to analyse social behaviour and to perform ethnographic research. For example, he analysed the features that dramaturgical structures in classical drama have in common with ritualized social practices, or ‘social dramas’ as he called them, and he ‘staged’ rituals with his students in order to elucidate their understanding of how and why rites of passage mark important moments in life. He and his wife and collaborator Edith called this practice ‘performing ethnography’. Turner continually broadened the scope of anthropological studies and theories, partly through contact with experimental performance in America, a country in which he spent most of his working life. Before his death he wrote ‘Body, Brain and 88

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Culture’ (1983), in response to growing interest in brain-mapping and attempts to explain consciousness. This explored the idea that there might in fact be a biologically determined desire or need for the kind of play that is found in rituals, which exists outside cultural constructs of games and socialization. Controversially, this questioned much anthropological theory, including the premises of most of his life’s research. It is a line of enquiry disputed by theorists like Judith Butler who have emphasized the importance of cultural constructions of identity and behaviour over and above biologically determined givens. Turner’s new avenue of research was tentative and unfinished, but its fundamental principles were explored in subsequent writings by Schechner and in the practice of Jerzy Grotowski, who investigated the possible existence of universal behaviour that is not culturally determined. Through his research, Turner built a bridge between studies of everyday life and performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

This lists the books by Turner that are most relevant to theatre and performance. Schechner’s texts articulate some of the connections between their ideas. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine. —— (1974) Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Press. —— (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications.

WILSON, ROBERT (AMERICAN DIRECTOR/SCENOGRAPHER/PERFORMER/ WRITER/VISUAL ARTIST, 1941–) For his revolutionary work in creating a theatre of images – which explores and promotes the visual potentials of space, light, objects, figures, costumes and movement – Robert Wilson is one of the most important directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout a prolific and celebrated international career, he has challenged conventional theatre practice, especially its emphasis on naturalistic representational idioms, de-emphasizing the text in the theatre event and concentrating instead on the formal, postdramatic properties of image, time, space, movement and sound. Wilson’s concern with form typically means that his shows appear stylistically surreal, moving without apparent psychological motivation from image to image. Trained in painting and architecture, he often begins work on his productions by drawing his shows in black-and-white storyboards that feature starkly minimalist, 89

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abstract landscapes. The storyboards are translated into usually very large proscenium arch stagings, with action – or near-static images or shapes of light – filling the vertical plane. In A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), the visual composition of the stage was inspired by an envelope, with the horizontal and vertical planes providing a rectangular shape and diagonal lines of light, and with costume and performer movement sometimes cohering to suggest the envelope’s flap. Wilson’s sets are pictorial, architectural and often abstract, resisting naturalism’s ‘real life’ and offering instead what may appear to be dream, fantasy or meditation. Wilson experiments also with the formal properties of time, exploring what aesthetic, emotional and psychological effects can be produced by drawing action out, or by juxtaposing slow and quick movements. Action is often performed repetitively, in a non-linear structure, in a style Wilson has described as ‘politely mannered’, or over great lengths of time. The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) was 12 hours in duration, and KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace (Iran, 1972) took seven days to perform. He experiments, too, with sound. Frequent repetition of words in his productions focuses attention on their formal properties – length and sound – rather than their meanings. For Wilson, the crucial feature of an opera is not sound but action. Wilson’s theatre is innovative, in terms not only of what it is but also of how it is made. His renown as an auteur director suggests that, because his shows are firmly imprinted with his signature style, his mode of direction must be autocratic. Certainly, his ways of working can be repetitive, mechanical, demanding, unfamiliar and uncomfortable for many performers, asking them, for example, to adopt positions in the stage picture rather than to build a character or find a motivation. But, given that Wilson’s sets of rules can be seen as simply different from other more conventional sets of rules, it is perhaps not surprising that many performers have found Wilson’s style of directing productively challenging. Arguments for seeing Wilson’s auteurism as autocratic should also be set alongside the fact that he is a keen collaborator. Early in his career he co-created scripts for silent operas with Raymond Andrews, a deaf-mute boy (Deafman Glance, 1971), and scripts that explored fractured language with Christopher Knowles, a teenage boy who had been diagnosed with brain damage (A Letter for Queen Victoria). (Wilson himself overcame a teenage speech impediment through work with a dancer, Mrs Byrd Hoffman, after whom he named his first theatre company, The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, in 1968.) Subsequent writer-collaborators include Susan Sontag (Alice in Bed, 1993), William S. Burroughs (The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, 1991), the German playwright Heiner Müller, who co-authored the German section of Wilson’s multinational epic the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down (1983–84) and Marina Abramović with whom he made The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011). Music collaborators include Laurie Anderson (Alcestis, 1986), opera singer Jessye Norman (Great Day in the Morning, 1982), and Philip Glass, with whom Wilson and another frequent collaborator, choreographer Lucinda Childs, produced Einstein on the Beach (1976; see Figure 4). 90

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Although Wilson’s work has maintained a striking aesthetic consistency throughout his career, it has also made a number of sizeable shifts. After devising silent operas and plays that deconstructed language, he began to produce more literary plays that were still elliptical and lyrical (the CIVIL warS), and then more classical plays and operas. In this later period, he has directed and designed many plays by modernists, such as Henrik Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, 1991), Gertrude Stein (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1992), August Strindberg (A Dream Play, 1998) and Samuel Beckett (Happy Days, 2008; Krapp’s Last Tape, 2009). He has also designed and directed numerous operas, including Wagner’s Parsifal (Hamburg, 1991) and Lohengrin (Zürich, 1991; New York, 1998) and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (Paris, 1993–97). As well as directing and designing, Wilson sometimes performs as in Hamlet: A Monologue (1995). He also makes a variety of other forms of visual art, including sculpture, painting, drawing and installation (for example, H.G., London, 1995). Wilson’s work has frequently been criticized for being elitist, both aesthetically and financially. His innovations and expansions in physical and temporal scale have indeed had implications for the financial scope of his work, usually making it very expensive to produce. For much of his career, this condition has resulted in his work being produced more frequently in European countries with relatively high levels of state subsidy to the theatre (especially Germany) than in Wilson’s native USA, not to mention any non-Western contexts. In his defence, Wilson sometimes uses amateur performers in his productions, so that in this respect at least participation can be seen as not elitist (unless one considers him to be exploiting these amateurs). Wilson’s theatre may certainly not be without fault, but in a theatre industry dominated by realism his formalism is startling, provocative and welcome. His theatre demonstrates the potentially awe-inspiring effects that can be produced by experimenting in epic scales of time and space and by prioritizing the making of images over the speaking of text. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht, Donker, Holmberg and Shyer all provide sustained description and analysis of Wilson’s work. Safir offers a richly illustrated collection of interviews with his many collaborators. Brecht, Stefan (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Donker, Janny (1985) The President of Paradise: A Traveller’s Account of Robert Wilson’s the CIVIL warS, Amsterdam: International Theatre Bookshop. Holmberg, Arthur (1997) The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robert Wilson. Online. Available www.robertwilson.com/ (accessed 14 October 2013). Safir, Margery Arent (ed.) (2011) Robert Wilson from Within, Paris: The Arts Arena and Flammarion, SA. 91

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Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Simmer, Bill (1976) ‘Theatre and Therapy: Robert Wilson’, TDR: The Drama Review 20.1 (T69): 99–110. Partially reprinted in Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge, pp. 147–56. Wilson, Robert ([1977] 1996) A Letter for Queen Victoria in The Theatre of Images, Bonnie Marranca (ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published by Drama Book Specialists.

WOOSTER GROUP (PERFORMANCE GROUP, FOUNDED NEW YORK, 1975) The Wooster Group has pioneered politically-engaged postmodern and postdramatic performance to a degree and with longevity unmatched in American experimental performance from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. Made up of a small core ensemble of artists, some of the Group’s original members, including director Elizabeth LeCompte and performer Spalding Gray, were working with Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group when they splintered to form their own company in 1975. This new group developed many of Schechner’s practices – including strategies for collectively devising and eclectically composing their work – while dropping others, particularly his emphasis on ritual and his promotion of the director as a kind of guru. Based in the Performing Garage in SoHo, New York City, the company’s main members have included LeCompte, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Peyton Smith, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos and Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray (who died in 1994 and 2004, respectively). The company has won many awards (including, for LeCompte, a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artist’s Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement) and has toured widely in the USA, Europe, Asia, South America and Canada, influencing many other theatre-makers. The Wooster Group’s work is aesthetically pioneering and politically radical and pivots around combining old and new texts and practices to interrogate the cultural power of both. In content, the Group’s productions typically collage elements from classic modern plays (usually from the American repertoire) with elements of personal and Group autobiography and diverse samplings from popular culture, including material which is culturally taboo. Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981) combined Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with pornography and a Pigmeat Markham comic routine from the 1960s performed by the company in blackface. LSD (. . . Just the High Points . . .) (1984) combined Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with accounts of Timothy Leary’s experiments with LSD. Juxtapositions like these produce new resonances in both sources of material, often working to deconstruct the assumed elitism of the ‘classic’ texts and to expose some of the prejudices – about race, gender, and age for example – on which they rely. In form, the company is exploring and experimenting with a host of theatre languages available to it alongside dramatic text, including dance, scenography and the multimedia potentials of video and lighting and sound design. Sets are often organized around tiered metal grids, with on-stage 92

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video playback and microphones, and with tables facing audiences for the performers’ presentation of material. These sets and the presentational style they facilitate have acquired a signature status and spawned numerous imitative ‘table plays’ – for example, Forced Entertainment’s Speak Bitterness (1994) and The Travels (2002). Stylistically, the productions are again eclectic, intercutting documentary-style presentation with naturalistic scenes (which are often, however, estranged through video or microphone mediation) and sequences of flamboyant theatricality often involving dance (for example, the shoe dance at the end of LSD) or other forms of athletic movement such as playing badminton in To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) (2001), based on Jean Racine’s Phèdre (and pictured on this book’s cover). The political engagement of the Wooster Group’s work operates on multiple fronts. The work deconstructs received high cultural artefacts, especially classic plays, and queries popular assumptions about what theatre should do and be. While acknowledging the power and seduction of naturalism’s illusionistic performance, the Group’s work also challenges its cultural dominance and perceived truth through a number of alienation techniques – for example, showing the actor putting drops in his eyes to simulate tears, and replaying a monologue, first as emotionally-charged realism and a second time accelerated and ridiculous (both in LSD). Finally, it provokes debate about the responsibilities of both producing and consuming culture by explicitly including controversial material, the most spectacular example being the blackface in Route 1 & 9, for which the company temporarily lost a major portion of its public funding. A pioneer in postmodern American performance, the Wooster Group celebrates performance’s pleasures (the actor’s presence, classic texts’ literary achievement, the thrill of high energy dance), interrogates its prejudices, explores the new forms it might take, is fiercely (if not straightforwardly) socially-engaged and remains committed to democratic methods of devising. The Group continues to make challenging productions, including Brace Up! (1991), which combined Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Japanese theatre forms and on-stage video capture and playback; House/ Lights (1998), based on Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (1939) and the 1964 softcore bondage film Olga’s House of Shame; and HAMLET (2006) which combined Shakespeare’s text with Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production of the play. In its exploration of new media, it has also made radio works and several videos, including White Homeland Commando (1992). The company increasingly collaborates with other companies such as the UK-based Royal Shakespeare Company and the New York City Players. Famous and extremely influential, the Wooster Group also remains one of the most energetically innovative theatre companies. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Savran provides detailed descriptions and analysis of many productions up to the late 1980s, while Shank describes and analyses work through the 1990s. Callens collects new essays on both the Group and other companies and directors it has influenced, 93

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including The Builders Association and Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players. Auslander’s books analyse the Group’s work, especially LSD. Giesekam considers the Group’s work in the context of postmodernism. Quick’s book provides great insight into the Group’s processes. The Group’s website has extensive video resources and other information and material. Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Callens, Johan (ed.) (2004) The Wooster Group and Its Traditions, Brussels: Peter Lang. Giesekam, Greg (2002) ‘The Wooster Group’, Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (eds), Oxford: Blackwell. Quick, Andrew (2007) The Wooster Group Work Book, Oxon: Routledge. Savran, David (1988) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. The Wooster Group. Online. Available http://thewoostergroup.org/blog/ (accessed 14 October 2013).

ZEAMI, MOTOKIYO (JAPANESE NOH ACTOR/THEORIST/PLAYWRIGHT, 1363–1443) Zeami is one of the founders of Noh theatre. He wrote approximately 100 of the extant 240 Noh plays. His insights, and those of his father (Kanami Kiyotsugu), into the practices and concepts of this ancient form provide one of the fullest and earliest analyses of performing and performance, and are equivalent perhaps to Bharatamuni’s Natyasastra (from India) and to a lesser extent Aristotle’s Poetics. Zeami’s treatises categorized principles like Grace (yugen) and the Flower (hana – the spiritual quality and presence a performer can acquire with maturity, insight and practice), as well as more pragmatic notions like ‘reading the audience’. His work offers not only invaluable historical information but vital instruction to the contemporary performer, even though he does not fit within the temporal parameters of this book. Zeami’s writings have also influenced several European artists, including Edward Gordon Craig, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, some directly and others more obliquely. Several Japanese experimental theatre practitioners, like Tadashi Suzuki, returned to his work keenly in the 1960s, reacting against shingeki, the Japanese version of Western realism, and in order to return to the source of Japanese theatre. European and Asian performance practitioners have been attracted to several aspects of his work: the long apprenticeship of decades rather than years which he proposes; his combination of pragmatism (for example, how to structure events in the day-long Noh festivals) and spirituality; his technical advice to the performer on sustaining energy and focus on stage; and the structured 94

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methodological approach of a performer moving through different ‘levels’, which peak in ‘The art of the flower of peerless charm’. Zeami also defined performing as a ‘way’ of being, a principle shared by theatre directors and martial artists alike, and evident in groups that range from The Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre in the US to Poland’s Gardzienice Theatre Association. BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a long time Rimer and Masakazu’s book has been recognized as the standard translation of Zeami’s treatises in English, though Wilson updates this. Quinn and Hare’s texts give invaluable insights into the total range of Zeami’s practices and theories. Quinn, Shelley Fenno (2005) Developing Zeami: the Noh actor’s attunement in practice, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Zeami, Motokiyo (1984) On the Art of the No Drama – The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu, New Jersey: University of Princeton Press. —— (2006) The Spirit of Noh, trans. William Scott Wilson, Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc. —— (2008) Zeami: Performance Notes, trans. Tom Hare, New York: Columbia University Press.

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4' 33"

4' 33" (BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, NORTH CAROLINA; ‘COMPOSED’ BY JOHN CAGE; 1952) Conceived by John Cage, 4' 33" (four minutes and thirty-three seconds) constructed the absence of music. This timed period of silence invited the audience to listen not to the piano playing of concert pianist David Tudor but instead to incidental sounds – their own breathing, coughs or the rustling of programmes. Tudor began 4' 33" by lifting the lid of a grand piano. He ended by replacing the lid. Between these two clearly defined actions he moved his arms three times, breaking the whole composition into three movements, in both the literal sense of the word and in terms of a musical score. The elements of chance, non-intentionality and naturally occurring sounds which made up 4' 33" were features that also appeared in many of Cage’s later works. The piece’s significance lay in its insistence that auditors or spectators must find their own meanings in the performance rather than respond to the expressive ideas of the artists. Through this seemingly simple decision, Cage defined the process of creativity as an essentially democratic one. He was undermining his status as a composer who intentionally constructs sounds to affect the spectator. But he was also playfully negating Tudor’s role as a virtuoso musician, as the piece prevented both artists from demonstrating their talents. Not surprisingly, 4' 33" ’s first audience was deeply provoked and the piece generated avid debate. It was an early example of, and inspiration for, the kind of provocative practices that became widespread in the 1960s, initially known as happenings and then performance art. These all questioned the audience’s role as passive observers and tried to make them somehow the object of the performance. 4' 33" still stands up as a conceptually challenging event, continuing to fuel debates about the nature of art. In summer 2002, it was the centre of a copyright dispute when composer Mike Batt was accused by Cage’s estate of plagiarism when he included a piece called ‘A Minute’s Silence’ on his album Classical Graffiti. Batt settled out of court. In January 2004, the piece was played for the first time in Britain by a full orchestra in a season of Cage’s works titled ‘John Cage Uncaged’, and transmitted on the radio. These examples and the interest that surrounded both events and Cage’s centennial in 2012 indicate how much the piece still lies firmly within the public consciousness and how it still functions as a paradigm of the extreme nature of some creative explorations. Recent interest in theatre and sound is extending and enriching such debates. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Understandably, none of these texts gives much detail about the performance, but rather they follow questions and issues it provoked, picked up in Kendrick and Roesner’s book which indicates the growth of interest in acoustic aspects of theatre and performance. Kaye places the work in a broader context of the history of postmodern performance.

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Cage, John (1967) A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press. —— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars. Kahn, Douglas (1999) ‘The Impossible Inaudible’, in Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 155–99. Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan. Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars. Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1993) Writings About John Cage, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

ARAB SPRING (NORTH AFRICAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN PEOPLE’S REVOLUTIONS, LATE 2010–) The Arab Spring is a series of large-scale, citizen-led national revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East that rose to prominence in December 2010 in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria amongst other places throughout 2011 and beyond. In different nations, particular local conditions spurred protest, demonstration, mass sit-ins and rioting. For example, in Tunisia, national protests erupted when 26-year-old street trader and sole breadwinner for a family of eight Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight after a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed cart and scales and assaulted him. However, the many revolutions shared numerous common causes and were ignited by a momentum that unfurled across the region, aided in large part by widespread use of the internet and appropriation of such corporate social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter as well as YouTube and Flickr. Protest was both violent and non-violent and, in general, denounced entrenched repressive governments. It also condemned such corollary problems as human rights violations, political corruption, plutocratic decadence, rising prices, high levels of poverty and high rates of unemployment, especially amongst large populations of comparatively well-educated young people. Its effectiveness across the region has been variable. Many regimes have fallen but many are still in flux, not least, at the time of writing, that in Syria. The Arab Spring is particularly socially significant because it indicates epochal – and ongoing – change in a region marked by serious social deprivation, social repression and conflict. Though similar to other mass political protests, the Arab Spring is distinctive partly for the great number of nations it encompassed so quickly and for its perception as the first major revolution of the social media age, where protesters used not only their own internet-based websites but appropriated corporate social networking sites. Performance studies might particularly help us understand the Arab Spring in several ways. In many nations, performative acts such as singing revolutionary songs were punished by state authorities in moves that only provoked more public protest; representational acts of performance often proved more powerful than material acts of State violence. Like other populist protests – such as in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, the protests of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in 100

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Argentina since 1977, Czechoslovakia’s 1968 Prague Spring and the Occupy movement of 2011 on – Arab Spring protesters in their thousands occupied highly symbolic public spaces such as Tahrir Square in central Cairo. This occupation allowed them not only to share opinions, strategize, mobilize and challenge the State authority often vested in those spaces, but also to make globally visible through media their sheer numbers and their force of shared feeling, sometimes represented through wearing particular colours, or waving specific flags. In ways that would previously have been unimaginable, social media allowed them to organize masses of people, evade state sponsorship and maintain control over the global dissemination of information about their conditions, demands and experiences of state repression. The importance of social media in organizing these live, public protests indicates that, as in debates about mediatization and liveness, cyberspace and ‘real’ space are mutually contingent and not as distinctive as they might at first appear. It also raises questions about the relative and long-term effectiveness of these apparently leaderless revolutions where communication is so dispersed, making it difficult to arrest revolutionary leaders but also potentially challenging to focus revolutionary aims. And it provokes consideration of the internet’s broader political efficacy and control. Although the internet is used globally not only for the dissemination of information and opinions, more often it is used for marketing, consumerism and entertainment. Though it can be used for revolutionary ends, it is also widely scrutinized by governments, often in ways that make state censorship invisible rather than transparent. And its corporate control by American companies begs questions about how independent its use can ever be, either ideologically or commercially. The Arab Spring is unfinished at the time of writing; its effects in its own region and beyond have been and continue to be monumental. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerbaudo offers detailed information on and analysis of Arab Spring events in Egypt (as well as protests in Spain and New York), focusing on their articulation through new media. Noueihed and Warren’s book describes and analyses relevant events before and during the Arab Spring across the Arab world. Azmy and Carlson’s co-edited special issue of Theatre Research International looks at the importance of both theatre and performance (including enactments in Tahrir Square) to the Arab Spring. The special issue of the journal Globalizations on ‘Arab Revolutions’ includes articles relating revolution to humour and to social media. Azmy, Hazem and Marvin Carlson (eds) (2013) Theatre Research International, Special Issue on ‘Theatre and the Arab Spring’, 38:2 (July). Gerbaudo, Paolo (2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Press. Globalizations (2011) Special Forum on the Arab Revolutions, 8:5 (October). Noueihed, Lin and Alex Warren (2012) The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Making of a New Era, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 101

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BALINESE DANCE-THEATRE (THE DUTCH PAVILION, PARIS COLONIAL EXPOSITION; DIRECTED BY COKORDA RAKA SUKAWATI; 1931) This dance-theatre presentation has come to epitomize the infiltration of Asian performance into Western theatre, shaping its practices and theories alike and taking it inexorably on a path towards interculturalism. This performance was not, however, by any means the first appearance of Asian performing arts in the West. For example, W. B. Yeats had already seen Japanese theatre in Europe and had been working with a Japanese dancer, Mr Ito, when he wrote his Noh-inspired Four Plays for Dancers, published in 1920. But the fact that Antonin Artaud saw this particular performance which inspired his essay ‘On the Balinese Theatre’ in The Theatre and Its Double (1938) has thrust this specific event irrevocably into the limelight. Presented in a mock-temple setting, the presentation included short modernized extracts from a myriad of Balinese forms – Balinese dance-theatre includes the popular Barong dance, the sacred Wali dance and the warrior dance Baris, all of which have centuries-long genealogies. The irony in Artaud’s analysis and the subsequent significance this has accrued is that he misunderstood what he was watching and its context, investing in the performance the spirituality and history he desired for his own theatre. He misinterpreted the performers’ codified hand gestures as abstract ‘hieroglyphics’, and he emphatically imbued the rather artificial event with a mysticism that the performers did not themselves intend to convey. Rather than being an authentic enactment of a Balinese sacred dance, the performance was pragmatically devised to entertain paying visitors to the exposition. Nevertheless, the Balinese dance-theatre’s gamelan music and striking physicality helped Artaud envisage a total theatre, much as Bertold Brecht’s meeting with Chinese performer Mei Lan Fang four years later supported the development of his theory of alienation. We can also use Artaud’s essay to gauge Western theatre artists’ growing preoccupation and frustration with the limitations of naturalist mimesis. Balinese ritual performance in its own domestic context has also become known through anthropologist Margaret Mead’s film footage, which shows performers in trance piercing themselves with the long thin ceremonial knives known as kris. The ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali (1952) is based on fieldwork conducted in Bali from 1936 to 1938 by Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson, with cinematographer Jane Belo. The access such documentaries and their earlier album Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) give to sacred ritual practices has led to deeper analyses of trance states in several investigations of acting. Within a wide spectrum of approaches to acting, the total absorption of those in trance stands at the other end from the detachment espoused by Brecht. Such analyses also emphasize the differences between what the spectator and the performer perceive even on a biological level, with the trance-dancer insensitive to the pain that spectators might assume he feels. Artaud’s limited perception during a time of still intense imperialism differs greatly from the later detailed anthropological surveys produced by Belo and Mead, and shows how understanding moved on. Hindsight has helped us understand the 102

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necessity of mutual insight into the ‘other’s’ position and context in cross-cultural projects. The exoticizing contained within his essay – perhaps inevitable, given the falsifying nature of the exposition – reminds us of the impositions and assumptions potentially implicit in intercultural projects. Current examinations of Asian performance practices by outsiders must now have a more sophisticated sense of alternative perspectives, thanks in part to the knowledge Artaud and anthropological studies and documentation such as Mead’s have bestowed. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The two essays cited here look at the specific misunderstandings in Artaud’s writing and the implications of this, while Schechner looks at the relationship between theatre and anthropology in general, including discussions of trance and Balinese performance. Artaud, Antonin (1970) The Theatre and Its Double, London: Calder and Boyars. Belo, Jane (1960) Trance in Bali, New York: Columbia University Press. Savarese, Nicola (2001) ‘Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition’, The Drama Review 45.3 (T171): 55–77. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Winet, Evan (1998) ‘Great Reckonings in a Simulated City: Artaud’s Misunderstanding of Balinese Theatre’, in Crosscurrents in the Drama – East and West, Stanley Vincent Longman (ed.), Alabama: University of Alabama Press and Southeastern Theatre Conference, pp. 98–107.

CABARET VOLTAIRE (ZURICH, SWITZERLAND; PERFORMED BY VARIOUS ARTISTS; 5 FEBRUARY 1916) The first night of the Cabaret Voltaire saw the birth of a challenging movement called Dada that has influenced much performance experimentation since, especially theatre of the absurd, performance art and happenings. These events performed in the neutral country of Switzerland during the First World War had destructive and irrational drives that chimed with the nihilism of the surrounding mass slaughter. Dada’s appeal also lay in the fact that it cut across artistic boundaries with participants drawn from literature, music, theatre and the plastic arts. Consequently, its impact has also traversed disciplines. Antonin Artaud and Tadeusz Kantor are just two amongst many theatre artists who were clearly inspired by the surrealist movement into which it evolved. The word ‘dada’ itself, selected when plucked randomly from a dictionary, means a horse or a hobbyhorse in French and ‘yes, yes’ in Russian, and it indicates the movement’s attempt to deny all significance, to resist categorization and, ultimately, to destroy art. The nature of the first Cabaret Voltaire performance at No. 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich was eclectic, including shouted poems, folk songs, the display 103

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of paintings, the recitation of manifestos, drumming and short sketches. Nightly themed performances ensued (initially these were country-specific based on materials from Russia, France and Switzerland), with both solo and collaborative work, most of it provocative. Performers played with words and reduced them to sounds in order to displace their functionality. With the exception of the highly-skilled cabaret performer Emmy Hennings, performances were rough and ready, denying virtuosity, professionalism or dramaturgical organization. The simultaneous reading of poems and nonsense texts accompanied by cacophonic noise, masks and absurd costumes led to riotous audience responses. Such interaction became commonplace and was even encouraged. As this animation and the audience’s hunger for scandal grew, so did the performers experiment more wildly, striving to keep breaking their own rules. The Cabaret Voltaire closed after five months. It had had some popular success, but its influence went well beyond these events alone. The Dada movement that the Cabaret spawned has provided a constant reminder of the ability, and perhaps indeed the necessity, of art to disturb the public and their expectations, and continually to move beyond the parameters which it establishes. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a wealth of material on Dadaism, but these texts place it in relation to the evolution of performance and its beginnings at the Cabaret Voltaire. Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday. Goldberg, RoseLee (1988) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and expanded edition, London: Thames and Hudson. Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHERRY ORCHARD, THE (MOSCOW, RUSSIA, MOSCOW ART THEATRE [MAT]; DIRECTED BY KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY, WRITTEN BY ANTON CHEKHOV; 17 JANUARY 1904) At the beginning of the twentieth century this production cemented the place of naturalism as a dominant and successful form, even though it had its detractors. These included Vsevolod Meyerhold and Chekhov himself, who saw The Cherry Orchard as comic and symbolic rather than the tragic slice of life for which Konstantin Stanislavsky strove. With designer Viktor Simov, Stanislavsky loaded his production of the play with sound effects such as frogs and corncrakes and numerous scenographic elements, like a mound of hay, whereas in the text Chekhov had stipulated the vast emptiness of the steppe. Chekhov’s desire for minimalist symbolism clashed head-on with Stanislavsky’s own love of stage technology and conspicuous detail. In spite of such conflicts during the process, the audience responded positively to this verisimilitude at The Cherry Orchard’s première, timed 104

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to coincide with an ailing Chekhov’s birthday. The play acted as an epitaph to the vanishing life of the gentry in the early years of the new century and signalled the changes sweeping through Russia before the imminent revolutions. This change was embodied in the character Lopakhin, who surprises even himself by buying the orchard in order then to chop it down and exploit the land commercially. The end of Act 4 resonates to the sound of axes and the orchard’s destruction. The play became the longest-running Chekhov piece in the Moscow Art Theatre’s (MAT) repertoire and has subsequently become one of Chekhov’s most produced works, the focus of its social critique shifting for each epoch and culture that produces it. Chekhov died shortly after the MAT production, closing the debates that had raged between himself and Stanislavsky as to the timbre of his plays. However, these differences continued in the tensions between Stanislavsky and Meyerhold regarding their divergent approaches to directing. Though numerous other plays and productions could supplant The Cherry Orchard as a paradigm of early twentieth-century naturalist theatre, it has become emblematic of such work. The play has proved versatile enough to allow diverse approaches like Peter Brook’s stripped-back production at his Thêátre Les Bouffes du Nord, Paris in 1981, Tadashi Suzuki’s 1986 intercultural version that mixed Japanese pop songs with traditional forms, or Giorgio Strehler’s rather more poetic rendition in 1974. The naturalist detail of its première was often emulated, though, and as a result its over-complex detail has reinforced both skewed notions of what naturalism is and how Chekhov might stereotypically be interpreted (with white dust sheets, dull lassitude and bubbling samovars). This production of The Cherry Orchard reminds us how canonized theatre so easily starts to reproduce not so much everyday life but in fact itself alone. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The play and its production have spawned numerous analyses, such as the ones by Edward Braun (in the Allain/Gottlieb collection) and Rayfield. Senelick and Benedetti place this production in the context of Stanislavsky’s numerous other works. Benedetti, Jean (1982) Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen. Gottlieb, Vera and Paul Allain (eds) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rayfield, Donald (1994) The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, New York: Twayne Publishers. Senelick, Laurence (1997) The Chekhov Theatre – A Century of the Plays in Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CONSTANT PRINCE, THE (WROCŁAW, POLAND: THE LABORATORY THEATRE, DIRECTED BY JERZY GROTOWSKI; 1965) The Constant Prince was a central performance in Jerzy Grotowski’s oeuvre as well as in world theatre of the twentieth century. Most remarkable was the actor Ryszard Cieślak’s portrayal of the eponymous Prince, which epitomized Grotowski’s approach to acting. Critics considered that Cieślak had achieved a ‘total act’ and, while they struggled to describe what this meant in practice, they agreed unanimously that he had somehow transcended both the role and his material presence, becoming what Grotowski defined as a ‘holy actor’. Cieślak recalled Antonin Artaud’s vision of the martyred actor, ‘burning alive at the stake but still signalling to the audience through the flames’, communicating even in his death throes. The production’s playtext, which is delivered at great speed in an incantatory way, had a complex cross-cultural evolution. The nineteenth-century Polish Romantic playwright Juliusz Słowacki had written a version of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play El Principe Constante (1629) from the Golden Age of Spanish drama, which Grotowski further drastically cut. As well as this pared-down text, in keeping with the principles of ‘poor theatre’, Grotowski used few props and simple costuming and had scenographer and architect Jerzy Gurawski construct a striking scenic arrangement for this piece. Gurawski had invented models of staging for several of the Laboratory Theatre’s previous productions, each time altering the perspective and position of the spectator. In The Constant Prince, the actors performed in a pit surrounded by wooden walls, reminiscent of a bullring or operating theatre. Seated on benches, the spectators had to lean forward over the barriers to look down on the action. They were thus meant to become suppliant witnesses of, and voyeuristic participants in, the Prince’s torture and subsequent martyrdom at the hands of his captors. On one level, Cieślak’s role symbolized a Poland which has been ‘crucified’ (or invaded and occupied) several times in its history. The piece used Christian imagery such as the pietà, which depicts a dead Jesus lying across his mother Mary’s lap. But the role was also a deeply personal exploration. Months of private work with Grotowski plumbing Cieślak’s memories of his first feelings of love as a teenager led to the precise physical and vocal sequence of actions or ‘score’ that was meant to contain and control the performer’s emotions. Cieślak’s ‘self-penetration’, as Grotowski described it, helped generate the piece’s acclaim on an international tour. Critics testified that The Constant Prince went beyond specific Polish referencing through its central archetype of the martyr and through Cieślak’s ‘gift’ of vulnerability before the audience. The Constant Prince is recorded minimally in a poor-quality film shot from a fixed position with a single camera with minimal lighting, for which the sound was recorded two years after the performance in another country. The near-perfect match between sound and action shows the absolute precision of the actors’ scores, even with this two-year gap. It is hard to discern a lot in the film, but in spite of this it affirms Grotowski’s vision of performance as an encounter between spectator and actor that attempts to change all participants on a deep, personal level as they remove 106

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the masks and habits inculcated in daily interaction. The basic premises of Grotowski’s performances in this period – the small audiences of fewer than a hundred people, the efficacy of communicating through Jungian archetypes, as well as the actors’ profound and almost destabilizing work on themselves – have been repeatedly questioned. Few can deny, however, the enormous impact the piece had aesthetically, or its many imitators, as well as the debates about theatre’s function, the need for craft and discipline, and the ethics of the director–actor relationship that it subsequently spawned. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following texts contain short accounts of this performance from various perspectives: the director’s, the critics’ and the scholars’. All these books relate this piece to Grotowski’s other works, though with focuses on different periods. The film is only available privately and contains subtitles in several languages. Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre, Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag. Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. Schechner, Richard and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge.

COYOTE: I LIKE AMERICA AND AMERICA LIKES ME (RENÉ BLOCK GALLERY, NEW YORK; ‘ACTION’ PERFORMED BY JOSEPH BEUYS AND A COYOTE; 1974) Joseph Beuys’ temporary cohabitation with a coyote broke down boundaries between everyday life and art in a compelling way, furthering his belief that everyone (even a coyote, perhaps) can be an artist or present art. Beuys had not been alone in integrating animals into performance but here the interaction was sustained and was unavowedly central to the piece. For a week, before an intrigued public in the René Block Gallery in New York, the German artist shared a small cage with the animal, with not much more than a pile of straw, a large sheet of felt and numerous copies of the Wall Street Journal, which the coyote enjoyed tearing up and urinated on. Beuys followed its every move and attempted to communicate with the animal constantly. Like many of his pieces, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me explored the indeterminate crossover between ritual, daily behaviour and performance. Beuys called these events ‘Actions’, though they shared many properties with happenings, and were even briefly connected to the very socially aware fluxus movement (1962– 65). His works gained their gravity from their socially-engaged critique as well as allusions to religious symbolism. He described his role as being akin to a shaman figure. Politically, he operated in left-wing and ecological groups, an engagement that fed directly into his art and that, in one event (Kukai/Akopeenein/Brown cross/ Fat corners/Model fat corners, 1964), led him to being attacked on stage by rightwing demonstrators. The performance with the coyote, for example, questioned the 107

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status of the United States’ Native population. With the protagonist of the coyote and a simple repeated sequence of structured moments of interaction, Beuys invoked the close contact to nature with which Native Americans live. Traditionally, for them, the coyote is a powerful totemic animal, whereas for contemporary Americans its status has been downgraded to little more than a pest. The piece’s challenge to America lay in Beuys’ allusion to this discrepancy. Beuys’ inspiration for his events, sculptures and installations derived in part from his personal experience during the Second World War, when his aeroplane was shot down over Crimea and he was kept alive by Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and rubbed animal fat on to him to keep him warm (a claim that some have queried). From a visual arts background (for twelve years, Beuys was Professor of Sculpture in Düsseldorf – before being dismissed in 1972 for his controversial views), the striking sculptural and physical presence of his works was usually animated by his own interactions, be it with the wild coyote, a dead hare with whom he was privately discussing his own artworks (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965) or a cardboard box in which he spent a whole day (Twenty Four Hours, 1965). His ‘social sculptures’ and Actions influenced and excited many, perhaps most surprisingly the Glaswegian ex-gangster prisoner/author Jimmy Boyle, with whom Beuys began a series of dialogues as a result of the coyote event. In November 2002, Flemish actor Benjamin Verdonck staged an anti-war piece during the build-up to the Iraq war, spending three days in a cage with a pig named ‘Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me’. Although Beuys died in 1986, works like Verdonck’s perpetuate his unconventional and politically-engaged practice and attest to his enduring impact. BIBLIOGRAPHY

These books are a mixture of essays, interviews, statements and visual information, providing helpful ways into Beuys’ often difficult to grasp visual and performed artworks. Bower, Alain (1996) The Essential Joseph Beuys, Lothar Schirmer (ed.), London: Thames and Hudson. Tisdall, Caroline (1976) Joseph Beuys: Coyote, Munich: Shirmer Mosel. —— (1979) Joseph Beuys, London: Thames and Hudson.

DEAD CLASS, THE (CRACOW, POLAND; CRICOT 2, DIRECTED BY TADEUSZ KANTOR; 1975) Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s production of The Dead Class was a masterpiece of visual theatre. Exploring notions articulated in his manifesto on ‘The Theatre of Death’, Kantor played with the staging of personal childhood memories, images of lifelessness and the replication of real life inherent in performing. The piece draws on a range of sources but was loosely based on a framework developed by the Polish Jewish writer, artist and teacher Bruno Schulz in his short story ‘The Old Age 108

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Pensioner’ (1934). On the verge of dying, an old man returns to his former school and gradually regresses to become a schoolboy again before he is swept away into the sky by the wind and disappears. The performance also contained fragments from Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke (1937), an imaginative homage to idle youth. The novel’s narrative sometimes focuses on (and thereby ‘enlarges’) parts of the body, a sort of textual zoom-in. Kantor’s actors replicated this device gesturally, through face-pulling, for example. Excerpts of text were also lifted from Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Tumor Brainiowicz (1920), an absurdist piece by the eccentric Polish writer, artist, photographer and philosopher, whose difficult and surreal plays Kantor frequently and successfully staged. Finally, The Dead Class also drew on Kantor’s own experience, or rather the memories of his childhood days. Kantor aptly described himself as a ‘text-mincer’, as this wide-ranging collection of sources and stimuli demonstrates. The Dead Class’s haunting macabre images were reminiscent of the sketches of hollow-eyed dome-headed figures that accompany Schulz’s stories. The scenography consisted of an archetypal pre-Second World War schoolroom with desks, where the uniformed children (played by adult performers) were straddled by mannequins strapped to their backs. At times these figures even replaced them, propped up at their desks – they were omnipresent as shadows that cannot be forgotten or erased. The unusual collection of characters included the Old Man with a Bike, who was represented semi-literally by a wheel tied to an old man’s body – one of Kantor’s ‘bio-objects’ as he described them. All action was overseen and orchestrated by the on-stage black-suited figure of Kantor himself, whose looming presence and critical eye focused moments through gestures of encouragement or admonishment. His participatory presence clearly framed the mise en scène as a representation of his own experience, and made the audience aware of his ongoing role as director and creator of that experience – a practice common to all Cricot 2 productions. The impact of the piece was sustained by several years of international touring as well as its presentation in other media. Textual transcripts of the performance exist, as well as grotesque, humorous photographs and the vivid sketches with which Kantor’s creative process always began. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda made a film as a response to the piece, shot in a Cracow cellar as well as outdoors where the characters become liberated from the schoolroom and their mannequin selves, in a departure from Kantor’s original performance. Théâtre de Complicité’s Street of Crocodiles (1992, UK), directed by Simon McBurney and based on another story by Schulz, was visually and thematically inspired by The Dead Class and Kantor’s work, a testament to the long-lasting impact Kantor has had. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apart from videos of the performance and Wajda’s film, none of which are commercially available, the best access to this piece is through the Drozdowski book. This includes a transcript of the performance text as well as reflections on the piece and its characters by Kantor. More indirect analyses and visual information are available in 109

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the other texts below. The website has a useful bibliography and selected information about Kantor’s work. Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor. Online. Available www. cricoteka.pl/en/ (accessed 5 July 2013). Drozdowski, Bohdan (ed.) (1979) Twentieth Century Polish Theatre, London: John Calder. Kobialka, Michal (1993) A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos by Tadeusz Kantor, Berkeley: University of California Press. Miklaszewski, Krzysztof (2002) Encounters with Kantor, George Hyde (ed.), London: Routledge.

DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN (PERFORMANCE BY DV8; 1988) This award-winning performance by British physical dance-theatre company DV8, made just two years after the company was founded, is a key reference point not just in terms of its form and influence on the then-emerging field of physical theatre, but as much for its troubled relationship to British law and moral and ethical issues. Its influence has been furthered by the film made of the performance, the documentation of which expanded debates around its subject matter and related concerns. The piece was based on the real story of Dennis Nilsen, a serial murderer who picked up homosexual men in nightclubs, took them home, murdered and cannibalized them. The main textual source was Brian Masters’ 1985 book on this subject, Killing for Company. Dead Dreams, as it is known for short, had a stark atmosphere underpinned by dynamic, athletic choreography, and gained an impact that has earned it a position as one of the foundational performances of physical theatre. Whilst the dance work itself received many positive, if not shocked, reviews, the aftermath of the work had much greater significance in that it was referenced in parliamentary discussions about the repeal of Clause 28. This 1986 Local Government law, instituted in the same year that DV8 was founded, forbade the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ or its presentation in a positive light (in schools and educational facilities in particular). DV8 were at the forefront of protests against this homophobic act, which was only repealed in England in 2003. The performance not only responded to the law, showing the potential risks of suppressing homosexuality and driving it underground through the extreme example of Nilsen, but was also referred to as indicative of homosexual vice after a London Weekend Television screening of the film made right-wing newspaper headlines. The documentation of the performance comprises a fifty-minute black and white film that operates as a standalone creative response to the performance rather than as a more faithful recording of the stage work. In it, the position of the audience is not fixed and the viewer cannot gain any sense of where they might have been located in the performance proper: a nightclub scene takes place in a 360° club environment which also acts as a prison. The metaphor of the club as prison is especially evident in a scene backed by loud disco music when the performers use each other as ladders 110

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to try to scramble up the walls to escape. Further innovative aspects of the performance and subsequent film include direct address by one dancer to the audience and DV8’s hallmark exaggerated gestural language where perhaps subconscious tics are repeated and extended to a grotesque level to capture and subvert everyday behaviour and mannerisms. This personal input from dancers as actors/storytellers, speaking in part autobiographically, has much in common with Pina Bausch’s approach in her dance-theatre. The performance also explored the ambiguity of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator, an especially important issue when, as the piece suggested, society bears responsibility for cultivating homophobia and when the violence of homophobia becomes internalized. Implicitly, Dead Dreams also referenced the then numerous deaths of gay men caused by AIDS, the aggressive homophobia nurtured by panic about this, and the violence of effective inaction on a state level both in response to that homophobia and in the search for a cure for HIV/AIDS. Dead Dreams’ choreography was in what was then called a Eurocrash style, which emerged across Europe in the 1980s, epitomized by the work of choreographers and companies like Wim Vandekeybus and V-TOL. Eurocrash denoted a high energy, physically risky mode of dance in which the performers seemed to disregard even their own well-being. The DV8 dancers’ apparent abuse of their own and each others’ bodies as they hurled themselves at and rolled over each other, and used each others’ shoulders and backs relentlessly to climb the nightclub wall, became a representation of the violence done by Nilsen to innocent young men. The vulnerability of some of the performers was exacerbated by the fact that one was dressed just in underpants, socks and boots. The four male cast members included company founder and artistic director Lloyd Newson as well as the late Nigel Charnock, who had a long-term connection to DV8, and was widely acclaimed for his confessional dance scene in their Strange Fish (1992). Dead Dreams in both its live and filmed versions helped launch DV8 as a company to watch, a reputation they still hold today, and had an enormous impact on many dance and theatre artists and groups such as Frantic Assembly and Volcano. The subject matter and physicality, as uncompromising as much body art, compounded by the virtuosic skills of the dancers, has shown the power of performance to interject into and comment on everyday events as much as being just an aesthetic presentation. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dead Dreams has been discussed in many contexts too numerous to list here, especially in relation to identity and sexual politics. DV8’s website contains basic information about the performance and film as well as a review and interviews. DV8 (1990) Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Millennium Productions/DV8 Physical Theatre. Film. Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. Online. Available www.dv8.co.uk/projects/deaddreams (accessed 5 February 2013). 111

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DIONYSUS IN 69 (NEW YORK; THE PERFORMANCE GROUP; 1968–69) Based on Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysus in 69 was devised by The Performance Group and its director, Richard Schechner, and performed in a purpose-built environmental set at the Performing Garage in SoHo, New York, for over a year from 1968 to 1969. It demonstrates some of the innovative performance methods Schechner and The Performance Group helped to pioneer in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as some of those methods’ advantages and problems. Schechner and his collaborators wanted to make theatre that produced more meaningful communication and a stronger sense of democratic community for its makers and audiences than they felt was produced by conventional text-based Western theatre. They wanted a theatre that performed a ritual function, making all participants feel they were building a community. Schechner and The Performance Group therefore adopted innovative approaches to text, performance practices and scenography. Written texts provided a starting point for performance rather than an authoritative blueprint. Dionysus in 69 used The Bacchae’s characters, story and some text, though not where The Performance Group’s performers felt they could portray material more effectively by other means, especially by speaking as themselves, and through highly physicalized, non-realist movement sequences. Dionysus’ birth ritual, for example, began with the actor playing Dionysus telling the audience a little about his own birth, and was performed with five male performers lying on the floor, five women standing, straddling them, and Dionysus being passed – or ‘birthed’ – through the resulting canal. The performers did the scene in minimal costumes for the first several months of the show, but in a bid to make it more sexually expressive and ritualistic they later performed it naked. The Performance Group created its shows in ways that aimed to be democratic, devising Dionysus in 69 over many months of workshops and rehearsals and continuing to alter the show throughout its run. Scenography for The Performance Group’s productions transformed the entire space of the Performing Garage, literally enveloping audiences in the show and facilitating a degree of audience–performer interaction that the company felt was qualitatively better than what conventional, proscenium-arch theatre allowed – today this would be described as immersive theatre. Performer movement in Dionysus in 69’s multi-level set was designed to be circular, thereby producing a sense of inclusion and intimacy. The audience was invited to sit and move where it liked in designated audience areas. But they were also asked to join in the performance, for example in a dancing scene, a caressing scene (sometimes also performed naked), and the concluding parade from the theatre out on to Wooster Street. For many, Dionysus in 69 produced a sense of democratic community-building and challenged taboos of self- and group expression, especially sexual expression. Such issues are still relevant today, as illustrated by the Rude Mechs’ decision to reenact the performance in Texas in 2009 as part of their Contemporary Classics Series. Despite its apparently altruistic aims and egalitarian effects, however, Dionysus in 69, Schechner and The Performance Group were sometimes criticized for being precisely the opposite – undemocratic and exploitative. As long as Schechner 112

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directed the show, the company was inevitably organized at least partially hierarchically. For example, when a student group in the audience executed a premeditated kidnapping of the performer playing Pentheus part way through one performance, Schechner made an executive decision about whether or not – and how – to continue the show. His decision was subsequently hotly debated amongst the company. Further, while the show idealized community, there was disagreement within the company. One of the chief points of debate concerned opportunities for audience contact, especially during scenes performed naked. While the nudity may have served director Schechner’s thematic aims, it nevertheless left the performers – especially the women – vulnerable to actual groping on stage. Like the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now (1968), Dionysus in 69’s bold exploration of methods for democratizing performance encountered and exposed some of the possibilities and hazards of that ambition. BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Palma et al’s film is a split-screen documentary of The Performance Group’s production, showing both performers and audiences. The Performance Group’s book documents the show’s development through text and images. Schechner articulates his arguments about environmental theatre and describes this show. Shank provides summary description and analysis. Shephard performed in the show and offers a personal account. Dionysus (1970) film directed by Brian de Palma, Robert Fiore and Bruce Joel Rubin, USA: Performance Group Stage Productions and Sigma III Group. Performance Group, The (1970) Dionysus in 69, Richard Schechner (ed.), New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause Books. Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shephard, William Hunter (1991) The Dionysus Group, New York: P. Lang.

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (AVIGNON FESTIVAL, FRANCE; DIRECTED BY ROBERT WILSON, MUSIC BY PHILIP GLASS, VOCAL TEXTS BY ASSORTED CONTRIBUTORS, CHOREOGRAPHY BY ANDREW DE GROAT AND LUCINDA CHILDS; 1976) Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (see Figure 4) marks a shift in the development of Wilson’s work and indicates the scale of his achievement as an innovator of visual theatre for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), it shows Wilson moving away from his visually complicated ‘silent operas’ towards a scenography that is more architecturally controlled and into an exploration of the theatrical power of language and speech

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Figure 4 Einstein on the Beach (1976) directed by Robert Wilson, music by Philip Glass; performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, Avignon Festival, 1976 – even when they are nonsensical. In a broader context, since its première in 1976, Einstein has shown how theatre can be non-linear, multidisciplinary and postdramatic – not prioritizing narrative sense and text, as most naturalist theatre and opera does, but fracturing narrative and exploring the aural qualities of speech as well as the equally important features of image, space, light, non-vocal sound, and movement. Einstein on the Beach combines a mathematically precise structure with allusive, dreamlike content – Wilson’s familiar trademarks. It is composed of nine episodes over four acts spanning five hours. Three images – a train, a courtroom and a space machine hovering over a field – appear first in pairs and, finally, all together in a trio. Wilson’s signature knee-plays (literally, joints between scenes) provide a prologue and interludes. Architectural precision is central to the design, too, as horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of objects, movement and light dominate the visual field, and most performers wear the Einstein ‘uniform’ of shirt, braces, trousers and tennis shoes. This precision is reiterated in Glass’s sound score, which features insistent patterned thematic repetition. The allusiveness of the performance is in its images and texts. The three recurring images are relatively banal and can form logical narrative links to Einstein’s lifetime, which stretched from the age of the steam locomotive to the brink of the age of space travel. But the enactment of these images is illogical and dreamlike. In the courtroom, for example, an elderly black male judge delivers a monologue about romance in Paris or women’s liberation, and dancer Lucinda Childs sways on a bed reciting a 114

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disjointed monologue written by Wilson’s teenage collaborator, the writer Christopher Knowles. Meanwhile, the chorus sings patterns of numbers – a ‘text’ introduced in rehearsals by Glass as a placeholder for the libretto he had not yet written, but adopted for performance by Wilson, who loved both its order and its arbitrariness. As in much of Wilson’s work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, speech and song do not tell a linear story; rather, they enhance mood, compel audiences to think or daydream associatively, and refer obliquely to the opera’s subject – Einstein and his mathematics. Other aspects of staging, too, compel audience engagement with the apparently irrational as well as the apparently rational, affective as well as denotative meaning and with scenic and aural elements of theatre. Like most of Wilson’s theatre, Einstein presents images that slowly transform before us, it is collaborative, and it combines elements of high and popular culture, juxtaposing Einstein’s mathematics and his tennis shoes. It also indicates the European appeal of Wilson’s work and the support he has found there: it received funding from the French government and was initially produced at the Avignon Festival. Its various remountings in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 2012, and the design changes these incorporated, show the evolution of his aesthetic towards an ever more architectural, elegant and refined theatre of images style as demonstrated in, for example, his Dream Play (1998). Perhaps most significant is the opera’s distinctive formality, in both its composition and its relationship to the audience. Wilson’s theatre almost never addresses the audience directly, unlike much American theatre of the same period, for example, that of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group. Wilson was, and continues to be, interested in altering audiences’ ways of seeing and hearing, rather than trying to revise ways of literally and socially interacting with the audience. His advice to audiences going to see Einstein was, ‘Go like you would to a museum, like you would look at a painting…You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures’ (quoted in Shyer: see Bibliography). BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obenhaus’ documentary film of the 1984 revival includes excerpts from the production and interviews with Wilson and Glass. All sources listed describe and analyse the opera or offer insights into its production. Brecht, Stefan (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985) film directed by Mark Obenhaus, USA, produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Holmberg, Arthur (1997) The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Safir, Margery Arent (ed.) (2011) Robert Wilson from Within, Paris: The Arts Arena and Flammarion, SA. 115

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Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shevtsova, Maria (2007) Robert Wilson, Oxon: Routledge. Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre Communications Group.

GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR, THE (SOHN THEATRE, MOSCOW; WRITTEN BY NIKOLAI GOGOL, DIRECTED BY VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD; 9 DECEMBER 1926) Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of Gogol’s 1836 play demonstrated his view of the director as interpreter and orchestrator of both the mise en scène and the text with a confidence that caused shockwaves in Russian theatre. By placing the onus of interpretation on himself as auteur rather than on the writer, Meyerhold was tampering with a sacred cow – that is, classical Russian material from the mid-nineteenth century. Critics balked at his heavily altered adaptation of the play, which he divided into fifteen episodes and interpolated with lines from other works by Gogol, such as his Petersburg Stories. They also questioned his tragicomic pantomime style, a major departure from the reverential realism with which such works had been treated previously, by the likes of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko. In spite of criticism that verged on abuse and which helped generate animosities that later culminated in Meyerhold’s officially sanctioned assassination, the production heralded a new path of experimentation with the classics in Russian theatre. Even with these detractors, the piece stayed in the company’s repertoire until 1938. Although in rehearsal Meyerhold initially asked his actors for clearly defined characters with biographies consistent with naturalist approaches, he soon pushed them towards caricature and the grotesque, asking them to find repeated habitual gestures, defined postures, idiosyncratic movements and a specific rhythm for their characters. By such means they caricatured petty officialdom and Tsar Nicholas’ bourgeois society and affectations. Elaborate stage business departed from the text and choreographed sequences sublimated the individual in carefully composed tableaux vivants. Meyerhold focused on the ensemble rather than the individual with several interpolated and additional choral scenes, like that of young officer-suitors strumming imaginary guitars. By now his cast were highly trained in biomechanics and were working with assured synchronicity and discipline. The actors’ movement was enhanced by exaggerated costumes and kinetic scenography, with sets that moved on trucks and that kept the action of this four-hour version flowing. Orchestral music, some of it original and some by nineteenth-century Russian composers, heightened their gestural, rhythmical acting in a style that Meyerhold intended to be consonant with Gogol’s satirical vision. Meyerhold’s uncompromising combination and exploitation of all elements of the theatre was ahead of its time. The production has since come to be considered an influential precursor of physical and visual theatre, an early example of successful 116

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theatrical stylization. While this might also be claimed for Meyerhold’s earlier productions, like The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), written by Belgian author Fernand Crommelynck, The Government Inspector is significant because of the text’s esteemed place in Russian culture and Meyerhold’s willingness to go beyond accepted interpretations and practices with such hallowed material, however great the risk. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Both Braun and Leach listed below are respected experts on Meyerhold. The Worrall article gives details about this particular production. Braun, Edward ([1979] 1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, revised edition, London: Eyre Methuen. Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worrall, Nick (1972) ‘Meyerhold Directs Gogol’s Government Inspector’, Theatre Quarterly 2.7: 75–95.

HAKA (TRADITIONAL MĀORI DANCE)

Figure 5 The haka performed by the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks (2012) Haka is the generic name for the dance of the Māori, Natives of Aotearoa/New Zealand, but it is probably best known internationally through the particular haka performed before matches by the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks (see Figure 5). This haka is known as the ‘Ka mata, Ka mata’ (the opening words of 117

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the chant, translatable as ‘I die! I die!’) or the ‘Te Rauparaha’ (after the Māori chief who is credited with having composed it in around 1820). Its chant speaks of the threat of imminent death and then the triumph of survival. Its dance portrays strength, control and determination and involves the whole body and face in a range of quick, alert, disciplined and powerful movements, including stomping, jumping, slapping the legs, quivering the arms, chanting, and grimacing with the eyes wide open and the tongue stretched out of the mouth. It was first performed internationally in 1888 by the New Zealand Native Team, a rugby team made up predominantly of Māoris. Even today, it is an All Black player of Māori descent who initiates its performance before a match. Like many rituals, the haka warms up and focuses its performers, strengthening their sense of community and presence and potentially alienating those who watch and cannot perform it – notably, the opposing team. The All Blacks’ ‘Ka mata, Ka mata’ haka performs Aotearoan/New Zealand national identity, more actively and distinctively than the conventional act that precedes many sports events – passively standing for a national anthem. However, it raises important issues about intercultural crossover and appropriation. The Māori were historically colonized by European settlers, or pakeha. Read negatively, the haka’s adoption as a performance of New Zealand national identity can be seen as an appropriation of the historically and culturally-specific traditions of a colonized people to signify a bit of ethnic colour for their colonizers. Read more positively, this adoption credits the Māori with founding the culture of Aotearoa/New Zealand, demonstrates the strength of that culture and articulates the pre- and postcolonial hybridity of contemporary Aotearoan/New Zealand identity. More broadly, the haka demonstrates how identity is produced through all kinds of performative acts, including – and even especially – those that take place in mass popular culture. BIBLIOGRAPHY

All sources provide history and description of the haka (or direct links to this information). Haka! is a page on a site dedicated to New Zealand rugby and is the most detailed. Haka! Online. Available www.haka.co.nz/haka.php (accessed 14 October 2013). Karetu, Timoti (1993) Haka! The Dance of a Noble People, Auckland: Reed. New Zealand Rugby Union. Online. Available www.allblacks.com (accessed 14 October 2013).

HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS AND MUSEUMS (WORLDWIDE; POST–1945) The horror of the Holocaust has produced a crisis in practices of representation and performative acts of memorialization. Memory had previously been widely conceived as objectively knowable, recoverable, and so possible to memorialize in static and solemn monuments, be they statues, poems or museums. Postmodern and poststructuralist thinking, especially from the 1970s onwards, questioned this model 118

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of memory, suggesting it risked displacing the horrific event with an aesthetic representation, replacing social acts of remembrance with inert placebos, and thereby actually sanctioning forgetting – instead of stimulating remembrance. These problems of memorialization were particularly urgent as people struggled to decide what to do with sites like the death camps at Auschwitz. Preserve them as memorials to the dead and reminders to the living? Or obliterate them as atrocities? Facing such critical decisions, postmodern thinking reconceived memory as subjective, multiple and possibly unknowable – although it acknowledged that remembering is both an emotional urge for individuals and an ethical responsibility for societies. Postmodern culture has not stopped producing memorials but has attempted to make them possess other responsibilities and presumptions that acknowledge the radical mutability of memory; stimulate in audiences active engagement and remembering; provoke audiences to take responsibility for preventing past horrors from being repeated; and continue to question if, how and when it is even possible to represent traumatic memories. An influential example of this kind of postmodern counter-monument is conceptual artists Jochen and Esther Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights, which was erected in Hamburg in 1986. Aiming neither to pay tribute to fascism nor to immobilize spectators in the face of it, the Gerz monument was designed to be interactive, changing and ultimately only a memory itself – or, rather, multiple memories. Its 12-metre pillar was covered in soft lead with steel-pointed pens attached near its base. Multilingual signs invited spectators to write on it and to commit to remain vigilant in support of peace and human rights. In a series of seven ceremonies, the pillar was gradually lowered into the ground so that the whole of its surface could be written on. It was finally interred in 1993, its site marked with a stone, thereafter evoking silence and absence. This example demonstrates counter-monuments’ potential interactivity, performativity and dynamic production of meaning in concert with their participant audiences. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, designed by James Ingo Freed and opened in 1993, uses other strategies to act as an appropriately awe-inspiring memorial, while it resists being inappropriately celebratory or even definitive. It deliberately combines seemingly contradictory elements – granite and brick, a tower and a hexagon, grand and prosaic entrances – in order to acknowledge its role as necessarily monumental and simultaneously democratic. These dual meanings were deemed vital as a response not only to the Holocaust but also to the museum’s location in the US state capital (see study by Patraka in the Bibliography). Probably the most famous museum of this kind is the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 1999. Libeskind sought to evoke the very absence of the Jews in post-Holocaust Berlin by incorporating into his building a number of voids – empty spaces that span several floors, interrupt the spaces of the rest of the building, and can be looked into and sometimes entered. As Berlin’s Jews experienced profound displacement, this building produces a strong sense of disorientation through its asymmetries and contrasts. Its structure is a zigzag; its windows are rarely horizontal or vertical and appear like slashes in the building’s façade; its 119

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surfaces contrast shiny zinc and dull concrete; and its garden contains a square area of 49 rough, inclined rectilinear concrete columns atop which willow oaks grow, their curving branches intertwining. While Libeskind’s building may appear to prioritize chaos and absence, it nevertheless incorporates many elements of order and presence: its heterogeneity validates the heterogeneity of the architecture surrounding it; and the apparently random lines of its windows actually ‘connect’ the addresses of great figures in Berlin’s Jewish cultural history. Furthermore, the building is not just about the past; its grounds are accessible to the public and provide access to a playground. The building explores and manifests the traumas and evacuations of Berlin’s Jewish past but suggests also Jewish achievement and endurance, inviting its visitors to witness all of these aspects of Jewish history in Germany. Many other communities worldwide who have experienced massive loss and trauma must also face, in different ways, the issues of commemoration addressed by these Holocaust and Jewish memorials. This is as true of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who witnessed Argentina’s ‘disappearances’ of the 1970s and 1980s, as it is of the citizens of New York after the events of 11 September 2001, for whom how to mark Ground Zero has been a haunting question. Such issues must be addressed in different media as well. Jeannette Malkin, for example, examines how twentiethcentury drama has worked to produce a kind of counter-memorial theatre. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Young provides extensive information and analysis of memorials. His article, Schneider’s book, and two articles in Performance Research’s special issue focus on the Jewish Museum, Berlin. Malkin analyses the work of memory in postmodern theatre, while Patraka looks closely at both theatre and performance. Heathfield, Adrian and Andrew Quick (eds) (2000) ‘On Memory’, a special issue of Performance Research 5.3, London: Routledge. Malkin, Jeanette R. (1999) Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Patraka, Vivian M. (1999) Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schneider, Bernhard (1999) Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines, trans. John Gabriel, Munich: Prestel Verlag. Young, James E. (ed.) (1994) The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, Munich: Prestel-Verlag. —— (2001) ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture’ in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, Barbie Selizer (ed.), London: The Athlone Press, pp. 179–97.

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MAHABHARATA, THE (PARIS AND TOURING; CENTRE INTERNATIONAL DE CRÉATIONS THÉÂTRALES [CICT], DIRECTED BY PETER BROOK; 1985–1988) The Mahabharata has at least a twofold significance for twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury theatre. It epitomizes many of the methods and aims of its highly influential director, Peter Brook, and it has provoked and sustained some of the most hotly contested debates around the risks and potentials of intercultural theatre from the late 1980s onwards. The source for Brook’s performance text originated in India in the third or fourth century AD and is known there simply as ‘the Epic’. At more than 100,000 stanzas in length, it is the world’s longest narrative poem. For many Indians it provides a foundational account of Indian, especially Hindu, cultures. Following extensive research in India and Europe, Brook’s collaborator, writer Jean-Claude Carrière, adapted this epic into a nine-hour playtext which Brook’s cast subsequently rehearsed and developed for nine months. The French-language version, called Mahabharata, premièred at the Avignon Festival in 1985. It toured Europe before it was adapted into English and toured to six countries on four continents from 1987 to 1988. It was finally adapted into a three-hour film and then a six-hour television version that was broadcast worldwide in 1989. For Brook, The Mahabharata offered a monumental opportunity to explore theatre as a vehicle for communication. He argued that, although ‘the Epic’ text may be Indian, it ‘carries echoes for all mankind’ (Brook, quoted in Williams 1991: 44); it is Indian and it is universal. This liberal humanist attitude influenced not only his selection of text, but also his decisions about scenography, music, performance styles and casting. He did not want design and music to attempt to be authentically Indian but rather to give ‘a flavour’ of India. Consequently, set design, for example, was minimal, using performance spaces largely as the company found them, but adding some accents of warm colour as well as the real elements of fire, water and earth. A firm believer in the universal power of storytelling, Brook staged The Mahabharata as a series of stories, sometimes narrated by a teller to a young boy and sometimes represented by performers. The action flowed easily between these modes of performance and acknowledged the communicative power of both speech and movement. Brook cast thirty performers and five musicians from eighteen countries, including France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Senegal, Trinidad and Vietnam. He cast this range partly because he believed the performers could each bring differences – of culture, language and performance skills – but centrally because he believed those differences would nevertheless be universally understood by his audiences. The Mahabharata is probably Brook’s most ambitious show to date, but it is nevertheless typical of his work. It aimed for direct communication, eschewed elaborate design and performance styles, was rehearsed by a multicultural company over many months, celebrated the power of myth and demonstrated his conviction that cultural difference is not a barrier to communication.

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This last point here is the one that has caused major disputes. Brook advocates an understanding of communication as potentially universal. His most virulent critics, led by Rustom Bharucha, argue that, rather than communicating the meanings of ‘the Epic’, Brook desecrated them, largely by trivializing them. By decontextualizing ‘the Epic’ and leaving out the core section of the Bhagavad Gita, Brook removed ‘the Epic’ from the specific contexts in which its mythology, vocabulary, social and religious references could be understood. By condensing it into a linear narrative, he disregarded the cultural significance of its many stories, its forms and its modes of expression. Brook’s aim to evoke merely ‘a flavour’ of India might have been an attempt at modesty, but for Bharucha and others it was irresponsible, rendering a complex culture superficial. Some have extended these arguments to a critique of Brook’s casting as well, arguing that he homogenizes his performers’ different skills, styles and cultural identities to produce a fluid but bland multicultural sameness. Brook has defended himself against these accusations by reiterating both his commitment to universal communication and his belief that universalism is more important than cultural difference. Other critics, keen to defend Brook’s Mahabharata as a powerful performance that does not appropriate Indian culture irresponsibly, but eager also to credit the significance of cultural difference, have posed a third argument. Recognizing the numerous diversities brought to The Mahabharata, they argue that it is multi-voiced or polyphonic rather than homogenized, that it allows interaction rather than assimilation, and that it produces new, hybrid, syncretic cultures rather than desecrating old ones. Debates around The Mahabharata may have lessened, but they continue to influence intercultural performance-making and critical discussion. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brook articulates his aims in the foreword to the play. Williams collects an excellent range of critical and documentary material. Chaudhuri summarizes critical debate succinctly. Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge. Carrière, Jean-Claude (1987) The Mahabharata, translation and foreword by Peter Brook, London: Methuen. Chaudhuri, Una (1998) ‘Working out (of) Place: Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and the Problematics of Intercultural Performance’, in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 77–97. Mahabharata, The (1989) Film. Directed by Peter Brook, screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, COL. Williams, David (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata, London: Routledge.

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MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN (DEUTSCHES THEATER, BERLIN, GERMANY; DIRECTED BY BERTOLD BRECHT AND ERICH ENGEL; 1949) Although not the première, this 1949 performance of one of Bertold Brecht’s central full-length plays is recognized as a model of what he championed for the theatre. The play was written in 1938 just before and in anticipation of the Second World War, and premièred in 1941 at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, directed by Leopold Lindtberg. Brecht, though, had no direct involvement in this production, as he was then in exile from Germany in Finland. The image from the 1949 production (see Figure 6), which Brecht co-directed, of his wife Helene Weigel as Mother Courage dragging her wooden cart across the stage has become an iconic image in twentieth-century theatre, and a role that has become inseparable from the actress. The performance was also significant in that it led to the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble, a hugely influential theatre company that was based initially in Socialist-administered East Berlin, but which still operates today in a reunited country. Core members of the 1949 production’s cast went on to develop pivotal roles in this ensemble. In addition, the piece cemented Brecht’s position as a director of repute as well as a writer. The play centres on the characters of the title, showing how the economics of war and the quest for survival in precarious times can corrupt, displacing the mother’s natural instinctive protection of her children. The reference to the mother’s ‘courage’ is partly ironic, but also indicates her stoicism and ability to keep her head above water economically in the face of the adversity war brings. Accompanied by her mute daughter Kattrin on the fringes of battle, Mother Courage scavenges what she can as the spoils of war, but even this is meagre. The performance plays out the economic and theatrical concerns of Brecht in his later period of work, embodied in techniques such as Gestus and through the disruptive placing of the dialectical songs. Scenes such as that in which the mute Kattrin is shot – unable to shout, she is conspicuously drumming on a barn roof in order to alert the townspeople of Halle to the advance of soldiers – are a good example of Brecht’s plays’ emotional power, belying the mistaken conviction that his works lack feeling. Although the Berlin production was a huge success both in a partitioned Germany and internationally on tour and stayed in repertoire for more than ten years, the play has never proved an easy piece to produce, with its embedded Brechtian techniques, complex central role and large cast. Many Western actresses – including Diana Rigg, Anne Bancroft, Judi Dench and Glenda Jackson – have struggled with the role of Courage. Brecht and Engel’s production is preserved in its ‘original’ form in a 1960 film as well as in a model book (one of the series of Modellbücher). This text assiduously documents the production through photos and a written commentary that gives details of the mise en scène, including blocking and scenography. This document initially led to some failed imitations, which were against the spirit of the model books – these were meant to give guidance only and not encourage replication. Other directors have experimented more boldly, including Richard Schechner in a 1975 version that ran successfully off-Broadway. The play has been produced consistently 123

Figure 6 Helene Weigel as Mother Courage in Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1949)

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and has been studied across the world, providing a recurrent critique of the personal and social devastation wreaked by war and proving an enduring testimony to Brecht’s ideology and artistic vision. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Willett is the most recognized English-language Brecht scholar. Numerous other writers, including Eddershaw, have analysed the play and its many productions. Brecht, Bertold (1970–present) Collected Plays, 10 vols, vol. 5, part 2 Mother Courage and Her Children, ed. and trans. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim, London: Eyre Methuen. Eddershaw, Margaret (1996) Performing Brecht, London: Routledge. Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen. —— (1964) The Theatre of Bertold Brecht, London: Methuen.

OLYMPICS (WORLDWIDE; USUALLY EVERY FOUR YEARS 1896–) Though primarily a competitive sporting event, the Olympics have become recognized as extravagant displays of cultural identity for nations’ self-promotion. They do not always make economic sense. Countries usually run the events at a significant loss, though the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was an exception and made a huge profit. However, an implicit sense of enduring tradition and a legendary history – the Olympiads were sporting displays held in ancient Greece – lend the event authority and weight, even though in their modern form the first Olympics were held in Athens as recently as 1896. Now the Olympics take place every four years, with summer and winter events staggered, providing both the host and the guest countries with the opportunity to create spectacles that frame their sportspeople as heroes. The winning of individual medals has been subsumed by obsession with the total tally, evident in the nationalistic rivalry between the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and America during the Cold War, and now between Russia, the US and China. The Olympics are a clear example of the potential seriousness of human play, when individual commitment becomes symbolic of national prowess. The sporting performances are circumscribed and embellished by theatrical devices, especially in the televised opening ceremony, which increasingly comprises the following to an extravagant level: fireworks, pyrotechnics and the eternal Olympic torch; flag-waving; music and especially national anthems; choreographed dance displays and parades using national teams; and elaborate masks and costuming. These events are directed by high-profile artistic teams, which in 1992 in Spain included experimental Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus and in London in 2012 theatre and film director Danny Boyle. Critics frequently lament the lack of focus on the sports themselves that the mediatization and interest in spectacle has brought, with its inevitable prurience about off-track relationships and rivalries, drugs scandals (as in Athens in 2004), and the creation and promotion of celebrity sporting personalities. 125

Figure 7 A poster for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Olympia Part I: Fest der Völker (Festival of the Nations)

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The most renowned example of a host country attempting to manipulate the Olympics to its own ends was in 1936 in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany (see Figure 7). The performance of German national achievement and Aryan racial supremacy was, however, upstaged by the brilliance of black American athlete Jesse Owens, who quashed the Nazis’ aspirations. Owens won four gold medals and broke several records to become ‘the fastest man on earth’ at that time. The event can also be hijacked for other ends, its importance guaranteeing mass publicity – in the 1972 Munich Olympics, eleven Israelis were killed in a terrorist attack. The organized exploitation of the global stage for national promotion inevitably generates counterdemonstrations and counter-actions, though not usually as bloody as the Munich attack. The Olympics’ theatrical nature has instigated a corresponding artistic event, the Theatre Olympics. This international festival, run by a committee of major world directors and theatre artists including Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Wilson and Wole Soyinka, has so far taken place in Greece, Japan, Turkey, Moscow and South Korea. Exploiting the global repute of the Olympics, the theatre has at last attempted to reverse the mirror and create artistic events in sport’s likeness. The Olympics themselves are also formally run in parallel with a Cultural Olympiad which stages extensive cultural activities featuring theatre and performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

MacAloon’s text is one of the few pieces that places the Olympics directly in relation to theatre and performance. A wealth of information can be accessed through the official Olympics website. Harvie, Jen and Keren Zaiontz (eds) (2013) Contemporary Theatre Review, special issue on ‘The Cultural Politics of London 2012’, 23.4. MacAloon, John J. (1984) ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle’, in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, pp. 241–80. Olympics, The. Online. Available www.olympics.org (accessed 26 June 2013).

PARADISE NOW (AVIGNON FESTIVAL, FRANCE; THE LIVING THEATRE, DIRECTED BY JULIAN BECK AND JUDITH MALINA; 1968) Like The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), Paradise Now epitomizes the radical, political and collective creations of 1960s experimental theatre groups. Adopting ritualistic patterns, the piece was structured in eight sections or rungs of a ladder. Each section had an ‘Action’ sequence which depended on the voluntary participation of spectators. Only through this close interaction with the audience could all the participants – that is, actors and audience – progress towards spiritual and political enlightenment and the piece’s final positive vision of an equal, open society (or Paradise). This process had to begin ‘now’, as the title indicated and 127

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as the symbolic action on the streets at the end of the performance demonstrated. In this way, theatre could intervene directly in everyday life, in order to change life’s rules and conventions, and could become truly ‘living’. Throughout their many productions, the Living Theatre have tested and pushed at the boundaries of legal and theatrical possibilities. As a highly politicized artistic group attempting to practise what they preached, the Living Theatre collective have promoted non-violent revolution in both their lifestyle and their performances. Paradise Now was created through much discussion and individual improvisational input. Further synthesizing life and art, the company attempted to use theatre as a tool to change the audience’s awareness of social, political and cultural restrictions. One notorious Action section – Rung Four, ‘The Exorcism of Violence and the Sexual Revolution’ – invited the audience to take off most of their clothes (which the actors had already done) and sit with their genitals in contact with a partner. Public sexual acts were of course illegal, even if this did not prevent everyone from refraining. Trust exercises (such as leaping into the group members’ linked arms) had become a hallmark of the Living Theatre’s training, and in Paradise Now they even solicited audience members to commit physically to their ideals and ‘make the big leap’, through such enabling devices. The carefully structured piece was a collage of statements, shouted slogans, exercises and tableaux that vocally and physically stretched the body and tested the audience’s responsibilities and the parameters of their participation. When they first showed Paradise Now, the Living Theatre collective had become tax exiles from the United States in 1964 and so were based in Europe. Here they had achieved almost mythical status and gathered a large following that travelled with them, at times numbering in the hundreds. In the wake of Paris’ mass protests and demonstrations in May 1968, the première of Paradise Now at the Avignon Festival added fuel to the fire. In the final stages of the performance the company rallied their audience to meet on the streets and so begin the process of revolution. Fearful of unrest, the Festival authorities asked the group to present another work instead, but the group refused, railing against this censorship. On their return to the United States to tour Paradise Now after its French première, the group faced similar difficulties, including arrest. Frustrated by the restrictions inherent in the theatre spaces and administrative structures of Europe and America, the group split into cells, with one led by the anarchist couple Julian Beck and Judith Malina (the group’s leaders, if they can be so described) moving to Brazil in 1970. Shifting the focus of their work outside theatre buildings and institutional structures, they could then be open to audiences not dominated by the middle class, as had been the case in their performances in the United States and Europe. On the streets of Latin America, the Living Theatre pursued their search for paradise on Earth with the poor and oppressed people who perhaps had the greatest need for it. They continue this mission today, touring to festivals and leading community-based projects from their New York base, most recently with the Occupy movement, though without Beck (who died in 1985). The group has gone further than most to embody Antonin Artaud’s vision of a total, transformative theatre. 128

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shank places Malina and Beck’s own accounts in their book in a broader context of American experimental performance, while Tytell provides an easy introduction to their work and lives. Malina, Judith and Julian Beck (1971) Paradise Now: Collective Creation of The Living Theatre, New York: Vintage Books. Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tytell, John (1997) The Living Theatre: Art, Outrage and Exile, London: Methuen.

REINCARNATION OF SAINT ORLAN, THE (SERIES OF OPERATIONPERFORMANCES; ORLAN; 1990–93) In a series of nine surgical operations, French feminist performance artist Orlan altered her face to incorporate features from famous works of art, including the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. Orlan was not trying to make herself into a static image of ideal beauty. Rather, through pastiche, parody and camp performance, she questioned who produces ideals of female beauty – pointing the finger at male artists, male fashion designers and a male-dominated medical establishment. Further, she staged identity as something that is not inert and biologically given, but is continuously socially produced – or performative – and therefore contestable. Orlan’s Reincarnation challenged the medical objectification of women’s bodies by taking control of the operating theatres where her Reincarnation took place, in a gesture similar to Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s occupation of bourgeois art galleries in their Temple of Confessions (1994–97). Orlan decorated the theatres, hired designers (including Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake) to costume the participants (surgeons included), and remained conscious throughout the operation-performances. During the events, she directed action, read excerpts from texts on psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminism and performance (by, for example, Antonin Artaud), and responded to faxed queries from audiences watching via electronic link-up in art galleries around the world. By introducing intertextual references, Orlan invited her audience to understand her work as a commentary on ideas of beauty, self-fashioning, the Theatre of Cruelty, and boundaries – of the body, of propriety and of performance practice. By interacting with her audience, she challenged the conventional separation of audience and performer and – like fellow body artists Marina Abramović, Ron Athey and Stelarc – compelled her audiences to take responsibility for what they witnessed. By using multimedia to perform and transmit her work, Orlan challenged the assumption that the meaning of the biological body is transparently available. Orlan documented her recovery from the operations with daily photographs and other relics, including videos of the surgical procedures, blood finger paintings and 129

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mounted samples of extracted bodily tissue. These relics challenged her audience to consider what distinguishes the sacred relic from the profane. They made flesh the problems of documenting liveness and the ephemeral performance event, while revealing the post-operative physical and emotional trauma that cosmetic surgical practice conventionally hides. Irreverently, Orlan inserted her self-Reincarnation into a long history of religious and spiritual art, collapsing the historical distance between archaic relics and her postmodern present, and challenging the grand narratives of Catholicism and art history. Reincarnation’s first four operations took place in 1990, the fifth in 1991, and the sixth to the ninth in 1993. Orlan subsequently discussed the possibility of completing Reincarnation with an operation to extend the bridge of her nose to her forehead, but eventually decided to stop the surgery because it became both too risky and too expensive. She then considered concluding her Reincarnation by asking an advertising agency to rename her – or, more accurately, to rebrand her, creating a new identity and passport. This conclusion would reiterate Orlan’s ongoing critique of – and engagement with – the consumerism of the art market. It would also reinforce Reincarnation’s proposition that the body and identity are socially produced. In what she calls her ‘carnal art’, Orlan is intentionally non-conformist, questioning what the body, the face and identity are, and who defines and controls them, throughout art history as well as in our contemporary, technologically-advanced culture. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ince’s book is well illustrated, as well as analytically thorough and insightful. For more sources of information, see the Orlan entry in Part I. Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg. Orlan. Online. Available www.orlan.eu (accessed 14 October 2013).

ROUTE 1 & 9 (THE LAST ACT) (NEW YORK; THE WOOSTER GROUP; 1981) Route 1 & 9 is typical of the Wooster Group’s work in that it experimented with form and combined radically different source materials in order to explore and challenge cultural assumptions about art, performance practices and American society. As the first part of a trilogy, it both returned to and raised ongoing company practices and concerns. Almost all of the Group’s work has successfully provoked debate, but this can be seen as their most controversial piece, its blackface performance and sexually explicit video attracting accusations of racism and sexism and leading to a withdrawal of a significant portion of their state funding. The main sources for Route 1 & 9 are Thornton Wilder’s classic American play, Our Town (first produced in 1938), and vaudeville routines performed in the 1960s in blackface by African-American entertainer Dewey ‘Sweet Papa Pigmeat’ Markham. 130

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Our Town is a close study of a handful of characters in the small town of Grover’s Corners in early twentieth-century New Hampshire. Grover’s Corners is fictional, but the ‘Our’ of the title invites audiences to see the town as typically American and the play as containing universal truths about life and death. Route 1 & 9 disrupted Our Town’s universalizing fantasy of a white, middle-class, puritan American idyll by introducing the racial and cultural difference Wilder’s play omitted. It first proposed an alternative version of the United States by shifting the suggested location from Our Town’s imaginary, idealized, pastoral New Hampshire town to an actual urban environment of heavy industry, traffic and commerce: Route 1 and 9, a 50km-long stretch of highway flanked by gas stations, malls, restaurants and industrial plants in New Jersey. It further challenged Our Town’s whitewashed, realist version of American culture by embedding Wilder’s play in sections of performance that were non-realist and came from non-white acting traditions. These included sequences where white actors in blackface emulated Pigmeat Markham’s scatological comic routines from the 1960s and made phone calls from the theatre, trying (often unsuccessfully) to get uptown Harlem restaurants to deliver downtown to the Performing Garage in SoHo, in other words to cross a social divide marked by class and ethnicity. Other non-realist sections of performance included a parodic opening video ‘lesson’ on how to understand Our Town, a mid-show high-energy dance, and a concluding set of videos showing a road trip from Manhattan to Route 1 and 9 and a couple trying out a variety of sexual positions in what appears to be a pornographic film in the making. Using video playback and extreme close-up reminiscent of soap opera, Route 1 & 9 presented sections of Our Town but always using alienation techniques that are typical of the Wooster Group’s efforts to deconstruct realism’s claim to portray ‘the truth’. The Wooster Group’s director, Elizabeth LeCompte, has argued that in Route 1 & 9 she aimed to confront not the audience but difficult source material, which the audience must then witness. However, many audiences – including critics and statefunding representatives – found the show’s use of blackface and extreme racial stereotyping not critical but offensive, so much so that the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) rescinded the Group’s funding by forty per cent the following year. The Group held public forums to discuss the show’s alleged racism and appealed the NYSCA’s decision, but the appeal was not upheld. Perhaps what was most successful about Route 1 & 9 was its provocation to debate issues around who has the right to represent whom, what new forms political theatre might take, and how to devise a deconstructive, provocative, but intellectually, kinetically and emotionally engaging form of multimedia, postmodern, postdramatic performance. These debates continue, often in direct relation to the Wooster Group’s work. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Savran excellently documents and analyses much of the Group’s work to the mid1980s. Auslander’s books include useful analyses of this piece and another in the trilogy, LSD (...Just the High Points…) (1984). 131

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Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Savran, David (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre Communications Group. —— (1991) ‘Revolution…History…Theater: The Politics of the Wooster Group’s Second Trilogy’, in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (eds), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 41–55.

SHOOT (1971) In 1971, American performance artist Chris Burden was deliberately shot in the upper left arm in a small white-walled gallery in Los Angeles, in part as a response to the then-current Vietnam War. The incident took place at Burden’s request, the event a planned performance, though there was no intention for him to be injured quite so badly. The .22 rifle was shot by a friend of Burden’s in front of a small group of invited spectators, but the plan was that the marksman’s bullet would just glance his arm. Unfortunately Burden flinched, with painful consequences (see Figure 8). However momentary the event, the piece has had a resonance that has endured far longer than the seconds within which the main action took place, revealing how performance can have an impact that reaches well beyond its actual temporal frame. Performance affords the opportunity to distil time and focus such moments in a

Figure 8 Chris Burden, Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, CA, November 19, 1971: ‘At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’ 132

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concentrated form from which it can reverberate outwards. Shoot also demonstrates the lengths to which some artists will go in their creative and embodied explorations, echoed in the practice of Ron Athey, Orlan and Stelarc to name but three. Burden continued this approach with further self-sacrificial performances in which he was crucified on a car, electrocuted and cut. All four artists have worked with risk and danger, pushing at the limits of what society might deem acceptable or ethical behaviour, at the boundaries of affect and feeling, but ultimately attesting to how our fate lies in our own hands. Such an emphasis on individual autonomy is intrinsic to most body art. Shoot also has important things to say about documentation of performance and art. The ambiguous title refers both to the gunshot and the fact that the work was shot on Super 8 film. A short black and white extract some eight seconds long accompanied by Burden’s explanatory voiceover and two photos are widely available. The event and its record make us realize how contingent art is and how it nearly always deviates from well-made plans, failure perhaps built in from the beginning. Yet, this failure can be of as much interest to us scholars and spectators as a piece’s success, highlighting in this example the vulnerability of the human form and the artist in particular, who through his or her actions purposefully stands out from the crowd. Perhaps the strangest afterlife of Shoot, and which operates as another form of its documentation, albeit an oblique one, is Laurie Anderson’s 1977 song It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You – It’s the Hole, dedicated to Burden. Performances such as Shoot resonate not just in wider social circles and sometimes globally but also within artistic circles. As is typical of postmodernism, ideas are recycled, referenced and represented, and so Shoot endures. The ramifications of the piece in relation to its context are multiple, some more evident than others. Shoot makes explicit reference to the Vietnam War which had fuelled large-scale ongoing protests and demonstrations around the world both before and during 1971. Burden’s individual protest was contiguous with these but also looked back to the notorious self-immolation by a Buddhist monk in Vietnam in 1963, during the early stages of the war. Although here the action is framed by the white gallery walls and happens before an invited rather than incidental audience, several parallels can be found; though of course Burden is still very much alive and active as a visual and performance artist. Shoot asks difficult questions about art and life and their interconnectedness, and individual responsibility within these two spheres. More locally, the piece also questions a core principle of American life where the right to carry arms is enshrined in the Constitution. Frequent rampages by gun-wielding individuals across America demonstrate that Burden’s implicit critique of the availability of weapons is still trenchant, decades on. Just as Shoot has ambivalent meaning, so too does the idea of an arm: one metal and potentially destructive, the other soft, vulnerable and full of life. In Shoot, Burden brought the two terms and materials into direct confrontation, with an unanticipated but long-lasting effect.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The YouTube film of Shoot cited here shows the event and its build up. Peggy Phelan’s collection focuses especially on violence and performance art in Los Angeles, with Shoot as a significant discussion point. Phelan, Peggy (ed.) (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, London: Routledge. Shoot. Online. Available www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5u3ThYyl4 (accessed 7 May 2013).

SPORTS Sports events run parallel to theatrical performance, providing inspiration, theoretical analogies, and serving as spectacles in themselves. The Olympics are the grandest example of theatricalized sport, the event framed by spectacular opening and closing ceremonies, parades and the dramatic stagings of the awarding of medals accompanied by national anthems. The very idea of performance is embedded in sports and especially in the word ‘play’. But, while most performance playing is ultimately for entertainment, sports have more serious outcomes and are highly competitive. There is subsequently a lot more at stake in sport than there is in performance, and events like the Olympics put national pride and confidence on the line. Sports also have much greater public inclusion than the theatre, and the public’s emotional investment in sports is extensive. Sports stars are as celebrated today as Hollywood actors, their off-pitch activities attracting as much interest as their games. Spain’s bullfighting brings this relationship between sports, ceremony, ritual and everyday life into even sharper focus, more so than other potentially fatal sports such as boxing and motor-car racing. Bullfighting involves elegant costuming and a flamboyant red cloth, as well as the sophisticated ‘dances’ of the toreadors. These decorative performance elements do not, however, hide the fact that this ritual-like event frequently ends in bloodshed or death, of both the bull and occasionally the bullfighter. The more gentle race against time is one of sport’s primary aims, embodied in landmark moments such as the achievement of the four-minute mile or the smashing of the ten-second 100 metre sprint. With their emphasis on physical achievement, the need for training is central to sports. Sports-like training principles and practices have crossed over into the performing arts, recognizable in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s functional biomechanics, in some highly athletic approaches to dance like Eurocrash, and in actor training methods such as that of Tadashi Suzuki, based partly on martial arts, which many people practise as sports. In martial arts, the two fields of sport and art are even more integrated, for they demand a way of life, or at least a psychophysical approach. As the rewards for sporting success have grown, so too has greater significance been attributed by sports psychologists and coaches to sportspeople’s lifestyles and their mental conditioning – with sportspeople’s domestic lives often considered to be impacting negatively on their play.

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In spite of advances in technique, psychological analyses and training, much in sport still depends on what might be called ‘improvisation’ – performances and sports both have unpredictable outcomes. This element of chance is what gives it its excitement and generates sport’s massive popularity. And, as in the theatre, spectators can affect the outcome of events (consider the difference it makes to a football team’s performance whether it is playing away or at home). Unlike most theatre, however, sports carry no message as such, even if they use complicated systems and codes or rules which the spectator must know how to read. This is what separates them so clearly from theatrical performance, even if many of their processes are shared. The popularity and the aesthetics of sport have inspired many theatre practitioners, especially Bertold Brecht. He advocated that the boxing ring is a useful model for the theatre and that spectators should approach the theatre as though a boxing match – critically detached, with pleasure and smoking. Italian comic performer Dario Fo has presented several satirical performances (like Mistero Buffo) in vast sports stadia in Italy in order to reach a large and predominantly working-class audience. Theatresports is the name of a widely practised type of competitive improvisation, with performers responding spontaneously to prompts given by audience members. Appropriating the aesthetics rather than the political and inclusive dimension of sport, the Wooster Group played badminton to signify battles in their piece To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) (2002), based on Jean Racine’s Phaedra. British choreographer and dancer Shobhana Jeyasingh’s Raid (1995) investigated the boundaries between dance and sport, and specifically an Indian street game called Kabbadi. But cross-fertilizations are not just practical. Richard Schechner is one theorist who has investigated similarities between sport and performance on a theoretical level, revealing the difficulties in classifying such activities. There are many examples of the convergence of sport and performance in both practice and theory. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht’s views are posited in his 1926 chapter, an article originally written for newspaper publication. Social psychologist Russell has a detailed section on social influences on sports performance that includes analysis of crowds. Schechner’s ‘Event–Time–Space Chart’ in By Means of Performance lists sports as a specific category and provides a useful introduction to comparative analyses. Brecht, Bertold ([1926] 1964) ‘Emphasis on Sport’, TDR: The Drama Review 16.1 (T53): 3–15. Reprinted in John Willett (ed. and trans.) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen, pp. 6–9. Russell, Gordon W. (1993) The Social Psychology of Sport, New York: Springer-Verlag. Schechner, Richard ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge. —— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen. 135

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TEMPLE OF CONFESSIONS, THE (TOURED USA; GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA AND ROBERTO SIFUENTES; 1994–97) This performance-installation by Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes is representative of their innovative work as performance artists and activists, and indicates how their intercultural agendas have tested the artistic and social potentials of interactive performance. The Temple of Confessions opened in Arizona in 1994 and toured the USA until 1997, visiting a range of venues, from art galleries, to a convent, to city festivals. It was composed of three areas: the Chapel of Desires, the Chapel of Fears, and a sort of mortuary chamber in the middle. In ‘living dioramas’ in the two Chapels, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña posed in Plexiglas boxes as ‘living saints’ with hybrid identities composed mostly of what they saw as ‘Anglo’ fantasies of Mexicans. Sifuentes was covered in tattoos and fake bullet holes, evoking fantasies of youths of colour as simultaneously sexually attractive and threatening. Gómez-Peña wore a clichéd ‘Tex Mex’ outfit festooned with souvenirs and talismans, evoking fantasies of Mexican culture as being in touch with some sort of pagan wisdom. (Effigies replaced Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña in the installation after they had appeared live for three days.) A body bag marked ‘INS’ (Immigration and Nationality Service) implicated American bureaucracy as potentially violent in its relationship to other cultures. The installation’s ironic undercutting of an authentic spirituality was further enhanced by velvet paintings of other hybrid saints, small tables covered with votive candles and icons, and two live dancers dressed as nuns who used their veils to clean the Plexiglas boxes and visitors’ shoes. Audiences were invited to confess their intercultural fears and desires, whether orally (at two prayer benches with microphones placed before Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña), in written statements to be placed in an urn at the installation, or over the phone to a toll-free number. Recorded confessions were subsequently played back in the installation’s soundscape, further encouraging audiences to confess and to engage with their feelings about the installation and broader issues of migration and ethnicity. Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña challenged dominant cultural assumptions and the public’s interest in confessional behaviour, by both displacing and reanimating them in disturbing ways. Where artists like Orlan have occupied galleries to criticize how they display and objectify women, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña did the same here to interrogate how forms of dominant culture objectify other cultures. By making the performance a semi-ritualized opportunity for audience confession, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña extended the limits of audience–performer interaction and social engagement developed in many different ways by other theatre and performance makers (for example, Split Britches, Ron Athey, Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski). Specifically, they wanted to compel audiences to explore their complicity as cultural tourists in producing the clichéd images Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña inhabited. At the end of its tour, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña created an online version of Temple, using the internet to extend Temple’s interactive reach still further into time and cyberspace. 136

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Temple of Confessions publication includes an audio CD; its website is available at www.pochanostra.com (accessed 3 February 2014). Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (2000) Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, London: Routledge. —— and Robert Sifuentes (1997) The Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Saints, New York: powerHouse. Temple of Confessions, The (1996). Video. Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library. Online. Available http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/000518344.html (accessed 14 October 2013).

TIANANMEN SQUARE DEMONSTRATIONS (BEIJING, CHINA, APRIL–JUNE 1989) In what is reportedly the largest public square in the world, a mass popular demonstration and sit-in turned into a massacre. The significance in recalling this event is not only its symbolism on a political and social level, representing how mass movements like the Arab Spring can emerge to threaten the authorities, but also how performative such occasions become. They utilize theatrical elements such as costumes, props and non-daily modes of behaviour – in Beijing, for example, there was music, dancing, chanted slogans and the parading of a home-made statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy and Freedom’. When participants actively seek out and exploit the mass media in order to spread the message about what is happening, the ensuing sense of being observed, both locally and even globally, and therefore of performing, deeply informs these protests. Inevitably, then, there is a fine line which is often crossed between such events and more artistic happenings that might be primarily motivated by aesthetic concerns. Reversing this equation, happenings might also accrue or utilize political connotations and implications, a premise which many groups, including Bread and Puppet Theatre, have explored. Events such as those in Tiananmen Square frequently manipulate and subvert the dominant modes of representation and the symbols that public spaces possess. This square is first and foremost a site for May Day military parades, where thousands of soldiers march past Communist Party officials with rows of tanks and other weapons, and where the State’s authority is celebrated. All is ordered and tightly structured in space and time to foster the appearance of control, overlooked by giant placards of Mao Tse-tung, whose mausoleum is in the square. It is a performance of state power directed at the nation, its ‘enemies’ and the global media. Such images were exploited continuously in the Cold War by the opposing sides. The 1989 uprising, which had many other forms but was most manifest in this square in Beijing, was a performance of another kind, with few rules and another cast, led by carnivalesque subversive play. The third ‘act’ of this large-scale ‘production’, when hundreds were killed as the authorities cleared out the protesters in order to re-establish the square’s place

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within the regime’s construction of authority, was a tragic denouement. It is this slaughter which makes the two-month sequence of events so unforgettable. There are countless examples of such performative mobilizations of people throughout the world and throughout history. The Tiananmen Square protests took place only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of the same year, for example. Tiananmen demonstrators also used some of the same tactics of spatial occupation as the protests of Argentina’s las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Tiananmen Square stands out because of its scale, its closing violence, and the surprise it generated by happening in what was largely perceived abroad as a nation of passive conformists. Such moments have helped shape the field of performance studies and broadened the scope of what its analytical terrain might be. Performance theorists and especially Richard Schechner have argued how loose the boundaries are between consciously staged events and those which become theatricalized incidentally through being observed or mediatized. They also reveal how frequently devices used in performance are adopted in everyday life to heighten demands, draw focus, or simply as inevitable elements of public celebrations and community gatherings, when the fluid rules of play displace the rigid structures of government. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The theatrical dimension of these protests has been analysed in these short pieces – one end of the wide spectrum that is political theatre. Esherick, Joseph W. and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (1990) ‘Acting Out Democracy: Political Theatre in Modern China’, Journal of Asian Studies 49.4: 835–56. Kershaw, Baz (1999) ‘Fighting in the Streets: Performance, Protest and Politics’, in The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge, pp. 89–125 Schechner, Richard (1993) ‘The Street Is the Stage’, in The Future of Ritual, London: Routledge, pp. 45–93.

TRIO A (JUDSON CHURCH, NEW YORK; CHOREOGRAPHED BY YVONNE RAINER; 1966) Although only just over four minutes long, Trio A – or The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 as it was originally called – opened up the parameters of dance and performance in general, and helped to define what has been labelled postmodern dance. In practical terms, the piece attempted to flatten crescendos and phrasing, working against the natural rhythms of breathing and climactic cycles which usually exist in dance as build-up, culmination and then release. Trio A explored a pared-down minimalist aesthetic, without music, costume, reference to an audience or intentional interaction with other dancers, even though the work was made for three people (hence its later name). Its vocabulary was daily or ‘actual’, as Rainer saw it, rather than extraordinary, with deceptively simple turns of the torso or a controlled sinking to the floor, and a mode of engagement in the movements that was low-key and apparently 138

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effortless. Trio A tried to de-emphasize dance technique, in part by replacing phrasing with continuous flow. Ironically, great skill was needed to suppress the performer’s tendency to utilize climaxes and instead create a consistent, even rhythm and application of energy. This mastery and effort was made as invisible as possible, focusing attention instead on the movements as tasks rather than on the dancers, their abilities and their interpretations. Trio A was part of the Judson Dance Theatre group’s experiments in a community centre in Manhattan, New York, at a time of artistic ferment, being temporally close to such pieces as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 (1968–69) and the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now (1968). The Judson group’s explorations shifted emphasis away from virtuosity towards an absence of technique and everyday movement under an umbrella notion of the dancer utilizing a ‘democratic body’, as dance critic and theorist Sally Banes described it, referring to these attempts to break out of dance’s apparent elitism and incorporate different kinds of dance and dancers. One group member was Steve Paxton, who later created the discipline of Contact Improvisation and who choreographed pieces based on walking. Although many works have played a similarly influential role in dance experimentation at that time, Trio A’s impact has been endorsed by Rainer’s own lucid analysis of the performance in a 1968 article, as well as through the existence of a short silent black-and-white film recording. This shows the piece firstly in its entirety and then focuses on detailed movements of parts of the body to highlight the craft of abnegation and suppression. Banes has described Trio A as a paradigm of postmodern dance which questions all previous rules, even though it draws on a modernist interest in minimalism, evident in Rainer’s reference to minimalist sculptures in her analysis. The piece exemplifies the difficulty of categorizing creative works within historical and theoretical boundaries and the complexity of defining what postmodernism is. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banes contextualizes this piece within the larger body of the Judson group’s work, whereas Kaye relates it to postmodern performance of all kinds from this important period of artistic activity. A short film of the piece is available on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aggv4jybdaY (accessed 18 March 2014). Banes, Sally (1981) Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan. Rainer, Yvonne (1974) ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, in Work, 1961–73, New York: New York University Press.

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UBU ROI (THÉÂTRE DE L’OEUVRE, PARIS; WRITTEN BY ALFRED JARRY, DIRECTED BY AURÉLIEN LUGNÉ-POE; 1896) Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was not only an inspiration for the surrealist movement but can also be considered the progenitor of much experimental performance in the twentieth century, including theatre of the absurd. Ubu Roi, the first of a trilogy of Ubu plays that Jarry began writing at the age of 15, achieved a central role in twentieth-century theatre in spite of Jarry’s short, self-destructive life (he died aged 34). Its première was a landmark that heralded the beginning of modern performance, which offered an uncompromising alternative to naturalist or illusionist theatre. The première of Ubu Roi immediately erupted into uproarious tumult amongst the 2,500 audience members, when the absurd pot-bellied, masked figure of Ubu opened the play with his first word, ‘merdre’, a corruption of the French word for ‘shit’. The audience were provoked by the scatological puns, the eccentric visual scenography (in Scene 3, King Ubu brandishes a toilet brush) and the childish content. The previous night’s public dress rehearsal for 1,000 people had been equally tumultuous. The scandal among a wildly animated public was fuelled by the press response, much to Jarry’s evident enjoyment: he was mocking the illusionistic devices of naturalism with its attempted verisimilitude and psychologically motivated characters, but he was also launching a broader attack on the values of bourgeois society enshrined in naturalism. The playful, puppet-like characters with cardboard horse-heads stemmed in part from Jarry’s youthful games, the central character based on a school physics teacher. But Ubu Roi was also sophisticated – for example, in its parody of Shakespeare, when the stupid king is urged by his wife Ma Ubu to kill King Wenceslas, just as Macbeth is spurred on to assassinate Duncan. Such derision and absurdity were picked up by the Dadaists and the surrealists and later in the theatre of the absurd, whose dark and often grotesque comedy borrowed much from Jarry’s exaggerated characterization and zany dialogue. As Jarry continued to write new Ubu material, notably Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Enchained, as they are known in English, the play was performed in Paris again in 1898, this time with marionettes as it had originally been envisioned. Anticipating Vsevolod Meyerhold, the roots of Jarry’s imaginative vision were clearly in visual theatre and popular theatre forms and figures, such as those from commedia dell’ arte and clowning, both of which are licensed to lampoon society. Jarry took this buffoonery and mockery one step further when he began to dress like and adopt the manner of Père Ubu, as his art and everyday life merged. Events surrounding the performance became as much part of the spectacle as the staging of the play. The Ubu plays themselves are rarely performed – not surprisingly, given the provocative nature of the material and the difficulty it gives translators and directors. Yet, the first performances and the play itself still possess an almost mythological status.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braun and Esslin deal briefly with this performance as part of their overviews of the evolution of directing and the absurd. Shattuck focuses on Jarry as both person and artist in relation to his fellow Frenchmen and the political, social and artistic background. Braun, Edward (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen. Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday. Jarry, Alfred (1968) The Ubu Plays, London: Methuen and Co. Shattuck, Roger (1959) The Banquet Years: The Arts in France 1885–1918: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire, London: Faber and Faber.

WAITING FOR GODOT (THÉÂTRE DE BABYLONE, PARIS; DIRECTED BY ROGER BLIN, WRITTEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT; 5 JANUARY 1953) Like Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1949), Waiting for Godot has become a globally recognized signature piece of twentieth-century theatre, its significance embodied in the distilled image of a stunted tree and two tramps on a bare stage. The play, by Irish author Samuel Beckett, was written at the end of 1948 and in January 1949, and was informed by the loss and violence of the Second World War, which goes some way towards accounting for its bleak mood. It is a simple story that involves a child, a tree and four adult characters, waiting for the enigmatic figure of Godot. Yet this simplicity belies a deep complexity in the material, which has seen the play continually evolve and cross cultural borders through its many translations. Its atmosphere of desperate anticipation and existential questioning is wide open to interpretation, for thematically it never posits what the meaning of life might actually be – it simply depicts the rather pathetic search for meaning. The play’s cross-cultural transferability also stems from the fact that it is set in a non-space of an almost empty stage and is not rooted in a specific epoch. This metaphorical and suggestive nature has helped give the text its longevity and value. It is also stylistically open in terms of its genre. The Japanese première in 1960 incited several Japanese writers to experiment with minimalism and absurdity, exploring the difficult balance between tragedy and comedy that Beckett’s play treads so delicately. It has achieved acclaim in a multitude of contexts – from its successful reception in the San Quentin prison in California in 1957, to Susan Sontag’s production in a besieged Sarajevo in 1993. The plot-confounding play has a distinct human dimension that allows it to operate on what might be considered a universal level. Godot is not only shorthand for a Christian God, as many critics have suggested, but can equally be Clinton stalling on making a decision to save a bombed city, or (for a convict) Godot is long-awaited parole. The play’s style, with its rhythmical, poetic nature and anti-plot was startlingly original when written, and even now proves difficult to perform. It has its roots in 141

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popular theatre and especially clowning and music hall vaudeville tradition, but its philosophical disposition runs much deeper than these forms might suggest. Beckett’s own production as director in 1975, staged at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin, was longawaited to see how the writer would present the elusive material. The production was much faster and lighter than anticipated, and influenced numerous productions afterwards. The necessity for directors to adhere strictly to the stage directions, demanded formerly by Beckett and now by his estate, has meant that few have been able to make radical experiments with the material. But the difficulty also lies in the play’s strict rhythm and pattern, which does not lend itself to edits, cuts or radical interpretations. In spite of this seeming restriction, productions vary extensively in their mood, pace and in the balance between comedy and darkness, such is the text’s richness. Waiting for Godot is considered a landmark piece of experimental twentiethcentury theatre writing. The play clearly continued the investigations of the Dadaists and Antonin Artaud some thirty years before, but it also looked ahead and was the foundation of the artistic movement that Martin Esslin defined as the theatre of the absurd. Wherever and whenever it is played, it still attracts good ticket sales and fervent critical and academic interest. BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are just a few of the numerous analyses of Beckett’s work in general and of this play in particular. Esslin demonstrates the play’s important position in the evolution of the absurd, while Bradby gives detailed accounts of the play and various key productions. States’ short essay examines the play and its structure more theoretically. Bradby, David (2001) Waiting for Godot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday. States, Bert O. (1978) The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot, Berkeley: University of California Press.

