- https://veronicarodriguezmorales.com/
- Drama, Theatre Studies, Arts and Humanities, Critical Theory, Feminism, Latin american feminism, and 29 moreWomen's Studies, Women, Contemporary British Theatre, Contemporary British Drama, David Greig, Contemporary Performance, Spectatorship, Performance Theory, Contemporary European Theatre, Affect (Cultural Theory), Body in Performance, Political theatre, Shamanism, Shamanism and Shamanic Healing, Contemporary Spirituality, Audience and Reception Studies, Philosophy of Theatre, Ecology, Feminism and Feminist Theatre, Feminismo, Feminist Theory, Theatre Theory, Holed Theatre, Adaptation, Ancient Greek Theatre, Female body, Refugees and Forced Migration Studies, Post-migration studies, and Bertolt Brechtedit
- I am Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at University of Alicante (Spain). My research focuses on contempo... moreI am Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at University of Alicante (Spain). My research focuses on contemporary British theatre and health and illness in theatre and performance practices with a feminist perspective. I have lectured at University of Barcelona, Canterbury Christ Church University, Royal Holloway, University of London, Richmond University, ‘The American International University in London’, University of Reading and Buckinghamshire New University. My monograph David Greig’s Holed Theatre: Globalization, Ethics and the Spectator, with a foreword by Dan Rebellato, was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. I participate in the research project “Gender, Affect and Care in Twenty-First Century British Theatre,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PID2021-126448NA-I00) - see the research team Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona’s website: http://www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona. I am also a commissioned playwright (e.g: Royal Court Theatre), published poet, workshop facilitator and women’s health coach. For more info, see https://veronicarodriguezmorales.com/edit
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With a Foreword by Dan Rebellato, this book offers up a detailed exploration of Scottish playwright David Greig’s work with particular attention to globalization, ethics, and the spectator. It makes the argument that Greig’s theatre works... more
With a Foreword by Dan Rebellato, this book offers up a detailed exploration of Scottish playwright David Greig’s work with particular attention to globalization, ethics, and the spectator. It makes the argument that Greig’s theatre works by undoing, cracking, or breaking apart myriad elements to reveal the holed, porous nature of all things. Starting with a discussion of Greig’s engagement with shamanism and arguing for holed theatre as a response to globalization, for Greig’s works’ politics of aesthethics, and for the holed spectator as part of an affective ecology of transfers, this book discusses some of Greig’s most representative political theatre from Europe (1994) to The Events (2013), concluding with an exploration of Greig’s theatre’s world-forming quality.
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This chapter puts Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland (2021) and Ellie Kendrick’s and RashDash’s Hole (2018) together to keep calling attention to violence against women’s bodies and other forms of control or constraints and to focus on increasing... more
This chapter puts Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland (2021) and Ellie Kendrick’s and RashDash’s Hole (2018) together to keep calling attention to violence against women’s bodies and other forms of control or constraints and to focus on increasing alliances and communities of care. Firmly rooted in our intersectional and gender-diverse present, the chapter uses ecology and feminism to consider the plays as ecofeminist and explore the concept of gyn/ecology in particular, developed in Mary Daly’s book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978). The present chapter looks at how these plays came about, what they meant to Kirkwood and Kendrick as well as how women’s bodies are written and staged in both plays (and beyond) and with what potential implications. Using ecofeminism methodologically, it veers away from focusing on an anthropocentrist representation of ecology and instead coins the term gyn/ecological theatre to describe the ecofeminist features of the analysed plays.
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2022: “Theatre of Migration: Uncontainment as Migratory Aesthetic”, Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre. Eds. Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, José Ramόn Prado-Pérez and Enric Monforte. London,... more
2022: “Theatre of Migration: Uncontainment as Migratory Aesthetic”, Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre. Eds. Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, José Ramόn Prado-Pérez and Enric Monforte. London, Oxford, New York, Sydney and New Delhi: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp. 143-58.