YAQUI LENT AND EASTER CEREMONIES (NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES) The Yaqui are a Native tribe resident in the southwest of the USA and northern Mexico. They adopted Christianity during an intense period of contact with Jesuit missionaries from the early 1600s to the mid-eighteenth century. However, they also adapted it to their own local experience (of geography, for example) as well as to their own cultural practices – their myths, social structures, architecture, pre-Christian ceremonies, and so on. Thus, they created new ways of performing important Christian events, the most famous of which are their Lent and Easter ceremonies. These are traditionally Christian in many ways: they portray Jesus’s time in the wilderness, his betrayal by Judas, his burial and resurrection; they follow a Christian calendar; and they incorporate sermons. But they are also traditionally Yaqui: they 142

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take place within the Church but also in other significant sites around the community, many outdoors; they incorporate Yaqui characters (deer dancers and other tricksters, including the masked Chapayekas, who simultaneously represent Pharisees); and they are led by an orchestrating maestro rather than a cleric. Anthropologists and performance scholars – Richard Schechner chief among them – have studied and employed Yaqui Lenten rituals to develop many arguments and analyses. For these critics, the Yaqui ceremonies demonstrate ritual’s social value, here as a performance of the Passion, an Artaudian exploration of cruelty, and a re-enactment of the survival of the Yaqui, who have historically been attacked by the Spanish and the Mexicans and oppressed by the USA. The rituals demonstrate crosscultural differences – for example, by being led by a maestro instead of a cleric – and similarities – the tricksters resembling the mummers common in European religious celebrations. They indicate how intercultural contact produces new hybrid or syncretic practices, as demonstrated also, for example, in the postcolonial playwriting of Wole Soyinka. The ceremonies facilitate critical exploration of the performative significances of site, space, time, performer–audience relationships and characterization. They also demonstrate some of the challenges of documenting performance, not only because of its liveness, but also because its sacredness to participating communities must be respected. In this and other ways, these rituals remind scholars to be self-reflexive about their practice. Deak argues that EuroAmerican scholars’ interest in the Yaqui rituals is a symptom of their nostalgia for pre-secular culture. Others point out that the rituals’ dynamic of Euro-American observing Native American reminds us that power is distributed unevenly in intercultural anthropological observation and must itself always be carefully scrutinized. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The rituals are described and analysed in detail from a performance studies perspective by Deak and Schechner, and from anthropological perspectives by Spicer and Crumrine and Spicer. Valencia et al provide some Yaqui perspectives on both Yaqui religious practices and their anthropological study. Deak, Frantisek (1989) ‘Yaqui Easter: A Reflection on Cross-Cultural Experience’, Performing Arts Journal, ‘The Intercultural Issue’, 11.3/12.1 (PAJ 33/34): 69–78. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. —— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. Spicer, Edward H. (1980) The Yaquis: A Cultural History, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spicer, Rosamond B. and N. Ross Crumrine (eds) (1997) Performing the Renewal of Community: Indigenous Easter Rituals in North Mexico and Southwest United States, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Valencia, Anselmo, Heather Valencia and Rosamund B. Spicer (1990) ‘A Yaqui Point of View: on Yaqui Ceremonies and Anthropologists, in By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–108. 143

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Part III CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES

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ACTI NG

ACTING Acting is the art of performing in theatre, especially using the actor’s voice and body. While this may sound obvious, it makes the point that acting is both intentional and theatrical, whereas other forms of performance, such as participating in ritual or protest, may be neither. The intentional nature of acting means the actor will be selfreflexive about his or her craft, its practice, and its aesthetic and social functions. Because it is theatrical, acting happens in a social context and can have significant social effects; further, it often aims to be mimetic – to copy a recognizable reality. These three features of acting as intentional, social and mimetic are not only descriptive. They are also at the core of arguments about whether acting is an innate and spontaneous or learned and mechanical skill, the social and ideological effects it can have, and how it performatively produces or reproduces the world. The first question gets to the heart of debates about what the function of acting is and how that is achieved. Actors are generally expected to convey emotion and to empathize with the characters they play, especially in naturalism. Thus, many analysts in the West have wanted to see the emotional link between actor and character as natural. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Denis Diderot went against this prevailing opinion to argue that it was in fact necessary for actors to maintain an objective distance in order to control their own emotions, the better properly to portray those of their characters. Diderot called this dependence of emotion on technique the ‘actor’s paradox’. From the late nineteenth century on, the recognition that what we perceive as good acting usually depends on intellectual and physical training and discipline has gained wide acceptance. This is evident in the importance commonly attributed from the mid-twentieth century on to such concepts as focus, control, research, psychophysical preparation, textual interpretation, and the identification and realization of objectives, whether the performance is devised, improvised or conventionally rehearsed. Nevertheless, the continuing value placed on the actor’s quality of presence and liveness reveals a residual ideological investment in understanding acting as spontaneous, inspired and somehow natural. As actor training techniques have shifted across time, so have other aspects of acting, all indicating changing social understandings, not only of acting. The Elizabethan prohibition disallowing women’s appearance on stage reflected gendered ideologies of the time. Western acting has practised intercultural borrowing at least since the early twentieth century, when Antonin Artaud and Bertold Brecht, for example, were both influenced by Asian performance. This borrowing persists in Western practitioners’ increasing adoption of Asian forms such as yoga, Kathakali and t’ai chi ch’uan, raising questions about balances of power in intercultural economies of exchange. From the late nineteenth century on, naturalism’s emphasis on character and psychology has been continuously reinforced by training methods derived from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system and has reflected understandings of identity as whole, autonomous and self-actualizing. Postmodern acting has interrogated this idea of a unified subject and individual agency in a variety of ways. The Wooster Group’s Route 1 & 9 (1981) explicitly demonstrated the acting 147

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conventions it used to construct character and emotion. Robert Wilson’s theatre of images frequently prioritizes the actor’s role as a scenographic element over his or her role as a total, emotive character, as does much physical theatre. Sheffield’s Forced Entertainment often compose performance as a set of tasks to be executed rather than an arc of emotions to be played through. Partly because it resists psychological characterization in these ways, postmodern acting is often understood more broadly as performance/performing. Further, as all of these examples indicate, from the late nineteenth century on, acting has been directly developed and deployed by directors to realize their aims. Acting’s social status has had a chequered history. While tragic actors were highly regarded in ancient Greece, acting has often been seen as disreputable. This can partly be attributed to anti-theatrical prejudices – the actor is distrusted precisely because of his or her very skill in mimetic representation, disguise and dissembling. Throughout the twentieth century into the twenty-first, the actor’s status has been variable. It has risen with the cult of the celebrity and repeatedly sunk as the actor’s paradox persists in fuelling acting’s associations with both artlessness and artifice, sometimes configured as self-indulgence and self-importance. What also endures, however, is a continuing fascination with acting for both performers and audiences alike, indicating acting’s specific potential to engage intellectually and phenomenologically with questions of, amongst other things, subjectivity and representation. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roach analyses Western theories of acting from the seventeenth century into the twentieth. Harrop provides an accessible introduction to many aspects of twentiethcentury acting. Hodge collects useful introductions to the training methods of important Western director-practitioners. Zarrilli collects influential and thoughtprovoking essays, including Kirby’s early attempt to distinguish between acting and not-acting/performing and with Daboo and Loukes explores cross-cultural models of acting process. Auslander traces some of the changes in acting that have transformed it into performance. Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Harrop, John (1992) Acting, London: Routledge. Hodge, Alison (ed.) (2010) Twentieth Century Actor Training, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Kirby, Michael (1972) ‘On Acting and Not-acting’, TDR: The Drama Review 16.1: 3–15. Reprinted in Phillip Zarrilli (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, pp. 40–52. Roach, Joseph (1985) The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. —— Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes (2013) Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process, Basingstoke, Palgrave. 148

AFFECT, FEELI NG AND EMO T I O N

AFFECT, FEELING AND EMOTION In the early twenty-first century an ‘affective turn’ in critical thinking in the arts and humanities has increased attention on affect, emotion and feeling. (‘Affective’ has to do with feelings; this is different from ‘effective’ which has to do with the efficiency of something, or how well it works.) This entry outlines definitional distinctions between these related terms, explores critical and political consequences of the ‘affective turn’ and considers its particular relevance to theatre and performance studies. It argues that paying fuller attention to affect increases appreciation of the roles of feeling and of bodies in making meaning and that this appreciation importantly recalibrates historical hierarchies of meaning which have denigrated bodies, feelings and, for that matter, theatre and performance. It also argues that, as practices which feature and foreground feelings and bodies, theatre and performance can help us better understand the cultural work of feelings. Affects are sensory, bodily responses to stimuli which are manifested in such things as goosebumps, blushing and a racing heart. They happen in our bodies but are usually beyond our conscious control. In the context of theatre and performance, a concern with affect raises the importance of the body in meaning-making for both the performer and the audience. For some theatre scholars, it has provoked collaboration with scientists in exploring the ways that cognition happens. It has also turned attention to and validated audience responses which are apparently irrational or initially unexplainable, giving authority to such claims as ‘I liked it’ or ‘It moved me’, to feelings of presence and to the individual audience member and his or her intimate, immediate ‘gut feelings’. Feelings are our recognition of affects. And emotions are how we understand and interpret affects through social agreement and personal memory, for example, as fear, pity or desire. The affective turn has shifted credit for meaning-making from features and practices which focus on semiotic systems, representation, sense-making and interpretation onto bodily experience, feelings and emotions. It restructures hierarchies which tend to privilege apparently rational understandings and apparently ‘cerebral’ cultural practices (that is, ‘high art’). It has been very important to – and has been led by – feminist and queer studies as well as critical race theory because the historical denigration of the expression of feeling has been linked both frequently and intimately to historical prejudices against women, queers and people of colour. For the same reasons and more, the affective turn is important to theatre and performance. This is especially the case for those forms which are more commonly associated with feeling and bodies, including much popular theatre and performance such as nineteenth-century melodrama, the megamusical, dance and sports. But it is also true for practices which are apparently elite – or, for some, esoteric – such as body art and performance art/live art. The affective turn is also important because, as Erin Hurley, Nicholas Ridout, Martin Welton and others have persuasively argued, theatre is a sort of ‘feeling-machine’, an apparatus designed to stimulate feelings through such triggers as lighting, sound, movement, mise en scène, pacing, structure, characterization, human proximity and more. Theatre’s many 149

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feelings include cathartic pity and fear in the theatre of the fifth century BCE according to Aristotle; empathy across much of theatre history; visceral feeling for Antonin Artaud; politically provocative feelings of outrage and indignation in the theatre of Bertold Brecht; and a range from fear through euphoria to boredom in butoh. Feeling is also crucial to making theatre, for example through emotion memory exercises in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky and in relation to longstanding debates about the so-called ‘actor’s paradox’ which asks whether performers must actually feel emotions during performance in order properly to portray them. Paying critical attention to affect and emotion in performance can furthermore help expand how we understand audiences’ experiences as not just about interpretation, but also about feelings. It can help us see how theatre and performance can motivate political action in any socially-engaged form, which Jill Dolan might call a utopian performative, and which includes such things as public protests – like those of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Tiananmen Square and the Arab Spring – and sites such as Holocaust Memorials and Museums. It can enhance our understanding of performance work which provokes us to reflect on affect and emotion, be that the apparently affectless theatre of New York-based writer/director Richard Maxwell, or the viscerally challenging work of artists such as Marina Abramović and Ron Athey. It can help us make sense of a range of practices of ‘affective labour’; that is, labour which is emotional and also intellectual (rather than principally physical), such as parenting, working in a service industry or acting. And it can help us to understand not only our own feelings but also those of others. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hurley’s Theatre & Feeling provides a wonderful overview of key issues which are explored in more theoretical context in her co-edited collection with Sara Warner. Some relevant works in theatre studies include books by Dolan, Escolme, Ridout, Thompson (who applies the ‘affective turn’ to applied theatre), and Welton and Di Benedetto, both of whom focus on the senses. Key works which engage with the performativity of emotions include texts by Ahmed, Clough and Sedgwick. Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto (ed.) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham: Duke University Press. Di Benedetto, Stephen (2010) The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, New York: Routledge. Dolan, Jill (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Escolme, Bridget (2013) Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves, London: Arden Shakespeare. Hurley, Erin (2010) Theatre & Feeling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— and Sara Warner (eds) (2012) Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Special Section on ‘Affect/Performance/Politics’, 26:2, 99–219. 150

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Ridout, Nicholas (2007) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Welton, Martin (2012) Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

ANIMALS Anecdotally, the presence of animals on stage, like that of children, is best avoided because their behaviour is unpredictable and difficult to control. Yet, animals have often been used in performance by many groups and artists, exploiting these very qualities of surprise and unpredictability. This ranges from England’s Rose English and France’s Théâtre Equestre Zingaro, who both perform regularly with horses, through Italy’s Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio, who work with children and animals, to Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theatre. Bausch has frequently used the much more predictable, though still challenging, devices of performers dressed as animals and even a stuffed deer (in 1980), which provided an enigmatic stillness in the surrounding vortex of movement. Historically, the circus was at the forefront of performance with live animals until increasing concerns about exploitation in the 1980s led to the development of humanonly circus events, dominated now by the hugely successful Canadian company Cirque du Soleil. In various actions and happenings, performance artists have provoked strong feelings with their exploitation of dead and live animals. Most notorious amongst these is Hermann Nitsch, who from 1962 onwards ritualistically played with dead chickens and blood as visual media with which to paint the body and adorn the space, perhaps inevitably causing a scandal. Joseph Beuys used a dead hare and a live coyote in Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) as performance partners. He deployed these animals not so much for their potential as spectacle (though this is inevitable), but more to provoke questions about our identity, about the function of art as communication (by asking how animals communicate), and about human responsibility for nature and for other beings. The juxtaposition of human performers alongside animals enables the spectator to scrutinize both stage presences closely – and comparatively – within the objectifying frame that performance provides. A performance’s liveness is also accentuated by the risk of animals’ unpredictability. Other correspondences between humans and animals exist in concepts of actor training and performance, like Tadashi Suzuki’s idea of performers utilizing ‘animal energy’. Several directors and teachers, like Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski, have also attempted to emphasize the ‘extra-daily’ or non-social aspects of performance, implicitly advocating a return to nature and ritual that goes back to the goat song (tragos) at the source of tragedy. These artists espouse biologicallydriven, impulsive, even irrational (or at least non-cognitive) behaviour, that is 151

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somehow animalistic. This is different from, though not completely unrelated to, the imitative animal exercises that have become familiar in many acting processes, notable in Jacques Copeau and Jacques Lecoq’s training. Such processes of transformation and imitation may have little relation to the overt display acts of ‘performing’ dolphins or bears. But the presence of animals in performance, the challenges they pose theoretically, and the models of behaviour they offer, all add unusual complexity and richness to investigations of what performing might be. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read collates theoretical reflections as well as more descriptive pieces by and on various practitioners who work with animals. Orozco’s book provides a short overview of the corresponding worlds of animals and performance, whilst Ridout focuses specifically on various anomalies prompted by mixing animals and theatre. Chaudhuri examines zoos and circuses in order to understand better the crossovers between human and animal performance, thereby building on Bouissac’s early and unusual study. Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chaudhuri, Una (2003) ‘Zoo Stories: “Boundary Work” in Theater History’, in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theater History, W. B. Worthen with Peter Holland (eds), Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Orozco, Lourdes (2013) Theatre & Animals, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Read, Alan (ed.) (2000) ‘On Animals’, a special issue of Performance Research 5.2, London: Routledge. Ridout, Nicholas (2006) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

APPLIED THEATRE AND SOCIALLY-ENGAGED PERFORMANCE In applied theatre, trained practitioners work actively and collaboratively with participants who are not usually theatre experts and who are often from sociallymarginalized groups, so that those participants become both spectators and makers, or ‘spect-actors’ in the words of applied theatre pioneer Augusto Boal. With and for those participants, applied theatre ‘applies’ itself, explicitly aiming to bring about social change, such as education, social empowerment, revisions to legislation, conflict resolution, activism or therapeutic impact. It is usually embedded in its participant community’s contexts, such as schools, prisons, hospitals, community centres and other public places. Its techniques include theatre games, making tableaux, role-playing and other forms of improvisation and are designed to engage spect-actor participants, explore issues of concern to them and stage potential solutions. Some theatre companies which use applied practices, such as Sistren and the Bread and Puppet Theatre, do produce shows, but they tend to maintain a somewhat 152

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amateur or rough style, downplaying performance expertise and actively emphasizing process over product. Some of applied theatre’s best-known forms include theatre in education (TiE), prison theatre and several forms pioneered by Boal such as Legislative Theatre and Invisible Theatre. In contrast to applied theatre, socially-engaged performance aims less to bring about social change directly than to make social interventions which provoke discussion which may in turn lead to change. It also tends to pay more attention to the finished quality of its aesthetic product than does process-focused applied theatre. Deriving its name from the capacious category of ‘socially-engaged art’, it is a looser term than ‘applied theatre’ and can capture a wider range of practice. Some artists who might be considered practitioners include Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Orlan and Marina Abramović, whose works address such issues as misogyny and ethnic discrimination through complex artistic practices. Socially-engaged performance has become important in theatre and performance studies as practical, disciplinary and intellectual lines between performance, live art and art have blurred, and as debates have grown about the political efficacy of art which aims instrumentally to create social change. A core question in these debates asks what the roles of art and performance should be in contexts where social change is desired. If they aim to be instrumentalist, bringing about change, does this risk turning them into social work rather than art practice? Are practitioners more like teachers and facilitators than artists, and what is jeopardized if they pay less attention to artistry? James Thompson has argued persuasively that applied theatre should focus less on its quantitative social effects and more on its qualitative affects, the feelings that art can produce through, for example, beauty, and the benefits of those feelings. Art critics and historians Claire Bishop and Grant Kester have staged a fierce debate in this area, mostly in the pages of the journal ArtForum International. Bishop argues against a critical approach which focuses on art’s social effects and ethics to the exclusion of its aesthetics. Such an approach, she maintains, prevents aesthetic analyses which might read such work as, for example, potentially socially unsuccessful, simply boring, artistically bland or even ethically uncomfortable. (For Bishop as for Jacques Rancière, this discomfort can be aesthetically and socially productive for the ways it troubles normative assumptions and re-distributes the sensible in Rancière’s terms). Kester counters that Bishop’s proposed approach is elitist in its advocacy of critique which is aesthetic, deconstructive and certainly sceptical rather than, for example, joyous in its participation, as so much applied theatre can be. These are not the only debates about performance work which aims to stimulate social change. Critics warn that applied theatre can pose risks to its participating communities when its engagement is too brief, superficial, patronizingly didactic or even exploitative; for example, when a practitioner imposes unsolicited ‘help’ on a community without proper consultation. On the other hand, some warn that sociallyengaged projects risk being too esoteric, exclusive, elitist, insufficiently integrated with the communities and issues they address, not to mention too product-driven and complicit with a capitalist art market as distinct from what might be seen as applied 153

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theatre’s gift economy, as in Eugenio Barba’s practice of barter. Furthermore, several observers argue that the distinctions posed here between applied and sociallyengaged practices are, for many practitioners such as Split Britches and Annie Sprinkle, redundant, not to mention counter-productive, since such divisions can police and separate practices that deliberately hybridize the political, the social and the aesthetic in important ways. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast literature on applied theatre and its various forms (for example, Boal, McAvinchey, Nicholson, Thompson and Kester; Prentki and Preston’s edited collection is full of useful selections). Those who focus on socially-engaged performance and art include Jackson and Bishop. Shaughnessy makes the case to recognize these kinds of practices as often significantly mutually integrated. Bishop, Claire (2006) ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, ArtForum International 44:6 (February): 178–183. —— (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso. Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press. Jackson, Shannon (2011) Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Oxon: Routledge. Kester, Grant (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (2006) ‘Another Turn’, ArtForum International 44:9 (May): 22. McAvinchey, Caoimhe (2011) Theatre & Prison, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Helen (2005) Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Prentki, Tim, and Sheila Preston (eds) (2009) The Applied Theatre Reader, Oxon: Routledge. Shaughnessy, Nicola (2012) Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

ASIAN PERFORMANCE There is an overt problem in trying to write a single entry on the performance forms of a continent, for it will inevitably limit, simplify, exclude and possibly mislead. Yet, from the Western perspective this book adopts, Asian performance has long appeared as a challenging and enticing corollary to Western practices. Interest in interculturalism cemented this, but only at the very end of a century of fascination, misunderstanding and appropriation, to name some of the worst aspects of this crosscultural interaction. Asian performance has also offered inspiration, education and a constant reminder of the ritual sources of, and possibilities for, Western theatre, dance and other art forms that, amongst many others, director Ariane Mnouchkine has explored with her Théâtre du Soleil. For these reasons it is important to attempt to 154

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summarize the complex impact that traditional Asian performance (the focus here is not on contemporary practices) has had on the West, while being sensitive to ethical issues. Much interest in Asian performance has been driven by fascination with the exotic, as articulated broadly by the late Edward Said in his influential writings on Orientalism. The codified performance forms of Kathakali and Noh, for example, might distance outsiders because of their specific gestural languages or mudras (Kathakali’s symbolic hand gestures), but they obviate this with their emphasis on physical and energetic techniques, which can be felt and seen (if not understood) cross-culturally. The skill these forms require depends on long-term training from an early age that has an equivalence in the West in sports, ballet and music rather than in the theatre itself, and which is markedly different from relatively short-term theatre training programmes in the West. Equally compelling for Western theatre practitioners and historians alike are the still evident roots of these forms in ritual practices and an overt connection to spirituality, as in Balinese dance-theatre. Contemporary or experimental Asian forms like butoh have not totally cut themselves off from these traditions, even if they have called into question any dogmatism with which they might be associated or practised. This metaphysical dimension is what Antonin Artaud wanted to capture, just as Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski were also animated by the idea of a holy theatre or actor. But the very idea of performance in Asian cultures is fundamentally different from that in the West, especially in relation to its role in society. Asian forms often have a central role in their communities, which many feel is lacking in the West, even if practitioners of popular theatre and community arts workers have tried hard to develop this political purpose. Asian performance forms have also helped establish the notion of the performer as someone who might sing, dance or recite text – a challenge to the Western Aristotelian model of acting based on mimesis. Correspondingly, performer training in Asia has other priorities from Western approaches. Achievement in later life is emphasized rather than youth and talent, just as originality is secondary to perpetuating traditions. Such notions have been picked up by many in the West, including Eugenio Barba, Grotowski and American director Anne Bogart, and especially those working in physical theatre. The importance of mastery of techniques and rules of training, for example in Motokiyo Zeami’s treatises, have inspired practitioners like Phillip Zarrilli to follow and then translate methods of transmission and instruction found in Asian practices into Western contexts. The differences between Asian and Western performance can too easily be overstated, but it is important to counterbalance these by recognizing that there are also many shared principles and practices. Barba’s theatre anthropology is a well-documented example of an approach which looks for such common ground. Similarly, it is vital to remember that there is a two-way traffic of ideas and practices, as in Japan’s shingeki, the term for a hybrid of Japanese theatre based on a Western, mostly naturalist model. Dynamic explorations of contemporary forms like multimedia work fused with traditional practices have been the result of recent pan-Asian projects 155

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based in Singapore (Theatre Works’ ‘Flying Circus’ is one example), and ongoing collaborations between Singaporean artists and Australian groups like Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre, who produced Tadashi Suzuki’s Australian version of Macbeth in 1992. Asian performance must not be further set in stone or falsely exoticized as locked in its past – traditions evolve and can be home to innovation, though perhaps at a rate that is slower than is usual in the West. The respect for both tradition and experimentation in much of Asia adds weight to arguments that Western theatre is too often driven by commercial rather than aesthetic or even spiritual considerations, and increasingly lacks social or political purpose. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature even on singular Asian performance forms is vast, as Brandon’s important panoptic guide illustrates. These are a few examples that begin to explore the inter-relationship between Western and Asian performance practices and some of the theoretical concerns that surround them. The two edited collections cover a range of materials, forms and approaches. RPA Brandon, James R. (ed.) (1993) The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, John Russell (1998) New Sites for Shakespeare, London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Josephine Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer (eds) (1990) The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Pavis, Patrice (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge. Said, Edward (1995) Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reprinted from the 1978 original with a new afterword.

AUDIENCE AND SPECTATOR Literally speaking, an audience is a group of people who listen and a spectator is one who watches. By most definitions, the audience and/or the spectator fundamentally constitute theatre and performance by witnessing it and at least partially producing its meanings. Beyond these basic points of definition, however, the precise nature of the audience and/or spectator is troubled by questions about who the audience actually is and what it does. As an abstract collective noun, the term ‘audience’ tends to homogenize the sense of who is in it, both across different times and places and within audiences at particular events. The idea of the audience as a collective is appropriate in some instances (for example, in Aristotle’s understanding of the function of tragedy as an event which spiritually cleanses the community) as well as in certain models of theatre – such as black theatre or women’s theatre – which aim intentionally to address and validate particular communities that may otherwise be marginalized. But often this sense of the audience’s coherence and consistency is not only inaccurate but also deceptive. This is because it produces an impression of shared identity, 156

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mutual ideologies and community – or Victor Turner’s communitas – that might not actually exist. Historically, for example, the class, gender and ethnic constituency of theatre audiences has varied according to shifting ideas about who is permitted to attend and whether or not theatre-going is ‘proper’ or fashionable. That said, while an audience may appear to be mixed, the performance’s address to the audience can constitute it as homogeneous. Many feminists, for example, have pointed out that much Western theatre often assumes an ‘ideal’ spectator who is white, middle class and male. They argue that to maintain another perspective in the face of this assumption is to sustain one’s exclusion from the show’s projected meaning and from the dominant class. This homogenization of the audience also problematically presumes that audiences consistently do the same thing. But there clearly exist many different understandings about what audiences do, and especially about whether audience participation is fundamentally active or passive. In some models, often associated with commercial forms such as Broadway and West End megamusicals, audiences bankroll the show, look and hear, sit back and expect to be entertained. In other models, they become voyeurs, or are spiritually uplifted, or emotionally moved. Sometimes they watch and listen, applaud or jeer, witness and take responsibility, or are compelled to act. In different configurations of theatre and performance space, audience involvement can range from the passivity encouraged by the darkened, segregated auditoria of traditional proscenium-arch theatres, to the mobility necessitated by environmental and site-specific performance, immersive theatre and one-to-one performance and installation art. For Aristotle, the audience identified with the tragic hero and experienced catharsis, or the purgation of difficult feelings. This analysis of the audience’s experience persisted for a long time – and still persists. But it drew criticism for modelling a fundamentally passive spectator: the spectator might recognize hardship in a play’s narrative but would not act on it in real life because the will to act had been quelled by the experience of catharsis in the theatre. Arguing against what he saw as naturalism’s inherently politically passive spectator, Bertold Brecht advocated an active spectator who would be compelled by epic theatre to go out after the show and take direct political action. Augusto Boal has proposed a ‘spectactor’, who literally participates in both Forum Theatre – by deliberately entering the performance as a vocal, thinking participant – and invisible theatre, which surreptitiously draws ‘innocent’ bystanders into public altercations. Many playwrights, movements and practitioners, including Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke, Dada, futurism and the Wooster Group, have tried to challenge the inherent passivity of assumed rules about being an audience by deliberately provoking and even offending their audiences. Theorist Jacques Rancière has argued that though conventional theatre audiences may be physically passive they are creatively and intellectually active. Jerzy Grotowski moved from a strong belief in the importance of the audience in constituting the show’s meaning to favour instead a paratheatre, where the powers of catharsis were fundamentally designed to transform the performers rather than the audience. While an audience is nearly always an essential part of theatre and 157

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performance, therefore, what an audience is understood to mean and do shifts according to changing ideas, not only of what theatre and performance are and how they make meaning, but also of what community and identity are. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett and Freshwater offer detailed surveys of theoretical understandings of the audience, concentrating on twentieth-century theatre practice and active audiences. Blau’s book is a well-informed rumination on the audience, grounded in psychoanalytic theory and asking important questions about what the social and political function of a community or public is, and whether one is possible. Dolan’s book is a foundational feminist critique. Rancière’s delineation of the ‘emancipated spectator’ has increasing influence. Bennett, Susan (1997) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Blau, Herbert (1990) The Audience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Freshwater, Helen (2009) Theatre & Audience, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso.

BODY ART Body art is radical performance art that explicitly uses the artist’s own body to comment visually, sensually and often viscerally on identity and to enact the body’s social meanings and expressive possibilities. It began after the Second World War with artists actually using their own and others’ bodies in their art; in the 1950s, a fully dressed Yves Klein infamously deployed naked women’s painted bodies as ‘paintbrushes’, directing their movement on canvases to leave paint marks. Body art came to prominence in the 1970s as part of a growing recognition that the body’s specificity and social significations mean it can never be neutral, either as an artistic medium – the actor’s body – or as the author of meaning – the artist’s body. Body art was led by feminist artists who put themselves in their work, collapsing the distance between artist and artwork, subject and object, and process and product, and insisting that their embodied gendered experiences affected their work, its reception and its meanings. Body art has consistently challenged the ways that bodies signify – or are made to signify – within dominant cultures. Feminist body art has explored how the female body is controlled by, for example, dominant conceptions of beauty and sexuality, such as the kind of sexual objectification of women demonstrated by Klein. Orlan’s series of plastic surgery operations, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93), simultaneously acknowledges icons of beauty in Western art history by adopting elements from famous portraits, and undermines them by combining them in hybrid new configurations. Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle and numerous other artists have performed naked or 158

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semi-naked to challenge audiences to confront the ways pornography, fine art and other forms of representation persistently portray women as commodified sexual objects, rather than as active subjects. As well as exploring the social significations of bodies differentiated by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, illness and so on, body art has explored the body’s material capabilities and limits. This work has focused on and tested the body’s material borders – such as its skin – as well as the limits of mental endurance. Numerous artists, including Chris Burden (in Shoot), Marina Abramović, Ulay, Ron Athey, Fakir Musafar and Franko B, have shot, cut and/or pierced their bodies in performance, with a variety of effects – provoking audiences to consider the ethics of their passive spectatorship, and exploring responses to pain, transgressed taboos, the putatively ‘obscene’, masochism, the presence of the performer and the mortality of the body. Stelarc’s early ‘body suspensions’ with meathooks viscerally illustrated the material body’s vulnerability, leading to his subsequent work exploring the relationship of the body to its technological environment in body work incorporating multimedia, robotic machines and the internet. Much body art has explored the complexities of subjectivity as conceived within postmodern theory, recognizing it as fragmented – partially constituted by culture and partly by the body’s given material conditions. It has interrogated the limits of personal volition as well as conceptions of identity as coterminous with the body. Work by artists including Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke and Gilbert and George self-consciously enacts the repetitions through which identity is produced and changed, demonstrating identity’s performativity – a critical concept developed by Judith Butler. Body art is practised in artistic contexts such as theatres and galleries, but it also occurs much more widely – and with many of the same meanings – through everyday life activities of costuming/body adornment such as tattooing, piercing and scarring. Other forms of body modification might be seen to include eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Like the gallery’s body art, these everyday forms articulate bodies’ social relationships of oppression and resistance. They also engage with ritual practices and rites of passage, mark the body in time, explore psychoanalytic understandings of feelings, pain and pleasure, and provoke varied interpretations as celebratory, exhibitionist, self-abusive or liberating. BIBLIOGRAPHY

All three books here provide strong critical overviews. Warr also provides extensive illustration and supporting critical reading. Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Dell, Kathy (1998) Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon. 159

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BUTOH Butoh was part of a powerful new movement of underground or alternative performance forms in Japan that emerged in the late 1950s and (more forcefully) the 1960s, a decade of radical protest amongst students in Japan, as elsewhere in the world. Butoh performers were highly critical of 1950s Japanese culture and politics. Against the troubled background of the economic and material destruction of Japan during the Second World War – exemplified by the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent American Occupation –debates shifted between the conservative right-wing forces espousing the preservation of traditions and cultural autonomy, and the reformists championing Western influences and change, with which butoh aligned itself. Expressionism, for example, was a significant influence on butoh. Initially, butoh was led by individual artists such as dancer/choreographers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Ohno was Hijikata’s collaborator, then pupil. His dance style emphasized personal expressivity, in part derived from his work with a student of German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. Only in 1972 was the standing of butoh in Japan reinforced by the founding of the first butoh group, Dairakudakan (which translates as ‘Dance Apricot Machine’), led by Maro Akaji. And it was only in the 1980s that butoh achieved widespread popularity in Europe and the rest of the world through touring groups like Paris-based Sankai Juku (founded in 1975 and pictured in Figure 9). Butoh – or ‘the dance of darkness’ as it is known – turns the spectator’s attention to the simplicity of the stripped-bare, almost animal body and the innermost recesses of the Japanese psyche. To the West it reiterated the image of Japan as a nation

Figure 9 Sankai Juku perform HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away (1998) 160

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suffering in the wake of the Second World War. Painted white figures with shaved heads, moving in painfully slow, acutely controlled and contorted sequences on bleak sets, recall the ghosts of the traditional Noh theatre as well as the victims of radiation. Even if it still demanded strict allegiance in terms of company dynamics and a certain uniformity of expression, butoh demonstrated an innovative progression from strict Asian performance forms like Japanese Noh and Kabuki. Whereas these had set patterns or kata, many of which are centuries old, movement in butoh is devised largely though improvisation, even if the performance ultimately appears as precise, detailed choreography. Its intense physicality is meant to derive from the flow of deep atavistic inner impulses of an animal nature that reveal the performer’s very soul. The ‘dance of death’, which butoh is also called, should somehow transcend the body’s material presence. Training for, and practising, this form is frequently rigorous and intensely demanding of personal sacrifice, crossing over into everyday life. This principle was taken to its extreme in 1985, when one member of Sankai Juku fell to his death during a performance in Seattle, when the rope he was suspended from, high above the streets, snapped. Butoh continues to challenge orthodoxies on an artistic, personal, emotional as well as political level, both in its questioning of conformity and in its emphasis on individual instinctive creativity. It is also, in many ways, still largely an enigma. Butoh sits awkwardly, though challengingly, in a liminal space between dance, therapy, protest and acting. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is little written in English on butoh other than these four texts. The commercially-available Blackwood video offers an indispensable companion to these texts, especially since the form is so difficult to describe verbally. RPA Baird, Bruce (2012) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Blackwood, Michael (1990) Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, New York: Michael Blackwood Productions. Film. Fraleigh, Sondra (1999) Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Klein, Susan Blakeley (1988) Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo: Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.

CAMP Camp exemplifies Judith Butler’s conception of identity as performative – constructed through repetition, therefore provisional, and indicative of the potential of cultural identities not to be predetermined by biology but to be articulated and changed through cultural practice. However, the precise meanings of the term ‘camp’ and the practices it represents have been strongly disputed in cultural criticism 161

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– especially queer criticism. In her famous 1964 essay, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, cultural critic and theatre director Susan Sontag defined camp as a sensibility and a style characterized by artificiality, excess and a lack of political commitment. By suggesting that camp values the apparently vulgar and the popular over fine art, high culture and received notions of beauty, she usefully indicated the ways camp implicitly promotes cultural democratization by playfully challenging dominant cultural hierarchies. By identifying it as simultaneously attractive and repulsive, she acknowledged this antihegemonic cultural value, but also camp’s potential problems. While she did not specify what these were other critics have done so, suggesting that camp is: potentially misogynist, sometimes celebrating restrictive clichés of femininity; not egalitarian but elitist, as a sensibility shared only by those with the requisite ‘queer eye’; seduced by consumer culture; and desexualizing, engaged with eroticism and desire, but not linking them to any particular sexual practices. Some of these problems with camp are epitomized in the television programme Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003), which played on ideas of gay men as stylish but somewhat superficial elitist consumers. Sontag’s analysis has been criticized on a number of counts, especially for downplaying the link between camp and homosexual and/or queer sexual identities, and for identifying camp as apolitical. For many queer theorists, camp is socially-engaged queer activism: parodying dominant heteronormative culture in both everyday life contexts and at such events as parades and carnivals; challenging binary understandings of male and female genders, especially through cross-dressed or drag performance like that of Split Britches; and consuming excessively, not in a capitulation to capitalist culture, but to claim queer purchase within a dominant culture that otherwise violently marginalizes the queer. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The three collections here contain numerous good articles. Cleto’s is most substantial and includes Sontag’s essay, as well as a full bibliography dating back to the nineteenth century. Bergman, David (ed.) (1993) Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cleto, Fabio (ed.) (1999) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, Moe (ed.) (1994) The Politics and Poetics of Camp, London: Routledge. Sontag, Susan ([1964] 1987) ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation, London: André Deutsch, pp. 275–92. Reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.) (1999) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 53–65.

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CARNIVAL Carnival is popular street festival that usually combines music, masking or costume, dance, food, eroticism, and performances such as parades, street theatre and puppetry. Its practices raise key debates about cultural power and cultural identities. Theorist Mikhail Bakhtin influentially argued that carnival is socially liberating because it licenses the crossing of boundaries, especially between classes. As others have noted, carnival’s transgressive potential can also challenge the conventional separation of audiences and performers, as well as boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality in events such as Gay Pride festivals. Carnival can also challenge dominant social rules regarding time and space – as in women’s ‘Take Back the Night’ marches advocating women’s right to walk safely in the city at night, or in events where anti-globalization campaigners or Occupy protesters occupy the streets and prevent the usual flow of traffic and commerce. And it can challenge hegemonic assumptions of value, most importantly by celebrating marginalized communities, as in the community plays and events of Welfare State International (UK) and the Bread and Puppet Theatre (USA). However, in a debate subsequently extended by Stallybrass and White, Bakhtin acknowledged that carnival also has socially repressive potential because its licence to exist is granted only temporarily, in a circumscribed space and by the State. Thus, carnival produces an illusion of democratically dispersed cultural power while actually reinforcing hegemony: by allowing the oppressed classes to ‘let off steam’ temporarily, carnival evacuates their oppositional energies. These debates about carnival’s inherently ambivalent political potential can be demonstrated through the form that is now most pervasive in the West: carnival that originated in the Caribbean and has spread throughout the black diaspora to Europe, North America and beyond. Historically, this form combined imported European carnival practices that originated in Christian pre-Lent festivities with black and indigenous Caribbean forms of music and dance. The resulting hybrid combination can be considered both liberating for, and oppressive of, black communities. It is oppressive if the new hybrid form of carnival is seen as predominantly imposing European cultural practices on black cultures, and liberating if the carnival seems more significantly to challenge imposed culture through the black communities’ claiming of space, presence, music, dance, food and so on (compare with Yaqui Lent and Easter ceremonies). In contemporary contexts as far dispersed as Rio de Janeiro, London’s Notting Hill and Toronto, carnivals often function to articulate minority communities’ national, ethnic and/or ‘racial’ cultural identities, temporarily but powerfully contesting racism and oppression. Carnival nevertheless remains vulnerable to appropriation. While hegemonic governments may promote themselves as benignly multicultural by supporting carnival, they may simultaneously exploit it by presenting it as intercultural exotica and using it to attract tourists and to stimulate regional regeneration. Carnival is also vulnerable to capitalist exploitation. In the 1990s, the Notting Hill Carnival’s sponsorship by a soft-drink company meant it temporarily 163

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changed its name to the ‘Lilt Notting Hill Carnival’. This association of product and event was obviously meant to attach street credibility to the soft drink, but it is possible instead to see its actual effect as detracting from the Carnival’s oppositional status, linking the event with commercial rather than cultural priorities. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin’s book lays down ideas subsequently developed by Bristol, Schechner, Stallybrass and White, and most recently Crichlow in her edited collection. Carver discusses issues raised by Lilt’s sponsorship of the Notting Hill Carnival. Riggio’s collection examines a range of examples of contemporary carnivals worldwide, but with a particular focus on the Caribbean. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bristol, Michael D. (1985) Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, London: Methuen. Carver, Gavin (2000) ‘The Effervescent Carnival: Performance, Context and Mediation at Notting Hill’, NTQ: New Theatre Quarterly 16.1 (NTQ 61): 34–49. Crichlow, Michaeline A. (2012) Carnival Art, Culture and Politics: Performing Life, Oxon: Routledge. Riggio, Milla Cozart (ed.) (2004) Carnival: Culture in Action, the Trinidad Experience, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen.

CIRCUS An emphasis on large-scale spectacle and virtuosic achievement has always been integral to circus, an influential and continually evolving popular theatre form. Although demonstrations of skill and exotica may have much older roots, the idea of mass public circuses stems concretely from early Roman times. The term then denoted both the open-air stadia built for entertainment – like chariot racing at the Circus Maximus, for example – as well as the name of such events themselves. The circular shape of circus tents echoes these ancient counterparts and presents a nonhierarchical auditorium for the spectators, encouraging a participatory inclusivity, where vocal responses, eating and drinking are encouraged, and the audience see each other across the dirt stage. Tents are portable and easy to tour and are thus germane to its popularity. The collective nature of circus spectatorship was alluded to by Karl Marx in his phrase ‘bread and circuses’ (from the Latin panem et circenses), though he was suggesting that the masses could be fobbed off with such spectacles. Following Marx’s statement, debates focus (as with carnival) on whether circus is socially liberating or oppressive for performers and spectators alike. 164

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Circus went through extensive transformation following the public rejection of animal participation in the 1980s. Now the popular Moscow and Chinese State Circuses, for example, with their multiple franchises operating simultaneously in different countries, rely instead on human skill and invention. Such companies draw their personnel worldwide from national circus schools with their intensive training programmes. The specialist skills that circuses depend on take years to acquire and performers need constant practice. Canadian group Cirque du Soleil (founded in 1984) have taken virtuosity to an unprecedented level and an astonishing scale, and now runs a multimillion-dollar international business, as their multilingual website shows. As well as touring, the company is based at major leisure destinations like Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, and merchandises its work extensively. In the face of such competition and promotion, small travelling troupes – of the kind immortalized in Federico Fellini’s films like The Clowns (1970) – are having to adapt quickly. The commodification of circus has removed it from its former marginal and excluded position into mainstream consciousness. The broad appeal that touring allows is at odds spatially with the liminal places at the edges of towns and cities that circuses have historically inhabited. This marginal position is a reminder that circus has the potential to provoke and challenge public perceptions of norms as well as just entertain. There have been exciting innovations in what has been termed ‘new vaudeville’ (in the United States) or ‘new circus’, following the lead of experimental groups like Australia’s Circus Oz, France’s Archaos (now-disbanded) and American clown Bill Irwin. Archaos were renowned for working on the edge of safety, juggling with chainsaws in performances based on a heavy metal aesthetic. As well as taking circus skills into schools and communities, new circus practitioners in the United Kingdom have investigated how their form can create hybrids with other media, thereby opening up what was once centred on relatively closed, transient troupes. Even the traditional role of the clown has disappeared from some circus performances. Notions drawn from performance art, dance and the theatre are energizing circus, which (relieved from its heritage of animal exploitation) is undergoing a renaissance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Few academics or critics, with the notable exception of Bouissac, have engaged with theoretical issues about circus, and there is little other than scattered articles, five of which are collated in Schechter’s edition. Bolton gives a lively report on the changing face of circus in a range of countries and Jenkins looks at American performance that has been inspired by circus practices and other popular forms. Cirque du Soleil’s website shows the commercial possibilities of contemporary circus with its online store and numerous film extracts, rather different from Birch’s simple video. Birch, Miriam (1988) Inside the Soviet Circus, National Geographic Society. Film. Bolton, Reg (1987) New Circus, London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 165

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Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cirque du Soleil. Online. Available www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/welcome.aspx (accessed 8 July 2013). Jenkins, Ron (1988) Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM Cultural materialism is a politically-committed critical approach to studying all forms of culture from apparently ‘high’ practices such as Shakespearean theatre, opera and literature to apparently popular forms such as performance, fashion, music, television, journalism as well as the cultures of marginalized groups such as skateboarders. Focusing on the material conditions of culture’s production, cultural materialism draws attention to the fact that those conditions affect the culture’s meaning politically, socially and aesthetically. By examining culture in a material and social network, it recognizes all cultural products and events as not the stable and transcendent issue of an individual genius author’s mind, but as socially and materially negotiated by ‘authors’ and audiences, amongst other agents. By examining culture’s materiality, it seeks to understand culture’s consequences and how it reproduces – but can also intervene in – hegemonic ideologies. Most theatre production involves such material features as labour, funding, equipment, costumes, bodies, toilet facilities, advertising, texts and spaces for rehearsal, waiting, purchasing tickets, spectatorship and socializing. All of those material conditions have consequences for a production’s meanings. In the case of things like lighting and an actor’s performance this is evident and well attended to by semiotic theatre analysis, but it is also important to pay attention to material conditions which are less obviously significant. The comfort or discomfort of seating, for example, may enhance or distract audience attention and reinforce or undermine the would-be focus of the play. We might reasonably ask whether Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre is properly achievable if staged in lavish conditions which might dampen an audience’s receptiveness to his political provocations. Also affecting theatre’s meanings and mediating our understanding of it are material circumstances apparently ‘beyond’ the theatre itself, including education systems, advertising, urban geographies, and aspects of theatre industries such as production companies, funding networks, performer training systems and performance archives. For example, an economy in decline may inhibit people from going to the theatre, or provoke them to go, seeking release from the drudgeries of austerity budgets. It will certainly destabilize the theatre’s economies and is likely to elicit risk-averse, less costly programming – with, for example, smaller casts, less elaborate scenography and possibly ‘pop-up’ shows in inexpensive venues. An education system which instructs people to read Shakespeare psychologically will produce audiences who do so, though such an approach is anachronistic. Historical knowledge of much Elizabethan-age theatre as 166

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practised with royal patronage and no female actors can significantly inform how we understand not only its plays but also its attitudes to gender and class. Thinking about such a range of material conditions of theatre production helps us recognize both the instability of the text (how an understanding of Brecht, for example, depends on context), and how cultural meaning might be intervened in to produce different meanings and effects which are potentially socially constructive. Cultural materialism came to prominence in the 1980s. It evolved from Marxist analyses of culture, specifically the work of Welsh scholar Raymond Williams (1921–88) whose book Drama in Performance, first published in 1954, pioneered the dramaturgical analysis of plays, as distinct from the literary analysis then common. Beyond simply examining culture’s materiality, cultural materialism explores and challenges the ways that culture and its institutions (for example, education systems, a perceived ‘national’ theatre or a perceived cultural icon such as ‘Shakespeare’) are often used to reinforce existing hegemonic ideologies pertaining to, for example, privileges of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Some work in this area deliberately focuses on popular cultural forms, following Williams’ observation that ‘culture is ordinary’ and all culture has significance. Another influential strand led by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield examines works that are traditionally prized as high culture, especially the work of Shakespeare, showing how cultural hierarchies are produced and are not intrinsic. Cultural materialism has had a strong influence on theatre studies, as indicated in the bibliography below. In relation to performance, its ideas have contributed to legitimizing important and sometimes countercultural areas of practice and study such as live art/performance art and body art. But there is more cultural materialist work to do in this area, as initiated by critics such as Dominic Johnson, to examine in more detail the often very constrained conditions of these forms’ production and the implications of those constraints. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sinfield (2006) makes the case for the continuing relevance of cultural materialism. Knowles combines cultural materialism with the ‘close-reading’ strategies of semiotics. Carlson provides an extended example of the relevance of theatre’s material contexts to its meanings across centuries. Holderness offers analysis of the Shakespeare industry. Carlson, Marvin ([1989] 1993) Places of Performance: Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, revised ed.; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield (eds) ([1985] 1994) Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, second edition; Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holderness, Graham (2001) Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire. Johnson, Dominic (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, Oxon: Routledge. 167

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Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinfield, Alan (2006) Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism, Oxon: Routledge. Williams, Raymond ([1954] 1991) Drama in Performance, intro. by Graham Holderness, revised edition, Buckingham: Open University Press.

DADA AND SURREALISM Dada is an ‘anti-art’ form that came into being in 1916, partly as a deliberately illogical response to the perceived irrationality of the First World War. It was pioneered by a trans-European group of artists who fled their war-ravaged countries to gather – partially by chance – in the neutral domain of Switzerland. Here, in a Zurich nightclub in February 1916, the German poet and theatre-maker Hugo Ball opened the infamous Cabaret Voltaire. The Cabaret exhibited paintings and other graphic artworks, but its main function was to present performance. Initially, the performances resembled conventional cabaret, staging poetry readings alongside musical turns. However, they quickly became much more experimental, combining dances and skits that were often performed in masks to avoid naturalistic characterization; cubist costumes; recitations of manifestos; music exploring silence, rhythm, noise and sounds produced by the body; and, most famously, unconventional poetry readings. These emphasized sound rather than literal meaning by simultaneously combining drumming and bell-ringing with multiple voices speaking different languages, singing, whistling and simply making noises. In contrast to the dominant performance of their time, the Dadaists’ performances rejected rationality and its oppressive hierarchies in favour of apparent nonsense and freedom, fantasy, the abstract, process, chance and spontaneity. Like futurism, Dada aimed deliberately to challenge its audience, even to scandalize them, provoking them to respond actively. It also shared futurism’s forms of cabaret, phonic poetry and manifestos. However, where futurism celebrated war, Dada’s artists were fleeing war; where futurism extolled the machine, Dada was interested in the primitive and the infantile, including the nonsense of pre-linguistic speech; and where futurism had a sense of mission, Dada was characterized by anarchic play. The name ‘dada’ itself ambiguously invokes a horse in French, ‘yes, yes’ in Russian, and in many languages a sense of childish precocity and deliberate obstruction. Dada, of course, cultivated this ambiguity. The Cabaret Voltaire shut after only five months, but Dada’s practice spread to Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, Holland, New York and Barcelona. The publication of Dada magazines, books and posters, and the foundation of dedicated gallery spaces, led to a split among its primary exponents, who argued for and against Dada’s institutionalization. However, despite Dada’s relative brevity as a movement, its influence has been enormous. Its deliberate irrationality was taken up in the surrealism which flourished in the graphic art of, for example, Salvador Dalí, and in films such as Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928).

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Surrealism was less developed in theatre but its absurdity is visible in the earlier plays of Alfred Jarry, like Ubu Roi (1896), and later writers of the theatre of the absurd. Like expressionism, surrealist work featured illogical, often dreamlike and sometimes menacing narratives and images, it externalized otherwise repressed feelings, and it experimented with dreams, as both form and content. Dada’s expressive principles also worked their way into the dance of choreographers Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, who attended the Cabaret Voltaire. Its collage composition extended later into the epic style developed by Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, and its exploration of theatre’s many arts led to Antonin Artaud’s advocacy of a total theatre. Its anti-naturalistic avant-gardism worked its way into a range of performance and body art practices as well as happenings. And its experiments with chance were later extended in music by composers including John Cage in 4' 33" and in dance by choreographers including Pina Bausch. While it resisted being a coherent movement, Dada nevertheless articulated a clear sense of social resistance, demonstrating some of the ways art could operate as anti-art, challenging contemporary artistic and social conventions. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Through extensive, accessible documentation and narrative, Goldberg locates Dada within a series of avant-garde movements that led to the development of performance art. Matthews’ and Melzer’s histories focus on, respectively, playwriting (by authors including Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and Artaud) and performance (including theatre and dance). Richter was one of the original Dadaists. Goldberg, RoseLee (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and expanded edition, London: Thames and Hudson. Matthews, John Herbert (1974) Theatre in Dada and Surrealism, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richter, Hans ([1965] 1997) Dada: Art and Anti-Art, London: Thames and Hudson.

DANCE Dance is central to any study of performance and needs to be considered even in this Companion, which focuses mostly on theatre practice, a form with which it shares many elements. Indeed, in non-Western cultures, dance’s many manifestations are often inseparable from the theatre. Asian performance forms often integrate text, character and stylized movement, their performers operating as dancer/actors with little distinction discernible between the two. Dance in the West, however, is primarily concerned with movement in space rather than with text or acting. Western dance is usually choreographed, or at least follows a structure based on rhythmic patterns, sounds or music. As a phenomenon, dance – like play or ritual – is vast in 169

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its potential frameworks and in encompassing a ubiquitous part of human and even animal behaviour, with multiple motivations and functions. But, whereas play can often be solitary, dance mostly has a social dimension. As such it bonds, celebrates, integrates and identifies people through a particular affiliation (as in Mods’ or Rockers’ styles of dancing). This social role recalls dance’s origins in ritual practices, where communal dance accompanied by music would be a primary component of rites that brought a community together for calendrical or celebratory purposes. From such public participation evolved the individualized dances of shamans, for example, the beginnings of dance as performance presented for the aesthetic admiration and appreciation of spectators. While still predominantly using choreographed human movement, many Western dance experimenters have also explored text, character and site-specificity, concepts more familiar to the theatre. Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas (1983) was performed and later filmed (1997) in a disused factory. Many practitioners have consciously explored the boundaries between genres, like German choreographer Pina Bausch with her decades of dance theatre and William Forsythe, who uses a range of technologies in and beyond performance. British group DV8 describe themselves as a physical theatre company, yet they build on the 1980s Eurocrash dance movement, which pushed the body to its limits, as evidenced in their 1988 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. They have challenged narrow-minded views of the ideal dance performer by employing older dancers, questioning the fact that performers are assumed to be ‘finished’ after they reach their early thirties. The success of British dance company CanDoCo, which consciously integrates disabled with able-bodied dancers, has also nudged this important issue forward. Such groups have succeeded in making dance and movement explicitly political, in content as much as in its processes and context. Dance has frequently contended with the question of how to speak with the body or present concrete concepts or themes through abstract movement. Like DV8, postmodern dancers such as New York’s Judson Group tried to combine formal experimentation with politics. A piece like Trio A (1966) purposefully devalued virtuosity and technique and replaced it with everyday movement, rejecting the politics of body use and the aesthetics inherent in classical forms. The fact that dance scholar Sally Banes has subsumed such work under the title Democracy’s Body reveals how wider social agendas can be implicit in an aesthetic approach. Indeed, it can be argued that all movement, however abstract, contains, reflects or endorses an ideology. Battle lines have frequently been drawn against traditional forms like ballet, which is based on fantastical narratives, is removed from any political implications and in which movement is aestheticized and remote from the spectator, using an archaic codified language. The dominance of classical dance has also led many contemporary or modern dancers like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham to create their own techniques, focusing their experimentations on form. For Cunningham, for example, movement is about position and space rather than the development of narratives through danced action.

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For the scholar, dance shares the difficulty of all live performance forms in that it is inherently transitory. Dance studies range widely: from phenomenological approaches, which emphasize the experience of movement; through the techniques and precise vocabulary of physical processes such as those articulated by Rudolf von Laban; through questions of interpretation; to the placing of works in a historical, political and social context. Problems inherent in dance analysis are partly remedied by the fact that there have been some very good attempts to document dance on film from avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s 1940s and 1950s works onwards. The visual nature of dance and the ability of cameras to zoom in on details have led to many rich and informative film documents. Filmed dance has also fed back into performance in the works of companies like British group VTol Dance, The Forsythe Company and Belgium’s Charleroi Danses, who have experimented extensively with new technologies. Live performers have danced with virtual partners streamed through the internet or on film, and there has been much exploitation of motion capture technology, which, amongst other properties, allows dancers themselves to trigger lighting and sound cues. As is evident, the possibilities for dance analysis are as many as the forms and processes dance inhabits, the theories pushed to their limits by the moving body. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The range of styles and modes of dance is reflected in a huge dance bibliography, of which this is a very small selection. Some works on specific dancers can be found in entries on choreographers in Part I (‘People’). Thomas, a sociologist, gives a crossdisciplinary view. Foster’s various writings on dance have been eagerly picked up by theatre and performance scholars, and Carter offers a comprehensive reader on the study of dance. The DVD accompanying the Mitoma book is an excellent resource that includes almost two hours of dance footage. The Rosas website contains information on buying various films. Banes, Sally (1981) Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carter, Alexandra (ed.) (1998) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, London: Routledge. DV8 (1990) Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Millennium Productions/DV8 Physical Theatre. Film. Foster, Susan Leigh (1996) Corporealities, London: Routledge. Maya Deren (1945–55) London: Dance Films. Collected films. Mitoma, Judy (ed.) (2002) Envisioning Dance on Film and Video, London: Routledge. Rosas. Online. Available www.rosas.be/nl/rosas (accessed 8 July 2013). Thomas, Helen (1995) Dance – Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance, London: Routledge.

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DEVISING Devising is a method of making performance that is often non-text-based and includes the collaborative participation of the whole creative company in all stages and aspects of performance-making, from scenographic design, to textual or dramaturgical development, lighting and sound design, and actual performance. Companies that devise begin with one or more stimulus, such as an idea, question, theme, story, object, image, light, smell, movement, place or a piece of text or music. They then use a variety of methods first to develop performance material and then to rehearse and edit it into a performance event. Methods of generating material vary but may include improvisation exercises, writing, drawing, filming, play and games, research and discussion. Having developed material, the company selects, structures and edits it, practises it – sometimes seeking training to develop necessary skills – and often shows work in progress to solicit audience feedback. Devising methods can be seen in many earlier forms of performance such as commedia dell’arte, which directly influenced teacher Jacques Lecoq. However, these methods achieved newfound currency (if not yet the name ‘devising’), from the 1960s on, in the work of avant-garde companies that aimed explicitly to challenge conventional theatre-making methods. Such companies included the Living Theatre, Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and the Wooster Group in the USA; Theatre Passe Muraille in Canada; Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theatre in Germany; and, in Britain, the People Show, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment, Complicite and, later, Forced Entertainment and DV8 Physical Theatre. They challenged conventional theatre’s usual prioritization of text, director and performance product by using collaborative and/or collective methods to explore the possibilities and challenges of a less hierarchical theatre practice and an emphasis on all participants’ artistic processes. Thus, before the term ‘devising’ gained currency in the UK in the 1990s, the work of such companies was often known as ‘collaborative’ in the UK and as ‘collective creation’ in Canada. These makers frequently rejected dominant generic patterns and formal categories, often producing non-linear postmodern and postdramatic performance and cross-disciplinary performance as epitomized in the theatre of images. Because devised theatre is often temporally and site-specific, these companies also provoked audiences’ ethical engagement with controversial current social issues. For example, Caryl Churchill’s collaboratively developed Cloud Nine (1979) explored gender and colonial relations, the Wooster Group’s Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981) addressed race relations, the work of playwright Howard Brenton interrogated the ethics of witnessing violence, and director Mike Leigh explored class aspirations and animosities. Devised theatre frequently addresses a particular audience, such as children or people from a specific region. Because it requires enormous personal commitment from its makers, it often works to enhance the risk taken and emotional investment made in the performance, by both performers and audiences, and it is often autobiographical, as in the work of Robert Lepage and Pina Bausch. However, because it sometimes lacks ‘big name’ directors or playwrights and does not have the draw of a 172

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familiar (let alone classic) title, it can also be financially risky, sometimes having difficulty securing both development funding and box-office sales. Its anti-hierarchical origins were perhaps developed most extensively in the invisible and Forum Theatre work of Augusto Boal, for whom it was a universal method of rehearsal for revolution. It is worth noting, though, that as well as suggesting models of antihierarchical, more democratic theatre practice, devised theatre sometimes points out – whether inadvertently or knowingly – the challenges of a truly democratic theatre, questioning the necessity of a director or another figure who takes final decisions. While many companies worldwide still use devising practices, some of the utopian collectivism characteristic of devising from the 1960s to the 1980s has now dissipated. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Etchells’ inspirational book is a creative memoir and history of his company, Forced Entertainment. Oddey provides the first overview of devising practices, with many specific examples from British companies’ work. Books by Govan et al, Heddon and Milling, Mermikides and Smart and edited by Harvie and Lavender demonstrate recent interest in this area of study and practice, and are just a selection of many books that cover similar terrain. Bicât, Tina and Chris Baldwin (2002) Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide, Ramsbury, England: Crowood Press. Boal, Augusto (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Etchells, Tim (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge. Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Abingdon: Routledge. Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling (2006) Devising Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mermikides, Alex and Jackie Smart (2010) Devising in Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Oddey, Alison (1994) Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London: Routledge.

DIRECTING Today it seems surprising that Western theatre existed for so long without a director – or at least a director in the form with which we are now familiar. It was as late as the second half of the nineteenth century when Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen (in what is Germany today) took responsibility in the Meiningen company for both coordinating a mise en scène and interpreting the text. This concept of a director was 173

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quickly picked up by artists linked to naturalist theatre, especially André Antoine and Konstantin Stanislavsky, with whom the title became firmly established. Their primary concern was to create the coherent aesthetic central to naturalist theatre, focusing, for example, on psychologically believable characters and group cohesion, rather than creating vehicles for the star actors who had previously dominated the theatre. Before naturalism, the director’s role had often been taken on by an acting company member, an actor-manager or producer figure, or the playwright. However similar their work might have been in practice to that of the director we know today, the role was not recognized as a discrete one with its own expertise or responsibilities, and did not share the dominant position in theatre hierarchy that directing has today. Directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertold Brecht then emerged. They wanted control of a production in order to embody their own vision and style, which then led to the creation of a range of approaches to acting. What, though, are the director’s responsibilities as we now understand them, and what does directing actually involve? The answer of course depends on the work being directed, but the broad responsibilities do not vary extensively between different materials. Whether the director’s task is the interpretation of playtexts, the construction of a performance through a devising process or the creation of a visual theatre environment according to the model of director-auteurs Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Tadeusz Kantor, directing usually evolves from extensive planning into a rehearsal process. This may or may not involve training per se but will inevitably focus on acting techniques. It might also include a dramaturg working closely alongside the director. Rehearsals culminate with the addition of costumes, lighting and sound in the eventual construction of a mise en scène or scenography. This grows from collaboration with the technical team before and throughout the rehearsals, following on into runs or touring. Some directors work repeatedly with particular individuals in a collaboration that is central to their vision. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, who established the British company Cheek by Jowl, are a notable director–designer team. But at the heart of all directing processes is the director–performer relationship. This may vary from ensembles where a director works with a group over many years, as Eugenio Barba has done with Odin Teatret, to a situation where casting managed by an agent brings in people new to the director but appropriate to the material or methodology of his or her chosen production. The director’s main task is to make these performers comfortable with their characters, roles or tasks so they can perform them to the best of their abilities, whatever the stylistic conventions. In rehearsal, the director works almost as a proxy audience, reflecting the actor’s work back to him or her and providing what is often described as an ‘outside eye’. Work that is made without such an outside eye, in theatre collectives for example, has often been criticized for being indulgent or shapeless, perhaps indicating through this absence crucial aspects of the director’s job. Directors need to find a dramaturgical or structural shape to their work, a well-formulated and articulated rhythmical pattern, cultivate focused performers and a sense of shared purpose among the company, and build a staging or spatial environment that is consistent with their material and the acting style. A 174

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further vital part of the director’s work is to instill confidence in, and integrate, the entire cast and production team, to manage the inevitable nervousness that is generated by the expectations and actuality of public performance. These feelings of trust, balanced against carefully selected challenges and risks, are enabled by the constant evaluation and feedback that a director gives. The role is organizational as much as it is artistic, but too much organization of the performances can stifle the performers’ creativity. Subsequently, most directors do not have a strict methodology that they apply to all texts or concepts. The nature of the job is rather more pragmatic and serendipitous, the primary virtue of a good director perhaps being his or her ability to adapt to the particular conditions and given resources of each production. There is no denying the central place that directors have held, shaping (through their theories as well as their practices) the innovations that have revolutionized twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre and performance, as a glance at our list of ‘People’ in Part I confirms. But the public perception of theatre directors’ work is that it is often invisible. It might be sidelined by star actors or celebrated writers, but also most of their work is over by the time a production reaches the public. If directors have done their job well, the spectator will perhaps focus more on the content or the performers than on the staging, though directing cannot of course be extricated from these. Some directors cross over between the stage and television and film, building a reputation through the wider reception that these formats bring. Sam Mendes, formerly of the Donmar Warehouse, London, did just this with his first film American Beauty (1999). But for many directors public or critical acceptance can be a doubleedged sword, especially if they want to challenge established orthodoxies or be ‘cultural critics’, with radical interpretations of classics or new works, as the Wooster Group have done. Whether freelance or company-based, directing requires resourcefulness, imagination and perseverance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are numerous books on directing, many by directors articulating their own theories or approach. Several of these can be found in the individual bibliographies in the ‘People’ section. Below is a sample of books about directing that covers a range of approaches: from Delgado and Heritage’s interviews; Mitter and Shevtsova’s and Shevtsova’s and Innes’ collections and analysis; to Schneider and Cody’s collection of materials previously published in The Drama Review; Harvie and Lavender’s insightful edition about a range of rehearsals; and Braun’s thoughtful though rather outdated historical survey. Braun, Edward (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen. Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage (eds) (1996) In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 175

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Innes, Christopher and Maria Shevtsova (2009) Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre, Cambridge: CUP. —— (2013) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Cambridge: CUP. Mitter, Shomit and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge.

DOCUMENTATION Documentation in our field refers to the recording of or attempt to capture a live event, such as a theatre piece, performance or rehearsal and the subsequent output. There are many ways of doing this: technology has now moved well beyond simple written, static or two dimensional visual representational models like drawings, photographs or even cave paintings, perhaps the earliest example of a sort of artistic documentation of life events. The advance of digitalization means that performances or performance practice can be filmed and recorded relatively cheaply and easily and disseminated almost immediately, often online. Indeed, so good and readily available are such technologies that processes used in documentation of works on film have led to the frequent simultaneous live global presentation of staged events: as with the National Theatre’s NT Live scheme in England, which transmits performance films to cinemas for viewing, or the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcasts. Both of these formats are presented internationally, indicating the potential for these performances not just to be documented but also shared through other media. In such cases, the tools of documentation turn the live event into another form of ‘live’ performance, revealing just some of the complexities that pervade this area. The documentation of live performance has sparked many debates, often centred on issues about what remains of the performance after it has materially vanished. Scholars have described how we are torn between the desire to retrieve an artwork, in part in order to analyse it or at least remember it, and enjoyment of the very liveness and ephemerality that is performance’s hallmark. Peggy Phelan’s research has been central to these discussions, as she has argued for performance’s ontological status as something that cannot be reproduced, is ephemeral, and thus innately live. Philip Auslander has countered this view, proposing that all performance is somehow already mediated, even when live, and that the distinction between live and mediatized is therefore inaccurate. Fundamentally, documentation raises the question of what futures we create for the past, by producing durable documents to travel into the future. In addition, there are inevitably mixed views on what the best means of documenting live events are. It might be that a simple black and white photograph captures an atmosphere and moment better than continuous film, which might suffer because it is somehow too close to the original. Documentation can therefore serve simply as a trigger to allow a spectator or audience to recall what they have already seen or as a means just to suggest something of a work, to evoke its presence in a partial way. In considering such issues and with an awareness of their etymological 176

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connection, documentation thus draws on a long history of questioning how documentary films do or do not present an accurate record of reality, and how they in turn reconstruct that reality. Academic arguments aside, documentation of one’s own performance practice (or even one’s life in social media forms such as Facebook) has now become so ubiquitous that some scholars have questioned paradoxically whether something only exists when or if it is actually documented, a provocative conundrum. Distinctions between the live and the recorded, the actual and the documented are becoming increasingly blurred as the development of computer-generated images (CGI) in films attests. The consolidation in the United Kingdom of practice as research as a distinct mode of research, where there might also be a requirement for it to be documented for others to appraise or access it or for the sake of longevity (such as with practice-based doctorates), has generated extensive discussions around these issues. These have also been stimulated by the absence of good (at least by today’s exacting standards) documentation of past pieces, which in part has led several performance artists like Marina Abramović and some theatre groups to restage works made years before (Abramović) for example, in London’s Whitechapel Gallery (2002/3). In 1999, Birmingham’s Stan’s Cafe recreated Impact Theatre’s The Carrier Frequency from the 1980s, and in 2009 Texas’s Rude Mechanicals represented Richard Schechner and The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69. This ‘turn towards the archive’ has been practised across many fields and not just performance. With a similar fascination for archives, theatre and performance groups have also incorporated and referenced other kinds of documentation in their live performances. Polish theatre group Theatre of the Eighth Day, for example, made a piece called Teczki (Files) in 2007, which was based on secret police files about them, that they read and discussed in performance. And historical reenactment societies regularly use performance as a way of animating understanding of the past, as a kind of living archive. As technologies become smaller, cheaper and even more ubiquitous, the uses of documentation look set to continually expand, becoming more widespread almost certainly, but potentially also more complex. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander and Phelan’s books contain the key arguments about the ontology of performance and its ephemerality, though their arguments have been developed by many others in multiple directions since, including Schneider. Inevitably discussions about and examples of documentation are widespread, but Reason’s book remains a foundational synthesis. The Routledge Performance Archive is just one recent example of predominantly film-based performance documentation. Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy (1993) ‘The Ontology of Performance’, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 146–66.

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Reason, Matthew (2006) Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Routledge Performance Archive. Online. Available www.routledgeperformancearchive.com (accessed 3 May 2013). Schneider, Rebecca (2011) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London: Routledge.

DRAMATURGY Dramaturgy is a concept that grew initially out of continental European theatre, especially in Germany where the term ‘dramaturg’ denotes a formal role that has long been firmly established in many of its repertory theatres. Broadly, ‘dramaturgy’ denotes the organization of a performance in a range of possible ways, and ‘dramaturg’ the person who implements this. This structuring might be musical, physical, visual, lead to a ‘score’, be thematic or conceptual. There is no limit to the number of ways a performance can be organized but it is generally understood that a performance needs to have its own internal logic, even if it is, to the spectator or audience at least, chaotic or unstructured. Both the term and the role evolved in Germany from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s work with the Hamburg National Theatre as early as at the end of the eighteenth century, much of which process he recorded in his journals. Since then, and especially since the 1990s, dramaturgy has become increasingly popular within theatre and performance studies and practice. An important factor in this rise is the growth of performances that are devised from a non-textual or physical starting point, what is loosely called physical theatre. In such contexts, dramaturgical principles and oversight can give a piece a logic or cohesion that otherwise would have been provided by a writer’s text. The institutionalization in the United Kingdom of practice as research has also brought some dramaturgs into universities and colleges, not surprisingly given the often historical or scholarly nature of a dramaturg’s work. As well as supervising and advising on a performance’s clarity and purpose, its meaning perhaps, dramaturgs often work closely with a director or creative team before a performance to help gather research materials and textual information to take into rehearsals, for example, or to generate a performance’s leading concept. They usually also have to prepare the playscript before rehearsals start, perhaps working across translations. Once rehearsals are underway the dramaturg might then be given the crucial role of ‘outside eye’, standing back to look at how the mise en scène operates as a whole. Equally, their remit can sometimes encompass educational work around a project, using the information gathered during the creative process to give others insight into it, which can also feed into their task of writing the theatre programme. The notion of what a dramaturg is and does varies across cultures and institutions. In larger British theatre companies and theatres, such as London’s Royal Court for example, the literary manager is involved in the selection of texts, translation work, and the production of new scripts through a range of writing development processes. 178

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This more literary focus involves a narrower understanding of what a contemporary dramaturg can be, but historically and culturally offers the most ubiquitous and familiar description of what dramaturgy might encompass. As performance-making practices continue to evolve beyond the traditionally constructed triangle of writer– director–actor, and as theatre increasingly involves the actor as creator as much as interpreter, and dramaturgy becomes more frequently integrated into the director’s work, especially within devising companies, it seems likely that the role of the dramaturg and recognition of the importance of dramaturgy will continue to thrive. And following such growth and evolution, what it comprises will continue to diversify. The dramaturg still remains a slightly enigmatic figure, championed as much as they are treated with suspicion, even amongst those who practise the art of dramaturgy every time they stage or make a performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cardello’s edited collection includes some excellent contributors and has an informative geographical spread that examines Europe and the USA. Its cultural and historical perspective predates the recent growth of interest in the role, represented by Luckhurst’s and Turner and Behrndt’s books. The user guide and the network have a more practical professional focus but provide helpful starting points. Eugenio Barba’s book focuses on the actor’s dramaturgy and is rooted in his experiences with Odin Teatret. Barba, Eugenio (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge. Cardello, Bert (ed.) (1995) What is Dramaturgy?, New York: Peter Lang. Dramaturgs’ network. Online. Available http://www.dramaturgy.co.uk (accessed 10 January 2014). Dramaturgy: A User’s Guide (2000) London, Central School of Speech and Drama. Luckhurst, Mary (2006) Dramaturgy: a Revolution in Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Cathy and Synne Behrndt (2007) Dramaturgy and Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

ENVIRONMENTAL THEATRE AND SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE These two forms aim explicitly to alter the conventional spatial practices of performance to enhance both the relationship between performers and audience and the performance’s engagement with its space and site of production. The term ‘environmental theatre’ was popularized in the early 1970s through the writings of Richard Schechner, works made by his company The Performance Group, and the practices of other innovative makers such as Jerzy Grotowski. Schechner intended to include a broad range of theatre practices in this term, including theatre made in found spaces. In practice, however, The Performance Group concentrated on making work in their studio, which they altered radically for each performance. These physical alterations 179

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focused on producing for each show a specially constructed scenography that would provoke performers and audiences to interact, through both looking and contact. Productions such as Dionysus in 69 (1968–69) avoided end-on perspectives, put audiences closer to and often in the action, encouraged them to move around, and sometimes provided multiple, simultaneous focal points, which would now be described as immersive theatre. Site-specific performance shares many of these features. However, it achieved currency as a name in the 1980s and 1990s to identify performance that was produced in non-theatre sites, aimed to engage directly with the meaning and history of those sites, and went out to audiences who might not normally come to the theatre. This shift in production practices reflected an increasing imperative felt by many makers to address local audiences in the face of advancing globalization. Coincidentally, the shift in name also responded to the increasing association of ‘environmental’ with ecological issues. The Welsh company Brith Gof produced devised shows in rural outdoor sites (Tri Bywyd, ‘Three Lives’, 1995) and a disused urban factory (Gododdin, 1988–90), provoking audiences to think about the significance of these sites in Wales’ recent post-industrial economy and culture. Orlan’s choice of an operating theatre as her site for The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93) invited audiences to reflect on various aspects of such a site’s usual use, including its gender divisions. Tinderbox Theatre Company’s convictions (2000) staged seven short plays in Belfast’s disused Crumlin Road Courthouse, site of many ‘Troubles’ trials, to reflect on issues of justice and Northern Irish identity in the context of a faltering peace process. Although the terms ‘environmental theatre’ and ‘site-specific performance’ only came into common use in the twentieth century, the spatial practices they name have a much longer Western history, from Greek amphitheatres set in spectacular natural environments, to medieval religious processions through towns, to Dada performance like the Cabaret Voltaire in cafés, to festivals, carnivals and protests – in all of which people occupy familiar everyday sites in unfamiliar ways. These practices also share similarities with performance art, installation art, happenings and Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre, which put creative and often critical work in unusual sites in order to ask questions about those sites and the ways people behave in them (compare with Erving Goffman). Environmental theatre and site-specific performance almost always aim to make political interventions in relation to their audiences and sites, but the effectiveness of these aims is sometimes questionable. Some performances exploit the novelty of sitespecific performance to attract large audiences without necessarily developing a critique of the site – an example might be the Cirque du Soleil, which commonly exploits rather than interrogates the cultural cachet of the urban sites in which it pitches its tent (such as lower Manhattan’s Battery Park). Physical proximity between performers and audience does not necessarily produce critical or democratic interaction. What such work does consistently is raise questions about the effectiveness of different performance sites, asking whether performance is more effective in a ‘neutral’ space that can be adapted or in a specifically selected space to which it explicitly refers. 180

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Aronson and Schechner write on environmental theatre; Kaye, Pearson (former co-director of Brith Gof) and Shanks discuss site-specific performance. Aronson, Arnold (1981) The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Kaye, Nick (2000) Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation, London: Routledge. Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theatre, New York: Applause Books.

EVERYDAY LIFE ‘Everyday life’ is both a descriptive and a theoretical term. It describes what people do every day, especially such repetitive activities as working, consuming food, and interacting. From that basic description, at least three related critical applications of the term arose in the twentieth century. Cultural theorists and historians used it to emphasize how all culture is grounded in everyday activity, to argue for the importance of popular culture (as distinguished from elite culture) and to refocus critical study on what had previously been considered unworthy of analysis, such as the lives of workers, women and immigrants. This shift in thought influenced theatre studies by propelling the development of performance studies through the analysis of such popular forms as ritual and festivals. Activists known as the Situationist International and French sociologists Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau developed this first understanding of everyday life by identifying it as the medium both of people’s oppression but also of their emancipation. Everyday life was oppressive because it was organized by state and capitalist control. It consigned people to the alienating drudgery of repetitive work and, even in the apparent safety of their own homes, it ‘terrorized’ them through such means as advertising into the equally alienating drudgery of unthinking consumption. It was nevertheless emancipating because it was through activities such as carnivals, face-to-face communication and other small acts of resistance that individuals could tactically challenge the alienations of capitalist life and claim subjectivity and agency. Lefebvre wrote, ‘Everyday life should be a work of art’, indicating that performative interventions could change and enhance people’s lives. A related performative analysis of everyday life had already been developed by the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, who focused on how people’s daily behaviour could be understood through dramaturgical analysis. Goffman observed that in regular social interactions such as communicating with colleagues, people are not simply being, they are performing – both consciously and unconsciously. Identity is not what we are (a given), it is something we make and do through the deployment of dress (costume), objects (props) and behaviour (acting). Where many critics had previously distinguished rigidly between ‘real’ life and theatre, Goffman 181

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argued that real life was theatre. He did not denigrate real life as false but simply recognized that real life shares features with theatre, and that performance analysis can therefore be used to help understand human behaviour. Goffman’s argument has certainly been corroborated in performance studies. Michael Kirby’s influential analysis of acting put all behaviour from acting to ‘being’ on a continuum, and claimed that certain activities were seen as acting, not because of what they were but because of how they were framed for an audience. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ critical preoccupation with everyday life has other important links to theatre and performance. It inspired many performance artists, especially those who did durational work that explicitly challenged the separation of life and performance. In Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), Joseph Beuys lived with a coyote in a New York gallery for a week, literally staging his lived daily experience as a European in the constant presence of American culture, embodied by the coyote. And Chris Burden’s Shoot showed the potential risks of when art crosses over into life. Analyses of everyday life similarly influenced much environmental theatre and site-specific performance. Frequently set in everyday contexts such as people’s homes, factories and familiar landscapes, this work emphasizes performance’s ethical responsibility to function directly in people’s everyday lives, rather than removed from that context in theatres. The rise of reality television at the turn of the millennium, where people’s daily lives are explicitly presented as entertainment, once again tests distinctions between real life and performance and presents new challenges for critical understandings of everyday life. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goffman’s book is foundational to analyses of life as performative. Lefebvre and de Certeau argue for the revolutionary potential of everyday life. Read proposes that the imbrication of theatre and everyday life gives theatre the responsibility – and opportunity – to be an influentially ethical practice. Highmore collects an excellent range of critical and creative texts. de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday. Highmore, Ben (ed.) (2002) The Everyday Life Reader, London: Routledge. Kirby, Michael (2002) ‘On Acting and Non-Acting’, in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, Phillip B. Zarrilli (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 40–52. Lefebvre, Henri ([1968] 1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers. Read, Alan (1993) Performance and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London: Routledge.

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EXPRESSIONISM The term ‘expressionism’ was first used most widely near the turn of the twentieth century to describe a radical style of visual art that aimed to express emotion nonnaturalistically, in violent protest against the perceived bourgeois repression of naturalism. It is exemplified in Edvard Munch’s well-known lithograph The Scream (1893), where the central figure’s scream sends powerful shockwaves through the entire surrounding environment. Practised across a range of art forms, expressionism’s roots stretch back to the nineteenth century and the advent of psychoanalysis, with its interests in people’s emotional life and in dreams. Theatrical expressionism begins with the work of playwrights such as Frank Wedekind and August Strindberg, but it was especially prevalent in Germany from about 1907 to the early 1920s, largely in response to the First World War and its aftermath. Expressionist plays by such writers as Oscar Kokoschka, Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser are polemical but highly poetic. They often focus on a single male protagonist who declaims long selfexploratory monologues interspersed with brief dialogue with often nameless supporting characters acting as representative social beings. Often, the plays are violent, are concerned with human conflict (especially generational and class conflict), challenge taboos (particularly sexual taboos), and adopt the associative and highly visual qualities of dreams. Expressionist acting developed a complementary declamatory, intensely physically committed style featuring actors with haunted, emaciated physiognomies; action that was spare and often allegorical; and the intention to move its audience to ecstasy through empathy with the protagonist. Other aspects of expressionist theatre, most notably its scenography and lighting, were also revolutionary, eschewing naturalism in favour of strong lighting and colours, stark contrast and asymmetry, and the kind of emotionally suggestive abstraction familiar from The Scream. A good extant visual example of expressionism’s early performance and scenographic styles is Robert Wiene’s 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with its intensely energized performances and sinister angular, disproportionate sets (compare with Vsevolod Meyerhold’s constructivist sets). The impetus behind expressionism – as with its near-contemporaries Dada and futurism – was to effect revolutionary change. David F. Kuhns argues, for example, that expressionist performance could performatively regenerate German society by fostering the audience’s ecstatic engagement with alternative social possibilities and visions. Expressionism was distinctive from those other movements, however, in its initial emphasis on stimulating empathy for human suffering. Even as expressionist artists gradually grew disaffected with the lack of social change occurring, they maintained their focus on human emotion and developed a cynicism quite different from the nihilism of Dada’s absurdity. Despite the relatively brief life of a wholly expressionist theatre, many aspects of theatrical expressionism have persisted. Beyond Germany, expressionist playwrights include the American Eugene O’Neill and the Irishman Sean O’Casey. Bertold Brecht adopted and developed expressionism’s iconic imagery and declamatory speech as well as its social impetus. Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig and Robert Wilson developed its revolutionary 183

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scenography. Choreographers Mary Wigman and, later, Pina Bausch and butoh practitioners have all explored emotional material through performance in ways that expressionism pioneered and legitimated. Theatrical expressionism’s wordiness and abstraction have made its production somewhat uncommon, but it is still produced by directors such as Katie Mitchell and Wilson, who want to test theatre’s expressive possibilities as well as their own craft. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Styan analyses the broad historical and geographical range of expressionist drama. Richard and (especially) Kuhns provide more sustained analysis of expressionist theatre and performance. Beil and Dillmann’s extensively illustrated edited collection has ample source material and analysis from across genres. Beil, Ralf and Claudia Dillmann (eds) (2010) The Total Artwork in Expressionism: Art, Film, Literature, Theatre, Dance, and Architecture 1905–1925, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Kuhns, David F. (1968) Seven Expressionist Plays: Kokoschka to Barlach, London: Calder and Boyars. —— (1997) German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richard, Lionel (1978) Phaidon Encyclopedia of Expressionism, Oxford: Phaidon. Styan, J. L. (1981) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol. 3, Expressionism and Epic Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FEMINISM Feminism is a political practice which addresses gender identities, relationships and representations in order particularly to redress inequalities which disadvantage women. ‘First wave’ feminism spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and focused on improving women’s rights, especially their access to education and suffrage (the right to vote). ‘Second wave’ feminism burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a broader escalation in civil rights protest and identity politics. This included protests against the Vietnam War and for black and gay rights in the USA especially, and French student demonstrations against institutional and state oppression, notably in 1968. Among other things, second wave feminism advocated greater equality in conditions of labour and pay, better childcare provision, and women’s right to control their reproduction, for example through access to contraception and abortion. But it was also increasingly concerned not only with the explicit legislation that controlled women, but moreover with how women were controlled in more implicit, everyday material and social practices, such as through daily language, the personal politics of family relations, and representation, for example in advertising, film and theatre. Feminist precepts have been articulated through theatre, dance and performance throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Several first wave 184

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feminists wrote and performed plays advocating female suffrage and decrying double standards in the social behaviour expected of women and men (for example, Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women [1907]). Christabel Pankhurst and others might be seen as early makers of performance art and body art, staging public protests and hunger strikes in pursuit of suffrage. Throughout the twentieth century, feminist theatre and dance have interrogated the ways women’s conventional representation is often derogatory, exploitative or at least patronizing, reproducing relationships of representation and audience spectatorship that disempower women. They have indicated how women’s representation is often founded on clichés and stereotypes that invite voyeuristic consumption; how female characters serve as foils in plots centred around male characters; and how the dominant theatre simply offers fewer roles for women. Many theatre- and dance-makers have drawn attention to these inequalities. Pina Bausch’s dance theatre and Split Britches’ theatre, for example, intentionally stage clichés of femininity and masculinity in order to explore how they are socially constructed or performatively produced. Other makers overturn these inequalities by producing theatre run by women (Sistren, Split Britches). Some feminist theatremakers deploy postmodern and postdramatic strategies of deconstruction to interrogate conventional practices of representing women, for example by engaging with both pornography and the conventional family structures of classic American drama, as in the Wooster Group’s Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981). Feminists including Hélène Cixous have challenged what they perceive as male-dominated languages and structures of representation, using écriture féminine and non-linear structures to explore non-patriarchal strategies of representation. Feminist theatre-makers have also adopted devising and improvisation techniques to evade theatre’s conventionally hierarchical structuring. And feminist historiographers have retrieved women’s ‘lost’ theatre histories. Across these critical and creative practices, feminist theatre-makers and analysts have worked to strengthen women’s communities and to change gender inequalities. Feminist performance has pursued many of the same objectives through parallel strategies. Protesters such as las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo have congregated to strengthen female communities and to display their gender (and age) to advocate social change. Numerous performance and body artists – including Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Bobby Baker, Orlan and Annie Sprinkle – have redressed conditions of women’s oppression through the use of direct address and autobiography. Feminist critics have explored not only how feminism can inform theatre and performance, but also how ideas developed through theatre and performance can inform and progress feminism. Judith Butler and others have pioneered understandings of how sexist identities are performatively produced through naturalized, repeated behaviours. They have suggested, further, that these identities might therefore be transformed by interrupting that repetition. Peggy Phelan has advocated a feminist political practice which, unusually, does not advocate visibility and rights. Instead, she embraces women’s status as ‘unmarked’ or less visible culturally, proposing that

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this marginalized position is actually enabling because it allows women to evade voyeurism and surveillance. Theatre, dance and performance have been crucial media for enacting feminist concerns because they facilitate detailed interrogation of the ways gender inequalities are produced, most importantly through acts of representation and through embodied behaviours. In the context of theatre, performance and feminist theory, some critics’ heralding of post-feminism in the early 1990s seems to have been premature, as all three continue to challenge and work to change gendered representations and behaviours. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Publishing on feminism and theatre exploded in the late 1980s, and continues. Early influential texts are the journal Women & Performance (founded in 1983, and published twice annually by New York University’s Department of Performance Studies), Case’s 1988 book (reissued in 2008), and books by Dolan and Aston; Aston and Harris’s book explores what they call popular feminisms, often in mainstream theatre. Strong collections of articles include those edited by Case, Goodman and du Gay, Hart and Phelan, and Martin. Chothia’s edited collection of suffrage plays contains Robins’ Votes for Women. Baker is an influential feminist performance artist in the UK. Aston, Elaine (1995) An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, London: Routledge. —— and Geraldine Harris (2012) A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Barrett, Michèle and Bobby Baker (2007) Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life, Oxon: Routledge. Case, Sue-Ellen ([1988] 2008) Feminism and Theatre, reissued ed., Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. —— (ed.) (1990) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chothia, Jean (ed.) (1998) The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Goodman, Lizbeth with Jane du Gay (eds) (1998) The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, London: Routledge. Hart, Lynda and Peggy Phelan (eds) (1993) Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Martin, Carol (ed.) (1996) A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage, London: Routledge. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Online. Available www.womenandperformance.org/ (accessed 14 October 2013).

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FESTIVALS Festivals are spatially and temporally limited events, usually held annually, where theatre and/or performance is staged and celebrated. Like carnival, they often serve significant social functions, such as honouring the host community or encouraging artistic innovation. However, they also pose certain risks, for example, the possibility that a select few may exploit a festival to serve their own interests rather than those of the broader community. These ambivalent potentials are demonstrated in the West as far back as the fifth century BC in Athens’ Festival Dionysia, a major civic competition that presented both comedy and tragedy. The Festival Dionysia aimed to serve a ritual function for all of Athens’ citizens through the mimetic enactment of symbolic sacrifice. Because it was grounded in a system of patronage, however, the Festival Dionysia nevertheless privileged the city’s leaders. Festivals take many forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: presenting international, national, local, amateur or professional work; combining dance, theatre, music, opera, sports, workshops and/or debates; or exploring in detail a particular form, as at the London International Mime Festival (founded in 1977). Many theatre festivals are dedicated to the work of a single playwright, most frequently Shakespeare. Such festivals are partly designed to celebrate the genius of an individual, but these and other festivals also function to acclaim the ‘genius’ and achievement of their host city, nation or region – as the Olympics do. Many European international theatre festivals founded after the destruction and alienation of the Second World War – including Edinburgh, Avignon and Holland (all 1947), the Berliner Festwochen (1951) and the Théâtre des Nations (Paris, 1954) – were created to demonstrate Europe’s cultural accomplishments as well as to facilitate European regeneration and international communication. Festivals continue to foster diverse community identities through the proliferation of black, women’s, children’s and queer theatre festivals. Festivals have many potential benefits for their sites, art forms and participants. They can benefit their sites by fostering economic development and urban regeneration. They can foster artistic appreciation and development, providing opportunities for artistic experimentation and introducing audiences to new work through innovative programming and producing. Given their frequently amenable conditions of big budgets and well-equipped theatre spaces, major international festivals significantly support the work of such eminent directors as, for example, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Tadashi Suzuki. Through such activities as the ‘Enquiries’ of the London International Festival of Theatre (founded 1981), festivals can also provoke reflection on the (potential) purposes of theatre, as well as the nature of community. Both the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (founded 1947) and the Edinburgh People’s Festival (founded 1951) challenged the perceived elitism and exclusivity of the Edinburgh International Festival. The 1990 Los Angeles Festival curated by director Peter Sellars excluded much work from the Euro-American pool that international festivals usually draw on, and included Asian and Mexican practices and groups that represented the backgrounds of many of LA’s marginalized 187

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immigrant communities. It thus asked who and what LA was and what communities the festival should both represent and serve. Despite all these positive potentials, there are a number of festival characteristics that bear critical scrutiny, especially as festivals continue to proliferate alongside growing international trade and tourism. First, as in any context of intercultural exchange, festivals risk trivializing and commodifying the cultures they represent. Second, given the standardization of international theatre festivals’ conditions of production, they risk internationalizing aesthetic trends, producing homogenized festival fare (which is recognizably large-scale, auteur-directed/branded so it will sell), and often visual theatre, so it can trade across linguistic barriers. Finally, they risk producing an acute elitism, certainly because they are often financially expensive, but also because they frequently deploy rarefied theatre vocabularies that address specialist (international) audiences but may be less accessible to local audiences. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contemporary Theatre Review’s special issue includes useful articles on festivals in Avignon, Edinburgh, Africa and the Arab world, and on how festival conditions affect the work of Robert Lepage. The collection edited by Hauptfleisch et al includes essays on a global range of festivals. Knowles details how international festival conditions affect theatre’s meanings. Contemporary Theatre Review (2003) special issue on festivals, 13.4, London: Routledge. Hauptfleisch, Temple, Shulasmith Levaladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter and Henri Schoenmakers (eds) (2007) Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FUTURISM Futurism is an avant-garde artistic movement and ideology that originated in Italy before the First World War. Its founding manifesto by poet and playwright F. T. Marinetti, published in 1909 in Paris’s Le Figaro newspaper, espoused the destruction of museums and libraries – as enervating sites of reflection on the past – and celebrated machines, speed, youth, masculinity and war. Automobiles, aeroplanes and other machines and technology provided models for a new era driven by an aggressive masculine energy focusing on the future. Futurist art often took literary and graphic form, but it keenly adopted and developed many performance techniques in order directly to shock audiences out of lazy conformity by actively provoking debate, protest and – ideally, for many of its proponents – riots. Its numerous manifestos were rhetorically conceived less to be privately read than to be publicly declaimed. Futurist cabaret-style performance evenings were inspired by traditions of popular performance and variety theatre, encouraged improvisation to be as provocative as possible, and combined several unrelated acts such as sequences of noise music, 188

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poetry readings and brief plays designed to produce a sense of acceleration in their stripped-down compression. Eventually earning the name ‘synthetics’ for their dynamic synthesis of numerous disparate elements, these events embraced abstraction and rejected the dominant theatre’s focus on artifice, linear narrative, psychology and naturalism. They were similar to Dada’s cabarets, such as the Cabaret Voltaire, but more destructive and assertive of a world view than Dada’s absurd questioning. Scenographically, futurist theatre often emphasized the mechanical by using machine-like costumes, automatons and marionettes, realizing the performance of Übermarionetten that Edward Gordon Craig had advocated but not fully achieved. Because it glorified war and was linked to Fascism, futurism was somewhat discredited with the coming of the First World War, although its experiments continued in theatre, dance, film and radio through the 1920s until the early 1930s, primarily in Italy but also, for example, in Russia. From the 1970s on, theatre historians have recuperated futurism as an important progenitor of numerous twentiethcentury avant-garde and political performance practices, from Dada, to the theatre of the absurd that developed in Italy (for example, in the plays of Luigi Pirandello) and elsewhere in Europe (in the work of Samuel Beckett, for instance), to the interventionist practices of happenings, to multimedia performance. Elements of futurism’s aggressive experimentation have certainly been influential, but its advocacy of violence and war has resulted in the critical, highly selective adoption of its practices. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Kirbys collect archival material and develop a detailed analysis in order to recuperate futurist theatre from critical neglect and demonstrate its contribution to other non-naturalistic twentieth-century theatre practices. Goldberg draws out this link to other avant-garde practices. Goldberg, RoseLee ([2001] 2011) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 3rd edition, London: Thames and Hudson. Kirby, Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby ([1971] 1986) Futurist Performance, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Marinetti, F. T. ([1909] 2002) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, reprinted in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds) The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.

HAPPENINGS Happenings are cross-disciplinary non-text-based events that utilize all media and means at the artists’ disposal, and especially those from outside the maker’s own field. A central part of artistic experimentation of the 1960s, happenings evolved from various disciplines. They were inspired by challenges in dance led by the Judson Church and pieces like Trio A (1966), as well as the earlier pioneering 189

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explorations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College during the 1950s. Many consider Cage’s work the main inspiration for happenings. But as in Dadaist events like the Cabaret Voltaire, visual and plastic artists (connected to the pop art movement) were particularly dominant. The actual term was coined by American artist Allan Kaprow and came to prominence in the 1960s, even though the notion had been in circulation in the 1950s, as Kaprow’s own event 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) demonstrates. But it was only with the plethora of live and installation works by Jim Dine, Kaprow, George Brecht and Robert Whitman, for example, as well as later publications by Kaprow and Michael Kirby in response to these, that this distinctive genus of performance clearly emerged. Although happenings took place mainly in the United States, they also had their proponents in Europe and Japan. Jean-Jacques Lebel produced and wrote about his fiercely political happenings in France, Tadeusz Kantor conducted events in Poland with mannequins, found objects and eccentric home-made contraptions, and Japan’s Gutai Theatre’s performances led to international renown. After the 1970s, happenings, ‘assemblages’ and events were subsumed under the range of work labelled performance art. Happenings relied predominantly on visual or material elements, many of which were deliberately impermanent or destroyed during the act of performance. Practitioners consciously avoided using artists’ materials or theatre techniques, working outside their disciplines and beyond familiar gallery spaces. In Kaprow’s Notes to Soap (1965), participants were smeared with jam and buried on a beach. Joseph Beuys, in what he termed ‘Actions’ rather than happenings, lived with a coyote in Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Such events shared much with environmental theatre, often taking place in outdoor or non-performance spaces like streets, shops or in the countryside. They were frequently participatory, deliberately immersed in, or intervening in, everyday life rather than in spaces created for the showing of art. Although these one-off unrepeatable events were loosely scored or structured rather than improvised, they depended on planning rather than on rehearsal or training. They were what Michael Kirby has referred to as ‘non-matrixed’ performance, where performers do activities, tasks or actions in the present time and in an actual place, rather than acting in illusionist or mimetic terms where they are expected to fabricate an alternative here and now. Happenings demanded aesthetic re-evaluation of all processes that they utilized, deliberately blurring the boundaries between art and life. As the name suggests, happenings were intended to make the audience aware of the liveness of the event, to encourage them to engage in the moment and experience what was happening. As such, they contested realist art forms that depend on artifice and reproduction, and what might be considered the privileged position of funded work presented with sophisticated technologies and techniques in dedicated spaces for paying audiences. In sympathy with, and emerging from, the political idealism of 1960s America, Europe and Japan, happenings shared features with (and were sometimes inseparable from) protests and demonstrations, particularly in their European manifestations. The 1968 demonstrations in Paris and around the world took 190

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inspiration from happenings’ challenges and transgressions. Happenings were roughand-ready events that were free and accessible and thus operated in a different economy from commercial art. With their seemingly random association of actions (which were in fact usually carefully planned), happenings posed provocative political, aesthetic and personal challenges throughout the 1960s and 1970s. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are several books that focus on the evolution of postmodern performance and performance art generally, but these texts focus on the specific nature of happenings. Kaprow’s has many useful black-and-white illustrations of his and others’ events and a short explanatory text. Glimcher’s book provides a historical survey, also with numerous illustrations. Glimcher, Mildred (2012) Happenings: New York 1958–63, New York: Monacelli Press. Kaprow, Allan (1966) Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Kirby, Michael (1965) Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Dutton. Sandford, Mariellen (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts, London and New York: Routledge.

HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography is the study of the writing of history. It recognizes that because history is past and in some senses unrecoverable, recollecting and writing it will never be an objective practice, but rather one that is subjective, interpretive and fundamentally creative. Different writings of the ‘same’ history thus implicitly reveal the cultural conditions and ideologies of their time. The subjectivity of history writing becomes evident when we compare histories of the same topic written at different times. Variations in theatre history writing, for example, show how attitudes towards theatre – as differentiated from drama – have shifted. While early theatre histories concentrated on the playtext as the primary source of the theatre’s meaning, more recent theatre histories focus overwhelmingly on the material conditions of production – or mise en scène – as crucial determinants of meaning. Much theatre history writing has also identified, and so produced, theatre as high cultural practice, excluding such popular theatre activities as offstage cross-dressing in the Renaissance, melodrama in the nineteenth century and contemporary megamusical theatre. As these examples indicate, the fact that history writing is subjective affects not only what information it explicitly conveys, but also the ideologies or beliefs it may implicitly carry. It matters not only what history is told, but also how it is told. So, a Renaissance theatre history that concentrates on the stage and not on other theatrical cultural practices will necessarily produce a gender focus on men because women were not permitted to perform on public stages at that time. Similarly, a history of 191

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nineteenth-century theatre that omits melodrama will simultaneously omit an enormous working-class audience. In the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a postmodern movement that rejected what critic Jean-François Lyotard called ‘grand narratives’ and their apparent certainties, it was increasingly recognized that ‘received’ histories were often the history of the dominant. It was also recognized, however, that absence from the histories did not mean absence from history, and efforts were made to redress the prevailing bias by retrieving lost histories. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to the rise of historiographies with explicit subjective focus on, for example, feminist, lesbian, gay and black theatre. In the 1990s and on, it has also led to the rise of performative theatre histories. Drawing on the particular challenges and possibilities presented to the historian by theatre and performance’s liveness and inevitable immediate loss or absence, these writings are explicitly self-reflexive about their own subjective formation of history and meaning. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bratton provides an excellent introduction to key issues in historiography and grounds them in English theatre history. Reinelt and Roach and Postlewait and McConachie collect articles which usefully indicate historiography’s practice and potential. Roach and Shepherd and Womack both demonstrate performative, self-reflexive historiography. Bratton, Jacky (2003) New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postlewait, Thomas and Bruce A. McConachie (eds) (1989) Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds) (1992) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roach, Joseph (1996) Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press. Shepherd, Simon and Peter Womack (1996) English Drama: A Cultural History, Oxford: Blackwell.

IMMERSIVE THEATRE AND ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE Immersive theatre invites audiences directly into its scenographic, installation-like environments, to explore and participate, effectively becoming performers themselves; its performance often draws extensively on vocabularies of physical theatre. One-to-one performance is usually a form of performance art/live art in which a single person performs with and for one audience member at a time, usually for a comparatively short duration of five to thirty minutes; the performer’s address immerses the audience member and usually necessitates his or her participation as a performer. These practices share an approach which actively, spatially and scenically integrates audiences as, to varying degrees, co-makers of the performance. 192

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They resemble environmental and site-specific theatre, but those forms usually guide large audiences more, both physically and along a linear narrative (though this is not always the case). In contrast, one-to-one performance tends to produce much greater intimacy, and immersive theatre’s invitation to roam usually means audiences’ experience of narrative is fragmented as well as secondary to their experience of spectacular and multi-sensory environments. These forms are also akin to happenings, but where those are usually performative interventions in everyday sites, these tend to be theatre events, with many pre-scripted features. They also share features with Antonin Artaud’s total theatre and the scenographic actor– audience experiments of Jerzy Grotowski. But in general, immersive theatre is less politically engaged and more focused on aesthetic experience than total theatre, Grotowski’s performances or much site-specific theatre. One-to-one performance, on the other hand, is frequently as political, or even more so, though in ways that may be less explicit or direct. These forms have proliferated since the early 2000s in the work of, for example, Ontroerend Goed (based in Belgium) and Shunt (based in London, UK). The most frequently cited example of an immersive theatre company is London-based Punchdrunk, who have also produced their highly successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Sleep No More, in New York (from 2011). Punchdrunk generally takes over large disused buildings such as warehouses, converting several storeys into a range of immersive environments. In their 2013 London production, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, they converted a former Royal Mail sorting office into the fictional film studios, Temple Studios, furnished with desert and woodland landscapes, artists’ trailers, costume shops and more in a visual theatre environment audiences could explore at will. Comparatively high-profile one-to-one performers include, in the UK, the late Adrian Howells, who washed, massaged, anointed and kissed individual participants’ feet in Foot Washing for the Sole (from 2008), and Toronto-based Jess Dobkin, who invited solo audience members to sharpen their pencils in her vagina dentata for a nominal charge in Fee for Service (2006). Many factors explain these forms’ proliferation and popularity. They are often site-responsive, reflecting on the location of performance, its histories, its meanings and, sometimes, emerging environmental issues. They can be fun, beautiful, evocative and pleasurable, for example, because of their imagery, their invitation to play and the proximity to performers they allow. They provoke strong feelings in audiences, such as excitement, adventure, intimacy, desire, sensuality and spirituality. They may offer the thrills of gaming without technological mediation and with the viscerality of liveness. They usually provide a range of sensory stimulations, including stunningly detailed spectacles, complex sound, bodily movement sometimes including dance, taste, smell (for example, a pine forest in Punchdrunk’s 2006 Faust) and – especially in one-to-one performance – touch. They invite audiences to experience unique events, such as opportunities to discover secret rooms or secluded scenes in immersive theatre, and to act or to share a private conversation in one-toone performance. One-to-one in particular affords audiences the prospect of intense, intimate and even therapeutic communication. As this example suggests, perhaps 193

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most importantly, these forms can give audiences agency, the opportunity actively to improvise, and to influence, direct, co-devise and co-create the performance, even to make a relationship. However, for some observers such as Jacques Rancière, this sense of audience agency may be more apparent than real. The spectre of agency these forms apparently proffer can not only mislead audiences but, worse, train them to misrecognize the limits of both their own power and others’ authority over them. Such performance can coerce audiences into acting in ways they might not want to, whether through implicit direction, explicit command or simply the audience’s sense of obligation. Many observers criticize Punchdrunk’s shows, for example, for the ways they mandate audiences’ obedience, deliberately spatially confusing them, requiring them to wear masks and forbidding them from speaking. As in what Bertold Brecht called ‘culinary theatre’, these forms’ spectacle can also be seen as superficial and trivial in ways that both distract audiences from responding to more important issues and reinforce theatre as part of an entertainment or culture industry, rather than an arts culture or a socially engaged theatre, let alone a sphere of activism. From these perspectives, these forms of performance can cultivate negative feelings, from the banality of boredom, disappointment, frustration, awkwardness and embarrassment to the more disturbing vulnerability and anger. ‘Good’ or ‘bad’, these forms do raise – and potentially productively trouble – a range of important questions about: narrative and spectacle; activity and passivity; giving and taking; relationships between host and guest; consent; emotional and ethical risk; mutual ethical responsibilities shared by performer and spectator; normative distinctions between the public and the private; normative assumptions about who should touch whom, where and how; and gender and power relations in economies of service labour, whether that is banking, hairdressing, sex work or performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Detailed information on immersive theatre is available in Machon’s book and also White’s article. On one-to-one performance see: Zerihan’s fulsome study guide, which contains a large bibliography, as well as her article on eroticism; the article by Heddon, Iball and Zerihan; and the special issue of Performing Ethos co-edited by Kartsaki, Lobel and Zerihan. For complementary reading on participation in recent art practices, see Bishop’s edited collection and the catalogue edited by Frieling. Bishop, Claire (ed.) (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel. Frieling, Rudolf (ed.) (2008) The Art of Participation: The 1950s to Now, London: Thames & Hudson. Heddon, Deirdre, Helen Iball and Rachel Zerihan (2012) ‘Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review 22:1 (March), 12–133. Iball, Helen (2013) ‘Towards an Ethics of Intimate Theatre’, Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance 3:1 (July): 41–57. 194

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Kartsaki, Eirini, Brian Lobel and Rachel Zerihan (eds) (forthcoming 2014) Performing Ethos: An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance, Special Issue: ‘One-on-One Encounters: Desire, Reciprocity and Ethics’, 4:1 Machon, Josephine (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Punchdrunk. Online. Available www.punchdrunk.com (accessed 7 October 2013). White, Gareth (2012) ‘On Immersive Theatre’, Theatre Research International 37:3 (October): 221–35. Zerihan, Rachel (2009) One to One Performance, Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide, London: Live Art Development Agency. Online. Available http://dev.thisisliveart. co.uk/uploads/documents/SRG_Zerihan_reducedsize.pdf (accessed 7 October 2013). —— (2010) ‘La Petite Mort: Erotic Encounters in One to One Performance’ in Karoline Gritzner (ed.), Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire: 202–23.