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This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin... more
This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin Gray, and first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016. Following an agonistic (Chantal Mouffe), rather than a consensual (Jürgen Habermas) model of the public sphere, it argues that under globalisation, three cumulative and interwoven senses of the public sphere, the discursive, the spatial, and the individual and his/her/their relation to a larger form of organisation, despite persisting hegemonic structures that perpetuate their containment, have become undone. This is the kind of unbounded model of public sphere Greig’s version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women seems to suggest by precisely offering undoings of discourses, spaces, and individualisations. In order to frame the first kind of undoing, that is, the unmarking of theatre as contained, the article uses Christopher Balme’s notion of ‘open theatrical public sphere’, and in order to frame the second, that is, the undoing of elements ‘in’ Greig’s version, the article utilises Greig’s concept of ‘constructed space’. The article arrives then at the notion of the open constructed public sphere in relation to The Suppliant Women. By engaging with this porous model of the public sphere, The Suppliant Women enacts a protest against exclusionary, reductive models of exchange and organisation, political engagement, and belonging under globalisation.
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David Greig's playwriting career began in the early 1990s with Suspect Culture, the company he co-founded with Graham Eatough. For more than two decades, Greig's award-winning plays have been produced across Europe and the United States,... more
David Greig's playwriting career began in the early 1990s with Suspect Culture, the company he co-founded with Graham Eatough. For more than two decades, Greig's award-winning plays have been produced across Europe and the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Korea, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. In this interview, Greig discusses a broad range of subjects, including the role of fiction in constructions of 'the real', his experiences of being a spectator of his own work, and the commonalities between artists and terrorists. He also reflects upon distinctions between 'artist' and 'citizen', the function of 'gendered generic forms' in his plays and the influence of shamanic practices upon his conception of The Events. Zāhir and Bātin is an Arabic pairing of words that may be roughly translated as 'seen' and 'unseen', which Greig uses in this interview to explain his understanding of theatre.
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This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theorist’ and the ‘playwright.’ It addresses this engagement in terms not just of influence but also of creative dialogue and enduring... more
This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theorist’ and the ‘playwright.’ It addresses this engagement in terms not just of influence but also of creative dialogue and enduring inspiration. The first part of this article looks at Brecht and Greig’s similarities and Greig’s Brechtian influence generally, which are explored, for instance, through Brechtian concepts such as “breaking the rules,” “critical stance” and “entertainment.” The second part focuses on the idea of “making political theatre politically ” (Thamer and Turnheim 90; emphasis original) and argues that the most relevant Brechtian aspect in Greig’s work is the way it envisions and politicizes the relationship between the play and the audience via the use of some strategies that draw on epic theatre, which, in Greig’s work, operate under “post-Brechtian dialectics” (Barnett, “Performing”). The third part of the article illustrates the Brechtian import of Greig’s work by exploring two case studies, The American Pilot (2005) and The Events (2013). In analyzing these two paradigmatically Brechtian plays, this article illustrates how understanding Brecht’s influence on Greig’s work is essential in order to understand the politics of Greig’s theatre. More widely, this article contributes towards understanding Brecht’s legacy with regard to political British theatre in the age of globalization.
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Scottish experimental theatre company Suspect Culture was co-founded by Graham Eatough, David Greig and Nick Powell in the early 1990s and produced work until the late 2000s, when their funding was discontinued. This paper aims at... more
Scottish experimental theatre company Suspect Culture was co-founded by Graham Eatough, David Greig and Nick Powell in the early 1990s and produced work until the late 2000s, when their funding was discontinued. This paper aims at tackling the intersections of text and performance – notions that crucially appear as undone and interpenetrated – in Suspect Culture’s work, and more particularly in One Way Street: Ten Walks in the Former East (1995). After a brief introduction that situates the paper in the context of Suspect Culture scholarship, the first part of the paper includes some theoretical remarks, tackles Suspect Culture’s positioning as regards the transgression of the text-based/non-text-based binary and argues for One Way Street as a piece that exemplifies an unloosening of boundaries between text and performance. Indeed, the specific argument of this paper is that Suspect Culture’s work – with One Way Street as a paradigmatic example – is interested in that space across text and performance. The second part of the paper suggests the feature of fragmentation, the method of devising and my experiences of the walks as phenomena where this space across text and performance is illuminated.