IMPROVISATION Improvisation is the spontaneous invention of performance. It has a long theatre history, for example in commedia dell’arte, which has been practised in Italy since about the mid-sixteenth century. In commedia, performers improvise unique performances within set rules regarding stock characters, plots and jokes. Commedia demonstrates improvisation’s particular ability to produce ‘new’ shows quickly and with few resources and, by responding to local contexts and current issues, to produce topical satire. Improvisation achieved popularity elsewhere in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, when its defining principles of spontaneity, creative play, openness to chance and group participation captured the imagination of artists and teachers. For these practitioners, improvisation seemed to hold out the possibility of escaping learned taboos, achieving freedom of expression, producing unexpected outcomes and developing more democratic group practices. These practitioners included: composer John Cage, dance-makers whose contact improvisation produced choreography out of performers’ unplanned movements; theatre-makers and performance artists including Richard Schechner, Laurie Anderson; and creators of happenings. Such practitioners were inspired partly by theatre’s own history of improvisation, but also by such things as improvisational jazz and contemporary educational theories about stimulating children’s learning through play. Improvisation in this context and beyond is a tool of creative stimulation both for its own sake and for devising performances. It is a method of facilitating better collaboration by requiring practitioners not to block a partner’s proposition, but to go with it and build on it. And it is a vital training and rehearsal tool, encouraging the breaking of habit, building of character, and generation of devised performance material. It also has links with stand-up comedy – which has to respond spontaneously to heckling and other audience interjections – as with a lot of political comedy, such as the longrunning American television programme Saturday Night Live. Improvisation’s capacity to be topical, to evade censorship and to facilitate democratic participation gives it enormous political potential that has been harnessed by 195

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performance artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, body artists such as Orlan and theatre artists including Augusto Boal, with his Forum Theatre. Improvisation’s capacity to challenge the received wisdom of ‘grand narratives’ has also made it a favoured tool of many postmodern performance-makers, including the Wooster Group. Despite its emphasis on freedom, improvisation relies on the observation of certain rules – for example, of genre and characterization. And, while it specifies a particular form of performance, elements of improvisation are intrinsic to all performance and the quality of liveness it produces, as performance must constantly be prepared to adapt to its live, unpredictable conditions. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Spolin and Johnstone’s books are early testimonies to the value of improvisation as a creative and self-actualizing practice. Frost and Yarrow and Johnston’s books provide historical and theoretical context and contemporary examples as well as practical exercises. Nachmanovitch has written a more theoretical behavioural analysis of what improvisation is and how it functions. Numerous ‘how to improvise’ books are available though are not included here. Frost, Anthony and Ralph Yarrow (1990) Improvisation in Drama, London: Macmillan. Johnston, Chris (2006) The Improvisation Game, London: Nick Hern Books. Johnstone, Keith (1981) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, London: Eyre Methuen. Nachmanovitch, Stephen (1993) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. Spolin, Viola (1973) Improvisation for the Theatre: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, London: Pitman Publishing.

INSTALLATION ART This term has been used since the 1960s to designate art practice which is not simply displayed in a supposedly neutral site, like most paintings hung in galleries, but which explicitly aims to include and refer to its site and context as a crucial constituent of its meanings. As in the installations of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Abramović, installation art sometimes involves the artists as performers. Usually, it is threedimensional, temporary, and can be entered and possibly interacted with by its audience/spectators. Almost always both the site and the spectator are regarded as necessary to the completion of the piece and its constitution as meaningful; often, as in relational art, the art is designed to produce social interactions between audience members more than between people and objects. Sometimes installation art occupies an art gallery unconventionally, as in such pieces as Abramović’s Balkan Baroque (1997), in which she scrubbed beef bones in a gallery for hours at a time, or Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), in which she challenged the putative austerity and objectivity of the public gallery by putting the intimate space of her dishevelled bedroom within it. Sometimes it occupies a space not normally dedicated to art, as in the ‘wrappings’ 196

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of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, where they temporarily engulf in fabric natural sites or famous buildings such as Berlin’s Reichstag. Like performance art, installation art arose at a point in art history when, in a political assault on the status quo, boundaries between art disciplines and media were breaking down to develop hybrid new forms. Like immersive theatre, environmental theatre and site-specific performance, installation art compels its audiences to reflect on the meanings and histories of its site. Like performance art, it challenges the institutionalism of much fine art, interrogating the ways galleries feign neutrality and contain, delimit and commodify art practices. Because it is almost always temporary, it argues against universalism and for the value of seeing art’s meaning as not only site-specific but also time-specific. It is directly relevant to theatre and performance for a number of reasons. For example, it is often indisputably performance, as in Gómez-Peña’s work, and its interactive models of the event–audience relationship bear useful comparison to more conventional theatrical models, as well as to such ideas as Augusto Boal’s ‘spectactor’. Perhaps most influential, however, is the way art scholar Michael Fried’s 1967 condemnation of installation art explicitly blamed what he saw as its moral failure on its inherent theatricality. For Fried, installation art was morally bereft because it relied on the theatrical features of duration and audience in order to produce its meaning. Unlike such modernist forms as painting and sculpture, which he saw as inherently complete and therefore achieving subjecthood, it needed contextualization to be complete and was therefore consigned to ‘objecthood’. Fried’s provocative argument denounced not only installation art, but also theatre and such inherent features of theatre and performance as duration and audience. It thus compelled reflection on these crucial aspects of theatre and demanded defence of what for many are precisely what makes theatre an ethical practice – its audience’s responsibility to it, and its responsibility to its social, temporal and spatial contexts of production. Despite Fried’s attack, the explicit relation of installation art to its audience and context actually secured its widespread acceptance and even mainstream popularity in the 1990s and on, as indicated by the title of Reiss’s book and the fame of such British artists as Emin, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst as well as the institutional rise and dominance of such sites of installation as the Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern and the central hall in New York’s Guggenheim. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop offers an excellent overview and critical context. Reiss provides an informative history. Both of Oliveira et al’s books include excellent illustrations. Bourriaud’s theory of the relational aesthetics often posed in installation works has been very influential. Bishop, Claire (2005) Installation Art, New York: Routledge. Bourriaud, Nicolas ([1998] 2002) Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland, Dijon: Les presses du réel. 197

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Fried, Michael (1967) ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum 5.10: 12–23. Reprinted in Philip Auslander (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, London: Routledge, pp. 165–87. Oliveira, Nicolas de, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry (1994) Installation Art, London: Thames and Hudson. —— (2003) Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses, London: Thames and Hudson. Reiss, Julie H. (1999) From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

INTERCULTURALISM The term ‘interculturalism’ describes cultural interaction which confronts and/or combines the practices of one culture with those of one or more others. Intercultural theatre and performance can thus be understood as referring more accurately to hybrid activities rather than to specific genres of performance. Intercultural performance is visible in the assimilation of Asian and African aesthetics by such Western directors as Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Julie Taymor. It is also visible in the preperformance work of such Western directors as Richard Schechner, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, who have used Asian forms of psycho-physical preparation such as yoga to inform their methods of both training and devising. As these examples indicate, the term ‘intercultural’ is used more commonly to describe the influence of practices from the South, East or third world on those of the North, West or first world. But it can also be used to describe movement in the other direction, as in the cases of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, who combines narrative forms from classical Greek and Shakespearean drama with local Yoruba myths, and of Tadashi Suzuki, who directs Western plays using Asian performance practices and traditions. It can also describe the hybrid ‘border art’ of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Following the sympathy for multicultural integration that was characteristic of much Western culture in the 1960s and 1970s, interculturalism partly arose in response to an increased desire – fuelled by postmodernism – to articulate cultural differences. As its widespread and longstanding practice indicates, intercultural performance has a number of irrefutable attractions. It can develop indigenous practices; it can lead to the creation of hybrid new forms of performance and expression; and it can help facilitate the understanding of different cultures. However, it has also been the subject of intense criticism. Because intercultural exchange often occurs between cultures with different levels of privilege and power, it can be exploitative, lacking respect or reciprocity or treating culture as commodity. And because intercultural performance is a form of cultural representation, it can be susceptible to misrepresentation, often trivializing and denigrating source cultures as cliché or stereotype, as when Western performance represents Asian and African forms as

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primitive. Such arguments have been made most boldly by Rustom Bharucha in his criticism of Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985). Patrice Pavis has argued that interculturalism’s arguments have become reductive, circular and outmoded. However, its practice and analysis usefully demand attention to the ethics of exchange and difference, to relationships of power, and to ideas of cultural autonomy. And such attention may be especially important as intercultural practices continue to spread within the contexts of globalization and the ongoing expansion of international theatre festival circuits. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer-Lichte et al provide geographic spread, Gainor provides historical depth, Holledge and Tompkins focus on women’s performance, and Marranca and Dasgupta collect a strong range of critical articles and interviews. Martin’s is a handbook for performance preparation. Pavis’s analyses are seminal. Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Josephine Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer (eds) (1990) The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Gainor, J. Ellen (ed.) (1995) Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance 1795–1995, London: Routledge. Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins (2000) Women’s Intercultural Performance, London: Routledge. Marranca, Bonnie and Gautam Dasgupta (eds) (1991) Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, New York: PAJ Publications. Martin, John (2004) The Intercultural Performance Handbook, London: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge.

INTERNET The rapid growth in the use and potential applications of the internet in the last ten years of the twentieth century, an expansion that is continuing inexorably in the twenty-first, has had some notable impact on the field of performance. Although performance in ‘cyberspace’ can scarcely be considered ‘live’ in terms of direct presence, it can question this very liveness through online and remote interaction. The fine line between reality and what is merely a construct becomes more and more fragile in such works. Exponential improvements in the growth of computer memory and the development of webcams, digital video and streaming have enabled performances of all kinds (sadly much of this dominated and driven by pornography) to be transmitted immediately to millions worldwide, following Paul McCartney’s landmark concert in December 1999 from the Beatles’ venue The Cavern in Liverpool. As such, the internet can be considered another form for distributing performance 199

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material as well as an efficient and global marketing and information tool for artists interested in promoting their profile or networking possibilities. Most artists have their own official websites for advertising and employment purposes such as casting, as well as for artistic ends. The potential is far greater, though, than mere self-promotion, as has been indicated by multimedia performance, Net Art, experiments with online games, research into virtual reality, and the use of the internet directly in performance by, for example, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Stelarc. Gómez-Peña solicited audience confessions online in response to his installation piece The Temple of Confessions (1994–97). Stelarc shifted his practice from total ‘body suspensions’, hanging from meathooks in both public and private spaces, to virtual ‘suspensions’, linking himself to the internet through specially created Stimbod software. Such interactions are understandably costly, technologically extremely complex and even dangerous, so he performs them rarely. What these and other examples of internet-based performance proffer is a community for performance and the creation of interhuman networks, many of which were subsequently established as and called ‘social media’, that differ markedly from a live audience interacting in one shared space. The immersive world of virtual reality and interactive gaming further extends the process of being a spectator, promoting interactivity rather than passivity. These communities have an interesting political as well as social dimension too, protected as they can be by their technological and actual remoteness. But such protection can also be a problem as evidenced in incidences of cyberbullying and abuse through media such as Twitter. The internet and related technology inevitably have become a common topic within performances, as both subject matter and media for human interaction. An early influential example was in Patrick Marber’s play Closer (1997), where two characters meet after an initial online chat, the content of which was projected on a screen. Companies like British group Blast Theory continue to explore the internet in their multimodal artistic experiments, moving on from early investigations such as Can You See Me Now? (2001), a sort of interactive online game that also deployed satellite tracking, which was quite advanced for its time. The idea of ‘internet performance’ offers an interesting corollary to the recent growing interest in the embodied nature of performance but the term itself has now mainly been consumed within the broader umbrella of multimedia performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Few books deal exclusively with the emerging interconnection between performance and the internet, but Giannachi gives a helpful introduction and Klich and Scheer look at multimedia performance more broadly. The Performance Research issue collects together short pieces, some of which refer to internet-based practices. Birringer and Auslander focus on the broader issues that face performance in a highly mediatized society.

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Allsopp, Ric and Scott deLahunta (eds) (1999) ‘Online’, a special issue of Performance Research, 4.2, London: Routledge. Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Birringer, Johannes (1998) Media and Performance: Along the Border, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blast Theory. Online. Available www.blasttheory.co.uk/ (accessed 14 October 2013). Giannachi, Gabriella (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Klich, Rosemary and Edward Scheer (2012) Multimedia Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

LIGHTING AND SOUND Lighting and sound may be indispensable elements of performance events but they are often overlooked by the public, critics and academics alike. An explanation for this invisibility is the fact that they usually have supplementary or supporting rather than dominant roles. Used often to provoke emotional responses or create mood in a subliminal rather than overt way, they are mostly employed non-figuratively. They thus need to be considered in relation to other aspects of the mise en scène or production rather than just by themselves. If they are conspicuous, this may mitigate against the believability of a scene, as is fundamental to naturalist theatre, where the spectator needs to focus on the stage and the actors rather than the surrounding theatre technologies. Lighting and sound are a vital part of scenography, though their primacy has often been disputed. Konstantin Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov disagreed about the director’s inclusion of so many sound effects in production, which the writer thought shifted his plays away from the more symbolic register he desired. With quite another stylistic intention from Stanislavsky, designers like Edward Gordon Craig have emphasized and advocated the role of lighting, working with swathes of light and shadows rather than three-dimensional materials to create location, volume and mood on stage. Bertold Brecht revealed the mechanisms at work in the theatre to the spectator, whereas Antonin Artaud called for the use of all stage technology as part of his manifesto for a total theatre. Yet, however unaware of lighting and sound the spectator or critic is, there is no denying their significance for: defining place (a room indoors as opposed to an open field outside); indicating the passage of time (lights rising to suggest dawn, reinforced by the sound of a chorus of birds); creating mood through colour or through suggestive sounds; establishing links or motifs that might close or open a piece, as in blackouts or introductory fanfares; and deliberately illuminating or obscuring what the audience can see and hear, so prompting them to reflect on the act of spectatorship and witnessing. The introduction of electricity into theatres in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century greatly enhanced lighting’s functionality as well as its creative potential. As electricity became established, and with the arrival of computers and 201

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digital technology much later, lighting and sound technologies have become extremely advanced. Intensity, colour, size, speed, volume, range and complexity of cues are all possible with extensive variables, making lighting and sound design sophisticated art forms in their own right. Many directors exploit the potential of these technologies as autonomous elements in themselves. Robert Wilson uses light bars or washes on the cyclorama as a central part of his stage action. Battersea Arts Centre, one of the foremost experimental producing venues in London, ran a ‘Playing in the Dark’ season in 1998 without any lighting, bringing techniques familiar from radio into a three-dimensional public shared space. Postmodern performance practitioners have shown ongoing interest in playing with light and sound as well as media like television, video and the internet. The replaying of sound bites from popular culture in British group Forced Entertainment’s work, or the relaying of video extracts of previous rehearsals of the Wooster Group, are just two examples. Such interaction with stage technologies questions the actuality and liveness of the performance event through the use of prerecorded narration, voices off, multimedia focal points, or perhaps illogical shifts in time and space. The ability of sound and lighting to make an impact on the spectator or auditor, evident especially in large-scale concerts, raves, or events like the Olympic ceremonies and parades, seems inversely proportional to the interest they attract within theatre and performance studies. Thankfully this is now changing, especially regarding the area of sound which is a thriving field, as evidenced by the two most recent books in our bibliography. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The extensive chapter in the Brockett and Ball book sketches the recent histories of these technologies and highlights practical issues. There are many handbooks like Reid’s and Fineli’s, but fewer theoretical texts in this area, though Brown’s and Kendrick and Roesner’s books mark an important shift. Pavis offers a short but useful introduction to analysis of these technologies in performance. Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Brown, Ross (2009) Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fineli, Patrick (2002) Sound for the Stage, Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press. Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars. Pavis, Patrice (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Reid, Francis (2001) Lighting the Stage, Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press.

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LIVENESS Liveness describes a quality of live performance – the sense that it is happening here and now. It is an important idea because it apparently distinguishes live performance from recorded performance-based media such as film and television, indicating that live performance has some intrinsic qualitative and even political difference from other forms of performance or even its own forms of documentation. It is an especially important idea because the nature, effects and even existence of this qualitative difference are the subject of considerable debate. For many, performance’s liveness gives it its distinctive energy, interest and social significance. It is in live performance that people – performers and audiences – encounter and potentially interact with one another in real time, space and social process. Performance’s liveness is exciting because it cultivates feelings and a sense of presence, and because risk is unavoidable where accident cannot be edited out (as it can in recorded media). Performance’s liveness is social because it produces meaning in a dynamic process, rather than in the fixed and passive form that recorded media seem to present. It gives live performance the potential to be a context where social change can be produced. And it is a quality that has been directly explored and exploited in theatre, stand-up comedy, speech-making, body art, happenings and performance art. For performance theorist Peggy Phelan, what distinguishes live performance is the fact that it is live; the archive and the record of performance are not performance because they are set. For her, this ephemeral quality gives performance a particular political potential. Because it cannot be captured, performance is ‘nonreproductive’; it resists becoming commodified, objectified and appropriated, and it maintains instead the dynamic possibility of being continuously creative. For Phelan, what makes performance exciting and gives it social value is not so much its sense of presence as its sense of absence – the sense that performance is forever escaping and cannot be reproduced. Phelan argues that performance theorists need to seek a ‘live’, performative, creative and critical discourse for analysing performance that enhances its ephemeral qualities, instead of trying to pin it down in conventional academic or journalistic prose. Philip Auslander directly challenges Phelan’s specific arguments as well as more conventional wisdom on liveness, arguing against seeing live performance as distinctive from other recorded media and proposing that seemingly live performance is pervasively mediatized. He demonstrates that early television was modelled on theatrical forms and that recent live performance is frequently adapted from films and television shows and is often multimedia, incorporating recorded images and sounds. Auslander concludes that the live and the recorded are deeply interlinked and that it is inaccurate to set them up as binary opposites. He disputes the idea that apparently live performance offers better opportunities for social exchange than recorded media, arguing that live performance is premised not on an intrinsic connection between audience and performer but on their necessary separation. And by refusing to disconnect live and mediatized performance, he refutes Phelan’s 203

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location of performance outside of an economy of reproducible commodities. Auslander’s arguments can come across as intentionally provocative and contrary. However, they aim to get beyond some of the mystifying, vague language that gathers around live performance, they question idealized notions of the performer– audience relationship, and they challenge the very idea that performance can escape commodity culture. They also provoke consideration of not only what distinguishes live performance from recorded media, but importantly the many things it now shares with those media. As technology, like the internet, becomes ever more interactive, and recorded media, like reality television, increasingly incorporate live sequences, the complex relationship between the live and the recorded requires continued critical scrutiny and articulation. Liveness is not a resolved term; it is at the centre of what does or does not make live performance unique and particularly meaningful. BIBLIOGRAPHY Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy (1993) ‘The Ontology of Performance’, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 146–66.

MASKING/BODY ADORNMENT In performance, ways of masking or decorating the body have been used repeatedly to transform, enlarge, disguise or separate performers – from the everyday, from ancient rituals to the make-up that turns West End or Broadway performers into cats. Archaeologists have provided evidence of such practices from prehistoric days onwards, unearthing pictures of the large headdress masks of ancient Greek theatre, for example. Popular theatre forms have often used masks, from the red nose of the circus clown to the stock characters of commedia dell’arte. But such traditional practices have also become experimental when translated from their original context. Inspired by circus and commedia, Vsevolod Meyerhold used mask-like make-up to establish a grotesque idiom, Bertold Brecht made his Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954) characters representative beings through masking them, and Jerzy Grotowski’s actors adopted ‘facial masks’ in Akropolis (1962), based in part on Asian performance practices and Kathakali. Facial transformation is needed to play a character or role even in naturalist theatre, although in this genre the process is one of imitation within believable realms rather than exaggeration, distortion or the invention of a heightened stylized idiom. Whatever their form, masking always has a double function. As make-up might cover a face, a ‘mask’ hides the performer’s body. This reflects the common usage of the word outside theatrical contexts. But masks also create a new identity. In the theatre, masks project significant and complex meanings, depending on their materials, design, and the context in which they are worn. 204

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As well as having a strong visual impact, the power of masks to transport the performer has frequently been articulated. In Asian performance, for example, where masks occur in numerous forms and have religious, aesthetic and historical importance, the Japanese Noh shite actor meditates on his mask in the green room before turning into one of the gods or dead beings that people the Noh stage. Jacques Copeau’s mask training and Jacques Lecoq’s neutral masks have proved how effective masking processes can be for performers, not just in rehearsal of a role but also for the performer’s self-development, to rid him or her of habits or clichés. Explorations of different styles of mask-based performance also stretch the performer’s expressive abilities. Such process-based explorations of what it is to perform and to metamorphose oneself correspond to the body adornment, piercings and tattoos that permeate daily behaviour. These are a continuation of ritually derived activities in secular contexts. Stelarc and Orlan, with her attempted The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93) as St Orlan to be brought about by radical cosmetic surgery, have further explored this crossover between everyday life and performance, as have many others involved in body art or performance art. Both these artists have examined how one can employ both simple and sophisticated technologies to test, alter or transform the body. Through her ongoing reconstruction, Orlan is interrogating how identity is constructed and how people perform themselves, ideas explored theoretically by Judith Butler. Masks and masking still make a significant contribution to contemporary performance exploration, even if technological advances and recent theories have shifted us well beyond the mythical awe inspired by ancient totemic face masks. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emigh and Lommel have both discussed masks from an anthropological perspective. Schechter’s collection explores masks in a range of performance forms from diverse cultural perspectives. Bell’s edited collection was originally published in the journal The Drama Review and considers puppets as well as some mask-related theatre forms and practices. Wilsher’s guide also contains some contextual material as well as experience drawn from his time with Trestle Theatre Company, which he co-founded. Bell, John (ed.) (2001) Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Emigh, John (1996) Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Lommel, Andreas (1981) Masks: Their Meaning and Function, New York: Excalibur Books. Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge. Wilsher, Toby (2007) The Mask Handbook: A Practical Guide, London: Routledge

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MEGAMUSICALS Megamusicals are big-budget, massively publicized, slickly produced, scenographically and technologically complex musicals featuring epic, sentimental narratives, pop-influenced musicality and sung texts. They typically originate on Broadway in New York or in London’s West End but are copied in franchise productions worldwide, usually running for years, even decades, and becoming fixed global cultural reference points. They are important partly for the ways they have influenced musicals in particular, but they also reveal epochal changes in theatre more broadly. These include the effects of megamusicals’ developing technologies on audience experience and the liveness of performance and, in particular, the theatre’s export across global markets, astronomical financial growth and ever-increasing mass industrialization through reproduction on a scale even Walter Benjamin might never have imagined. Many observers parse musical history into two main eras: BC, ‘Before Cats’; and AD, ‘Andrew [Lloyd Webber] Dominant’. Cats was first produced in London in 1981 and then on Broadway in 1982, with music by the form’s pioneer, Lloyd Webber, a text adapted partly by director Trevor Nunn from T.S. Eliot’s book of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and production by Cameron Mackintosh, who would become one of the form’s most important producers. Where Cats led, many megamusicals followed, including Les Misérables (first produced in Paris in 1980, London in 1985 and New York in 1987), The Phantom of the Opera (London, 1986; NY, 1988) and Miss Saigon (London, 1989; NY, 1991). Megamusicals are scenically extravagant: the oversized (and sanitized) garbage dump in which the performers in Cats roam literally spills out – revolve and all – into the theatre auditorium. They are technologically elaborate: Cats features a hydraulically lifted oversized tire, Phantom a crashing chandelier and Miss Saigon a real, flying helicopter. Since Cats, they have used radio mikes as standard, utterly transforming performance sound and styles by allowing for sequences in apparently cinematic close-up. They run for years and accumulate colossal global audiences: Cats played in London for twenty-one years, on Broadway for eighteen and has been produced in over 300 cities worldwide; by 1996, over 40 million people had seen ‘Les Miz’, as it is popularly known. They have giant budgets: the original Broadway production of Cats reportedly cost about US$4 million. And they make astronomical returns: by 1999, Phantom had made approximately $2.8 billion – more than the blockbuster films Star Trek or Titanic; and in 1993/94, gross musical revenues in North America alone were over $1 billion, enough to lure cinema giants such as Disney, which produced megamusical versions of Beauty and the Beast (NY, 1993) and The Lion King (NY, 1996). The figures speak for themselves: audiences evidently want megamusicals, a lot. Megamusicals’ many attractions for audiences include: their sheer entertainment, the spectacle and wonder of their scenographic or technological feats, their powerful stimulation of feeling, the catchiness of their tunes, the sense they give of participating in a shared global culture and the pleasurable narrative clarity their throughrunning music creates. Many performers love megamusicals, both for the pleasure of 206

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the work and the employment income. Culture and tourist economies worldwide benefit from megamusicals’ success. Megamusicals often tell culturally important stories, regularly engaging issues of social consciousness or social empowerment. And megamusicals’ popularity can be seen as democratizing, giving huge audiences worldwide access to the same cultural event – provided they can afford the often high ticket price. But for many critics, megamusicals exemplify serious problems. As part of what cultural critics T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer influentially identified in the mid-twentieth century as the culture industry, megamusicals can be accused of ‘dumbing down’ audiences, offering them simplistic, formulaic fare that is easily summarized in a logo such as Cats’ eyes, Les Miz’s waif or The Phantom’s mask. They can be seen to cultivate passive consumption rather than engagement which is active, critical, creative, genuinely democratic or even properly engaged with any particular cultural context. After all, how much do audiences really learn from Les Miz about revolutionary France, or from Miss Saigon about the Vietnam War? And how relevant is a musical about revolutionary France, for example, to all audiences everywhere; might it be better for performance explicitly to address its particular contexts of production and its audiences there? Megamusicals’ performers are employed, yes, but they can also be seen as profoundly alienated: globally replicated productions fiercely standardize their performances and delimit their creative agency; their gruelling performance schedules are often packed out with evening and matinée performances and are very long-running; and their voices are disembodied and dehumanized through the use of radio mikes, over-amplification and the synthesizing, voice-smoothing effects of live mixing. Franchise productions’ ruthless cloning has earned megamusicals the derisive nickname McTheatre, indicating not only their sameness (like the fare at McDonald’s restaurants) but also their potential metropolitan neo-imperialism, as Broadway and London dictate terms of production worldwide (see interculturalism). The vastness of megamusicals’ budgets further limits innovation and variety as risk-averse producers turn to proven hits and generic templates and help commercial, industrial and capitalist imperatives ultimately to trump creativity, craft and art. Time will show how the megamusical evolves, and whether it can retain its pleasures while diminishing any of its possible problems, whether it is the shape of industrialized theatre to come, or whether new forms of globally franchised theatrical industrialization – such as global screenings of productions by London’s National Theatre or New York’s Metropolitan Opera – might prevail. BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature on musicals is vast; most recent publications examine megamusicals to some degree. Sternfeld’s book provides the most sustained discussion of the form. Burston offers excellent technological, industrial and cultural information and analysis. Rosenberg and Harburg’s book contextualizes megamusicals in the longer history of the business of Broadway musicals. Prece and Everett give detailed 207

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readings of a plethora of shows. Stempel and Wollman each offer observant, pithy analysis of the megamusical in their two books cited here. Vagelis situates the megamusical in critical cultural context. Burston, Jonathan (1998) ‘Theatre Space as Virtual Place: Audio Technology, the Reconfigured Singing Body, and the Megamusical’, Popular Music 17.2 (May): 205–18. Prece, Paul and William A. Everett (2002) ‘The Megamuscial and Beyond: The Creation, Internationalism and Impact of a Genre’, The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246-65. Rosenberg, Bernard and Ernest Harburg (1993) The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art, New York and London: New York University Press. Stempel, Larry (2010) Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Sternfeld, Jessica (2006) The Megamusical, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press. Vagelis, Siropoulos (2011) ‘Megamusicals, Spectacle and the Postdramatic Aesthetics of Late Capitalism’ 5:1 (March): 13–34. Wollman, Elizabeth L. (2006) The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

MISE EN SCÈNE This is a term from French which literally denotes the act of putting something on stage. In the nineteenth century it was used to describe the staging of the text and specifically the text’s direction. This is partly because its original use coincided with the rise of the director or, in French, the metteur en scène. However, an awareness of theatre as a total act which was more than the sum of its various parts began to coalesce in the late nineteenth century, was furthered by artists and critics like Antonin Artaud in the early twentieth century, and was secured by the rise of semiotic analysis from the early 1980s on. In these contexts, ‘mise en scène’ has increasingly been used in both theatre and film to articulate the total multidisciplinary act of staging the performance or film. It is thus understood to include the performance’s direction, but also its acting, scenography, lighting and sound, costumes, use of multimedia, organization of time and space, and so on. Further, the term ‘mise en scène’ has emphasized how performance’s meanings are produced not only in the performance product – the show – but also through the processes of both production and audience reception. A concept of mise en scène helps the critic to differentiate between different stagings – or mise en scène – of the same text and to designate them as, effectively, different theatrical texts. The term ‘mise en scène’ has been widely adopted in English theatre vocabularies especially, because it conveys these expanded senses of theatre as a multidisciplinary process and product that is the creative outcome of many contributors. Most recently, scholar Patrice Pavis has tried to reclaim the term as a way of describing and analysing contemporary performances that cross over between theatre and performance, which might now be called postdramatic and which he dubs, his tongue in cheek, ‘performise’. 208

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Pavis defines the term and its history in detail in his dictionary as well as in his recent book. Pavis, Patrice (1998) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2012) Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today, Oxon: Routledge.

MOVEMENT Movement is as intrinsic to performance and the theatre as it is to life. We recognize death by the absence of movement just as we identify performance as the movement of bodies in space through time – whether this passage is tortuously slow, as in butoh; aims at stillness, as in some of Tadashi Suzuki’s work; or is based on a familiar repertoire of daily gestures or means of locomotion, as in naturalist theatre. Whatever the stylistic end point, movement training or the aestheticized enactment of movements in performance requires discipline and rehearsal practice. It also necessitates more heightened attention than we give our body in everyday life. Our bodies are constantly in animation, be it through breathing, the circulation of blood, or the shifting of muscles as we negotiate the battle against gravity that a seemingly simple action like standing demands of us. We usually only pay attention to such movements if we are ill, injured or operating dysfunctionally for whatever reason, or if it is intrinsic to our vocation, as it is with sports. But performance frames and thus draws attention to movement. In performance, everyday functions need to be harnessed and exaggerated, repeated or isolated, coordinated or relaxed, in order for the body to engage with a different range and repertoire of movements than the habitual. One extreme is choreography in dance, where set movements are learned so that they can be precisely executed and become second nature. All directors, teachers and performers inevitably explore movement in their work, but some do so more deliberately than others. As a teacher of actors, Jacques Lecoq developed a systematic pedagogical structure and training exercises for evolving performances and character from movement. Konstantin Stanislavsky’s approach to character and physical actions looked less at movement per se but rather for the psychological motivation for movement, arguing that all movements have a psychophysical purpose. But none have explored the potential of movement more than dancers. Choreographer/director Pina Bausch has prioritized why we move rather than how. Rudolf von Laban also used movement in performance for aesthetic purposes, as do all dancers, but he carried this interest over into everyday life. He observed, analysed and systematically annotated movement, seeing it as a way of knowing people. Many artists (and especially modernist ones) involved in the field of movement-based performance believe, as did dancer Martha Graham, that ‘movement never lies’. They consider that it somehow shows us as we really are, an idea that postmodern theory has interrogated closely, arguing that ideas of reality, fixity and essence are highly questionable. 209

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Some performance forms operate within a taxonomy of a daily repertoire of movements, to explore social relations, performative identities and connections with everyday life, while others are more abstract, exploring weight, velocity, patterns and shape, for example, as much dance does. There is general consensus that the daily gestures and range of movements of naturalist theatre do not need equivalent preparation or training time as do the codified gestures and ways of moving of Asian performance or ballet. Whether this is true is debatable, but codified movement forms are often very extreme, like being on pointe in ballet. Some even demand reshaping the body – to enable a particular bow-legged stance or way of walking in Kathakali, for example. Yet through an emphasis on duration, even daily or social movements can be given new purpose and significance; for example, Ulay and Marina Abramović walked towards each other along the Great Wall of China, one from each end, to meet in the middle in The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall (1998). The movement might be everyday, but the spatial and temporal dynamics of the action make it extraordinary, a feature of much performance art. The spectator’s interest can be aroused as much by a demanding disciplined approach, which desocializes or reforms the body’s mechanisms, as by the reframing of seemingly mundane movements. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lecoq and Newlove each describe a particular approach to training. Fleshman includes introductory chapters on various aspects of movement systems, movement in therapy, and other applications, as well as covering practices worldwide. Goodridge focuses on rhythm in different cultures and across varying forms. Fleshman, Bob (ed.) (1986) Theatrical Movement: A Bibliographical Anthology, Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, Inc. Goodridge, Janet (1999) Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and Ceremony, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body, Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London: Methuen. —— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. and ed. David Bradby, London: Routledge. Newlove, Jean (1993) Laban for Actors and Dancers, London: Nick Hern Books.

MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE Broadly speaking, this is any performance that combines different media. While it can therefore describe theatre that incorporates dance and music, it more commonly specifies work that mixes live performance with machines and/or mediated forms, such as computer technology, television, video, film and slide projection. As in Antonin Artaud’s total theatre and in postmodern and postdramatic forms of 210

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visual theatre, multimedia performance aims to extend and enhance performance by exploring the full range of expressive media available. By juxtaposing the live and the mechanical or mediated, exploring questions analysed by Walter Benjamin even in the late 1930s, it also raises issues of liveness and presence and interrogates the aesthetic and social potentials of contemporary technology and media culture as well as live performance. Multimedia performance was pioneered by futurism’s incorporation of machines and films into performance and by Bertold Brecht’s important predecessor, director Erwin Piscator, who put staged fictions in the context of real historical events by using large-scale documentary film projections as scenographic backdrops for live performance. It has proliferated since the 1960s and the rise of performance and body art, both as technological equipment and expertise have become more pervasive, but more importantly as questions about the relationships and boundaries between humans, our identities, our bodies, media and technologies have become more pressing (for example, in the work of the Wooster Group). An early example is Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994), which presented a character who disappears into the private space of an on-stage photo booth whilst his fantasies are simultaneously broadcast in large-scale projection. Such theatrical devices question our changing relationships to time and space by placing the ‘there and then’ of recorded performance within the ‘here and now’ of live performance. They also explore the technology of the body itself, often in relation to our highly medicalized culture and sophisticated computer and audio technologies. Artists such as Orlan, Stelarc and Laurie Anderson question where, how and by whom our identities, bodies, voices and realities are performatively produced in a technologically developed culture. By presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously, multimedia performance also examines how electronic surveillance is increasingly infiltrating our lives and our privacy. Internationally-renowned British company Blast Theory have investigated such issues in their extensive and often quite controversial multimedia work. Performance at the interface of the live and the mediated is expanding, moving on from virtual theatre, internet performance and cyber-performance, where artists like Stelarc become part man and part computer, and can be controlled by a near or remote audience. Such performance not only draws the performer increasingly into cyberspace; it leads the audience there too, often immersing it in a parallel, or at least proximal, digital world. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander’s volume includes important articles on media and technology. Giannachi introduces key issues in, and practitioners of, different forms of virtual theatre as well as other aspects of performance in relation to technology. Klich and Scheer provide a thorough overview of multimedia performance. Auslander, Philip (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, London: Routledge. 211

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Giannachi, Gabriella (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, London: Routledge. —— (2007) The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life TM, Oxon: Routledge. Klich, Rosemary and Edward Scheer (2012) Multimedia Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

MUSEUM DISPLAY Museum display has attracted the interest of performance studies scholars because it forces engagement with important issues about representing cultures and identities and the social production of meaning in time and space. Like other contexts of performance, museums are spaces in which audiences encounter and engage with selected and displayed objects and sometimes also sounds, moving images, multimedia installations, performers, and so on. As in other forms of performance, museum display aims to achieve a variety of effects, from instructing its audiences, to persuading them to a particular point of view, to producing a strong aesthetic effect, even one of charismatic presence. Influential performance studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums are fundamentally performative, creating and repeating their own practices, their contents, the behaviour of audiences and ultimately the identities of audiences. Following the influence of historiographers and postmodern theorists in the late twentieth century, museums have increasingly been recognized as contexts where knowledge is not objectively presented but is subjectively made. This recognition has provoked analysis of how museums produce meanings through processes of selection, omission, display and (re)contextualization. Despite their common best intentions to preserve and instruct, museums risk succumbing to familiar limitations of intercultural practice, potentially appropriating, decontextualizing and disrespecting the source cultures they represent. Performance artists and writers Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco make this point in their ‘living dioramas’, which challenge conventional, patronizing practices of ethnographic display. The point is also increasingly made by museums themselves, as they acknowledge the impossibility of achieving either comprehensive representation or complete objectivity and try to invoke broader contexts for understanding selected display materials. As discussed in the entry on Holocaust memorials and museums, architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, for example, demonstrates its subjective selectivity by focusing on a clearly limited choice of material that often relates to particular individuals’ stories. The museum nevertheless aims to put these stories into a larger context beyond its own physical and temporal limits; it is marked externally with lines that, if extrapolated, ‘join’ the museum to important sites in Berlin’s Jewish history. In a bid to explicitly share their subjective creation of meanings with their audiences, many museums have developed interactive multimedia installations. As with other experiments with audience interaction, however, it is worth asking whether the control these innovations seem to cede to their audiences is actually more apparent than real. Museum practices of curatorship and display raise issues that are important well beyond the museum – in theatre programming; tourist attractions like Shakespeare’s 212

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Globe in London; heritage sites; and historical recreations, perhaps especially those which incorporate performers, as at Plymouth Plantation in the USA. Like sitespecific performance, heritage sites invoke the site constructively as a memory trigger for events that happened there; more problematically, they suggest that the sites’ meanings transcend both time and change. A performance studies concept that might usefully challenge and develop museum practices is that of liveness, since it acknowledges the evanescence of the live event and raises fundamental issues about how to represent that event for future consideration. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett’s book summarizes key debates and discusses a range of vivid examples of theatricalized museums. Coming out of the field of museum studies, Karp and Lavine’s book gathers excellent essays, which engage in detail with specific exhibitions and address a wide range of issues. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is one of the most influential analysts of museums within performance studies. Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre & Museums, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine (eds) (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Berkeley: University of California Press.

MUSIC, THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE As Philip Auslander has pointed out, many theatre and performance academics have all but ignored music. This may be because of the commercial or conservative nature of many musicals and opera, which as a body of practice are not known for their radical form or content, and thus perhaps do not accord with the political or artistic interests of many scholars. Equally it may be that musical performance’s focus on rhythm, sound, tone, pitch and voice requires expertise other than that demanded by the text–meaning–interpretation axis of conventional studies of the theatre. But music is a part of performance and the links between the disciplines are extensive, as even this fleeting survey suggests. We do not want to further perpetuate the omission Auslander has identified, but are concerned here not so much with music for its own sake but with how music relates to our specific focus on theatre and live performance. Spectacular events accompanied musical concerts played in European courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the nineteenth century saw more considered theatrical experiments in musical performance in the West. Richard Wagner’s idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk advocated a total theatre in which music was one of several indispensable strands. Melodrama was a popular theatre form in which all action was underscored and accompanied by music, often to heighten feeling or support the stylistic exaggeration. More recent music/performance 213

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interactions include the avant-garde experimentation of John Cage and Harrison Birtwhistle, with pieces like the latter’s ‘punk’ opera Punch and Judy (1967). In some ways these have been no less influential than global commercial successes and megamusicals like Miss Saigon (1989), even if their audiences have been considerably smaller. Music can be, and has been, used for various ends in live performance: to expose characters’ feelings; to create mood or a setting; or to comment through songs on plot, as in Bertold Brecht’s work. These are just some applications. Some of the world’s foremost directors have repeatedly returned to the potential of musical performance. Robert Wilson has collaborated frequently with singersongwriter Tom Waits, Peter Brook has directed many operas, and Peter Sellars has presented several experimental operas based on real political events in a postmodern vein. As well as pointing to the precision demanded of his actors, Jerzy Grotowski’s use of the term ‘score’ shows the proximity between the fields, a gap which narrows further when a performance is based on movement and song as much as text, as in his own work. The idea of a score also reiterates the point that it is the playing or acting that makes a performance rather than the structure or content alone – just as notes written on paper do not make a piece of music. Unlike the theatre, music travels easily, does not depend on live performance, and has therefore easily absorbed intercultural influences. Most traditional African and Asian performance forms are based on dance and are thus rooted in music and rhythm, the participants being performers rather than actors in the mimetic Aristotelian sense. They utilize stylized modes of representation that lie outside the familiar tropes of realism, an approach that has influenced artists like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Eugenio Barba. Music’s prolific cross-cultural hybridization has helped shape Western theatre. Music is also infinitely reproducible, operating in a realm of commercial possibilities of which live performance can only dream, and eschewing the difficulties of documentation and longevity which trouble the theatre and dance. But, whatever the scale of its appeal, live theatre-related music suffers from charges of narrow elitism, especially in relation to opera and classical works. The accusations against producers of opera have been slightly allayed by the popularization of the form through productions like Britain’s National Theatre’s Jerry Springer the Opera (2003), based on the TV chat show host. The tide might be turning, with rapid advances in digital technology opening up potential for further interaction between acoustic and musical technologies and the sort of conceptual investigations that have sustained much performance art, from Cage and happenings onwards, up to Laurie Anderson. This may help bring music and theatre closer together for mixed audiences, integrating the popular and the traditional with the sophisticated and the innovative. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander has been a persuasive and almost isolated proponent, arguing for the inclusion of more music within performance analysis, as his book and his article in 214

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Little’s diverse collection demonstrates. Frith writes from a cultural studies perspective but has a clear grasp of music as performance. Theaterschrift brings together interviews and reflections in English, German, Flemish and French whilst Rebstock and Roesner have collated a diverse range of essays about all aspects of music and performance. Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Frith, Simon (1998) Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Little, Henry (consultant ed.) (2004) ‘Adventures in Music Theatre’, a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, 14.1, London: Routledge. Rebstock, Matthias and David Roesner (eds) (2012) Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, Bristol: Intellect. Van Kerkhoven, Marianne (ed.) (1995) ‘Theatre and Music’, a special issue of Theaterschrift, 9, Brussels: Kaaitheater.

NATURALISM AND REALISM Naturalism and realism are aesthetic and literary categories, but in the theatre they refer specifically to artistic movements that represent real life on stage, using what now seem the overly familiar devices of believable characters, narrative action and plot. The two terms can be used with reference to most art forms, but in the theatre they are almost interchangeable, with only nuances of difference between them. Some theorists suggest that naturalism pays more attention than realism to social environment as an influence on character, and that realism tends to proffer a more critical and less imitative or illusionistic aesthetic, but these distinctions are too subtle and contentious to be of much use today and it is difficult to achieve consensus on this subject. What is important is that realism and naturalism are both founded on the premise that art should hold up a mirror to nature, a once revolutionary concept. This demands a mimetic mode of representation, drawing in part on the logic of narrative structures and staging implied by Aristotle’s unities of time, space and action. Whatever the word hints at etymologically, naturalism in the theatre has nothing directly to do with the ‘natural’, just as realism only implies the real through its manipulated reconstruction or reproduction. These genres are highly artificial conventions. Their well-established techniques and processes enable the suspension of belief that they ask of audiences, and create the imitation that is at their heart. Interestingly, naturalist theatre was initially a response to the even more artificial and exaggerated devices of melodrama and other ‘pictorial’ styles that dominated the theatre up to the middle part of the nineteenth century. As such, it was an innovative avant-garde form that challenged the aesthetic status quo. Developments in the theatre followed the lead of fiction and novels by writers including Emile Zola. Zola was one of the key early proponents of naturalism, as 215

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demonstrated by his 1867 novel and eponymous play Thérèse Raquin (1873), and his 1881 manifesto advocating naturalism in the theatre. Although Thérèse Raquin has naturalist elements, it reveals an immature genre in development, leaning as it does frequently towards melodrama. Naturalism in the theatre took hold more firmly in the late 1880s and 1890s, cultivated by André Antoine of the Théâtre Libre, the first naturalist director of note, and groups like the Meiningen Company (from the south of Germany). It was then fostered by Konstantin Stanislavsky whose system for actors and detailed directorial vision are almost considered templates for the creation of naturalist theatre. One of the priorities of naturalist artists and writers was to expose on stage the minutiae of social life, depicting families in real contemporary situations, as in Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard (1904). Naturalism and realism were informed by Karl Marx’s political theories, scientific advances and growing interest in classification, medical progress and increased knowledge about diseases and the body, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (first published in 1859). Darwin’s evolutionary theory inspired naturalism’s constructions of socially determined beings located in and reacting to specific environments, like Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). His Ghosts (1881) introduced the issue of genetics that was coming to the fore in fervent debates about the environment and heredity. Under such influences, theatre moved on from melodrama and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Naturalism and realism heralded modern drama and all the artistic, social, cultural and scientific innovations that followed in the twentieth century and beyond. However revolutionary it was in the beginning, naturalism’s subsequent mainstream positioning has fuelled many counteractive revolts and experiments, from Dada through Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre to performance art. These have all questioned the social function of art and its forms by focusing on the presentational aesthetics of performance and its processes, as opposed to the supposedly realist representation of everyday life. It has repeatedly been argued that representation through naturalist aesthetics reinforces rather than challenges the status quo, and is therefore considered politically (as well as artistically) ideologically conservative. But naturalism and its history are complex and cannot be set against more experimental forms in an easy oppositional binary. The work of playwrights with explicit or implicit political or social messages – ranging from the ‘kitchen-sink’ drama of postSecond World War Britain, through Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams’ writings, to the plays of David Hare – contests such a view. One question that refuses to go away is whether the role of naturalism in the theatre has been superseded by television and film, which can replicate reality so precisely. Yet, however much it might be considered the rather tired or conservative norm today, and in spite of such doubts about its current function or value, naturalism has shown extraordinary resilience, popularity and longevity. It still remains the dominant theatre form in the Western world today, be it in political verbatim theatre or commercial West End productions of Chekhov or Ibsen.

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Innes offers an introduction to naturalism, with a focus on and extracts from works by Ibsen, Chekhov and Bernard Shaw as well as Zola’s manifesto. Styan takes a longer view of naturalist/realist playwrighting throughout the twentieth century. Williams’ text is influential for its contextualization of naturalist theatre as an experimental form. Diamond analyses mimesis and realism from a feminist perspective. Pickering and Thompson have written a much-needed overview which considers naturalism’s historical development. Diamond, Elin (1997) Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, London: Routledge. Innes, Christopher (ed.) (2000) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London: Routledge. Pickering, Kenneth and Jayne Thompson (2013) Naturalism in Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Styan, J. L. (1981) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol.1, Realism and Naturalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond (1989) ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in The Politics of Modernism, London: Verso.

PARATHEATRE Para, from the Ancient Greek, means ‘beyond’. In practice, paratheatre therefore lies outside and beyond the spatial, temporal and structural forms of the theatre, denoting instead related practices such as workshops, rituals, training programmes, drama therapy or even Augusto Boal’s ‘invisible theatre’ with its unwitting spectatorship. Jerzy Grotowski, in relation to whose practice the term is frequently applied, conducted his paratheatrical work in the 1970s, after and beyond his successes in theatre. He removed the spectator from the performance equation to encourage wider participation in what was termed ‘active culture’, centred on the non-professional performer as maker in a series of workshop-type activities rather than as passive recipient of events made for them. With no paying spectators, paratheatre operates according to very different economic criteria from aesthetic performance, although it can be commercially lucrative as business training or personal development programmes prove. Paratheatrical activities often draw on skills, techniques, strategies and even personnel that are deployed in the theatre. As in much paratheatre, Grotowski focused on the participant actor rather than the spectator, if indeed there is one. This emphasis can be seen in dramatherapy sessions, acting workshops and business team-building courses. In these contexts, ‘performance’ is not integral or an immediate corollary to the process, even if it may be the future longer-term aim or the motivation behind these practices. The participants are aware of being observed, judged, led or coached, but the role of observer is inside the process rather than the familiar more passive role of the external theatre spectator.

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Paratheatre also refers to non-theatrical processes or activities that might be construed as theatre or defined as performance. The way of framing an event might draw it within the parameters of what can be considered theatre, as Banes’ book on subversive art demonstrates. ‘Paratheatre’ is a fluid term that encompasses many aspects of performance beyond the familiar spectator–actor binary. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Literature related to paratheatre is extensive even if it does not use this specific term. It ranges from self-help books to theoretical texts that explore performance outside artistic frames, as in McKenzie’s challenging theoretical exposition. Banes’ collection of performance reviews scarcely defines paratheatre, but the term allows her to include ‘cat’ shows and the Japanese tea ceremony. Banes, Sally (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976–85, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge.

PERFORMANCE/PERFORMING ‘Performance’ has at least five relevant meanings in this context, indicating its importance but also its semantic instability and dynamism. First, it is used to identify the live event of presenting something usually pre-prepared before an audience. This can be the presentation of any performing art, including theatre, music, dance, circus or martial arts skills, happenings, improvised performance, and so on. Important features of this definition are the performance’s liveness and usually an expectation that the performer will produce a sense of presence. This use of the term can also denote a particular performer’s execution of a piece of music or a role, such as Ellen Terry’s performance of Ophelia. Secondly, and more broadly, performance describes all social behaviour including, as Erving Goffman argued, everyday behaviour. This understanding gained currency in the mid to late twentieth century as scholars from philosophy to anthropology and sociology identified in social behaviour and ritual the repetitive or restored behaviour that Richard Schechner saw as essential to performance. For scholars in other disciplines, including Judith Butler in feminist philosophy, this association of behaviour with performance helped to pioneer a theory of behaviour as performative and constitutive of identity. It thus helped to theorize a political response to oppression by enabling the argument that interruptions and variations in repeated behaviours could help to transform that oppression. Initially, this widespread theoretical use of the term ‘performance’ from the 1980s on made little direct reference to theatre or performance studies, seeming to deploy ‘performance’ more as a metaphor than a term with its own disciplinary genealogy, tools of critical thinking, or practices (as discussed by States). This decontextualized application of 218

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the word partly inspired performance studies’ development as a discipline by challenging it to demonstrate how it could help to enhance understandings of performance’s practices and effects through its own conception of the relationships between activities and audiences, space and time, process and product, activity and effect, and so on. A third and growing use of the term denotes success or achievement, as we might talk of sexual performance, or the performance of a car, a company, the global economy, or a sports or Olympic athlete. While this particular deployment of the term might seem to have little direct relevance to performance in the context of this Companion, it is important to consider how its expansion and impact on ideas of power and knowledge might relate to other deployments, as Jon McKenzie does in his influential book Perform or Else. For example, this use shifts focus from the process of performance to the outcome or product, making not only a semantic shift but also an ideological one, for example, towards the values of capitalism. Fourth, performance often is and has been used as a synonym for performance art and body art, coming out of a history of fine art practices. These forms of performance achieved prominence in the 1980s and have often exploited the liveness, presence and embodiment associated with the first use of the term to advocate for the rights of particular identity groups, such as women or lesbians and gay men. While performance art is sometimes deconstructive, it can also intentionally reinforce ideas of coherent identity, narrative and representation in order to make political claims for the identities it represents. This sets it somewhat apart from the fifth and final form of performance to be discussed here, the form of deconstructive performance distinguished primarily by its distinction from acting in theatre. Where most acting aims to achieve mimetic representation, this form of performance is usually at least partly presentational, working to challenge naturalistic characterization and narration in order to question the apparent truths ‘shown’ by representational forms. This mode of performance has a long history, for example in avant-garde practices like Dada, futurism, expressionism and Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre. But it has been developed most extensively in postmodern performance, where the will to challenge the assumptions of received representational forms has produced a host of deconstructive and metatheatrical performance strategies that foreground process over product, interrogate theatrical illusionism and resist offering stable, conclusive meanings. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlson’s study of performance’s recent meanings and practices is informative and comprehensive. The other suggested sources each concentrate on one or two of the above definitions. Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. 219

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Kershaw, Baz (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge. McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge. States, Bert O. (1996) ‘Performance as Metaphor’, Theatre Journal 48.1: 1–26. Reprinted in Philip Auslander (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, London: Routledge, pp. 108–37.