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This text is a provocative dialogue build around holes / nothingness / silence. It is an exchange of words and ideas between a performance artist and a researcher, a lecturer and a creative practitioner. Referring to John Cage’s Lecture... more
This text is a provocative dialogue build around holes / nothingness / silence. It is an exchange of
words and ideas between a performance artist and a researcher, a lecturer and a creative practitioner. Referring to John Cage’s Lecture On Nothing: “I am here and there is nothing to say. What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking. Give any one thought a push: it falls down easily but the pusher and the pushed produce that entertainment called a discussion. Shall we have one later? Or we could simply decide not to have a discussion.”1 A performance artist and researcher decided to have a discussion on the verge of research and artistic practice. How does an artist discuss emptiness, nothingness and holes with a researcher? Does it create a big hole, a stronger need for silencw or just the opposite — the hunger to explore, to fulfill these holes with knowledge? In this text, a researcher
and artist have an open conversation about holes which includes the exploration of the performer’s/ researcher’s relation to holes in their practice; abandoned places and site-specificity; the holed body of the performance artist; holes and the writer’s experience; the hole, the border and migratory experience; black holes; holes and feelings such as rejection; holes, anatomy and nakedness in performance; holes as silences, interruptions and discontinuities; holes and meaning; holes as performative and passive; holes and cooperation, collaboration and joy in artistic and academic practices; and love and holes.
In the conversation, the hole is revealed as a thinking-through instrument in theatre and performance studies and beyond.
words and ideas between a performance artist and a researcher, a lecturer and a creative practitioner. Referring to John Cage’s Lecture On Nothing: “I am here and there is nothing to say. What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking. Give any one thought a push: it falls down easily but the pusher and the pushed produce that entertainment called a discussion. Shall we have one later? Or we could simply decide not to have a discussion.”1 A performance artist and researcher decided to have a discussion on the verge of research and artistic practice. How does an artist discuss emptiness, nothingness and holes with a researcher? Does it create a big hole, a stronger need for silencw or just the opposite — the hunger to explore, to fulfill these holes with knowledge? In this text, a researcher
and artist have an open conversation about holes which includes the exploration of the performer’s/ researcher’s relation to holes in their practice; abandoned places and site-specificity; the holed body of the performance artist; holes and the writer’s experience; the hole, the border and migratory experience; black holes; holes and feelings such as rejection; holes, anatomy and nakedness in performance; holes as silences, interruptions and discontinuities; holes and meaning; holes as performative and passive; holes and cooperation, collaboration and joy in artistic and academic practices; and love and holes.
In the conversation, the hole is revealed as a thinking-through instrument in theatre and performance studies and beyond.
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Theatre and Performance Practices on the Spanish Stage: An Introduction.
This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theorist’ and the ‘playwright.’ It addresses this engagement in terms not just of influence but also of creative dialogue and enduring... more
This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theorist’ and the ‘playwright.’ It addresses this engagement in terms not just of influence but also of creative dialogue and enduring inspiration. The first part of this article looks at Brecht and Greig’s similarities and Greig’s Brechtian influence generally, which are explored, for instance, through Brechtian concepts such as “breaking the rules,” “critical stance” and “entertainment.” The second part focuses on the idea of “making political theatre politically” (Thamer and Turnheim 90; emphasis original) and argues that the most relevant Brechtian aspect in Greig’s work is the way it envisions and politicizes the relationship between the play and the audience via the use of some strategies that draw on epic theatre, which, in Greig’s work, operate under “post-Brechtian dialectics” (Barnett, “Performing”). The third part of the article illustrates the Brechtian import of Greig’s work by e...