PERFORMANCE ART/LIVE ART Performance art (often called live art, especially in the UK) is a live artistic practice that evolved chiefly out of fine art – as differentiated from theatre. It developed as artists sought to extend art beyond the conventional media and practices of painting and sculpture. Much performance art was (and is) explicitly politically motivated, aiming to challenge dominant values and practices and to respond to social crises. Thus, though its roots reach back to performance in the 1910s, including Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire, it came of age in the era of second wave feminism, Vietnam protests and happenings in the 1960s and 1970s, continued throughout the 1980s during the right-wing leaderships of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher and the rise of AIDS, and continues still. Performance art is difficult to define because it potentially combines so many media – including performance, text, music, dance, architecture, sculpture, video, film and multimedia – but also because it often aims to challenge categorization, exploring the expressive possibilities of combining diverse elements to produce new hybrids. Performance art’s initial rejection of traditional painting and sculpture reflected a widespread feeling in Western art practice from the 1950s onwards that these forms were limited by the piety and burden of their fine art histories. Performance art rejected their focus on representation, exploring the more direct possibilities of presentation. It displaced a conventional emphasis on the commodified art object, concentrating instead on the transient artistic process. Performance art shifted the emphasis from the object to the event, simultaneously refocusing on the artist as creator, the relationship of art to everyday life, the ephemeral event as art, and the very difficulty of documenting (or rendering as commodified object) artistic practice. This focus on the artist meant that much performance art was and is concerned with identity and is frequently performed solo or by pairs rather than groups. Laurie Anderson, Bobby Baker, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, and many others, have performed autobiographical monologues, exploring issues of memory, the social construction of the subject through everyday life activities, and – especially for feminist artists – women’s limited access to the public sphere and the right to speak in it. Partly through the influence of 1970s improvisational dance techniques that used everyday movement, performance art also presents and selfconsciously frames everyday actions. Thus, it recuperates activities often seen as banal, valuing them instead as worthy of artistic exploration and crucially performative, in the sense that their very repetitiveness contributes to identity formation (see Judith Butler). Such everyday activities include cleaning, as in Marina Abramović’s 220

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Balkan Baroque (1997); food preparation, as in Bobby Baker’s Kitchen Show (1991); and masturbation, as in Vito Acconci’s infamous Seedbed (1971), where he reportedly masturbated under a ramp built into the gallery floor while visitors walked above him, unable to see him (Marina Abramović re-performed this work in Seven Easy Pieces in 2005). Like its close relation body art, much performance art also deliberately explores the materiality of the performer’s body as an artistic medium – its physical limitations, fluids and social significations (see, for example, the work of Ron Athey). Performance art’s interest in the liveness and ephemerality of the performance event indicates its broader interest in time. This is reflected in its more common British name, ‘live art’, and also in the names ‘durational art’ and ‘time-based art’. As part of a widespread postmodern refusal of dominant representational conventions including ‘grand narratives’, performance art often rejects conventional linear narrative, using rules of duration instead to produce new patterns of sequencing and structure. Joseph Beuys spent a week with a coyote in a New York gallery in Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Linda Montana and Tehching Hsieh tied themselves together with a 2.5m rope in New York for a year in Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–84. Such work draws attention to time partly to show the making – or processes – of art, even when the activity of making is precisely not very physically active or creative, according to conventional criteria. In Ulay and Abramović’s Night Sea Crossing (1981), the artists sat and stared at each other over a table daily for up to twelve hours at a time, making an emotional crossing if not a physical one. Such durational work also draws attention to the effects of endurance, such as exhaustion and euphoria; the ironic ephemerality of the event – even if the event is a year long, ultimately, it will endure only in images and memories, which Peggy Phelan has discussed; and the resulting resistance to commodification of this artwork in an era that is witnessing the ongoing rise of consumer culture. Running parallel to performance art’s concern with time is an interest in space, which it shares with installation art. Artists including Baker and Anderson have performed their site-specific work in such everyday spaces as homes and streets, again framing and drawing attention to conventional ideas of how to behave in these contexts. Performance art is often ridiculed by popular culture as self-indulgent, esoteric, or even downright ridiculous, potentially compromising its counter-cultural ambitions but also indicating important questions about its possible elitism, solipsism and emphasis on individual over community. Despite this criticism, artists continue to use performance art’s hybrid possibilities and its fundamental concern with identity to explore ‘othered’ identities such as queer identity. They also continue to hybridize its forms, increasingly by introducing techniques from multimedia and visual theatre. An innovation of the twentieth century, performance art continues in the twenty-first century not least because it is effective in responding to political issues – especially those that deal with identity and commodity culture. Beyond simply continuing, it may even be thriving, thanks in part to the popular cultural profile of Abramović and efforts made by her and others to secure live art’s institutional present and future, for

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example, in the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) and through London’s Live Art Development Agency. BIBLIOGRAPHY

See also the entry on performance. Stiles et al, Goldberg’s two books and Phelan’s book provide histories of the form as well as excellent photographic illustrations. Banes and Carr collate their New York newspaper criticism on performance art. Shank describes many American examples. Carlson places performance art in a more developed critical and historical framework. Johnson’s edited collection gathers together a range of interesting articles. RPA Banes, Sally (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York 1976–85, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carlson, Marvin (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Carr, C. (1993) On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Goldberg, RoseLee (1998) Performance: Live Art since the 60s, London: Thames and Hudson. —— (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and expanded edition, London: Thames and Hudson. Johnson, Dominic (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, foreword by Carolee Schneemann, London and New York: Routledge. Live Art Development Agency. Online. Available www.thisisliveart.co.uk/ (accessed 14 October 2013). Phelan, Peggy (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983, New York: Routledge. Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stiles, Kristine, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichire Osaki and Paul Schimmel (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, London: Thames and Hudson.

PERFORMATIVE/PERFORMATIVITY ‘Performative’ (as both noun and adjective) and ‘performativity’ have become key terms in performance studies, even though they are often used rather generally (like the term ‘theatricality’) to include anything that has a theatrical or performance-like quality. As an adjective, ‘performative’ was coined by John Austin, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, in his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Austin argued that words are not just for naming or describing things but can also do things, effecting change. Utterances, or ‘speech acts’ as he called them, can be performative and causal, pronounced in order to make something happen, as in the two simple but powerful words ‘I do’ at a wedding. This focus on action is what links the idea to performance, a connection that was promulgated by performance studies departments like that at Northwestern University in 222

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Chicago, Illinois, which emerged partly from the field of communication studies. In the theatre, words are carefully and intentionally selected either by an author or by the devising performer, to develop a character or plot, to evoke a feeling or to indicate something to an audience. Their causal effect is thus more manifest than words spoken in a daily context. Focus on the performative within performance has developed Austin’s initial theoretical treatise to consider in detail how, as well as why, words are actively stated or brought alive through their utterance. Discussions responding to Austin and attempting to define performativity multiplied with the rise of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking in the 1970s, spurred on by questions about how reality and actions are constructed. In the 1980s, Judith Butler developed Austin’s theories to suggest that identities are performed, that they are not necessarily biologically predetermined but are constructed through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’. If this is so and identity is not something that is fixed, hegemonic understandings of identity (gender, sex, sexuality, etc.) can then be undermined through variations and disturbances in these. Butler argued that, if performance is constructed through its iteration (in rehearsals and through repeated showings) then the same can be applied to behaviour. The performative as both a practice and an idea therefore has a radical potential, as Orlan and Ron Athey’s performances have forcibly demonstrated. The term ‘performative’ has been co-opted by a range of disciplines, from philosophy (where it began), through sociology, to theatre and performance studies. Its nuances vary greatly according to the context in which it is used. Debates about performativity rage on, as they do with its sister ‘theatricality’, a term equally open to interpretation and misunderstanding, as Davis and Postlewait have suggested in their tracing of that term’s lineage and complexities. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin’s book reads in an informal oral style, as it comprises posthumously annotated lectures. Butler’s range of texts develops her views on the performative nature of gender, whereas the Parker and Sedgwick collection (which includes another text by Butler) focuses on catharsis in the theatre but also performativity in non-theatrical contexts. Austin, John L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, London: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith (1990) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Davis, Tracy C. and Thomas Postlewait (eds) (2003) Theatricality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds) (1995) Performativity and Performance, London: Routledge.

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PHENOMENOLOGY As enquiries into what consciousness is and how it is constructed have become dominant in the sciences, phenomenology, with its emphasis on the experience of the spectator and the performer, has attracted growing interest as a philosophical framework for analysing performance. It challenges semiotics and other meaningbased systems of performance analysis, whose attempts to rationalize and explain communication in the theatre purely as a system of codes have proved limiting. Phenomenology emphasizes the role of the senses in reception, prioritizing sensations, feelings and other emotional phenomena and consequently valuing descriptive modes. It implies a form of enquiry that penetrates the specific and local context, what Clifford Geertz has called ‘thick description’ in relation to anthropological observations. Such evaluation centres on the perspective of the person perceiving and their physical presence within the work being observed. The very active responsiveness that this implies is diametrically opposed to the idea of cool, objective analysis. Phenomenology also resists the segmentation that is intrinsic to semiotic analysis. Consideration of units of meaning is replaced by an emphasis on the total embodied experience and flow. As activities in dance and physical theatre have expanded, so has phenomenology gained ground, often operating in conjunction with theories that place performance work in a wider sociological or cultural context, balancing the personal response with a more social or public framework. Phenomenology has also been useful for studies of the work of the performer and process-based accounts where personal and individual development take priority over the encounter or interaction with an audience, which are usually founded on reception theories. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the main exponents of phenomenology as a philosophical theory, has had a central influence on performance analysis because of his interest in the body. Merleau-Ponty developed the earlier ideas of Martin Heidegger and phenomenology’s founder, Edmund Husserl, and notably challenged Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentially-based theories. Merleau-Ponty considered these theories to be predicated on a problematic Cartesian dualism that separated mind and body. Much of the pioneering work in applying phenomenological approaches to performance that drew on Merleau-Ponty’s groundbreaking writings has originated in dance studies. Proxemics, kinaesthetics and sound, aspects of performance to which Antonin Artaud paid special attention and which resist the closure or fixity that a more semiotic approach might produce, are primary focuses for phenomenological analysis. In the theatre, Bert States’ writing and Stanton B. Garner’s work on Beckett have been influential, for Beckett’s plays, like dance, rely as much on movement, rhythm and space as they do on text. Judith Butler has extended such considerations of performance into her work on gender, where she has argued that identities and even gender are constructed and performed rather than being predetermined or given. Although critics have decried phenomenology for being essentialist and individualized, or too detached from political, cultural or social mechanisms, there is no doubting its important place within a range of potential theoretical systems for the analysis of performance and performance processes. 224

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Merleau-Ponty’s book and other philosophical texts are significant primary sources but are inevitably dense. Much insight into this difficult area can be gained by reading their theories through examples of performance in the more directly relevant books of Garner, States and Sheets-Johnstone, for example. RPA Garner, Stanton B. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice ([1945] 1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (1966) The Phenomenology of Dance, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. States, Bert O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

PHYSICAL THEATRE Physical theatre is a much used but problematic term with an uncertain history. Even whilst it seems to include so many types of practice across countries and periods, it is nevertheless culturally specific and located, most probably originating in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Broadly, it denotes performances that do not begin with a pre-written playtext but which instead evolve from adapting a story or other non-dramatic text, from improvisation and devising, from movement and dance, or from a starting point which is visual, thematic or crosses disciplinary boundaries, such as Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre. What is evident in all these modes is that material and physical aspects, such as the body, the scenography or elements like objects and puppetry are foregrounded rather than a structured prewritten text. Physical theatre therefore often requires careful dramaturgical structuring and usually demonstrates, following growing interest in physical approaches to actor training, technical mastery by the performer. Although the term is still mainly used in the UK, it now covers a wide range of forms such as circus and mime and has inevitably gained international currency. Interest in intercultural practices and theories has further promulgated its development and it has been especially influenced by Asian performance forms like butoh, many of which are dance-based and foreground a virtuosic body. Historically, physical theatre started to be used as a means to define specific theatre and performance practices in Britain in the late 1970s and more firmly established itself in the 1980s, linked to companies like Complicite and DV8, whose 1988 dance piece Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men came to epitomize the genre. As the form became popular, so it multiplied and spread to other English-language countries like the USA and Australia, and to some parts of Europe with Eurocrash dance, for example, and the spectacular often outdoor or environmental work of companies such as the Catalan group La Fura dels Baus. Several scholars have since applied the 225

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term retrospectively to encompass the work of Antonin Artaud, Vsevelod Meyerhold, and Jerzy Grotowski, for example, even though they of course never considered themselves physical theatre practitioners and would barely recognize the concept, seeing themselves rather as makers and directors of theatre, pure and simple. A categorization like physical theatre needs to be used and treated with caution and circumspection, especially when applied across time and cultures. The term is partly problematic because it is tautological, given that all theatre is, of course, physical. Whilst this is a truism, it does raise interesting questions – perhaps especially in countries outside Britain where theatre is frequently predicated as much on physical or visual concepts and starting points as textual ones, or where approaches to playtexts tend to be dominated by auteur directors like Robert Wilson or the late Tadeusz Kantor, to name just two examples. Debates in the UK circle around whether the term is useful, whether it should be more precisely located in a particular historical moment rather than still being current, and how much geographical reach it has. Two of the main books on this subject by Keefe and Murray try to address such issues by using the phrase ‘physical theatres’, plural, rather than the singular term, and by focusing on the physical in theatre. Such terminological slippage leaves the genre of physical theatre a wide open field. Consensus about what physical theatre is seems a distant prospect. Such vagary might not matter so much for artists, where positioning as a physical theatre troupe might have efficacy for attracting funding or audiences and where ‘physical theatre techniques’ are widely referenced; but it is an issue for academics who work or conduct research in this area and who are seeking greater terminological clarity. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callery’s and Keefe and Murray’s books broadly cover the term and its field of practice, with Keefe and Murray’s simultaneously published texts offering both a reader as well as a more analytical survey, the critical introduction. Callery’s longestablished book also includes practical exercises and games. There are of course many more books about and by single practitioners and companies working in this area and their approach to physical actor training, such as the Frantic Assembly one included here. Callery, Dymphna (2001) Through the Body: a Practical Guide to Physical Theatre, London: Nick Hern. Graham, Scott and Steven Hoggett (2009) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre, London: Routledge. Keefe, John and Simon Murray (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. —— (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.

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PLAY Play is a huge area for investigation and an activity that touches on folklore, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and ethnology, as well as being central to theatre and performance in general. It is also something that is practised by cultures and societies globally, even if each of them describes it differently. Play is ubiquitous – we all play – yet it is hard to pin down what we are doing when we do it, let alone to discover why we do it. Analyses of play have ranged from British psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott’s case studies of child behaviour to the broader influential work of French sociologist Roger Caillois and Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. These last two have been central in assessing what play is from the perspective of their own disciplines. Attempts by Caillois and others to systematize and categorize types of play have been interesting, but ultimately they merely reinforce how both fluidity and an absence of boundaries are endemic to play and games. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi referred to such a capacity – the state of being inside an experience and of losing oneself in it – as ‘flow’, with the recognition that this mode is somehow outside the daily weft of life or, as Victor Turner put it, ‘subjunctive’. As such, through proposing the question ‘What if?’, play has the power to subvert or undermine authority through parody, critique or mere laughter, as indicated in studies of clowning and carnival, and as evidenced by the appearance of the trickster figure in many cultures, as in Augusto Boal’s joker, to name one specific theatre-related example. It is naive, though, to believe that games are not serious, as Clifford Geertz has shown in his analysis of ‘deep play’, which emphasizes the potential risks and serious consequences of playing. Play easily crosses over from being a discrete and safe activity to one that is consequential – the phrase ‘We were only pretending’ has been uttered countless times by children to cover up a more serious transgression when play has got out of hand. Play transports its participants, altering biological patterns and mental states, speeding up the heartbeat, making participants alert and sending adrenalin coursing through the veins. Within performance studies, Richard Schechner has been central in analysing the role of play in performance or play as performance, addressing the vexed question of what the function of play might be. His enquiry is inevitably limited and he openly admits that any analysis of play postulates more questions than it can answer. His work draws on myriad theories and a vast range of exemplars, from sports to children’s games, through the theatre’s formal structures, to animal behaviour, all of which fall within play’s auspices. Animal play is striking for its similarity to human games, which suggests a biologically-driven need for play. This can be set against the idea that play has evolved as a cultural form, part of civilizing progress linked to aesthetic expression. Certainly, both aspects pertain to play, though to what extent depends on the form the playing adopts. Rugby, for example, is animalistically territorial and violent, yet (as the haka and rugby’s rules and tactical skills all demonstrate) it is also sophisticated, formal and aesthetically pleasing to watch. Such complex possibilities arise because playing is a fundamental human activity and as 227

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such varies from individual to individual and across cultures in its form, function and articulation. It spans an individual’s trivial inconsequential prank or joke to part of a community’s calendrical ritual, the practice of which is deemed vital in order for plants to grow. It is thus culturally specific and yet also enacted by animals, and so eludes easy definitions. The other difficulty with defining what play is, as some theorists like Erving Goffman have argued, is that we continually play by adopting roles in our everyday lives according to differing social situations and their needs or assumed hierarchies. We improvise continually in our interactions. Postmodern thinking has extended this idea that there is no such thing as a stable or fixed identity, for if even gender is a construct, as Judith Butler has suggested, then playing with representations of who we are is central to our being. The kind of play practised in performance forms like the theatre, to which Peter Brook alluded when he wrote in The Empty Space (1968) that ‘a play is play’, has much clearer parameters. In such play or plays a specific space for the event is chosen and there is mutual agreement between all participants about the rules of the game. If naturalist in style, this depends on imitation and an accepted lie, recognizing that the character should somehow mask the actor, though both co-exist simultaneously and cross-refer. In devised work, the role of play is more experimental and encourages risk-taking, not just for the performers. The devising process might extend into a show, so that the spectator is unaware of what is scripted and what is improvised, reinforcing the sense of liveness in performance. Playing reveals and hides, it separates and integrates. It is the sheer complexity and range of such multiple understandings and practices of play that makes the term fascinating yet all but meaningless unless precisely contextualized. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schechner has written extensively on play and performance. Other key texts more generally on play are listed below, a tiny selection of the vast amount of material available. Caillois, Roger (1979) Man, Play and Games, New York: Shocken Books. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Huizinga, Johan (1970) Homo Ludens, New York: Harper. Schechner, Richard ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge. —— ([2002] 2013) ‘Play’, in Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge, pp. 89–122. Winnicott, Donald Woods (1982) Playing and Reality, London: Routledge.

POPULAR THEATRE Popular theatre is a broad category for defining performance whose forms range across melodrama, street theatre, circus, vaudeville, clowning, mime and musicals. 228

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Historically and culturally, it encompasses ancient Greek theatre in the West and Kabuki and Kathakali in Asian performance, as well as many types of contemporary and twentieth-century performance practices. It immediately becomes evident that the term means little if separated from the ideologies that inform it, the forms in which it is manifest and the context in which it happens. What is popular in Britain might not be so in Augusto Boal’s Brazil. Beyond cultural specificity, though, there have recently been a number of productions that have mass popular appeal worldwide, like the commercial circus work of Cirque du Soleil, the Abba tribute musical Mamma Mia (1999), which has been presented in at least eighty countries, or the megamusical Cats (1981), which played in London for twenty-one years. These examples point to the need to make a distinction (even if this formula is not rigid and the gap is sometimes bridged) between popular commercial theatre and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, popular theatre that has an overt political agenda. Outside commercial contexts, popular theatre refers more frequently to a politically- and socially-engaged approach to making theatre, as Bertold Brecht, Boal or Vsevolod Meyerhold practised, that aimed to bring working-class audiences into theatres or take the theatre out to them. At its most extreme, this impulse materializes as demonstrations, like the street performances of America’s Bread and Puppet Theatre. Popular theatres often share similar priorities. They want to be accessible and cheap to make and participate in. They are often large-scale and rough-and-ready in their format, use vernacular materials or sources, and provide entertainment as much as education or instruction. Popular theatre also draws readily on structures like carnival, sports, happenings and the circus, and familiar forms like puppetry or masks to broaden its appeal and encourage access. Throughout twentieth and twentyfirst century theatre history, numerous artists and directors have consciously modelled their work on older popular theatre models in order to increase and broaden the currency and impact of their own practices. Peter Brook favours the immediate and rough Elizabethan theatre, whereas Jacques Copeau toured French villages with models based on Greek theatre and commedia dell’arte. Inevitably, popular theatre often occurs in non-theatre spaces and is site-specific. Italian performer/playwright Dario Fo has shown his Mistero Buffo (1969) in football stadia and factories, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe toured to targeted community venues, just as John McGrath took his company 7:84 to the remote Scottish Highlands in the 1970s. Those who have continued to work predominantly within theatre architecture, like Meyerhold and Brecht, have attempted to change its atmosphere, its scenography and even its construction, with cigar smoke, constructivist sets or theatres in the round. Even if in practice it already existed for thousands of years, the idea of formalizing popular theatre as an institution or recognized term began most evidently in mid-eighteenth-century France with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s call for a ‘théâtre populaire’. In the following centuries and in a range of countries, such aspirations materialized in diverse forms, from transitory festivals to the establishment of culture centres to receive work as well as promote artistic involvement. Such multi-purpose buildings multiplied throughout Communist Eastern Europe and Russia. Britain’s 229

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creation of a single national theatre in London in 1976 diminishes next to the establishment of five regional national theatres in France, which began with the founding of the Comédie-Française in 1680. Arguments continue to rage about how these institutions are or are not elitist, and numerous strategies have been tested to bring in a wider audience base. But the popularizing of theatre is complex and needs to encompass many sociological as well as aesthetic considerations: about the space in which the events happen, the form it takes, its content, the economics of the artistic exchange, cultural diversity (of which intercultural practice and theory have made us acutely aware) and the message or import of the work and its life after the performance. To sustain a popular theatre it is vital to build audiences while challenging them – no mean feat! Audiences are unpredictable and often fickle. Most artists might want their work to be popular, but how is such esteem achieved without compromising artistic values? And how does one innovate with traditions, while maintaining their essential qualities? In such conundra lie the complexities that make the very idea of popular theatre an ideology that is hard to attain in practice. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are as many books as there are types of theatre within this broad category. The two edited collections below exhibit this range and introduce key practices and issues, most usefully in the up-to-date Schechter collection. McGrath’s is a classic and influential practitioner’s manifesto. McGrath, John (1981) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Eyre Methuen. Mayer, David and Kenneth Richards (eds) (1977) Western Popular Theatre, London: Methuen. Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.

POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE ‘Postdramatic theatre’ is a name popularized by German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book of the same name (published in English translation in 2006). It identifies avant-garde theatre principally of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries which de-prioritizes narrative text (or drama) based in psychologically coherent characterization and plot-driven action, and instead foregrounds theatrical aspects of theatre as well as structuring which is non-linear. It is often more about the sensory than rational sense; it tends to be self-reflexive, metatheatrical and concerned with time, space and image for what they are as experiences rather than how they convey narrative; and it interrogates conventional realist practices of representation. Compared to more conventional forms of theatre, it attributes greater value to the meanings of affect and feeling, movement, the visual, sound, multimedia elements, the significations of performing bodies, the real-time theatrical event (as distinct from a fictional story) and other sensory theatrical elements. The acute demands it places on audiences to construct meaning acknowledges them as 230

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the principle makers of theatre’s meanings and challenges dominant theatrical hierarchies which invest authority in the text, its author and the director. If it seeks to be political, it does so through the ways it problematizes perception, rather than through attempting to tell a political story. Lehmann’s book on postdramatic theatre focuses extensively on continental European artists and companies such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jan Fabre and Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio. It includes much devised theatre work whose processes often produce non-linear narration (for example, in the work of the Wooster Group). And it includes much highly visual theatre, for example by Marina Abramović, Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre. Postdramatic theatre overlaps significantly with postmodern forms. What makes the theory of postdramatic theatre distinctive and most constructive within theatre and performance studies is that it is specifically a theory of theatre practice, generated from within theatre. It is therefore distinct from theories of postmodernism which originated in discussions of architecture and literature and were then applied to theatre and pays more attention to the specificities of theatre than much postmodern theory. Postdramatic theatre has been widely accepted as a useful theory, not least because it seems accurately to identify predominant trends. However, critics argue that it does not account for the ongoing popularity of linear, narrative-based, coherent, realist theatre, nor for the contemporary theatre’s persistent interest in, and experiments with, storytelling. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon: Routledge.

POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism is a range of cultural practices and sensibilities that have developed since the 1980s especially and that reject some of the apparent certainties, or ‘grand narratives’, of modern paradigms of thought. Challenging ideas of coherent identity and universal value and truth as not only impossible but also duplicitous, it proposes that these ‘grand narratives’ only pretend to represent everyone’s interests and actually represent dominant class interests. Having discarded universalism, postmodernism explores how meaning is always multiple and contingent on contexts, audiences and makers. Roland Barthes influentially proclaimed ‘The Death of the Author’ (1977) and advocated a more democratic understanding of the production of meaning by emphasizing meaning’s contingency even in a written text and attributing its production to the reader/audience. Jean Baudrillard argued that the media saturation of contemporary consumer culture made it impossible to distinguish between the real, or truth, and the representation: everything is simulation. Because it is concerned with meaning’s representation – however compromised – postmodern art practice is often conspicuously self-conscious or meta-representational. Thus it is interested not 231

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only in what meanings it is making, but also in how it is making them, often emphasizing process over product. In performance, postmodernism’s rejection of apparent certainties takes numerous forms. It is visible in movements away from text-based theatre towards the potentially more democratic devising techniques practised by Split Britches and Robert Lepage and the playful and destabilizing approaches to identity that are characteristic of much performance art. It is present in the hybridization of performance disciplines epitomized by Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s and Annie Sprinkle’s activist performance/protest interventions, and in the diversification of the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. Postmodernism’s media saturation is explored in the multimedia work of Orlan, Stelarc and Laurie Anderson. And the visual theatre of Robert Wilson or Tadeusz Kantor pursues postmodernism’s interrogation of the image as truth or simulation. For many critics, postmodern performance is epitomized in the work of the Wooster Group. This queries the truth of naturalist theatre through different approaches to: acting/ performing, which aims less to represent character than to acknowledge that it presents the performer; text, which appropriates and mixes high and low cultural source material; and style, for example in the Group’s use of violently non-linear composition and multimedia. For many critics, performance’s liveness makes it the ideal medium through which to test postmodernism – but for two different reasons. For some, this liveness seems to insist on performance’s authenticity, authority and truth, presenting a useful challenge to postmodernism. For others, performance’s liveness insists on the material presence of the body and resists the abstraction of universalist thinking. While postmodern performance is often easy to recognize, its effects are widely debated. For its supporters, it is democratizing because it challenges elitist, universalist assumptions, and it is often thrillingly pleasurable in its playful abandon of the familiar, its renegade engagement with diverse source materials, its exuberance and its humour. For its detractors, these same qualities can make it descriptive of too broad a range of practices to be critically useful. Worse, they can make it deliberately obscure, elitist and – while spectacular – emotionally and politically empty. Its critics also point out that postmodernism’s aim to challenge racist or sexist cultural assumptions by presenting controversial material is fundamentally compromised by its simultaneous interrogation of the possibility of representing anything truthfully. For example, the Wooster Group’s refusal to provide explicit rationale for including taboo material risks allowing that material to be read as condoned by the performance rather than as the object of the performance’s critique or at least its enquiry. Similarly, postmodernism’s radical contingency can seem to place it outside of history, beyond the possibility of commenting on the past, the present or the future. In other words, postmodern performance risks a dangerous ethical relativism. In response to such criticisms, Philip Auslander has argued that postmodern performance does not aspire to be a political theatre; rather, he argues, it is a ‘resistant’ theatre with politics, aware of its political and ideological effects but not necessarily making an explicit argument because it does not assume this is possible. Baz Kershaw 232

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regrets the way Auslander’s model casts postmodern performance as politically passive rather than active. He proposes that we look to a greater range of performance practices (from prison theatre to protest) to see how they make interventions in much broader contexts that are less compromised by the theatre’s commodification, and to appreciate how their political radicalism is enhanced by their contexts and reception. As the scale of debate around postmodern performance’s effects makes clear, it challenges representational practices but has by no means resolved them. It is a term which is used with less frequency in the twenty-first century, when much of what it meant to capture is now encompassed by postdramatic theatre. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seminal postmodern theory texts include those by Barthes, Baudrillard and Jameson. Auslander, Kaye and Kershaw explore at length the relationships between postmodernism and performance. Bertens and Natoli’s collection includes articles on Chinese-American performance-maker Ping Chong, Robert Lepage and the Wooster Group. Birringer makes reference to (among others) Laurie Anderson, Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson. Lehmann’s text has largely displaced discussions of postmodern theatre. Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bertens, Hans and Joseph Natoli (eds) (2002) Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Oxford: Blackwell. Birringer, Johannes (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan. Kershaw, Baz (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon: Routledge.

PRACTICE AS RESEARCH Practice as research (‘PaR’ for short) has come to be recognized as a mode of research within academic institutions that departs from traditional written methods of investigating, articulating and disseminating original ideas. It occurs predominantly within visual and performing arts and can encompass artefacts, products, events or other outputs that are the result of, but to some extent also demonstrate, a research process 233

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and findings. In our field, a performance or event might be presented that shows new ways of working, techniques or concepts of theatre and performance. Of course, all performance and theatre-making involves some research, be it into a period, theme, characters or ways of working, often done as part of dramaturgical research. PaR is therefore not so much about content or revised ways of looking at a particular subject matter (such as a performance piece which casts fresh light on a historical figure) but about original techniques, tools, methods or practices. Many scholars and funding bodies have therefore understandably been careful to make the distinction between creative practice as a primarily artistic process, and creative practice which has research at its core and which usually therefore takes place within educational establishments. PaR is also different from applied research, though not exclusively. The latter generally denotes original ideas that are then put into practice in a particular field, but where the research is largely done prior to engaging with the target community. One of the burning issues PaR raises is how the research might be evaluated or even accessed for auditing or assessment purposes, if the event is ephemeral or ‘live’ and thus not easily retrievable; one might then have to use proxies, and inevitably writing, to access these. Such debates have fed into discussions around the much picked over notions of liveness and presence. This concern is as pertinent at doctoral level where practice is nearly always accompanied by written reflection and documentation as it is in government audits, such as the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK, where all submitted PaR has to be accompanied by a 300-word statement outlining the research imperatives and context, further supported by other forms of evidence. Since PaR became accepted towards the end of the twentieth century the term has become richer but more complex, in that it has spawned related concepts such as practice-led research, practice-based research or performance as research. All these add nuance, but in so doing the emphasis can shift away from practice as the final outcome – for example, an author might explore practice-led research to write a book about actor training, without presenting aspects of that practice as the result of their research. Defenders and supporters of PaR fear such redefinitions might signify a conservative retrenchment to more traditional research methods, though this seems unlikely in the UK at least. As the term has moved beyond the UK where it began, and has now come to be recognized and utilized in parts of Europe, North America and Australia, culturally-specific notions and differentiated levels of institutional integration and acceptance have been foregrounded. In the USA, where there is still widespread scepticism about the legitimacy of this method of research, performance as research is the more familiar, perhaps safer and narrower, term. Interpretations inevitably depend on the institutional and national contexts in which the research operates. Debates rage about what PaR constitutes, with its validity often probed according to more established ‘harder’ scientific models; with such inappropriate comparators and criteria it can inevitably fall short. Practice as research evolved in the UK in part because of the increasing emphasis on practice in the study of theatre and performance at tertiary level, but also because of the increasingly thin line between academic teaching and research and 234

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professional bodies like theatre and performance groups and artists. Countless people now migrate across both platforms, investigating ideas and practices in the academy as well as in the profession in work that extends well beyond traditional scholarly writing. In addition, advances in digitalization have allowed the documentation of practice in myriad ways, just one of which is film. As such, PaR looks set to feature as a vital element in academic research within the creative and performing arts for many years to come, widening the scope of the object of study but also how we approach and document it. BIBLIOGRAPHY

These books predominantly include case studies from across the creative disciplines as a way of unpicking issues around practice as research, its context and its documentation. Nelson’s combines international case studies as well as a survey. PARIP was a pioneering funded project exploring Practice as Research in Performance in the UK. RPA Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini (eds) (2009) Practice-asResearch in Performance and Screen, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bol (eds) (2007) Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, London: I.B. Tauris. Freeman, John (ed.) (2010) Blood, Sweat and Theory: Research through Practice in Performance, UK: Libri Publishing. Nelson, Robin (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. PARIP. Online. Available www.bris.ac.uk/parip/ (accessed 3 May 2013). Smith, Hazel and Roger Dean (eds) (2009) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

PRESENCE In the context of performance, ‘presence’ is used to describe a perceived quality of performance – that is usually live but is sometimes recorded – where the performer appears to be notably focused or ‘in the moment’. What these tautologies mean is that performers convey charisma, strong engagement with themselves, their roles and/or their work, a particular quality of concentration, and a special ‘aura’, to use Walter Benjamin’s term from a different but related context. The performer’s presence strongly engages the audience’s attention and cultivates the audience’s own sense of presence – a feeling of the importance of being in that moment at that event. Some performance traditions such as Method acting seek to maximize this sense of presence because they perceive it as consonant with focused performers and an audience that is engaged, responsive and even enthralled. Other performance traditions, including postmodern ones, often seek to challenge performance’s apparent reliance on presence. This is because they see it as potentially manipulative – as in the seductive, charismatic performance of state leaders such as Hitler – and 235

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exclusive, since it is only available to those audience members privileged enough to witness the performer’s ecstatic moment here and now, and it is often perceived as introspective and self-indulgent. By drawing attention to a sense of selfhood, presence can facilitate critical engagement with ideas of subjectivity, be that the psychologically coherent subjectivity cultivated by the presence of naturalism’s characters or the fractured subjectivity often explored through the qualified presence of postmodernism’s performers. Because of its reliance on a sense of immediacy, it shares with the concept of liveness not only many features, but also many points of contention and debate. Benjamin’s reflection on what happens to the aura of the unique painting now that mechanical reproduction has challenged the uniqueness of any artwork is useful to consider in relation to the fate of presence in an age of multimedia performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander’s discussion of presence identifies some of its potentials and problems. Giannachi, Kaye and Shank’s edited collection gathers a great range of articles. For a fuller discussion of related issues, see the entry on liveness. Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter (1973) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, London: Fontana Press. Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (eds) (2012) Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, Oxon: Routledge.

PROTESTS, DEMONSTRATIONS AND PARADES These are forms of mass group performance that generally take place in public spaces in order to influence public opinion by occupying and exploiting the power of those sites. While not strictly theatre, these forms often deploy its features – such as music, props, orchestrated movement and organized time – to harness its symbolic effects. While protests and demonstrations are broadly associated with countercultural activism, parades are often State-organized and State-supporting: consider, for example, Olympic ceremonies, Victory parades, Hitler’s infamous Nazi Nuremberg rallies, and inaugural processions for State rulers. Parades can also support other forms of social authority – Christmas parades common in many Western cities, for example, can be seen to support capitalist consumerism. Most commonly, though, protests and demonstrations occupy public space in ways intended to challenge authority, claim freedom of movement and expression, consolidate a sense of counter-cultural group identity, and reclaim a sense of democratic agency for the people rather than the State. As twentieth-century political theatre-makers grew dissatisfied performing for self-selecting audiences inside theatre buildings, they moved their work outside and adopted practices from protests 236

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and demonstrations. This is illustrated in happenings, the work of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, performance art and installation art. In complementary ways, political activism co-opted more and more performance techniques to enhance its symbolic and actual power. Thus, early feminist suffragettes used marches and other forms of visible public protest to insist on and occupy their literal and metaphorical space within a democratic society, and they often protested on sites associated with the State in order directly to challenge its authority. Many other civil rights protesters have done the same, including: African-Americans in the 1950s; anti-war protesters in the 1960s, 1970s and early twenty-first century; las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina from the late 1970s on; anti-nuclear protesters in the 1980s; gay, lesbian and queer rights activists in Pride marches from the 1980s on; Greenpeace and other ecological protesters from the 1980s on; Chinese protesters in Tiananmen Square and East Berliners on the Berlin Wall in 1989; anti-globalization protesters from the late 1990s on; Occupy protestors across the world from 2011; and participants in protests in the Arab Spring. While the pervasiveness of twentieth and twenty-first century protest and demonstration is not in dispute, its political efficacy has been questioned. Richard Schechner and others have argued that protests and demonstrations share with Bakhtinian carnival the potential to be both socially transgressive and – by acting as a short-term valve that releases social pressure – always only temporary and often supportive of the status quo. Baz Kershaw acknowledges that protests and demonstrations are at least partly conservative because they are always somewhat repetitive and familiar, but he argues that they nevertheless continue to take new forms and so they are not purely conservative. Responding to arguments that theatre has become less political in postmodern contexts, Kershaw also argues not only that culture has become more pervasively performative, but also that it has become more politically performative, the proliferation of protest offering a case in point. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen-Cruz brings together a vast international selection of writings on the topic. Schechner’s analysis of a range of events – including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen demonstrations – considers their political effects centrally in the terms of Bakhtinian carnival. Kershaw considers many of the same examples and argues for an analysis that goes beyond Bakhtin’s liberating–oppressive binaries. Cohen-Cruz, Jan (ed.) (1998) Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, London: Routledge. Kershaw, Baz (1999) ‘Fighting in the Streets: Performance, Protest and Politics’, in The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard (1993) ‘The Street Is the Stage’, in The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS Psychoanalysis is the study of mental processes, especially unconscious ones. Pioneered by Sigmund Freud from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s as a therapeutic treatment for neurosis, it has become an important tool of cultural practice and analysis. Freud established that the self is made up of three parts: the id, composed of instinctual desires; the super-ego, the repressive social rules we internalize; and the ego, the social individual who partly reconciles the id and super-ego. Socialization requires the individual to repress many of the id’s desires, but these do not vanish. Instead, they form the individual’s unconscious – active mental processes that we may feel we have little knowledge of, let alone control over. The unconscious cannot be analysed directly because it is repressed. Therefore, it has to be studied through its indirect expression in jokes, slips of the tongue, repetitions, dreams, creative practices including performance and writing, and physical symptoms that have no apparent organic cause. Freud linked psychoanalysis to theatre by using names of dramatic characters for psychoanalytic concepts including the Oedipal and Electra complexes, exploring subjectivity through characterization in dramatic literature and performance, and describing many formative events as acts of social mise en scène. The primal scene, for example, is the real or imagined scene where the child first witnesses parental sex and perceives his or her own origins. Theatre and psychoanalysis are further linked through many other shared concerns. Psychoanalytic paradigms for understanding identity, desire, relationships and feelings are visible in the family dramas of William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Federico García Lorca, for example. Frank Wedekind’s drama and the writing and theatre practice of Antonin Artaud share psychoanalysis’s interest in repressed desires. Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902) and Hélène Cixous’ Portrait of Dora (1976) attempt to mimic the non-linear structure of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s greatest contributions to theatre and performance have been the tools it provides for critical analysis. Feminist theories of audience spectatorship, for example, have been influenced by psychoanalytic concepts of scopophilia (the love of looking), masochism (the drive to be controlled by another) and the mental processes that produce sexual identity. Performance itself has been understood as fantasy, the mise en scène of desire, and a safe way of enacting desire by displacing it through identification on to characters who stand in for ourselves. Relationships between the actor, director and audience, and within processes of rehearsal, improvisation and devising, have been informed by reflection on their psychodynamics. Analysis of the fetish – the object that stands in for something that is absent – provides a means of understanding the unconscious investment that audiences make in willingly suspending their disbelief. Theories of the abject – that which bodies expel and which we may find both repulsive and compelling – can inform understanding of the body art of Franko B, Stelarc, Ron Athey and Orlan. As therapeutic psychoanalysis can help to work through trauma by staging it through the ‘talking cure’, performance can aim to do the same through a performative cure or 238

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enactment. Such a critical approach helps to explain the social function of many Holocaust memorials and museums, performances like Orlan’s The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93), such repeated protest as that staged by las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and, for Peggy Phelan, all performance. Phelan argues that performance’s liveness, evanescence and ensuing absence and loss make it a helpful form of rehearsal for experiencing loss elsewhere in life – for example, through bereavement. Freudian psychoanalysis has been widely criticized; for example, its theories of human development have been seen as falsely universalizing. But psychoanalysis’s theorization of the unconscious remains crucial to current understandings of subjectivity and human behaviour, including performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reinelt and Roach include a useful introduction to psychoanalysis and two essays focusing on identification. Campbell and Kear’s collection addresses a broader range of topics, from rehearsal and therapeutic processes, to melancholy and homesickness, to social trauma. Murray focuses on the relationship of trauma to the production of racial and gender identities in theatre and film. Pellegrini explores intersections between psychoanalytic theory and gendered and racial identity in contemporary performance. Walsh examines the relationship between theatre and therapy. Campbell, Patrick and Adrian Kear (eds) (2001) Psychoanalysis and Performance, London: Routledge. Murray, Timothy (1997) Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video and Art, London: Routledge. Pellegrini, Ann (1997) Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race, London: Routledge. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds) (1992) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Walsh, Fintan (2013) Theatre & Therapy, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

PUPPETRY What separates puppets in performance from art objects or anthropological curios hung on a domestic or art gallery wall is the puppeteer or performer’s ability to manipulate the object and thus bring it to ‘life’. This principle can be carried over to any object, from a crudely shaped piece of wood to a sophisticated mask, costume or other body adornment. Tadeusz Kantor’s mannequins shadow his actors, overtly exploring the dialectical dynamic between animate and inanimate beings and questioning how theatre uses artifice to bring events to life and plays with liveness. As children manipulate puppets or dolls to represent challenging real-life situations by safe proxy, so can puppets intimate other worlds. Edward Gordon Craig emphasized this potential in his writings on the Übermarionette, recalling how puppets evolved from ritual and totemic representations of another spiritual dimension. This 239

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is still seen in much Asian performance, where the use of puppets is common, as in Balinese shadow puppetry. They can possess great power and transport vital messages to a community through the puppeteer/medium, who is sometimes also a shaman. Craig’s vision was shared by many modernist artists and groups such as the surrealists, Dadaists and futurists in the early part of the twentieth century, who believed puppets make striking metaphors, representing the human condition of subjugation and powerlessness in an often absurd but immediate way. Power play lies at the heart of puppetry’s interactions with live performers. Even detached from any religious or spiritual implications, puppets can carry authority because of their visual impact rather than their suggestions of a metaphysical realm. Julie Taymor’s Lion King (1997) was one of the best-known early examples, followed by War Horse a decade later with giant horse puppets by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. Interestingly, both examples bring animals to life. An inanimate object can provoke human sensitivities and diminish our selfimportance through its vastness, exposing feelings of vulnerability or, alternatively, reinforcing them through placing the human body alongside miniatures. Such qualities have been utilized by Bread and Puppet Theatre for mass participatory events as well as for protests, demonstrations and parades. Puppets can also broach taboos and do the humanly impossible, like the moon-walking astronaut puppet of Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon (2000) or the wife- and child-beating violence of a Punch and Judy show illustrate. In such knock-about forms, puppets are frequently satirical, can carry topical and critical messages, and are a highly accessible style of popular theatre. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) exploited such popular but transgressive potential in its characterizations, as did the Cabaret Voltaire, with their inclusion of puppets and objects in their cabaret events. Whatever form puppets possess, be it as shadow, rod, glove, marionette, body double or ritual totem, they have a powerful transformative ability in both popular and more esoteric modes of performance, linking ancient roots with up-to-date concerns and practices. With the advance of nano-technology, digitization and shrinking computers, it seems inevitable that we will become increasingly used to robots intervening in our lives and acclimatized to the presence of the ‘puppet’ object in our homes as well as in our theatres. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Segel considers some of the forms puppets (in the loosest meaning of the word) have adopted in the modern period. Schechter provides five articles on a range of puppet styles from different cultures, a project that Bell’s edited collection takes further, with numerous illustrations. His other book is a broad up-to-date historical introduction, while Tillis gives a more theoretical survey and Francis offers many practical and theoretical insights. Bell, John (2000) Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History, Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts. 240

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—— (ed.) (2001) Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Francis, Penny (2011) Puppetry: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge. Segel, Harold B. (1995) Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tillis, Steve (1992) Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

REHEARSAL The French call rehearsals répétitions, affirming the necessity that is central to most rehearsal processes to repeatedly go back over and practise material. In Englishlanguage usage, the word has entered into common parlance to indicate a draft runthrough, implying that this is just a stand-in for the real thing, the event or performance itself. Yet, as all performance practitioners know, rehearsals are fundamental to the making of a performance, though there is no prescription that good rehearsals (whatever that implies) lead to successful performances. One primary role of rehearsals is to create an ensemble feeling as it is often described, though few critics or academics are ever specific about what this actually means. Feelings of ease, creativity, self-confidence and mutual trust, which are also central to training approaches, can and should carry over into performance once the job of rehearsals is finished. But some directors avoid constructing the rehearsal performance continuum so linearly, calling actors back for rehearsals during runs of a production. Some theatres, like Britain’s National Theatre, to name but one, also have the luxury of instituting previews before the official press night, when a work is presented to a paying public but is framed as still being in preparatory or rehearsal mode, not the ‘real thing’, and therefore not subject to critical scrutiny or review. Such a practice opens up the terms ‘rehearsal’ and ‘performance’. The substance of rehearsals is primarily contingent on the various requirements made of actors: to learn lines; to enter into their roles; to establish their movements and interactions (also known as blocking); to create a mise en scène or the integration of disparate parts of the staging and their related technologies; to create the ‘world of a play’ or its aesthetic, sometimes according to details like the period setting, unity of time and space, and variations in the mood. The director’s timing of when to bring the disparate elements of a production together, or knowing when to run a play in rehearsal, is crucial – too late and the performance will look underrehearsed and half-baked, the actors hesitant and lacking confidence. Too soon and they might become mechanical – the first night is just one of many repetitions, and there needs to be further enrichment as the performance is run in. The idea of a cohesive vision is fundamental, even if the style being worked on allows juxtaposition and rupture. Even chaos has its own rules, and staged chaos might need to look unplanned and as though it is happening every night for the first time, as in Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess (2004, UK). 241

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In British theatres where the focus is on producing plays quickly, rehearsals typically last for three or four weeks. In countries where there has historically been substantial state subsidy of the theatre, they might last a year or more. This was the case with Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and is even true today of an ensemble like Lev Dodin’s Maly Theatre from St Petersburg. With recent growing interest in devised work, the nature of rehearsals has become more exploratory and they have subsequently needed to be longer. Rather than being for the purpose of interpreting and blocking a text, rehearsals have become more often a period of group-led creative exploration, though this still needs to be balanced with or subsumed within the director’s vision and/or the requirement to deliver a ‘show’ by the opening date. As well as fulfilling the crucial role of establishing the performers’ work, the director also has to oversee the integration of the designer and their technical team, unless they also take charge of the scenography, like auteur-directors Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio’s Claudio Castellucci. In larger companies, rehearsals will be run by a stage manager and his or her team who incrementally introduce production elements like props and costume or a floor plan of the set, culminating in the technical and dress rehearsals when lighting and sound are fully incorporated. On the European continent, dramaturgs either work on specific productions or are sometimes based permanently in a theatre. They occasionally take responsibility for script development and contextual materials that pertain to the background or translation of a play and might provide information on its other productions for research purposes. Of course, rehearsals cannot replicate the experience of performance, only prepare for it. They should provide a familiar structure within which the actors are more or less free to respond within a production’s particular parameters. Rehearsals help make the unknown interaction of performance less daunting. Games, play and improvisation are useful for breaking down barriers between actors and for encouraging relaxation and creativity, but there are very few commonly recognized and utilized rehearsal systems. One that has recently come to prominence are the RSVP cycles (Resources, Scores, Valuaction, Performance cycles), developed by American dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin with her husband, architect Lawrence Halprin, and utilized by Robert Lepage. RSVP offers a collaborative, affirmative model of group work, useful also for companies rehearsing without a director figure, who would normally be the outside eye and final authority. Anne Bogart’s ‘Viewpoints’ is another dance-derived approach that provides both a vocabulary and a clear creative methodology for group work. Such methods help formalize the process of editing and eliminating discovered material. Seemingly, this leads to great waste but also, hopefully, to a concentrated distillation, and is a crucial function of rehearsals, especially if a work is devised. Good documentation or even accounts of rehearsals are rare, in part because they are a time for ‘private’ exploration. Observers or outsiders might unsettle the atmosphere, making actors self-conscious. But the lack of documentation also indicates the difficulty of writing about an often-serendipitous process where methods or systems 242

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may be inappropriate. A director’s relationship to each performer has to be individually tailored to their needs and limitations. Rehearsal methods are as varied as the possibilities of performance they precede. BIBLIOGRAPHY

It is necessary to read widely to garner information about specific rehearsal approaches and strategies. Mitter’s book focuses on four directors’ theories of acting and their training ethos and exercises, rather than the rehearsal process per se, which Toporkov describes well. Schechner provides a brief overview and introduces the RSVP cycles. Mitter and Shevtsova’s broad collection offers good opportunities for comparing varied practices. Harvie and Lavender provide numerous contemporary case studies for all, of which the contributing scholars have gained various levels of access to rehearsal processes. Bogart, Anne (2001) A Director Prepares, London: Routledge. Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage (eds) (1996) In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitter, Shomit (1993) Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook, London: Routledge. —— and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge. Toporkov, Vasily Osipovich (1998) Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years, London: Routledge.

RITUAL Ritual is impossible to encapsulate simply and briefly, ranging from ubiquitous everyday aspects of human behaviour, through specific cultural patterns of action that are much closer to formal performance, to a theoretical term that has multiple possible definitions and applications. Broadly, the term ritual denotes an action or series of actions that are done in order to have an effect – to alter the weather, to bring prosperity or to move a person emotionally and practically from one phase of life to another in a rite of passage. This last function is frequently linked to difficult life events, of growing up, conjoining or separation, and in these contexts rituals function as a support and a means to enable transitions. With their emphasis on efficacy, rituals can be distinguished from much performance in that they have at their centre active participation, an individual or a group doing rather than presenting something – for it is by this activity that a belief is confirmed or change is thought to be brought about. However many elements ritual and performance share, this shift away from the actor–spectator binary towards paratheatre and the actions of the performer is crucial for understanding the substance and significance of ritual activities. 243

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In psychological terms, a ritual denotes repetitive behaviour that may be a sign of an individual’s mental instability or disorder. Beyond the individual, rituals often have a social function, for example, in encouraging group cohesion. This is very evident in youth culture and in sports. Supporters’ songs, movements, chants and gestures all have ritual qualities, defining one community in relation to their opposition. The haka epitomizes this element of display within sports. A sense of group identity is involved on a much larger scale with regard to the religious aspects of rituals. Ritual ceremonies exist as forms of prayer and worship in most cultures. Rituals are not only part of human behaviour, however. Just as animals play, so do some animals practise what can only be called rituals. This is usually related to courtship challenges and demonstrations – peacocks flourishing their tails, for example. It appears that rituals have more than a purely cultural basis. Victor Turner explored this view and tentatively proposed that rituals have a biological basis and our participation in them is genetically conditioned. Any serious study of what rituals are needs to begin with anthropology. However different his views at the end of his life, Turner began his research in anthropological fieldwork, which led later to his adoption of a process he called ‘performing ethnography’. Rituals were re-enacted in the classroom in order for students to learn about them through active participation rather than just observation, even if the ritual was decontextualized and performed. Similarly, Richard Schechner’s observation of Yaqui Lent and Easter ceremonies helped his research into possible sources of the theatre by looking at ancient but still extant practices. Such comparative present-day analysis differs from the more familiar historical trajectory that considers the theatre’s evolution from Dionysian ritual into ancient Greek theatre and beyond. Investigation of current ritual practices has proved more fruitful than historicallybased analyses, partly because of the lack of information about pre-Dionysian rituals. They have been inspirational and offered practical materials for theatre artists like Tadashi Suzuki and Jerzy Grotowski. Grotowski pursued detailed research into ‘objective’ elements of practice informed by ancient crafts and knowledges embodied in ritual gestures, songs and ways of moving, often derived from Haitian voodoo. An inseparable conjunction between religious ceremony and dramatic presentation lies behind many Asian performance forms such as Balinese dance-theatre, a factor Antonin Artaud clearly identified. This proximity has informed interculturalism and has bled into secular events otherwise framed as performance art or happenings. Paradise Now (1968) overtly used ritual structures in performance. Marina Abramović, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Joseph Beuys – in his Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) – have all adopted ritualistic elements as ways of structuring and framing their artworks, with Beuys operating almost as a shaman. Shamans are central to many rituals and, attributed by their community with special powers, they often initiate, guide and control proceedings, much as a director might orchestrate a theatre event. Fruitful comparisons have been made between Western magicians, performers or theatre artists and the shaman’s role as a conjuror or medicine man.

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At the core of the numerous comparisons that exist between rituals and performance lies the fact that performance shares with rituals a non-daily and specialized use of time and space, often enacted in buildings that are set aside for that purpose, like churches and mosques, or at least temporarily transformed from their daily use. As such, rituals are not to be distinguished and separated from performance, but, as Schechner has pointed out, they should rather be placed alongside each other on a continuum, their practices, functions, aesthetics and characteristics often overlapping and shared. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below is just a small sample of a mass of materials, especially if this includes anthropological fieldwork on rituals. Schechner devotes a useful summative chapter to ritual in Performance Studies and Franko has edited a collection of diverse disciplinary perspectives on rituals in theory and practice. Franko, Mark (ed.) (2009) Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Pespectives, London: Routledge. Harvey, Graham (ed.) (2003) Shamanism: A Reader, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge. —— ([2002] 2013) ‘Ritual’, in Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge. pp. 52–88. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine. —— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Press.

SCENOGRAPHY Even though the practice has existed for hundreds of years in various forms, as a term ‘scenography’ is relatively new and still unfamiliar. It has superseded the phrase ‘theatre design’, for ‘scenography’ denotes the integrated work on all elements of a production, from costumes through soundscapes to masks, a breadth which the expressions ‘stage design’, ‘scenic design’ and ‘theatre design’ cannot encompass. Although etymologically its roots in Greek refer to scenic painting, in a performance context it alludes to the three-dimensional construction of a visual, aural, material and spatial mise en scène, using a synthesis of different technologies, from the intangibles of lighting and sound through to the actuality of wood and cloth. It is, however, only in the interaction of these elements with living beings, with the performer and (more tangentially) with the audience that scenographers’ plans become fully realized in a performance space. The idea that designers create backdrops or decorative environments to foreground the performers was central to Restoration theatre, for example, but was replaced by notions of total performance environments that surround the performer and even at times the spectator, as artists like Antonin Artaud championed. The term ‘scenography’ has evolved along this trajectory from image to installation and participation. In the twenty-first century, 245

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immersive performance has become popular where participants enter into and are often subsumed within a total 360º environment, often in a found location or building. In practice, scenographers have to negotiate a fragile balance between the visual and imaginative dimensions of a stage design and its functionality for performers, technicians and a director. In order to realize a world represented in a text or to construct a space for performers to inhabit, scenographers need to share their vision with the director in a long process of research, consultation and negotiation. Traditionally, a design emerges initially on paper from textual and contextual research before appearing as a model box. It is then that the mechanics of a design become manifest and budgetary considerations start to make a direct impact, though they will always have been an important consideration. As well as responding to a director’s interpretation or a devising team’s desires, the scenographer liaises closely with production staff who will build and handle a set or environment through various scene changes or in and out of a van if a production tours. In addition, the scenographer has to convince the performers about his or her designs – a third but equally vital relationship, for the performers have ultimate responsibility in bringing the scenography to life before or in proximity to the spectator. The scenographer needs organizational and diplomatic as well as creative skills, in what is a decidedly collaborative art. Some directors like Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor eschew such collaboration. From visual arts backgrounds, these two director/designers are representative of auteur artists who take sole responsibility for designing the stage environment. Their success has, however, supported the emergence of the scenographer’s role within performance-making, an idea championed especially by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia at the beginning of the twentieth century, when scenic design mostly involved backdrops for naturalist dramas. A turn towards abstract and non-realist designs followed, enhanced by the harnessing of complex stage technologies – in the Constructivist scenography that Vsevolod Meyerhold developed and in the pioneering work of Czech designer Josef Svoboda with multimedia slide and film projection. Today, visual aspects of performance are increasingly being foregrounded. The growing interest in devised work, installations and performance art, as well as environmental and physical and visual theatre, has opened up notions and understanding of what a scenographer does and the place of his or her work in creating a total mise en scène. Emphasis has shifted away from designs that are finished months before rehearsal, towards the construction of a space together with the performers. Similarly, many artists are now more excited by pre-existing spaces, as in sitespecific performance. These serve as a reminder that design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. The design, architecture, architectonics and the location of theatre and performance spaces have all become the focus of many recent theoretical studies. The idea that these are inhabited passively by the spectator is long gone, with questions about interaction, participation, phenomenological experience and virtual space driving scenographic practices forward.

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Howard’s book is clear and accessible, drawing on her extensive experience as a scenographer, while Brockett and Ball present more traditional models of what they call scene design. There are numerous books about specific designers such as Koltai’s lavish collection. Collins and Nesbitt have compiled a fifty-two chapter collection from across the broad spectrum of scenographic practices. Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Collins, Jane and Andrew Nesbitt (2010) Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, Oxon: Routledge. Howard, Pamela (2002) What is Scenography?, London: Routledge. Koltai, Ralph (2003) Ralph Koltai: Designer for the Stage, London: Nick Hern Books. Thorne, Gary (1999) Stage Design: A Practical Guide, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: The Crowood Press.

SEMIOTICS Semiotics provides a system of analysis of performance that emerged in the 1970s. Theatre semiotics evolved from semiological theories of communication and language that had been used to examine the way the arts impact on the spectator/ reader. In the theatre, semiotic analyses like those of Keir Elam extended the linguistic studies of Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, who were both – broadly speaking – structuralists. This term describes theorists whose work is predicated on analysing how things are constructed rather than the context in which they operate or their history. Semiotics initially offered detailed and seemingly comprehensive models for analysing the minutiae of performance events. In the 1980s, though, even as some critics like Patrice Pavis were elaborating on its overarching concepts, its principles were repeatedly questioned. Criticism centred partly on the need for semiotics to isolate certain aspects of a performance such as costume, lighting or sound for analysis, before reassembling these elements. This fragmentation meant that semiotics was less able to deal with the temporal flow of theatre, as Pavis has pointed out. This approach also struggled with much experimental postmodern performance that deliberately played with the disjunctures between signs, and which exploited the dense layering of different systems or codes. Semiotics was able readily to analyse visual theatre and scenographic aspects of performance, such as a set, costume or the appearance of particular characters, but engaged inadequately with embodied actions. Critics also questioned the assumption that everything can be subsumed within a realm of legible understanding, recognizing instead that much of performance is ineffable, and certainly momentary. In focusing on coded systems of signs, semiotics perhaps overvalued intention, implying that there is a linear progression from authorial intent through the act of communication to reception, following the sign, signifier and signified model on which structuralist theories of language are broadly based. Roland Barthes countered such an emphasis 247

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on intention with his writings on ‘The Death of the Author’ and he also attempted to look at the physicality of performance in ‘The Grain of the Voice’, for example, which examined timbre and tonality as much as language itself. Shifts away from the problematic closure inherent in the idea of reading and interpreting visual signs were vital developments in semiotic analysis. With these reservations in mind, while we might consider ourselves to be in a post-semiotic age of performance analysis, the assiduousness, clarity and clinical rigour of semiotic approaches still serve an important function. Used in conjunction with other models, semiotics offers systematic ways of breaking the dense complexity of performance events into manageable elements, whatever the inadequacy of this segmentation. Semiotics has an indispensable role in the ongoing quest for comprehensive methodologies of dissecting performance, not just because of its historical importance. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a wealth of background material on semiotics and the structuralist approaches (mentioned above) that have been central to the development of semiological analysis. What follows is a small range of works by some of the main theorists who have engaged with this mode of study in the theatre, both approvingly and critically. Pavis’s more recent book has a useful section on the limitations of semiotic analysis. Barthes’ book contains his influential articles mentioned above. Aston, Elaine and George Savona (1991) Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance, London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. Elam, Keir (2002) The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice (1982) Languages of the Stage, New York: PAJ Publications. —— (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ubersfeld, Anne (1999) Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

SPACE In a very basic formulation, theatre and performance are both events which take place in time and space and in which performers and audiences participate, and therefore thinking about space is fundamental to understanding how theatre and performance make meaning. It has thus become a central critical practice since the late 1960s, with the rise of newly spatialized performance practices by the likes of Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, numerous performance artists, installation artists and makers of site-specific performance, immersive theatre and happenings, and the development of semiotic, anthropological, phenomenological and other materialist approaches to analysing performance. 248

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Theorists commonly divide theatre space into three categories: the stage space, the theatre space and the theatre environment. Stage space usually refers to the on-stage scenic area and its scenography. Examining stage space in phenomenological or material terms, we might consider how it facilitates or limits movement for on-stage performers and objects and how it affects opportunities for interaction between performers. Analysing stage space in semiotic terms provokes consideration of its metaphorical and fictional significations, such as whether it represents a recognizable place like a drawing room, and/or whether it is abstract, invoking a mood of airy optimism or restricted oppression, for example. The theatre space is the architecture that encompasses stage and audience spaces. Thinking about this helps critics analyse the relationship between the performance and the audience by considering sightlines, acoustics, proximity, scale, furnishings, audience and performer amenities, and so on. Common Western theatre space configurations include the proscenium-arch or end-on arrangement, the thrust stage, the traverse and the theatre-in-the-round. In more abstract terms, reflecting on theatre space may help us consider the space’s emotional effects, such as whether it feels open or closed, for whom, when, and so on. The theatre environment is the site of the theatre in its wider social geography – where it is located geographically and what the significances of that location are. For example, is the theatre in a marginal location off-Broadway or on ‘the Fringe’? Is it out of the way for many but still a site of ‘pilgrimage’ such as Stratford-upon-Avon, England, or any city hosting the Olympics? As these examples all suggest, space is social; it produces social effects and meanings that are, in turn, ideological. Thus, analyses of performance space must not stop short at phenomenological and semiotic analyses but press on to consider the social and ideological meanings of performance spaces. How, for example, does stage space configure relationships of power between characters? How does the theatre environment affect diverse audiences’ accessibility to the theatre – through the expense of travelling there, or through the sense of safety or danger the site produces? How does theatre space produce relationships of power between audiences and performers, as well as between different performers and different audience members, for instance in the hierarchical location of backstage dressing rooms and seats in the auditorium? Why does theatre commonly mask its sites of labour – such as the lighting box – in order to enhance its sense of naturalism? And what did Bertold Brecht achieve in dismantling this kind of masking? These are all questions that much politicized performance practice – such as protest, popular theatre and the work of Augusto Boal – is acutely aware of. In his influential book, The Empty Space, Peter Brook argued, ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’, suggesting that a performance space is ideologically neutral until performers give it meaning. However, much recent politicized performance and critical analysis of space indicates instead that any space comes already ideologically loaded with meanings produced by shape, decor, location, history, relationship to other performance architectures, and so on. There are no empty spaces, only variably different spaces.

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Although there is more extensive critical analysis of theatre space than performance space, many of these ideas are directly transferable to thinking about such things as ritual, sport, performance art, rehearsal and other forms of performance. And, although space is fundamental to all performance, it has been especially explored in the large-scale theatre work of such artists as Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson. Many directors, including Brook, Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Lepage and Ariane Mnouchkine, director of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil, founded dedicated sites for producing their work in order to develop a sustained relationship with a particular social, geographical and architectural environment. Similarly, many companies produce site-specific theatre to foreground the spatial meanings of the site of production. David Wiles argues that recent theatre practice may be moving away from the modernist propensity to produce in ‘containers’ or supposedly ‘abstract’ dedicated theatre spaces, to produce in sites where physical and social specificities can be engaged with more productively and directly. BIBLIOGRAPHY

McAuley concentrates on stage space, the Leacrofts on theatre space and Carlson on the theatre environment. Wiles develops a sustained critical analysis of the first two aspects. Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: McGibbon and Kee. Carlson, Marvin (1989) Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Leacroft, Richard and Helen Leacroft (1984) Theatre and Playhouse: An Illustrated Survey of Theatre Building from Ancient Greece to the Present Day, London: Methuen. McAuley, Gay (1999) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wiles, David (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THEATRE The word ‘theatre’ has interesting permutations in many languages and has encompassed a panoply of nuances since its etymological origins in the Greek word theatron, a place for viewing or seeing. It is even spelled differently in American and British usage. Intriguingly, it denotes the form itself, the repertoire of plays which are its constituent elements, as well as the buildings in which those events occur. In many dictionaries, the first definition listed is the building, undoubtedly the most straightforward aspect of this term. Further definitions show how widely the term ranges linguistically, from being the site where battles take place in wars, to a place for medical operations – a corollary which has inspired several practitioners. This latter meaning reminds us how, rather than being the sealed, sterile spaces they are today, operating theatres used to be open for observation by medical students and 250

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even the public, a notion that Jerzy Grotowski explored in The Constant Prince (1965). Thus the word alludes to a form which is hard to pin down and very much defined according to its epoch and culture, as much as it refers to concrete spaces. The theatre as a practice or form of artistic work is usually bound by the events or playtexts which it mainly comprises at any given time. Critics and theorists have often attempted to group these in broad categories linked to content and style, be it the theatre of the absurd, melodrama or the drama of Angry Young Men, to name but three. Numerous directors have been instrumental in this categorization. Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski stripped the theatre down to define it as an encounter between the actor and audience, with elements like lighting and sound having only peripheral significance. Directors like Augusto Boal and Bertold Brecht used popular theatre for political and social means, to educate and enlighten as much as to entertain. Groups like America’s Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre have found theatre buildings limiting, restricted by the formal arrangements of the auditoria and the fact that in such a context their work is only for those who actually enter these buildings. They have therefore taken their practice out into public and community spaces, sometimes engaging in a kind of paratheatre, or performing in and as demonstrations. Site-specific performance is an extension of this desire, its playing with spatial boundaries calling into question the parameters of the nature of theatre and where it is located. Theatre is one part of the broad spectrum that is known as performance. At the end of the twentieth century, there was increasing interest in this term ‘performance’. The expansion of performance studies courses (particularly in the United States) and cross-disciplinary discussions about performativity have demonstrated this. Progressively, events like site-specific pieces and happenings, which do not take place within theatres, have been studied more as part of performance than of theatre. The growing study of the history and current manifestations of performance art have also clarified what theatre is and is not. The idea that it revolves around playtexts, mimetic representation or other modes of acting, and that it utilizes specific theatre technologies, has become more entrenched, although not definitively or unproblematically. Theatre depends on rehearsals, training and collaborative work, even if this is just a director and solo actor. It thus operates within an economic framework that supports groups or companies rather than individuals. Performance art (or live art as it is also known in Britain) tends to be more individual in its personnel, more able to adapt and respond to its environment, and is economically more independent. More significantly, it overtly plays with the modes of representation and the roles of performer and spectators that much theatre seems to take for granted. Its main technology has also often been the body, especially in body art practised by the likes of Stelarc, Marina Abramović and Orlan. This is not to say that theatre is necessarily conservative or reactionary; only that performance art has often experimented more radically than the theatre with the forms and theoretical positions that playing constructs. At the heart of the theatre are its buildings, and these absorb much of the costs and energy of supporting this art form. Theatre buildings reflect the styles, interests and 251

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needs of an era. The Olivier auditorium at Britain’s National Theatre (the theatre building opened in 1976) represents the idealism of a popular theatre and mass audiences, based as it is on ancient Greek amphitheatres. In the 1990s, the intimacy of the Cottesloe Studio (at the National Theatre, to be renamed The Dorfman from 2014) became more appealing for directors, as it was hard to make work succeed in the 1,160-seat Olivier. The availability of small cheap rooms above pubs in London and other British cities, and of warehouse and loft spaces in New York and elsewhere, catered for this inclination and supported the vibrant growth of Fringe theatre and off-off-Broadway. At the other end of the spectrum, large venues have green rooms, dressing rooms, backstage and specialist technical areas – spaces that are closed to audiences – often with separate entrances from those used by the spectators. Ideologies of the theatre are embedded in the bricks and mortar and the structures into which these coalesce – a point illustrated by many nations’ efforts to affirm their national identities by building national theatres. Some architects have tried to reconfigure such hierarchies, building theatres-in-the-round (as at Stoke-on-Trent in England), which have a democratic rather than hierarchical seating structure as well as increased intimacy. ‘Theatre’ is a problematic word that implies a vast range of forms, materials or spaces. It therefore always needs to be defined to reveal the innate assumptions its usage contains. These assumptions may say more about the person using the term and the context in which they operate than they do about the theatre itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below is a selection of reference texts, as well as Mackintosh’s book on theatre buildings and Carlson’s semiotic analysis of theatre architecture and sites. The Pavis dictionary deals with more theoretical terms than the other reference sources. Carlson, Marvin (1989) Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Hartnoll, Phyllis (ed.) (1983) The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 4th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackintosh, Iain (1993) Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice (1998) Dictionary of The Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stanton, Sarah and Martin Banham (eds) (1996) The Cambridge Paperback Guide to the Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY It is not unrelated, but theatre anthropology should not be conflated with comparative explorations of the discipline of anthropology as a way of understanding what theatre and performance are. Anthropological concepts, and to a lesser extent practices, have proved central to the evolution of performance studies, as Victor Turner’s work has 252

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exemplified, linking performance with other aspects of human behaviour like ritual and play. Theatre anthropology, on the other hand, is a much more specific praxis developed by Eugenio Barba under the auspices of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, founded in 1979. His approach examines the differences and similarities between Western and Asian performance practices, looking at what common principles underlie performance cross-culturally. The analytical focus is more on the performer rather than performance as such, examining how roles are constructed and with what implicit assumptions. It thus considers performance processes outside cultural and social contexts. This has attracted criticism for its universalizing tendencies from the likes of Rustom Bharucha, as well as from feminist critics, who have asserted that Barba has ignored or sidelined issues of gender, especially in his analyses of female impersonators in Asian performance. Others have protested that he has excluded African performance from his research focus, which Barba counters by emphasizing the need to narrow down and select in order to make his research operable. These debates have helped crystallize issues regarding intercultural performance and the borrowing or application of non-Western or foreign techniques in Western theatre. Focusing on what he terms ‘pre-expressive behaviour’, Barba has identified theatre anthropology’s core principles as follows: the amplification and dilation of the body energetically and spatially, to create an energized and ‘extended’ performer; the use of extra-daily rather than daily techniques, pushing and enlarging the body’s capabilities and balance beyond usage familiar to social situations; opposition as a guiding principle of movement, as in a counterbalance or in moving downwards to prepare for a jump upwards; and ‘inconsistent consistency’, the internal logic or consistency which coded extra-daily modes of performance possess. Ballet, mime or Kabuki, for example, all have unique to them their own particular ways of moving the feet, which must be followed precisely and sustainedly. Barba has extended his research from training-based and theoretical enquiries into the creation of new performances with cross-cultural forms. On paper and in the theatre, his approach has made an original contribution to the study of performer processes and acting, though not without stirring controversy. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barba’s two texts present the fundamentals of this approach, with numerous illustrative examples in the large dictionary. Watson’s book has a range of more critical positions on theatre anthropology in broad relation to intercultural theories. Barba, Eugenio (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler, London: Routledge. —— and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge. Watson, Ian and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 253

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THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Theatre of the absurd was a term created by Hungarian-born critic and theatre scholar Martin Esslin in the 1960s to describe dominant trends in contemporaneous plays as well as those of the previous two decades. The designation was summarized in a book of this title which describes the phenomenon in relation to the oeuvre of a selection of mostly European, all-male playwrights: notably Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. The absurd in this context relates less to notions of the ridiculous or plain comic and more to the idea of purposelessness and the loss of belief in God and ‘master’ narratives (as it later came to be defined under postmodernism). Esslin’s definition drew largely on the work of Albert Camus, the existentialist philosopher and writer and his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. Ironically, whilst the term accounts for a particular style of playwrighting, popularized in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it actually depicts a movement away from language, or at least language as it was previously used and understood. Many plays at that time dispensed with narratives, psychologicallymotivated behaviour and characters and linear plots. Notable examples include Ionesco’s The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959), most of Beckett’s well-known oeuvre and the likes of Edward Albee’s 1958 Zoo Story (Albee is a rare American representative of absurdism in the book, a rarity which puzzles Esslin in his attempt to analyse the causes and context for the evolution of this mostly European trend). In all these and similar works, widely accepted modernist ideas and traditions were usurped by notions and practices that subsequently became recognized as part of postmodernism. As well as focusing on West European writers, Esslin draws several East European playwrights into his purview, many of whom were using drama to express the contradictions and false promises of life within Soviet-run countries. Such writers were trying to circumvent censorship through allegories and allusion (hence the eponymous rhinoceros of Ionesco’s play – the inhabitants of a town gradually turn into these thick-skinned creatures, echoing Franz Kafka’s 1915 The Metamorphosis). This artistic mini-revolution thus battled against the Socialist Realist aesthetic which had been politically imposed across the Eastern Bloc. But the movement also grew out of earlier experiments with form from across Europe such as those of Dada and the surrealists, which were themselves inspired by the huge loss of life and futility of the First World War. Looking further back even to popular genres such as commedia dell’arte, clowning, mime and variety theatre, the latter evident especially in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), theatre of the absurd used comic devices, extraordinary characters and figures, symbolism, fantasy and dreams to create imaginative stage pictures and unreal scenarios. Another important theatrical reference point was Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), with its eccentric characterization, playful punning text and non-sequiturs. In terms of cross-disciplinary influence, silent film also made a big impact on theatre of the absurd, further emphasising how this approach rejected the dominance of the text within plays. The movement thus synthesized a range of experiments across media, cultures and periods. 254

THEATRE OF THE OPPRE S S E D

The term theatre of the absurd is rarely used today other than for describing this historical movement. Nevertheless, it is revealing to consider just how much it prefigured postmodern performance, events such as happenings and contemporary physical theatre, where the appearance on stage of other worldly figures and irrational behaviour was and still is quite commonplace. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Esslin’s book, which has gone through several editions, is the definitive work on this subject. The plays by authors mentioned in this entry and by Esslin provide numerous examples of the theatre of the absurd. Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Anchor Books.

THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED The term ‘theatre of the oppressed’, coined by the late Augusto Boal after Paolo Freire’s writings on oppression, has become recognized and adopted internationally for denoting a way of creating theatre and conducting paratheatrical work with a particular ideological framework. At its heart, this is the attempted liberation through performance techniques of a group or individuals from their own restriction or burden, be it social, cultural, financial, psychological or political. Boal developed several techniques and modes of performance, often involving games, that can operate in theatre and non-theatre milieus to achieve his aims of social franchisement and support. As well as formulating new practices, these processes have resulted in the reconception of specific terminology within the theatre, like his idea of spectactors. Boal’s combined theoretical and practical approach was meant to give people understanding and even, through rehearsal, experience of the possible means by which they can improve their oppressive situations. Even if these do not lead directly to change, they make the participants aware of their own potential to find other ways of living and being. One technique often used within theatre of the oppressed, Forum Theatre, allows audiences to participate by halting the action of a piece, orchestrated by a go-between figure called a joker. Typically, these ‘plays’ or short dramas tackle a local or topical problem head-on. The audience members can then suggest alternative responses to the issue and act these out themselves, positing ways of solving real-life difficulties and oppressions and thereby empowering themselves and their communities. Boal considered this to be a ‘rehearsal of revolution’, and coined the neologism ‘spectactor’ to identify this new participatory role for the audience. In Invisible Theatre the audience must remain unaware that what they are watching is in fact a carefully rehearsed situation that intrudes into real life, such as the verbal sexual abuse of a woman on an underground train. The ‘invisible’ actors attempt to draw an audience in and encourage them to take sides – a situation of conflict or oppression is therefore chosen to stimulate participation and debate. Newspaper Theatre allows workshop 255

CONCEPTS AND PRAC T I C E S

participants to read behind the lines through the enactment of news stories. Image Theatre utilizes symbolic action and gestures rather than text, emphasizing physical rather than verbal processes, with some affinity to Bertold Brecht’s notion of Gestus. These are just some of the processes which Boal developed under the umbrella of theatre of the oppressed. Questions have been asked about the actual efficacy of such techniques and their relationship to real life, with concerns that false hopes might be raised or unrealistic situations presented. Boal’s own personal shift in his later life into working in politics in Brazil and use of Legislative Theatre did not mean the abandonment of these techniques. Instead it can be seen as another means of facilitating the freedom which he sought for oppressed peoples and encouraging an active dialogue between those with power and those who seemingly have none. The major difference in this last phase of his work is the emphasis on changing actual legislation rather than changing situations in general. BIBLIOGRAPHY

These ideas are presented in Boal’s books, two of which are included here, and both of which are based loosely on Freire. Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz depict wider applications of theatre of the oppressed practices beyond Boal’s own work. Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, London: Pluto Press. —— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. Freire, Paolo de (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury. Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and Activism, London: Routledge.

TRAINING Performer training encompasses many disparate processes, even if these often centre on common principles and techniques, as Eugenio Barba has attempted to outline with his theory of the pre-expressive and theatre anthropology. One fundamental belief in training performers is that, however variable the conditions of performance, especially regarding the unpredictability of audience reception, certain skills can be developed to make communication clearer and the experience easier for the performer. In training, the performer usually practises integrating the voice and body, working towards what Phillip Zarrilli has called a ‘body-mind’, where impulse leads immediately to action without self-judgement or extended reflection. These principles are also developed by improvisation, relaxation and muscular control, ease of breath and an open voice, focus and concentration – fundamental elements of most training systems, depending on the type of theatre that is dominant in any culture. In EuroAmerican culture, for example, where naturalist theatre is still the main form and television and film are so economically significant, most emphasis in training is on 256

TRAI NI NG

vocal delivery of text as well as the invention and psychological interpretation of a character or role, based largely on systems articulated by Konstantin Stanislavsky or Lee Strasberg. This is markedly different from an Eastern form such as Noh, which emphasizes the complex codified use of the body, all but ignores originality or creativity, employs imitation of a master as its primary teaching mode and considers longevity of training as indispensable. The time structures in which training happens vary from short workshops measured in days, to lifelong projects as in southern India’s Kathakali, where the body is reshaped by vigorous massage – the hips are opened to enable a wide, deep stance. Correspondingly, theatre school communities differ greatly according to their context, from the family-based systems found across Asia, where the school almost replaces the family in the student’s life, to the short-lived compressed training of drama or acting school programmes familiar to the individualized and commercially oriented approaches found in the West. For many performance forms, from circus and dance to Asian performance, the need to train is evident. With less skill-based modes, the requirement to train is more debatable, and factors such as charisma and talent can replace systematically acquired learned knowledge. The explorations of Yvonne Rainer and the postmodern dancers of the 1960s in New York, epitomized in a piece like Trio A (1966), sanctioned the rejection of technique and turned instead to everyday forms like walking (as in Steve Paxton’s work). Some performance artists deny the need for (or are overtly disinterested in) training, drawing instead on themselves as social rather than trained performative beings. Here, autobiography often takes the place of performer craft, though dramaturgical considerations still apply, and there is no question that they are not performing – there is simply a different emphasis on the craft. Yet even those like Barba and Jerzy Grotowski, who have focused so much of their efforts on establishing discipline and rigorous techniques to help the performer find spontaneity and freedom (a central paradox within performer training), have abandoned training at times or articulated the danger of fixing processes. At one stage Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre gave up their training regime as it had ceased to have any purpose and had become a habitual ritual. The primary aim of any training is to go beyond personal and group habits, to explore creatively, and be open to new ways of working. This manifests itself in the sort of receptivity that an audience detect in a group when they appear to be what is called a ‘true ensemble’. But such qualities are elusive, and training programmes cannot ensure that such an impression will arise or be perceived within the performance event itself. The belief that formulaic methodologies simply do not work and that the individual must find his or her own way in relation to the form underpins most models of training in the West. In performance, performers must focus less on technical matters and more on the actor–spectator relationship, their relation to other performers working with them, and the performance material they are handling, be it a character, a song, a dance or a piece of text. Of course, these cannot be separated from the techniques with which they are enacted, but training and rehearsal periods are the time for focusing on the minutiae – be it diction, breath, ways of moving or posture. In the 257

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performance, the performer must bring all the separate elements together in a synthesis. Whatever techniques and processes have been explored in training or rehearsal, these skills need to become ‘second nature’ for the performance. The idea of neutrality as the performer’s vital base is central to Jacques Lecoq’s training, but the neutral mask is just a tool, and is therefore not worn in performance. Performance is pragmatic, and training can only ever be preparation for the high levels of stressful – though also potentially exhilarating – uncertainty that performing entails. BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are many books on specific approaches to acting but few about theories of actor training in general or performer training as a whole, with Matthews’ book being a welcome exception. Zarrilli and Hodge therefore provide useful collections. Schechner’s chapter ‘Performer Training Interculturally’ in his 1985 book outlines some of the functions of training cross-culturally with reference to Kathakali. The relatively new Routledge journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal focuses on questions of training across performance disciplines. RPA Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge. Hodge, Alison (ed.) (2000) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge. Matthews, John (2011) Training for Performance: a Meta-Disciplinary Account, London: Methuen. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practice, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.

VISUAL THEATRE AND THEATRE OF IMAGES Both of these names specify theatre that prioritizes spectacular scenographic stage images, presenting visual language as theatre’s most important element, and radically challenging Western culture’s usual hierarchical, logocentric deference to text and language. Theatre of images can be spectacular in visual content, scale and/or trickery. Magnificent visual content characterizes such work as Pina Bausch’s flower-strewn set for Nelken (1982), Tadeusz Kantor’s performances, and the work of Italy’s Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio, which features enormous curtains, on-stage animals and unusual bodies, from the anorexic to the obese. Robert Wilson’s and Laurie Anderson’s performances repeatedly play with scale, introducing outsize costumes, props and instruments. And Robert Lepage’s work is notable for its visual trickery, seamlessly transforming a grand piano into a gondola in Tectonic Plates (1988), and using multimedia projections in The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) to overlay multiple fictional locations.

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Beyond its fundamental political commitment to celebrating the visual, however, the theatre of images ranges widely in its political aims and effects. Writing in 1977, Bonnie Marranca identified the theatre of images of avant-garde American directors Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Lee Breuer as overtly politicized postmodern theatre. It featured non-linear structure, non-representational performance and flat images, she argued, in order partly to draw metatheatrical attention to how meaning is made through representation. Such work arose from a variety of antecedents, such as Bertold Brecht’s use of Gestus and tableaux and Antonin Artaud’s total theatre. It also owed a debt to the rise of film and television and to the developed visual literacy they produced in their audiences. And its politics extended not only to its aesthetics but also to its processes, since much of it was collectively devised and placed equal value on the work of each of its contributing artists, from designer to performer to director. However, while this work has some potential to be politically challenging, it can also be conservative. Its emphasis on spectacle and entertainment potentially commodifies what it shows. Directors Lepage, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, for example, have all been criticized, especially in debates on interculturalism, for using superficial images of cultural difference to produce visually exotic shows that do not properly represent cultural difference. Wilson, Bausch and the Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio could also be criticized for using unusual bodies as objects for stage pictures rather than as subjects. The dominance of auteur-directors in this field suggests it not only fails to escape theatre’s conventional hierarchies but actually reinforces them. Its popularity at international festivals is secured by the accessibility of its visual language, but potentially supports the commodification of both the visual and the theatre. The theatre of images pioneered an important cultural and aesthetic re-evaluation of the significance of the visual; what it risks is a capitulation to empty spectacle. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irvin surveys the work of many influential directors in this area and includes extensive photographs. Marranca collects plays by American directors Foreman, Wilson and Breuer, as well as providing thoughtful contextual analysis. Debord’s analysis of the political vacuity of spectacular culture is seminal. Debord, Guy (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books. Irvin, Polly (2003) Directing for the Stage, Hove: RotoVision. Marranca, Bonnie (ed.) ([1977] 1996) The Theatre of Images, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Appendix A CHRONOLOGY OF WORLD/ PERFORMANCE EVENTS, BIRTHS AND DEATHS

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Jacques Copeau Rudolf von Laban Mikhail Bakhtin Walter Benjamin Antonin Artaud

1879

1885

1892

1896–

Boer War

The Cherry Orchard, (director) Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) Moscow, Russia

Titanic disaster

1899–1902

1904

1912

John Cage

Bertold Brecht

Vsevolod Meyerhold

1874

1898

Edward Gordon Craig

1872

Motokiyo Zeami

BIRTHS

Konstantin Stanislavsky

The modern Olympics are founded Ubu Roi, (director) Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, Paris

WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS

1863

1443

1363

YEAR

Motokiyo Zeami

DEATHS

Erving Goffman Peter Brook

1922

1925

Balinese dance-theatre, The Dutch Pavilion, Paris Colonial Exposition

Hitler leads Germany

1931

1933

1934

Wall Street Crash – worldwide economic depression

1929

1928

Richard Schechner Wole Soyinka

Jerzy Grotowski

Augusto Boal

Tatsumi Hijikata

Jacques Lecoq

1921

The Government Inspector, (director) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sohn Theatre, Moscow, Russia

Victor Turner

1920

1926

Merce Cunningham

Russian Revolution

1917

Tadeusz Kantor

BIRTHS

1919

Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, Switzerland

WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS

1916

1915

YEAR

DEATHS

Laurie Anderson Orlan

1947

1948

Rustom Bharucha Stelios Arcadiou (Stelarc) Marina Abramović

1946

Atom bombs dropped on Japan Holocaust memorials and museums begin to be planned

Robert Wilson

1941

1945

Pina Bausch Jacques Rancière

Second World War

Tadashi Suzuki

Hélène Cixous

1940

1939–45

1939

1938

1937

Eugenio Barba

1936–9

Spanish Civil War

Christo Jeanne-Claude

1935

Antonin Artaud

Vsevolod Meyerhold Walter Benjamin

Konstantin Stanislavsky

Robert Lepage

1957

1965

The Constant Prince, (director) Jerzy Grotowski, Laboratory Theatre, Wrocław, Poland

Cuban missile crisis

1962

1963

US troops enter Vietnam Berlin Wall built Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd published

1961

Bread and Puppet Theatre founded

Ron Athey

Judith Butler

1956

1958

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Waiting for Godot, (director) Roger Blin, Théâtre de Babylone, Paris

1953

1955

4' 33", John Cage, Black Mountain College, North Carolina, USA

1952

William Forsythe

Annie Sprinkle

Mother Courage and Her Children, (director) Bertold Brecht, Deutsches Theater, Berlin, Germany

1949

BIRTHS

1954

WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS

YEAR

Rudolf von Laban

Bertold Brecht

Jacques Copeau

DEATHS

Riots in Paris and worldwide Paradise Now, (director) Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Living Theatre, Avignon, France Dionysus in 69, (director) Richard Schechner, The Performance Group, New York (to 1969)

Moon landing

Shoot, Chris Burden, Los Angeles

1968

1969

1971

1982

1981

Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), Wooster Group, New York

Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo begin protesting

1977

Split Britches founded, New York

Sistren founded, Kingston, Jamaica

Vietnam War finishes Einstein on the Beach, (director) Robert Wilson, Avignon Festival, France

1976

1980

Market Theatre founded, Johannesburg, South Africa

The Dead Class, (director) Tadeusz Kantor and Cricot 2, Kraków, Poland

1975

Wooster Group founded, New York

Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, Joseph Beuys, René Block Gallery, New York

Bausch founds Wuppertal Dance Theatre

1974

1973

Trio A, (choreographer) Yvonne Rainer, Judson Church, New York

1966

Erving Goffman

Mikhail Bakhtin

Edward Gordon Craig

The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan series of operations begins (to 1993)

1990

War on Iraq begins

2003

Arab Spring protests begin

Iraq War officially ends

2010

2011

2009

World Trade Towers attacked, New York

2001

1999

1994

The Temple of Confessions, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, toured USA (to 1997)

Berlin Wall falls Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Beijing, China

1989

1992

Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, DV8, London

The Mahabharata, (director) Peter Brook, Les Bouffes du Nord, Paris (to 1988)

WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS

1988

1986

1985

1983

YEAR

DV8 Founded, London

BIRTHS

Pina Bausch Augusto Boal

Jerzy Grotowski Jacques Lecoq

John Cage

Tadeusz Kantor

Tatsumi Hijikata

Victor Turner

DEATHS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramović, Marina (1998) Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998, Milan: Charta. Allain, Paul (1997) Gardzienice: Polish Theatre in Transition, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. —— (2009) The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, with DVD, London: Methuen. Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini (eds) (2009) Practice-asResearch in Performance and Screen, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Laurie (1994) Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–1992, New York: Harper Perennial. Artaud, Antonin (1970) The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London: Calder and Boyars Ltd. Aston, Elaine (1995) An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, London: Routledge. —— and George Savona (1991) Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance, London: Routledge. Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. —— (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 vols, London: Routledge. Austin, John L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, London: Oxford University Press. Azmy, Hazem and Marvin Carlson (eds) (2013) Theatre Research International Special Issue on Theatre and the Arab Spring 38:2. Baal-Teshuva, Jacob (1995) Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Köln: Benedikt Taschen. Babbage, Frances (2004) Augusto Boal, London: Routledge. Baird, Bruce (2012) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist (ed.), trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. —— (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Banes, Sally (1987) Terpsichore in Sneakers, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. —— (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York 1976–85, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Banham, Martin (ed.) (1995) The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, revised edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barba, Eugenio (1985) Beyond The Floating Islands, Denmark: H. M. Bergs Forlag.

SELECT BI BLI OGRA P H Y

—— (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler, London: Routledge. —— (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge. —— and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge. Barker, Clive (1977) Theatre Games, London: Eyre Methuen. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. Bell, John (ed.) (2001) Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benedetti, Jean (1982) Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen. Benjamin, Walter (1970) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, 219–53. Bennett, Susan (1997) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Bentley, Eric (1968) The Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. John Willett, London: Penguin. Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge. —— (2000) The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, London: Athlone. Bial, Henry (ed.) (2004) The Performance Studies Reader, London: Routledge. Birch, Anna and Joanne Tompkins (eds) (2012) Performing Site-Specific Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Birringer, Johannes (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —— (1998) Media and Performance: Along the Border, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (2000) Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture, London: Athlone. Bishop, Claire (ed.) (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel. —— (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso. Blau, Herbert (1990) The Audience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, London: Pluto Press. —— (1995) The Rainbow of Desire, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. —— (1998) Legislative Theatre, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. —— (2001) Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics, trans. Adrian Jackson and Candia Blaker, London: Routledge. —— (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. —— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge. Bottoms, Stephen J. (2003) ‘The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy’, Theatre Topics 13.2. Bradley, Karen K. (2009) Rudolf Laban, London: Routledge. Bratton, Jacky (2003) New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braun, Edward ([1979] 1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, revised edition, London: Eyre Methuen. 270

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—— (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen. Brecht, Bertold (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, London: Methuen. —— (1970–present) Collected Plays, 10 vols, London: Eyre Methuen. Brecht, Stefan (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (1988) The Bread and Puppet Theatre, 2 vols, London: Methuen. Bremser, Martha (ed.) (1999) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, London: Routledge. Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: McGibbon and Kee. —— (1988) The Shifting Point, London: Methuen. —— (1993) There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, London: Methuen. —— (2013) The Quality of Mercy, London: Nick Hern Books. Brown, Ross (2009) Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, revised edition, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Cage, John (1967) A Year from Monday; New Lectures and Writings, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. —— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars. Caillois, Roger (1979) Man, Play and Games, New York: Shocken Books. Callens, Johan (ed.) (2004) The Wooster Group and Its Traditions, Brussels: Peter Lang. Campbell, Patrick and Adrian Kear (eds) (2001) Psychoanalysis and Performance, London: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin (1989) Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1993) Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Carr, C. (1993) On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Carter, Alexandra (ed.) (1998) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, London: Routledge. Case, Sue-Ellen (1988) Feminism and Theatre, New York: Methuen. —— (ed.) (1990) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (ed.) (1996) Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, London: Routledge. —— and Janelle Reinelt (eds) (1991) The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Chambers, Colin (ed.) (2002) The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, London: Continuum. Charest, Rémy ([1995] 1997) Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, trans. Wanda Romer Taylor, London: Methuen. Chaudhuri, Una (1997) Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— and Holly Hughes (eds) (2013) Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Chinoy, Helen Krich and Linda Walsh Jenkins (1987) Women in American Theatre, revised and expanded edition, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Cleto, Fabio (ed.) (1999) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Climenhaga, Royd (ed.) (2009) Pina Bausch, London: Routledge. —— (2013) The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: the Making of Tanztheater, London: Routledge. Cohen-Cruz, Jan (ed.) (1998) Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, London: Routledge. Colleran, Jeanne and Jenny S. Spencer (eds) (1998) Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Collins, Jane and Andrew Nesbitt (2010) Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, London: Routledge. Counsell, Colin (1996) Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth Century Theatre, London: Routledge. —— and Laurie Wolf (eds) (2001) Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook, London: Routledge. Craig, Edward Gordon (1911) On the Art of the Theatre, New York: Theater Arts Books (reissued in 2009 by Routledge, ed. Franc Chamberlain). Davis, Tracy C. and Thomas Postlewait (eds) (2004) Theatricality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage (eds) (1996) In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— and Caridad Svich (eds) (2002) Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— and Dan Rebellato (eds) (2010) Contemporary European Theatre Directors, London: Routledge. Diamond, Elin (ed.) (1996) Performance and Cultural Politics, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, London: Routledge. Di Benedetto, Stephen (2010) The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, New York: Routledge. Dobson, Julia (2002) Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing, Oxford: Peter Lang. Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (2001) Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. —— (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Driver, Senta (ed.) (2000) William Forsythe, Amsterdam: Harwood. Elam, Keir (2002) The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Emigh, John (1996) Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday. Etchells, Tim (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge. Evans, Mark (2006) Jacques Copeau, London: Routledge. Fernandes, Ciane (2001) Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation, New York: Peter Lang. 272

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—— (eds) (2000) The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, London: Routledge. Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Oxon: Routledge. Graham, Scott and Steven Hoggett (2009) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre, London: Routledge. Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre, Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag. Harding, Frances (ed.) (2002) The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader, London: Routledge. Harding, James M. and Cindy Rosenthal (2011) The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hart, Lynda and Peggy Phelan (eds) (1993) Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hartnoll, Phyllis (ed.) (1983) The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 4th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvie, Jen (2005) Staging the UK, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— (2013) Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayward, Philip (ed.) (1998) Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, London: John Libbery. Heathfield, Adrian (ed.) (2004) Live: Art and Performance, London: Tate Publishing. Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling (2006) Devising Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodge, Alison (ed.) ([2000] 2010) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge. Holledge, Julie and Joanne Tompkins (2000) Women’s Intercultural Performance, London: Routledge. Holmberg, Arthur (1997) The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, Pamela (2002) What Is Scenography?, London: Routledge. Howell, Anthony (1999) The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Huizinga, Johan (1970) Homo Ludens, New York: Harper. Hurley, Erin (2010) Theatre & Feeling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Huxley, Michael and Noel Witts (eds) (2002) The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg. Innes, Christopher (ed.) (2000) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London: Routledge. —— and Maria Shevtsova (2013) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (eds) (2013) Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Shannon (2003) Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2011) Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Oxon: Routledge. Johnson, Dominic, (ed.) (2012) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London and Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect.

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—— (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, Oxon: Routledge. Johnstone, Keith (1981) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, London: Eyre Methuen. Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan. —— (1996) Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Keefe, John and Simon Murray (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. —— (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars. Kennedy, Dennis (ed.) (2003) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kershaw, Baz (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge. —— (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge. Kirby, Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby ([1971] 1986) Futurist Performance, New York: PAJ Publications. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, Susan Blakley (1988) Ankoko Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kleymeyer, Charles David (ed.) (1994) Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development: Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. Klosty, James (ed.) (1975) Merce Cunningham, New York: Dutton. Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhns, David F. (1997) German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laban, Rudolf von (1960) A Life for Dance, trans. Lisa Ullman, New York: Theatre Arts Books. —— (2011) Choreutics, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd. Law, Alma and Mel Gordon (2012) Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia, Jefferson: Macfarland & Co. Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body, Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London: Methuen. —— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. David Bradby, London: Routledge. Ledger, Adam J. (2012) Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon: Routledge. Lommel, Andreas (1981) Masks: Their Meaning and Function, New York: Excalibur Books. Luckhurst, Mary (2006) Dramaturgy: a Revolution in Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 275

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Machon, Josephine (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McAuley, Gay (1999) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McAvinchey, Caoimhe (2011) Theatre & Prison, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McCaw, Dick (ed.) (2011) The Laban Sourcebook, Oxon: Routledge. McConachie, Bruce and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds) (2010) Performance and Cognition, London: Routledge. McGrath, John (1981) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Eyre Methuen. McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge. Mackintosh, Iain (1993) Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge. Malkin, Jeanette R. (1999) Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marranca, Bonnie (ed.) ([1977] 1996) The Theatre of Images, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— and Gautam Dasgupta (eds) (1991) Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, New York: PAJ Publications. Martin, Carol (ed.) (1996) A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage, London: Routledge. Mayer, David and Kenneth Richards (eds) (1977) Western Popular Theatre, London: Methuen. Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mermikides, Alex and Jackie Smart (2010) Devising in Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitter, Shomit (1993) Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook, London: Routledge. —— and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London: Routledge. Murray, Timothy (1997) Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance,Video and Art, London: Routledge. Nelson, Robin (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Helen (2005) Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Noueihed, Lin and Alex Warren (2012) The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Making of a New Era, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Oddey, Alison (1994) Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London: Routledge. Oliveira, Nicolas de, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry (1994) Installation Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Orlan (1996) This Is My Body . . . This Is My Software, London: Black Dog. —— (2004) Orlan: Carnal Art, trans. Deke Dusinberre, Paris: Editions Flammarion. Orozco, Lourdes (2013) Theatre & Animals, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds) (1995) Performativity and Performance, London: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice (1982) Languages of the Stage, New York: PAJ Publications. —— (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge. 276

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—— (1998) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— (2013) Contemporary Mise–en-scène: Staging Theatre Today, trans. Joel Anderson, London: Routledge. Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. —— (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, London: Routledge. —— and Jill Lane (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press. Pickering, Kenneth ([2005] 2010) Key Concepts in Drama and Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— and Jayne Thompson (2013) Naturalism in Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollock, Della (ed.) (1998) Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Postlewait, Thomas (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prentki, Tim and Sheila Preston (eds) (2009) The Applied Theatre Reader, Oxon: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques ([2000] 2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum. —— (2010) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso. Read, Alan (1993) Performance and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London: Routledge. Reason, Matthew (2006) Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds) (1992) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Richards, Thomas (2008) Heart of Practice: within the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, London: Routledge. Ridout, Nicholas (2007) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riggio, Milla Cozart (2004) Carnival, London: Routledge. Roach, Joseph (1996) Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press. Routledge Performance Archive. www.routledgeperformancearchive.com Rubin, Don (general ed.) (1994–2000) The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, 6 vols, London: Routledge. Rudlin, John (1986) Jacques Copeau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sandford, Mariellen (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts, London: Routledge. Savran, David (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause Books. —— ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge.

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—— (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. —— ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge. —— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge. Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge. —— (2011) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London: Routledge. —— and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge. Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and Activism, London: Routledge. Servos, Norbert (1984) Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater, or, the Art of Training a Goldfish: Excursions into Dance, trans. Patricia Stadié, Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen Verlag. Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shaughnessy, Nicola (2012) Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shepherd, Simon and Mick Wallis (2004) Drama/Theatre/Performance, London: Routledge. Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Simon, Ronald T. and Marc Estrin (2004) Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Vermont: Chelsea Green Books. Smith, Marquard (ed.) (2007) Stelarc: The Monograph, Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (eds) (2002) Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Soyinka, Wole (1988) Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, London: Methuen. Spier, Steven (ed.) (2011) William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography, London: Routledge. Sprinkle, Annie (1998) Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My Twenty-Five Years as a Multimedia Whore, revised and updated edition, San Francisco: Cleis Press. —— (2001) Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance: Annie Sprinkle: Solo, Gabrielle Cody (ed.), London: Continuum. Stanislavski, Konstantin (1924) My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins, London: Geoffrey Bles. —— (2008) An Actor’s Work, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge. —— (2009) An Actor’s Work on a Role, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge. States, Bert O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stelarc (2005) Stelarc: The Body is Obsolete, Melbourne: Contemporary Arts Media. DVD and CD-ROM. Sternfeld, Jessica (2006) The Megamusical, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press.

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Stiles, Kristine, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichiro Osaki and Paul Schimmel (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, London: Thames and Hudson. Striff, Erin (ed.) (2003) Performance Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Suzuki, Tadashi (1986) The Way of Acting, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Taylor, Diana (1997) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Durham: Duke University Press. Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Cathy and Synne Behrndt (2007) Dramaturgy and Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine. —— (1974) Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Press. —— (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications. Ubersfeld, Anne (1999) Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo: Shufunotomo Co. Ltd. Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon. Watson, Ian and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Welton, Martin (2012) Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiles, David (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and Christine Dymkowski (eds) (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen. Williams, David (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge. Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. —— (2009) Psychophysical Acting: an Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, with DVD, Oxon: Routledge. —— Bruce McConachie, Gary J. Williams, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (2010) Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 2nd edition, Oxon: Routledge. —— Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes (2013), Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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SELECT JOURNALS Contemporary Theatre Review TDR: The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies Theatre, Dance and Performance Training The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Modern Drama NTQ: New Theatre Quarterly PAJ: Performing Arts Journal Performance Research Theater Theatre Journal Theatre Research International Theatre Topics

280

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate pages with figures. 4’ 33” 5, 18, 42, 99–100, 169 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life 23 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 191 Abba 229 Abdoh, Reza 22 abject, theories of the 70, 238 Abramović, Marina 15–17, 21, 90, 129, 150, 153, 159, 177, 185, 196, 210, 220–2, 231, 244, 251 Absurd, Theatre of the 103–4, 109, 140–2, 169, 183, 189, 240, 251, 254–5 Acconci, Vito 221 acting 5, 20, 32, 36, 46, 54, 56, 58, 67, 83–4, 102, 106, 116, 131, 147–8, 150, 155, 161, 169, 174, 182, 183, 190, 194, 208, 214, 217, 219, 232, 235, 243, 251, 257, 258; acting process 36, 152, 253; believability 83, 174, 201, 215 Acting Out 72 ‘Actions’ 107–8, 190 active culture 55, 217 activism 32, 45, 54, 82, 152, 162, 194, 236–7 ‘actor’s paradox’ 147–8 actor–audience relationship see performer–audience relationship Admiring La Argentina 57 Adorno, T.W. 30, 207 Affective Athleticism’, ‘An 19

affect 8, 22, 45, 58, 99, 115, 133, 149–51, 153, 230 African theatre 7, 66, 198, 214, 253 Akaji, Maro 160 Akropolis 54, 204 Albee, Edward 238, 254 Alcestis 18, 90 Alfred Jarry Theatre 20 Alice in Bed 90 ALIE/N A(C)TION 51 alienation 37, 93, 102, 131 All Blacks 117–8, 117 Aller à la mer 45 American Beauty 175 Anderson, Laurie 5, 17–19, 24, 42, 90, 133, 185, 195, 211, 214, 220, 232, 233, 250, 258 Andrews, Raymond 90 animals 59, 107, 151–2, 227, 228, 240, 258; animal energy 87, 151; animal play 244; animal rituals 244 Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn, from Reel to Real 81 anthropology 3, 53, 71, 75, 88, 103, 244, 252–3; see also theatre anthropology Anthropométries 70 anti-theatrical prejudice 148 Antigone’s Claim 41 Antoine, André 174, 216 Apocalypsis cum Figuris 54 Appia, Adolphe 183, 246 applied theatre 9, 33, 73, 152–4 281

I NDEX

Arab Spring 3, 4, 65, 100–1, 137, 150, 237 Arcades Project 31 Archaos 165 Arden, John 37 Arien 28 Aristotle 33, 94, 150, 156, 157, 215 Art of Movement Studio 59 Art as Vehicle 55–6 Art/Life One Year Performance 221 Artaud, Antonin 19–22, 38, 56, 73, 102, 103, 106, 128, 129, 142, 143, 147, 150, 155, 169, 193, 198, 201, 208, 210, 224, 226, 238, 244, 245, 259 Artist is Present, The 16 Asian performance 7, 27, 32, 75, 94, 102, 103, 147, 154–6, 161, 169, 198, 204, 205, 210, 214, 225, 229, 240, 244, 253, 257; see also Balinese dance-theatre; Beijing Opera; Bunraku puppetry; Chinese theatre; and Noh theatre; Japanese theatre; Kathakali Athey, Ron 8, 21, 22–4, 69, 82, 129, 133, 136, 150, 159, 221, 223, 238 Atlas, Charles 49 audience 156–8; challenges to 16, 29, 130, 157, 159, 163, 168; confessions 16, 53, 111, 136, 200; contact 113, 128, 180; engagement 16, 23, 36, 74, 115, 119, 136, 172, 183, 212, 235, 192–5; feminist theories 238; meaning making 42, 49; participation 255–6; provocation 23, 29, 53, 99, 119, 131, 140, 150, 151, 165, 166, 172, 180, 187, 193, 201; reading 94; suspension of belief 215; see also spectators and spectatorship audience–performer interaction 104, 112, 127–8, 136, 180, 196, 197, 203–4, 246, 249 audience–performer relationship 15, 54–5, 143, 192–4, 257

aura 30, 235, 236 Auslander, Philip 72, 176, 203–4, 213, 232, 233 Austin, John 222, 223 auteur directors 58, 90, 116, 174, 188, 226, 242, 246, 259 autobiographical performance 19, 28, 81, 111, 220 autobiography 22, 92, 185, 257 Avignon Festival 113, 114, 115, 121, 127, 128, 187 B, Franko 159, 238 Bacchae, The 86, 112 Baker, Bobby 185, 220, 221 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 24–5, 163, 237 Balcony, The 75 Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis 102 Balinese dance-theatre 20, 102–3, 155, 244; shadow puppetry 240 Balkan Baroque 16, 196, 221 Ball, Hugo 168 ballet 27, 28, 50, 51, 155, 170, 210, 253 Bancroft, Anne 123 Banes, Sally 139, 170, 218 Barba, Eugenio 25–7, 32, 56, 67, 84, 94, 136, 151, 154, 155, 174, 198, 214, 252–3, 256, 257 Barrault, Jean-Louis 46 barters 25, 26, 154 Barthes, Roland 231, 247 Bataille, Georges 22 Bateson, Gregory 102 Batt, Mike 99 Baudelaire, Charles 31 Baudrillard, Jean 231 Bausch, Pina 27–30, 59, 111, 151, 169, 170, 172, 184, 185, 209, 225, 231, 232, 258, 259 Beauty and the Beast 80, 206 Beck, Julian 128 Beckett, Samuel 87, 91, 141–2, 157, 189, 224, 254 282

I NDEX

behaviour; animalistic 151–2, 227; performance as description of 218; performative analysis 52 Behaviour in Public Places 52 Beijing Opera 37 Belle Reprieve 80 Bellywoman Bangarang 77 Belo, Jane 102 Benjamin, Walter 2, 8, 30–1, 38, 206, 211, 235, 236 Berkoff, Steven 60 Berliner Ensemble 36, 123–5, 123 Beuys, Joseph 107–8, 151, 182, 190, 221, 244 Bharatamuni 94 Bharucha, Rustom 3, 26, 31–3, 39, 76, 122, 199, 253 Bing, Suzanne 47 biomechanics 67, 68, 116, 134 Birtwhistle, Harrison 214 Bishop, Claire 153 BITE Festival 7 Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets 90 black theatre 192 Blast Theory 200, 211 blocking 123, 241, 242 Bloody Mess 241 Blue Beard 28 Boal, Augusto 33–4, 38, 73, 77, 152, 153, 157, 173, 180, 196, 197, 217, 227, 229, 249, 251, 255–6 Bodies that Matter 41 body; as artistic medium 221; medical objectification 129; as site for feminist campaigning 81–2 body adornment 159, 204–5, 239 body art 9, 15, 22, 69, 86, 111, 149, 158–9, 167, 185, 196, 203, 205, 219, 221, 251 body artists see Abramović; Anderson; Orlan; Sprinkle; Stelarc ‘Body, Brain and Culture’ 88–9 body suspensions 159, 200

body-mind 256 Bogart, Anne 87, 155, 242 Boleslavsky, Richard 84 Born in the RSA 66 Bouazizi, Mohammed 100 boxing ring 37, 135 Boyle, Danny 125 Boyle, Jimmy 108 Brace Up! 93 ‘bread and circuses’ 164 Bread and Puppet Theatre 34–6, 35, 48, 77, 95, 137, 152, 163, 229, 237, 240, 251 breathing, training of 19 Brecht, Bertold 24, 30, 33, 36–8, 73, 102, 123–5, 135, 141, 147, 150, 157, 166, 169, 174, 183, 194, 198, 201, 204, 211, 214, 216, 219, 229, 249, 251, 256, 259 Brecht, George 190 Brenton, Howard 172 Breuer, Lee 259 Brith Gof 180 Broadway 93, 157, 204, 206–8 Brook, Peter 21, 32, 38–40, 55, 66, 94, 105, 121–2, 136, 155, 187, 198, 214, 228, 229, 248, 249, 250, 251, 259 Brown, Trisha 18 bullfighting 134 Bunraku puppetry 56 Burden, Chris 21, 132–4, 132, 159, 182 Burroughs, William S. 90 Burton, Richard 93 Buss Out 77 Butler, Judith 2, 29, 40–1, 82, 89, 159, 161, 185, 205, 218, 220, 223, 224, 228 butoh 56, 57, 59, 150, 155, 160–1, 184, 209, 225 Butoh Genet 57 Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds 90 283

I NDEX

Cabaret Voltaire 3, 103–4, 168, 169, 180, 189, 190, 220, 240 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 183 Cage, John 5, 18, 41–3, 49, 99–100, 169, 190, 195, 214 Caillois, Roger 227 camp 52, 80, 129, 161–2 Camus, Albert 254 Can You See Me Now? 200 CanDoCo 170 Caplan, Elliot 49 carnal art 130 carnival 24, 33, 35, 75, 77, 162, 163–4, 180, 181, 187, 227, 229, 237 Carrière, Jean-Claude 121 Carrier Frequency, The 177 Cartesian dualism 224 Caserne Dalhousie 62, 63 Castellucci, Claudio 242 Castle of Holstebro, The 25 catharsis 33, 157 Cats 26, 206, 207, 229 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The 36, 204 Cenci, The 21 Certeau, Michel de 181 Chairs, The 254 chance 18, 42, 49, 99, 135, 169, 195 charisma 212, 235, 257 Charleroi Danses/Plan K 171 Charnock, Nigel 111 Chaudhuri, Una 39 Cheek by Jowl 174 Chekhov, Anton 67, 84, 87, 93, 104–5, 201, 216 Cherry Orchard, The 84, 104–5, 216 Chiaroscuro Sewing 69 Childs, Lucinda 90, 113, 114 Chinese theatre 37 Christo 43–5, 197 Churchill, Caryl 172 CICT (Centre International de Créations Théâtrales) 39, 121 Cieślak, Ryszard 38, 55, 106

circus 39, 63, 67, 151, 156, 164–6, 204, 218, 225, 228, 229, 257 Cirque du Soleil 63, 151, 165, 180, 229 CIRT (Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) 39 CIVIL warS 90, 91 Cixous, Hélène 2, 45–6, 60, 71, 185, 238 classical dance 27, 28, 51, 170 Classical Graffiti 99 classical theatre 38, 40, 45, 79 Clayburgh, Jim 92 Closer 200 Cloud Nine 172 Clowns, The 165 Cocteau, Jean 63 codified performance 102, 155, 210, 257 collaboration 26, 42, 49, 62, 67, 149, 174, 195 colonialism 45, 78–9, 102, 118, 172 Comédie-Française 47, 230 commedia 47, 60, 67, 140, 172, 195, 204, 229, 254 Commune 75 communication; ritualistic 16; theatre as vehicle for 112, 256 communitas 157 Conference of the Birds, The 39 Confessional, The 63 Constant Prince, The 54, 55, 106–7, 251 constructivist scenography 68, 163, 246 consumer culture 31, 130, 162, 221, 231, 236 contact improvisation 139, 195 cop-in-the-head 33 Copeau, Jacques 7, 46–8, 152, 205, 229 Cottesloe Studio 252 Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me 107–8, 151, 182, 190, 221, 244 Craig, Edward Gordon 47, 48–9, 57, 58, 94, 183, 189, 201, 239, 240, 246 Crommelynck, Fernand 117

284

I NDEX

cross-cultural performance 8, 26, 32, 87, 103, 106 Crucible, The 92 Cruelty, Theatre of 19, 20, 21, 38, 129, 143 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 227 cultural assumptions, challenges to 93, 130, 136, 163, 232 cultural identity 161–2, 181, 205, 221, 231, 236 cultural materialism 30, 166–8 Cunningham, Merce 42, 49–50, 170, 190 Cunningham technique 170 Dada 24, 103, 104, 140, 142, 157, 168–9, 180, 183, 189, 216, 219, 220, 254 Dadaists 190, 240 Dafoe, Willem 92 Dairakudakan 160 Dalí, Salvador 168 dance 5, 7, 8, 20, 21, 59, 71, 75, 92, 93, 114, 125, 131, 134, 135, 143, 149, 154, 160–1, 163, 165, 169–71, 187, 189, 193, 209, 210, 214, 218, 220, 224, 225, 257; contemporary 49; experimental 51, 138, 168; expressive 23; feminist 185–6; improvisational 28, 195; postmodern 138–9, 232; see also butoh; haka dance theatre 27–9, 110–1, 154, 192 see also Balinese dance-theatre Darwin, Charles 216 Dasté, Jean 46 Davis, Miles 63 Dead Class, The 57, 108–10 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men 21, 110–11, 170, 225 deadly theatre 39 Deafman Glance 90 Deak, Frantisek 143 Death of the Author’, ‘The 231, 248

Death and the King’s Horseman 78 deconstructive performance 26, 50, 131, 219 Decreation 51 Decroux, Etienne 46 deep play 227 Deliverance 23 Democracy’s Body 170 demonstration performances 34, 229 demonstrations 5, 75, 127, 128, 133, 137–8, 184, 190, 229, 236–7, 240, 251 Dench, Judi 123 Deren, Maya 171 Derrida, Jacques 20 devised theatre 28, 38, 45, 77, 112, 147, 161, 178, 180, 195, 228, 231, 242, 246, 259 devising 172–3 dialogism 24 Diderot, Denis 147 digital technologies 8, 50, 70, 176, 202, 214 Dine, Jim 190 Dionysus 87 Dionysus in 69 15, 75, 112–13, 127, 139, 177, 180 dioramas, living 53, 136, 212 directing 173–6 director–designer teams 48, 246 Disney 206 Dobkin, Jess 193 documentation 8, 30, 50, 51, 103, 133, 176–8, 203, 214, 234, 235, 242 Dolan, Jill 80, 150 Dollimore, Jonathan 167 Doll’s House, A 216 Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant, The 34 Domesticks 77 Donnellan, Declan 174 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 24, 54 Downpression Get a Blow 77 Dr Faustus 54 285

I NDEX

Dr Faustus Lights the Lights 91, 93 Dragon’s Trilogy, The 62 Drama in Performance 167 Drama Review, The 75 dramatherapy 217 Dramatic Theatre 37 dramaturgy 25, 32, 36, 79, 88, 104, 167, 174, 178–9, 181, 225, 234, 257 dramaturgs 179, 242 Dream Play, A/The 21, 63, 115, 238 Drowned Man, The 193 Duchamp, Marcel 42 Duets on Ice 17 Dullin, Charles 46 durational art 16, 182, 210, 221 DV8 Physical Theatre 21, 29, 110–11, 170, 172, 225 economics 77, 80, 123, 230 écriture féminine 45, 71, 185 Edinburgh Fringe Festival 187 Edinburgh International Festival 7, 187 Edinburgh People’s Festival 156 ego 238 Einstein on the Beach 90, 113–6, 114 Elam, Keir 247 Electra complex 238 Eliot, T.S. 206 Emin, Tracey 196 emotion 8, 15, 16, 19, 21, 27, 28, 37, 48, 57, 71, 90, 93, 106, 119, 130, 131, 134, 147, 148, 149–51, 157, 161, 172, 183, 201, 221, 232, 243, 249 emotion memory 83, 150 Empty Space, The 39, 228, 249 Encounters 52 Ends of Performance, The 72 endurance 15, 22, 159, 221 English, Rose 151 environmental theatre 35, 75, 157, 179–81, 182, 190, 193, 197, 225, 246; see also Bread and Puppet Theatre

epic theatre 30, 37, 157, 166, 169, 219 Esslin, Martin 142, 254–5 Eurasian theatre 26, 32 Eurocrash dance movement 111, 134, 170, 225 everyday life 28, 34, 52, 75, 83, 105, 107, 111, 128, 134, 138, 140, 159, 161, 181–2, 205, 216, 220, 228; body art 15, 159; happenings 190; bridging of performance and 107, 141, 161; queer activism 162; theatrical devices in 138; truthfulness to 83 everyday movement 28, 42, 139, 170, 209–10, 220 evolutionary theory 216 Ex Machina 62 Excitable Speech 41 existentialism 224, 225 Exorcism of Violence and the Sexual Revolution’, ‘The 128 experimental theatre 34, 38, 75, 88, 94, 125, 142 expressionism 28, 160, 169, 183–4, 219 expressionistic design 35 family dramas 238 Fang, Mei Lan 37, 102 Far Side of the Moon, The 18, 62, 63, 240 Faust 193 Faust/Gastronome 75 Fee for Service 193 feeling 8, 16, 18, 19, 23, 45, 53, 55, 101, 123, 133, 136, 149–51, 157, 159, 169, 193, 203, 206, 223, 224, 230, 235, 238, 240, 241 Fellini, Federico 165 female audience/spectatorship 45 feminism 9, 45, 71, 72, 81, 82, 129, 184–6, 220 feminist artists 69, 129, 158 feminist dance 185 feminist suffragettes 237 286

I NDEX

feminist theatre 80–1, 185 feminists 40, 45, 69, 81, 157, 185 Ferdydurke 109 Festival Dionysia 187 festivals 25, 47, 75, 136, 163, 180, 181, 187–8, 229; see also theatre festivals fetish 31, 69, 238 Finley, Karen 158, 220 Fire 34 fluxus movement 75, 107 Flying Circus 156 Fo, Dario 60, 135, 229 Foot Washing for the Sole 193 Forced Entertainment 93, 148, 172, 202, 241 Foreman, Richard 259 Forsythe, William 8, 27, 49, 50–2, 170 Forsythe Company, The 50, 171 Forum Theatre 33, 157, 173, 196, 255 Fountain 42 Four Plays for Dancers 102 Frantic Assembly 111 Freed, James Ingo 119 Freeing the Voice 15 Freire, Paolo de 33, 255 Freud, Sigmund 20, 238 Fried, Michael 197 Fringe theatre 252 Fugard, Athol 66 Fusco, Coco 54, 212 futurism 157, 168, 183, 188–9, 211, 219 Gance, Abel 20 Garner, Stanton B. 224 gay theatre 192 Geertz, Clifford 224, 227 gender identity 40, 41, 70, 184, 223, 228 gender issues 77, 172, 184–5, 253 Gender Trouble 40 Genet, Jean 22, 56, 254 genetics 216 Gennep, Arnold van 88

Geometry of Miracles 62, 63 Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 173 Gerz, Jochen and Esther 119 Gesamtkunstwerk 213 Gestus 37, 123, 256, 259 Ghosts 216 Gilbert and George 159 Glass, Philip 90, 113–6 Godwin, Edward William 48 Goethe 75 Goffman, Erving 2, 52–3, 180, 181–2, 218, 228 Gogol, Nikolai 68, 116–7 Gombrowicz, Witold 109 Goméz-Peña, Guillermo 24, 53–4, 69, 129, 136–7, 153, 196, 198, 200, 212, 220, 232, 244 Government Inspector, The 68, 116–7 Graham, Martha 49, 170, 209 Grain of the Voice’, ‘The 248 grand narratives 192, 196, 221, 231 Gray, Spalding 92, 220 Great Day in the Morning 90 grotesque style 68, 109, 111, 116, 140, 204 Grotowski, Jerzy 7, 21, 25, 31, 38, 54–6, 66, 75, 84, 89, 94, 106–7, 136, 151, 155, 157, 179, 193, 198, 204, 214, 217, 226, 244, 251, 257 Gurawski, Jerzy 54, 106 Gutai theatre 190 haka 9, 117–8, 117, 227, 244 Halprin, Anna and Lawrence 61, 242 Hamlet 48, 75 HAMLET 93 Hamlet: A Monologue 91 Handke, Peter 157 Hapgood, Elizabeth 84 happenings 17, 21, 58, 73, 99, 103, 107, 137, 151, 169, 180, 189–91, 193, 195, 203, 214, 218, 220, 229, 237, 244, 248, 251, 255 Happy Days 91

287

I NDEX

Hardcore from the Heart 81 Hare, David 216 Hart, Lynda 72 Heidegger, Martin 224 Helms, Jesse 23 Hennings, Emmy 104 heritage sites 213 HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away 160 Hijikata, Tatsumi 56–7, 160 Hirst, Damien 197 historiography 185, 191–2, 212 Holocaust memorials and museums 10, 118–20, 150, 212, 239 holy actors 55, 106, 155 holy theatre 155 Horkheimer, Max 207 House with the Ocean View, The 16 House/Lights 93 Howells, Adrian 193 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 108 Hsieh, Tehching 221 Hughes, Ted 39 Huizinga, Johan 227 Husserl, Edmund 224 hybridity 27, 53–4, 70, 79, 81, 118, 122, 136, 143, 154, 155, 158, 163, 165, 197, 198, 214, 220, 221, 232 hyperrealism 20 Ibsen, Henrik 91, 216, 238 id 238 identity; masking 204; performance art 221; performativity of 18, 40–1, 80, 159, 222–3; questioning categorisation of 29, 53; see also cultural identity; gender identity; queer identity; sexual identity identity politics 111, 184 Ignorant Schoolmaster, The 73 Image Mill, The 63 Image Theatre 256 Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 42

Imagining O 75 imitative animal exercises 152 immersive theatre 21, 55, 112, 157, 180, 192–5, 197, 200, 246, 248 improvisation 28, 39, 47, 61, 77, 128, 135, 139, 147, 152, 161, 172, 185, 188, 190, 194, 195–6, 218, 220, 225, 228, 238, 242, 256 Indiad, or the India of their Dreams, The 45 Indian performance see Kathakali installation art 16, 44, 51, 53, 91, 108, 136, 157, 180, 190, 192, 196–8, 200, 212, 221, 237, 245, 246, 248 intercultural theatre 26, 32, 39, 53, 75, 86, 105, 121–2, 198–9 interculturalism 1, 7, 32, 63, 66, 70, 75, 76, 87, 102–3, 118, 136, 143, 147, 154, 163, 188, 198–9, 207, 214, 225, 230, 253 International School of Theatre Anthropology 26 internet-based performance 18, 53, 85, 86, 136, 159, 171, 199–201, 211 Interruption in Space 15 invisible theatre 153, 157, 173, 180, 217, 255 Ionesco, Eugene 254 Isozaki, Arata 87 Ito, Mr 102 It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You – It’s the Hole 133 Jackson, Glenda 123 Jamaican theatre 77–8 Japanese theatre 75, 86, 93, 94–5, 102, 155, 161, 205; see also butoh; Kabuki; Noh theatre Jarry, Alfred 20, 140–1, 169, 240, 254 Jay-Z 17 Jeanne-Claude 43–5, 197 Jerry Springer the Opera 214 Jewish Museum, Berlin 119, 120, 212 Jeyasingh, Shobhana 135

288

I NDEX

‘John Cage Uncaged’ 99 Johns, Jasper 42 Joint Stock 172 Jooss, Kurt 28, 59 Jouvet, Louis 46 Judas Cradle 22 Judson Dance Theatre 42, 138, 139, 170, 189 KÀ 63 KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace 90 Kabuki 87, 161, 229, 253 Kafka, Franz 254 Kaiser, Georg 183 Kammer/Kammer 51 Kane, Sarah 7 Kantor, Tadeusz 48, 57–8, 103, 108–10, 174, 190, 226, 231, 232, 239, 242, 246, 248, 258 Kaprow, Allan 190, 191 Kaspariana 25 Kathakali 75, 147, 155, 204, 210, 229, 257 Keersmaeker, Anna Teresa de 170 Kershaw, Baz 233, 237 Kester, Grant 153 kinetic scenography 116 King Lear 38 Kinjiki 56–7 Kirby, Michael 148, 182, 190 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 212 Kiss of the Artist, The 69–70 Kitchen Show 221 kitchen-sink drama 216 Klein, Yves 70, 158 Knapp, Alain 61 knee-plays 114 Knowles, Christopher 90, 115 Kokoschka, Oscar 183 Kott, Jan 39 Krapp’s Last Tape 91 Kroetz, Franz Xaver 32 Kuhns, David F. 183

Kukai/Akopeenein/Brown cross/Fat corners/Model fat corners 107 Kusama, Yayoi 158 La Fura dels Baus 21, 125, 225 Laban, Rudolf von 50, 59–60, 67, 169, 171, 209 Labanotation 59 Laboratory Theatre 25, 55, 257 Lady Gaga 17 Lane, Jill 72 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo 3, 64–5, 64, 100, 120, 138, 150, 185, 237, 239 Laugh of the Medusa, The 45 Laukvik, Elsa Marie 25 Leary, Timothy 92 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 190 L’Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq 60 LeCompte, Elizabeth 92, 131 Lecoq, Jacques 7, 46, 47, 60–1, 152, 172, 205, 209, 258 Le Dernier Caravansérail 45 Lefebvre, Henri 181 Legislative Theatre 33, 153, 256 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 230–1 Lehrstücke 36 Leigh, Mike 172 Lepage, Robert 18, 61–4, 172, 174, 187, 198, 211, 232, 240, 242, 250, 258, 259 Les Bouffes du Nord 39, 40, 105 Les Copiaus 47 lesbian theatre 80–1, 192 Lesbians who Kill 80 Les Misérables 206, 207 Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir 45 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim 178 Letter for Queen Victoria, A 90, 113 Libeskind, Daniel 119, 120, 212 Life and Death of Marina Abramović, The 17, 90 Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The 90 289

I NDEX

LifeForms software 49 Life of Galileo, The 36 lighting and sound 5, 20, 50, 55, 61, 92, 149, 171, 172, 174, 201–2, 208, 242, 245, 247, 251 Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation 61 liminality 71, 88, 161, 165 liminoid 88 Lindtberg, Leopold 123 Lion King, The 206, 240 Lips of Thomas 15 Little Women 80 Littlewood, Joan 59, 66 live art see performance art Live Art in LA 72 liveness 4, 5, 9, 18, 30, 71, 72, 73, 101, 130, 143, 147, 151, 176, 190, 192, 193, 196, 199, 202, 203–4, 206, 211, 213, 218, 219, 221, 228, 232, 234, 236, 239 Liveness 72 living dioramas 53, 136, 212 Living Theatre 21, 113, 127–9, 172, 251 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 206 Lohengrin 91 London International Festival of Theatre 7, 187 London International Mime Festival 187 Lorca, Federico García 238 Lord of the Flies 39 Los Angeles Festival 187 Lost Lounge 80 Lovers, The: Walk on the Great Wall 15, 210 LSD (. . . Just the High Points . . .) 92, 93 Lucas, Sarah 197 Lust and Comfort 80 Lyotard, Jean-François 192 Macbeth 156, 193 Macbeth, Sleep no More 193

McBurney, Simon 109 McCartney, Paul 199 McGrath, John 229, 230 McKenzie, Jon 19, 218, 219 Madame Butterfly 91 Madmen and Specialists 78 Magdalena Project 26 Magnanimous Cuckold, The 68, 117 Mahabharata, The 32, 39, 121–2, 199 Malina, Judith 127–9 Maly Theatre 242 Mamma Mia 229 Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The 40 Man Who, The 39 Manim, Mannie 65, 67 Mann, Sara Shelton 54 Maori dance 75, 117–8 Marat-Sade 38 Marber, Patrick 200 Margolin, Deb 80 Marina Abramović Institute 16, 222 Marinetti, F.T. 188 Market Theatre 65–7 Markham, Dewey (Sweet Papa Pigmeat) 92, 130–1 Marlowe, Christopher 54 Marowitz, Charles 38 Marranca, Bonnie 259 martial artists and arts 95, 134, 218 Marx, Karl 164, 216 Marxism 36, 167 Mask 48 masks/masking 5, 20, 34, 35, 47, 52, 60, 104, 107, 125, 140, 143, 163, 168, 194, 204–5, 207, 228, 229, 239, 245, 249, 258; see also neutral masks masochism 15, 57, 159, 238 Maxwell, Richard 150 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 68 Mda, Zakes 66 Mead, Margaret 102–3 290

I NDEX

Measures Taken, The 36 Measurings 70 media 4, 5, 16, 22, 44, 50, 53, 61, 66, 71, 74, 101, 109, 120, 165, 176, 186, 189, 197, 202, 220, 254; mass 137, 203; recorded 1, 203–4; saturation 231–2; social 4, 100–1, 177, 200; visual 151; see also multimedia performance mediate or mediation 4, 18, 42, 51, 70, 93, 101, 166, 176, 193, 210–11 mediatize or mediatization 101, 125, 138, 176, 200, 203 medical enhancement 85 medical objectification, women’s bodies 129–30 megamusicals 149, 157, 191, 206–8, 214, 229; see also musical performance melodrama 60, 149, 191–2, 213, 215, 216, 228, 251; melodramatic techniques 83 memorialization 118–19 Mendes, Sam 175 Merce Cunningham Dance Company 49 Mercy, Dominique 29 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 224–5 Metamorphosis 254 Method acting 84, 235 Method of Physical Actions 83 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 67–9, 84, 104, 105, 116–17, 134, 140, 174, 183, 204, 214, 226, 229, 242, 246 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 39, 63 Miller, Arthur 92, 216 mime 46, 60, 187, 225, 228, 229, 253, 254 mimesis 20, 52, 102, 155, 217 mimetic 147, 190, 214; actors 48; enactment 187; representation 20, 148, 215, 219, 251; tradition 7 Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 see Trio A minimalism 18, 89, 104, 106, 112, 121, 138–9, 141

mise en scène 20, 67, 109, 116, 123, 149, 173, 174, 178, 191, 201, 208–9, 238, 241, 245, 246 Mishima, Yukio 56 Miss America 80 Miss Saigon 206–7, 214 Mistero Buffo 135, 229 Mitchell, Katie 7, 184 Miyake, Issey 129 Mnouchkine, Ariane 45, 60, 154, 198, 250, 259 mobilization, of audience/spectator or people 75, 101, 119, 138 model books 38, 123 Molinier, Pierre 22 monologic discourse 24 monologue or monologues 18, 77, 91, 93, 114, 115, 183; autobiographical 220 Monstrous Regiment 172 Montana, Linda 221 Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights 119 Monument for Ishi, A 34 Moscow Art Theatre 48, 67, 83, 105 Mother Courage and Her Children 36, 37, 124–5, 124, 141 Mother, The 36 motion capture 49, 171 mourning 71, 72 Mourning Sex 72 movement 20, 28–9, 48, 51, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 80, 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 112, 114, 116, 118, 138–9, 149, 151, 158, 161, 172, 193, 195, 209–10, 214, 220, 225, 230, 236, 241, 244, 249, 253; in dance 28–9, 49, 51, 59, 114, 138–9, 161, 169–71 mudras 20, 155 Muffet Inna All a We 77 Müller, Heiner 90

291

I NDEX

multimedia performance 7, 17–19, 21, 30, 50, 62, 69–70, 81, 92, 129, 131, 155, 159, 189, 200, 202, 203, 208, 210–12, 220, 221, 230, 232, 236, 246, 258 Munch, Edvard 183 Musafar, Fakir 159 museum display 16, 53, 70, 115, 118–20, 212–3 musical performance 5, 18, 42, 50, 66, 75, 77, 99, 168, 178, 213–15, 228–9; see also megamusicals My Bed 196 My Father’s House 25 Mystery-Bouffe 68 Nana Yah 77 nano-technology 240 Napoléon 20 National Theatre [London] 63, 176, 207, 214, 230, 241, 252 national theatres 25, 47, 63, 65, 167, 178, 230, 252 naturalism 20, 36, 37, 48, 52, 67, 83–4, 90, 104–5, 140, 147, 157, 174, 183, 189, 215–17, 236, 249 naturalist acting and theatre 48, 67, 83–4, 87, 89–90, 102, 105, 114, 116, 140, 147, 155, 168–9, 174, 201, 204, 209, 210, 215–17, 219, 228, 232, 246, 256 Natyasastra 94 Needles and Opium 63 Neher, Caspar 37 Nilsen, Dennis 110–11 Nelken 28, 258 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 83, 116 Neo-Tarzanists 79 Net Art 200 neutral masks 47, 60, 205, 258; see also masks/masking neutrality 60, 197, 258 new vaudeville 165

New York State Council on the Arts 131 Newlove, Jean 59–60, 210 Newson, Lloyd 111 Newspaper Theatre 255 Ngema, Mbongeni 66 Night Sea Crossing 15, 221 Nitsch, Hermann 151 Noh theatre 46, 75, 87, 94–5, 102, 155, 161, 205, 257 Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs 63 non-linear performance 17, 82, 90, 114, 172, 185, 230, 231–2, 238, 259 non-matrixed performance 190 non-theatre spaces 85, 179, 229, 255 Norman, Jessye 90 ‘Notes on “Camp”’ 162 Notes to Soap 190 Notting Hill Carnival 163–4 nude 70 nudity 75, 113 Nunn, Trevor 206 Nyman, Michael 63 ‘O Superman’ 18 Objective Drama 55 O’Casey, Sean 183 Occupy movement, the 3, 101, 128, 163, 237 Odin Teatret 25–7, 56, 174, 179 Oedipal complex 238 off-Broadway 123, 249 off-off-Broadway 252 Ohno, Kazuo 56–7, 160 Old Age Pensioner’, ‘The 108–9 Olga’s House of Shame 93 Olivier auditorium 252 Olympics 4, 10, 59, 125–7, 126, 134, 186, 249; see also sport and Theatre Olympics Festival One Flat Thing 50 O’Neill, Eugene 183 One-Off Striptease with Trousseau Sheets 69 292

I NDEX

one-to-one performance 157, 192–5 On the Origin of Species 216 Ontroerend Goed 193 opera 28, 37, 38, 39, 62, 63, 68, 89–91, 113–16, 165, 176, 186, 206, 207, 213, 214 operation-performances see Reincarnation oppressed, theatre of the 33–4, 255–6 oppression 29, 33–4, 41, 45, 52, 53, 65, 73, 77, 78, 81, 128, 143, 159, 163, 164, 168, 181, 184, 185, 218, 237, 249, 255–6 Oresteia 75 Orghast at Persepolis 39 Orientalism 155–6 Orlan 15, 21, 69–71, 85, 129–30, 133, 136, 153, 158, 180, 185, 196, 205, 211, 223, 232, 238, 239, 251 Ormerod, Nick 174 Our Town 92, 130–1 outdoor performance 35, 87, 225 outdoor spaces or sites 35, 47, 87, 109, 143, 180, 190 pain 15–16, 22, 57, 102, 132, 159, 161 painting 69, 70, 71, 89, 91, 104, 115, 129, 136, 168, 176, 196, 197, 220, 236, 245 Pankhurst, Christabel 185 parades 25, 34, 75, 112, 125, 134, 137, 162, 163, 202, 236–7, 240 Paradise Now 21, 113, 127–9, 139, 244 paratheatre 55, 157, 217–18, 243, 251 Parsifal 91 passivity 20, 41, 194, 203, 233; of audience/spectator 29, 33, 73, 99, 118, 157, 159, 200, 207, 217, 246; of artists 70, 217; of citizens 33, 138 patriarchal oppression 45, 65, 69, 80, 185 Pavis, Patrice 199, 202, 208–9, 247–8, 252

Paxton, Steve 139, 257 pedagogy 33, 54, 73 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 33, 256 Peirce, Charles S. 247 People Show 172 Perform or Else 218, 219 performance analysis 3, 182, 214, 224, 248 performance art 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 15, 17, 22, 41, 53, 69–70, 71, 80, 81, 85, 99, 103, 129, 132–4, 149, 158–9, 165, 167, 169, 180, 185, 190, 191, 192, 197, 203, 205, 210, 214, 216, 219, 220–2, 232, 237, 244, 246, 250, 251 performance artists 2, 8, 80, 151, 177, 182, 186, 195–6, 212, 248, 257; see also Abramović; Anderson; Athey; Beuys; Fusco; Gómez-Peña; Orlan; Phelan; The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan; Schechner; Sprinkle; Shoot; Stelarc; The Temple of Confessions Performance Group, The 15, 75–6, 92, 112–13, 115, 127, 139, 172, 177, 179 performance studies 2, 9–10, 24, 30, 40, 41, 52, 54, 65, 71–2, 73, 75–6, 100, 138, 143, 149, 153, 178, 181–2, 202, 212–13, 218–19, 222–3, 227, 230, 232, 251, 252 Performance Studies 76, 245 performance/performing 148, 218–20, passim performative cure 238 performative theatre histories 192 performative writing 9, 46, 71–2 performative/performativity 3–4, 29, 41, 52, 53, 70, 71, 100, 118, 129, 137–8, 143, 147, 150, 161, 181–2, 183, 185, 193, 203, 209, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222–3, 237, 238, 257 performer–audience interaction 67, 112, 127, 136, 212, 224, 240, 245 293

I NDEX

performer–audience relationship 15, 23, 54, 55, 115, 143, 179, 185, 197, 204, 219, 238, 246, 249, 257 performing ethnography 88, 244 Petersburg Stories 116 Phantom of the Opera 206, 207 Phèdre 93, 135 Phelan, Peggy 46, 71–2, 82, 134, 176–7, 185, 203–4, 221–2, 239 phenomenology 224–5 photo-sculpture 69 physical theatre 8, 19, 21, 26, 29, 46, 57, 60, 68, 110, 116, 148, 155, 170, 172, 178, 192, 224, 225–6, 246, 255 Pinter, Harold 254 Pirandello, Luigi 189 Piscator, Erwin 169, 211 plague, theatre as a 19–20 play 3, 5, 18, 28–9, 39, 42, 45, 47, 51, 60, 80, 86, 88–9, 93, 99, 104, 108, 118, 125, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 147, 148, 151, 152, 162, 168, 169, 172, 193, 195, 202, 204, 214, 227–8, 232, 239–40, 242, 244, 247, 251, 253, 258 playwrights or playwriting 2, 4, 7, 37, 46, 66, 67, 90–1, 130, 143, 157, 169, 172, 174, 183, 187, 188, 216–17, 229, 254; see also Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, The Cherry Orchard, Hélène Cixous, The Constant Prince, The Government Inspector, Mother Courage and Her Children, William Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka, Split Britches, Ubu Roi, Waiting for Godot, Motokiyo Zeami Playbox Theatre 156 Poetics 94 Points in Space 42, 49 political critique 65–6 political protest see protests

politics see identity politics; visibility politics Politics of Aesthetics, The 73 Polygraph 63 polyphony 24 poor theatre 25, 55–6, 66, 106 popular culture 28, 77, 92, 115, 118, 181, 202, 221 popular theatre 28, 34, 37, 47, 60, 67, 74, 77, 140, 142, 149, 155, 164, 191, 204, 213, 228–30, 240, 249, 251–2 pornography 81–2, 92, 131, 159, 185, 199 Portrait of Dora 45, 238 Possible Worlds 63 postcolonial performance or playwriting 25, 77, 78–9, 118, 143 postdramatic 8, 24, 29, 51, 89, 114, 131, 172, 185, 210, 230–1, 233 Post-Porn Modernist 81–2 Post-Post Porn Modernist 81 postmodern and postmodernism 8, 17, 24, 29, 33, 43, 51, 54, 80, 82, 86, 92–4, 99, 118–20, 130, 131, 133, 139, 147–8, 159, 172, 185, 191, 192, 196, 198, 202, 209, 210, 212, 219, 221, 223, 228, 231–3, 235–6, 237, 247, 254–5, 259 postmodern dance 138–9, 170, 257 postmodern directing 63, 87, 214 poststructuralism 118, 223 practice as research 8, 10, 51, 177, 178, 233–5 pre-cultural techniques 26 pre-expressivity 26, 253, 256 presence 4, 5, 16, 93, 94, 106, 108, 109, 118, 120, 147, 149, 151, 159, 161, 163, 176, 182, 199, 203, 211, 212, 218–19, 224, 234, 235–6, 240 primal scene 238 protest and protests 3–5, 9, 25, 34, 35, 57, 64–5, 64, 78, 100–1, 110, 128, 133, 137–8, 147, 150, 160–1, 163,

294

I NDEX

180, 183, 184–5, 188, 190, 220, 232–3, 236–7, 239, 240, 249 PSi (Performance Studies international) 72 psychoanalysis 19, 20, 45, 71, 129, 158, 159, 183, 227, 238–9 psychodynamics 238 Public Cervix Announcement’, ‘A 82 Punch and Judy 214 Punchdrunk 21, 193–5 punk 22 ‘punk’ opera 214 Puppet Motel 18 puppetry 5, 56, 163, 225, 229, 239–41 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 162 queer 22–3, 41, 149, 187, 237 queer identities 162, 221 queer theories and criticism 71, 162 queer theorists 40–1, 162 Rabanne, Paco 129 Rabelais and His World 24 race 45, 71, 77, 92, 149, 159, 163, 172 Racine, Jean 93, 135 Raid 135 Rainer, Yvonne 42, 138–9, 257 Rancière, Jacques 2, 8, 73–4, 153, 157, 194 Rasmussen, Iben Nagel 25 Rauschenberg, Robert 42, 49 Ravenhill, Mark 7 raves 202 Reagan, Ronald 18, 220 realism 17, 67, 91, 93, 94, 116, 131, 190, 214, 215–17, 230–1, 254 rehearsal 39, 47, 84, 112, 115, 116, 140, 166, 173, 174–5, 176, 178, 190, 195, 202, 205, 209, 223, 238, 239, 241–3, 246, 250, 251, 255, 257 rehearsal of revolution 255 Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The 21, 69–70, 129–30, 158, 180, 205, 239

religious ceremony and ritual 9, 75, 142–3, 180, 244 religious iconography, reference and symbolism 16, 22, 53, 69, 107, 122, 129, 205, 240 répétition 241 representation 7, 20, 22, 42, 48, 58, 89, 100, 109, 111, 118–19, 137, 148, 149, 159, 176, 184–6, 198, 212, 214, 215, 216, 219, 220–1, 228, 230, 231, 233, 239, 251, 259 repressed desires and feelings 169, 238 Request Concert 32 Rhinoceros 254 rhythm 20, 42, 50, 59, 60, 68, 83, 116, 138–9, 141–2, 168, 169, 174, 213, 215, 224 Rhythm O 15 Richards, Thomas 56 Rigg, Diana 123 Rite of Spring 28 ritual 9, 15, 16, 20, 22, 29, 34, 47, 48, 54, 55, 57, 71, 75–6, 77, 88–9, 92, 102, 107, 112, 118, 127, 134, 136, 143, 147, 151, 154–5, 159, 169–70, 181, 187, 204–5, 217, 218, 228, 239–40, 243–5, 250, 253, 257 Robins, Elizabeth 185–6 role-play 80, 152 Rosas Danst Rosas 170–1 rough theatre 66, 80 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 229 Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) 92–3, 130–2, 147, 172, 185 Royal Court Theatre 79, 178 Royal Shakespeare Company 38, 46, 93 RSVP Cycles 61–2, 242–3 Rude Mechanicals 112 RUFF 80 Russian theatre 116 Sacks, Oliver 39 Said, Edward 155 Saint-Denis, Michel 46 295

I NDEX

San Francisco Mime Troupe 229 Sankai Juku 160–1, 160 Saratoga International Theatre Institute 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul 224 satire and satirical 80, 116, 135, 195, 240 Saturday Night Live 195 Saussure, Ferdinand de 247 Savran, David 72, 93, 131 scenography 9, 19, 28, 31, 37, 39, 44, 46, 52, 54–6, 60, 61–2, 68, 84, 89, 92, 104, 106, 109, 112, 113, 121, 123, 140, 148, 166, 172, 174, 180, 183–4, 192–3, 206, 208, 211, 225, 229, 242, 245–7, 249, 258; futurist 189; innovative 48; integration of Eastern and Western 87; kinetic 116; lighting and sound 201–2; see also constructivist scenography Schechner, Richard 9, 15, 32, 71–2, 74–6, 88–9, 92, 112–13, 115, 123, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 172, 177, 179, 195, 198, 218, 227–8, 237, 244–5 Schneemann, Carolee 158 Schulz, Bruno 108–9 Schumann, Peter 34–5 Scofield, Paul 38 scopophilia 238 Scream, The 183 sculpture 17, 69, 91, 108, 139, 197, 220; see also photo-sculpture; stomach sculptures Seagull, The 84 Seedbed 221 Self-Hybridizations 70 Self-Obliteration I 22 self-presentation 52 Sellars, Peter 187, 214 semiotics 149, 166, 208, 224, 247–8, 249, 252 Servos, Norbert 28–9 Set and Reset 18

Seven Easy Pieces 16 Seven Streams of the River Ota, The 62–3, 211, 258 Sex and the City 16 sexual identity 238 sexuality 22, 41, 57, 71, 77, 81–2, 110, 158–9, 163, 167, 223 Shakespeare our Contemporary 39 Shakespeare, William 38–40, 63, 93, 140, 166–7, 187, 193, 198, 212–13, 238 shaman 107, 170, 240, 244–5 Shaw, Peggy 80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 21 Sherman, Cindy 159 shingeki 94, 155 Shiraishi, Kayoko 86 Shoot 3, 21, 132–4, 132, 159, 182 ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’ 37 Shot at a Movie series 70 Sifuentes, Roberto 54, 129, 136–7 silent operas 90–1, 113 Simon, Barney 65–6 Simov, Viktor 104 simulation 93, 231–2 Sinfield, Alan 167 Sistren Theatre Collective 76–8, 152, 185 site-specific performance 9, 18, 43, 70, 157, 170, 172, 179–81, 182, 193, 197, 213, 221, 229, 246, 248, 250, 251 Situationist International 181 Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three 49 Słowacki, Juliusz 106 Smith, Peyton 92 Snapper, Juliana 22 soap opera 131 social critique 17, 19, 28, 105 social dramas 88 social media 4, 100–1, 177, 200 social role/function/responsibilities/ impact of; acting 147; art 15, 23,

296

I NDEX

30, 169, 196, 216, 244; body 158–9, 210, 253; carnival 24–5, 163–4; circus 164; culture 166, 211; dance 27–9, 170–1; festivals 187; memorialization 119, 239; ritual 9, 75–6, 88, 143, 244; public 158; theatre/performance 33, 66, 75–6, 128, 136, 156, 167, 172, 183, 184–5, 197, 203, 207, 216, 220, 251, 255; urban life 31; writing 2 socially-engaged performance 8, 22, 33, 35–6, 54, 77, 80, 81, 93, 107, 136, 150, 152–4, 162, 194, 229 Sociétas Rafaello Sanzio 151, 242, 258–9 Solar Anus 22 Songs and Stories from Moby Dick 18 Sontag, Susan 90, 141, 162 sound, experiments with 24, 39, 42, 50–1, 89–90, 92, 99, 104–5, 114, 136, 168, 193, 201–2, 203, 206; see also lighting and sound South African theatre 65–7, 240 Soyinka, Wole 2, 3, 7–8, 78–9, 127, 143, 198 space 9, 16, 18, 26, 37, 39–40, 44, 49, 54–6, 61–2, 68, 73, 86–7, 88, 89–90, 101, 112, 114–15, 119, 121, 128, 137, 141, 143, 151, 157, 163, 166, 168, 179, 187, 190, 196, 200, 202, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 221, 224, 228, 230, 236–7, 241, 245–6, 248–52; Aristotle’s system 33, 215; cyberspace 18, 101, 136, 199, 211; movement in 48, 51, 59, 60, 169–70, 209; women’s performance 70, 80, 163; see also non-theatre spaces; outdoor spaces; time and space spatial awareness or sensitivity 68, 87 spatial experiments 18, 21, 179–81, 192–4 spatialized performance practices 248 Speak Bitterness 93

speaking-in-tongues 22 spectactor 33, 157, 197, 255 spectators and spectatorship 5, 15, 21, 36–7, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 67, 73–4, 83, 85–6, 99, 102, 106, 119, 127, 132–3, 151, 152, 156–60, 164, 166, 170, 175, 176, 178, 194, 196, 200, 201, 202, 210, 217–18, 224, 228, 243, 245–6, 247, 251, 252, 257; feminist 80, 185, 238; sports 134–5; see also audience speech acts 222 Split Britches 80–1, 136, 154, 162, 185, 232 sports 4, 9, 10, 75, 118, 125–7, 134–5, 149, 155, 187, 209, 219, 227, 229, 244, 250 Sprachgesang 37 Sprinkle, Annie 69, 81–2, 154, 158, 185, 232 Spurt of Blood, A 21 stage manager 242 stage technology 104, 201 Stan’s Cafe 177 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 48, 55, 67, 83–5, 104–5, 116, 147, 150, 174, 201, 209, 216, 242, 257 state parades 25 state power 137 States, Bert O. 142, 218, 224 Stein, Gertrude 91, 93 Stelarc 15, 21, 70, 85–6, 129, 133, 159, 200, 205, 211, 232, 238, 251 Stephens, Elizabeth 82 Stephens, Simon 7 Stigma 52 Stimbod software 85, 200 stomach sculptures 86 Stories from the Nerve Bible 19 Story of O, The 75 Strange Fish 111 storyboards 89–90 Strasberg, Lee 84, 257 Stravinsky, Igor 5 297

I NDEX

Street of Crocodiles 109 street festivals see carnival Street Scene, The 37 Strehler, Giorgio 105 Strindberg, August 21, 63, 91, 183, 238 structuralists 247 Sturm, Robert 29 subjectivity 71, 80, 82, 148, 159, 181, 191, 236, 238–9 Summerspace 49 super-ego 238 superobjective 83 surrealism 42, 103, 140, 168–9 surrealists 20, 140, 240, 254 Surrounded Islands 44 Suzuki Company of Toga 87–8 Suzuki, Tadashi 8, 86–8, 94, 105, 127, 134, 151, 156, 187, 198, 209, 244, 250 Svoboda, Josef 246 Swamp Dwellers, The 78 Sweet Sugar Rage 77 symbolism 34, 48, 67, 84, 104, 107, 137, 254 synthetics 189 Szajna, Józef 54 tableaux 22, 128, 152, 259 tableux vivants 116 taboos, challenges to 23, 69, 112, 159, 183, 195, 240 Tahrir Square 101 ‘Take Back the Night’ marches 163 talking cure 238 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 67 Taymor, Julie 60, 198, 240 technology 4, 8, 9, 18–19, 30, 34, 42, 49, 50–1, 62, 70, 130, 170–1, 176–7, 188, 190, 193, 200, 204, 205, 206–7, 210–12, 214, 240, 241; in body art 17, 159, 251; in performance art 85–6; stage 20, 104, 201–2, 246, 251; see also

internet-based performance; multimedia performance Tectonic Plates 62, 258 Teczki (Files) 177 Tempest, The 39, 63 Temple of Confessions, The 53, 69, 129, 136–7, 200 Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, The 45 Terry, Ellen 48, 218 Thatcher, Margaret 220 theatre 250–2, passim Theatre of the Absurd, see Absurd, Theatre of the theatre anthropology 9, 26, 71, 75, 88, 103, 155, 244, 252–3, 256 theatre buildings 33, 128, 236, 251–2 Theatre of Cruelty 19–21, 38, 129, 143 Théâtre de Complicité or Complicite 60, 109, 172, 225 Theatre of Death, The 58, 108 Théâtre du Soleil 45, 154, 250 theatre environment 249–50 Théâtre Equestre Zingaro 151 theatre festivals 7, 17, 22, 25, 26, 29, 80, 87, 94, 115, 121, 127, 128, 180, 187–8, 199, 229, 259 theatre of images 89, 115, 148, 172, 258–9 Theatre and Its Double, The 19, 102 Théâtre Libre 216 Theatre Olympics Festival 87, 127 theatre of the oppressed 33, 255–6 Theatre Passe Muraille 172 théâtre populaire 229 Théâtre Repère 61 Theatre Royal 66 Theatre of the Eighth Day 177 Theatre of Sources 55–6 theatre studies 9–11, 167, 181, passim Theatre Workshop 59 Theatre and the World 32 theatres-in-the-round 249, 252 298

I NDEX

Theatreworks 32 theatricality 93, 197, 222–3 theatricalization 28 Theatrum Mundi 26 Thérèse Raquin 216 thick description 224 third theatre groups 26 Three Sisters, The 93 Tiananmen Square demonstrations 4, 65, 100, 137–8, 150, 237 Tight Roaring Circle 51 time and space 16, 91, 115, 163, 202, 208, 211, 212, 241, 245, 248 time-based art 221 Tinderbox Theatre Company 180 Tisch School of the Arts 72, 75 Titanic 206 To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) 93, 135 Today Is My Birthday 58 Toga Arts Park 87 Toller, Ernst 183 total act 55, 106, 208 total theatre 20–1, 102, 169, 193, 201, 210, 213, 259 Totem 63 Towards a Poor Theatre 25, 56 Tragedy of Hamlet, The 40 training 8, 9, 17, 25, 28, 46–7, 51, 55, 67–8, 83, 128, 134, 147–8, 151–2, 155, 161, 165, 166, 172, 174, 190, 195, 198, 205, 209–10, 217, 225–6, 234, 241, 251, 253, 256–8; of breathing 19; Lecoq programmes 60; sports-like 134–5; Suzuki method 86–7; vocal 26 Trance and Dance in Bali 102 trance states 102–3 Transit Festival 26 Travels, The 93 Tri Bywyd 180 Trio A 42, 138–9, 170, 189, 257; see also Mind is a Muscle Trojan Whore 23 Trojan Women, The 86

trust exercises 128 Tudor, David 42, 49, 99 Tumor Brainiowicz 109 Turner, Victor 75, 88–9, 157, 227, 244, 252 Twenty Four Hours 108 Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Spain 53 Tynan, Kenneth 39 Übermarionette and Übermarionetten 48, 57, 189, 239 Ubu Cuckolded 140 Ubu Enchained 140 Ubu Roi 20, 140–1, 169, 240, 254 Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) 15, 21, 159, 210, 221 Ullmann, Lisa 59 Umbrellas, The 44 Un Chien Andalou 168 unconscious 20, 45, 181, 238–9 United States 18 United States, I–IV 19 universalism 32, 122, 197, 231 universality, of performance 39 Unmarked 71 Upwardly Mobile Home 80 US 38 Vakhtangov, Evgeny 84 Valk, Kate 92 Valley Curtain 43–4 valuaction 61, 242 Vandekeybus, Wim 111 Verdonck, Benjamin 108 via negativa 55 Vietnam War 34, 38, 132, 133, 184, 207, 220 Vieux Colombier theatre 47 Viewpoints 242 Vinci 63 violence 15–16, 17, 23, 41, 77–8, 80, 100, 111, 119, 128, 134, 137, 141, 172, 189, 240 299

I NDEX

visibility politics 71; see also Peggy Phelan, Jacques Rancière visual theatre 28, 57, 62, 108, 113, 116, 140, 174, 188, 193, 211, 221, 231, 232, 246, 247, 258–9; see also theatre of images visual trickery 258 Volcano 111 Votes for Women 185–6 voyeurism 53, 86, 106, 157, 185–6 VTol Dance 171 Wagner, Richard 62–3, 91, 213 Waiting for Godot 141–2, 254 Waits, Tom 214 Wajda, Andrzej 109 Walkaround Time 49 Way of Acting, The 87 Weaver, Lois 80–1 Wedekind, Frank 183, 238 Weigel, Helene 36–7, 123–4, 124 Weil, Simone 54 Weill, Kurt 37 Weiss, Peter 38 Welfare State International 163 Western dance 154–5, 169–70 Western theatre 1, 7, 27, 32, 67, 102, 112, 147–8, 154, 156, 157, 173, 198, 214, 249, 253 What Tammy Needs to Know 80 When We Dead Awaken 91 Whitman, Robert 190 Wielopole Wielepole 57 Wiene, Robert 183 Wigman, Mary 59, 160, 169, 183

Wilder, Thornton 92, 130–1 Wiles, David 250 Wilke, Hannah 159 Willems, Thom 50 William James Lectures 222 Williams, Raymond 167 Williams, Tennessee 216, 238 Wilson, Robert 16–17, 18, 42, 89–92, 113–16, 127, 148, 174, 183–4, 187, 198, 202, 214, 226, 231–3, 242, 246, 249, 258–9 Winnicott, Donald Woods 227 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy 109 Wojnarowicz, David 22 Wooster Group 24, 75, 92–4, 130–2, 135, 147, 157, 172, 175, 185, 196, 202, 211, 231, 232 Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, ‘The 30 WOW (Women’s One World) 80 Woza Albert! 66 Wrapped Reichstag 43, 43–5 wrappings 43–5 Wright, Frank Lloyd 63 Wuppertal Dance Theatre 27–30, 151, 172, 231 Yaqui Lent 75, 142–3, 163, 244; and Easter Ceremonies Yeats, W.B. 102 Zarrilli, Phillip 155, 256 Zeami, Motokiyo 7, 94–5, 155 Zola, Emile 215 Zoo Story 254

300