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The chapter begins by highlighting the relevance of the spiritual in David Greig’s work via a discussion of Greig’s creative engagement with shamanism. It coins the notion of the “shamanic semionaut” to describe the playwright (the second... more
The chapter begins by highlighting the relevance of the spiritual in David Greig’s work via a discussion of Greig’s creative engagement with shamanism. It coins the notion of the “shamanic semionaut” to describe the playwright (the second term, “semionaut”, is borrowed from Nicolas Bourriaud). Rodriguez subsequently introduces the playwright’s life and work from the beginning of his career to the present. The chapter argues that in his work, Greig is interested in the scenes from the world. Since conjuring up the scenes from the world in ethical ways in a play is no easy task, Greig’s plays importantly resort to the dialectical method. Theodor W. Adorno and poet W.S. Graham help the book approach Greig’s nuanced understanding of dialectics. The chapter finally introduces the ideas of holes and holed theatre and presents the reader with the book’s structure.
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This article is concerned with 'aesthethics' in contemporary political theatre and its relation to the role of the intervention of the 'sensible'in the globalized society as exemplified in David Greig's The... more
This article is concerned with 'aesthethics' in contemporary political theatre and its relation to the role of the intervention of the 'sensible'in the globalized society as exemplified in David Greig's The American Pilot (2005). On the one hand, it is framed in the ethical turn that ...
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The chapter begins with a discussion of the connection between the concepts of neoliberalism and globalization. It then situates the concept of globalization within the contemporary while acknowledging the links with processes such as... more
The chapter begins with a discussion of the connection between the concepts of neoliberalism and globalization. It then situates the concept of globalization within the contemporary while acknowledging the links with processes such as colonisation. The chapter deploys David Harvey’s theory of space, Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of negative globalization and Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of mondialisation in order to introduce Greig’s theatre’s nuanced understanding of globalization. Exploring first the notions of “cosmo(s)politanism”, internationalism, the local and nationalism in relation to Greig’s work, the chapter finally moves on to exploring its main thesis—holed theatre as a response to globalization. Drawing attention to globalization’s championing of individualism and objecthood, Rodriguez argues that instances of undone time, space, character and narrative—which define holed theatre—in Greig’s theatre pursue a critique of globalization’s ills.
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Verticality, the concept that underlies the chapter’s analysis of The Architect (Traverse, 1996) is explored in this chapter from three angles. Firstly, verticality is related to the “rigidity” of city spaces, which “elegantly” execute... more
Verticality, the concept that underlies the chapter’s analysis of The Architect (Traverse, 1996) is explored in this chapter from three angles. Firstly, verticality is related to the “rigidity” of city spaces, which “elegantly” execute separation, exclusion and invisibility. Secondly, verticality is addressed in relation to a kind of subject position that denotes individuality, apparent self-sufficiency and enclosure. Thirdly, verticality is also analysed in connection with the play’s formal features and its treatment of space. The main argument is that the play undoes all these senses of verticality in order to arguably blow up—tear holes in—constricted architectures of power, a process that culminates at the end of the play with the incident whereby Leo commits suicide inside one of Eden Court’s flats—actually Sheena’s—as it is detonated by the local authorities.
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This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin... more
This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin Gray, and first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016. Following an agonistic (Chantal Mouffe), rather than a consensual (Jürgen Habermas) model of the public sphere, it argues that under globalisation, three cumulative and interwoven senses of the public sphere, the discursive, the spatial, and the individual and his/her/their relation to a larger form of organisation, despite persisting hegemonic structures that perpetuate their containment, have become undone. This is the kind of unbounded model of public sphere Greig’s version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women seems to suggest by precisely offering undoings of discourses, spaces, and individualisations. In order to frame the first kind of undoing, that is, the unmarking of theatre...
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Theatre and Performance Studies in English: An Introduction.
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El objetivo principal de la presente tesis, titulada “Globalisation in David Greig’s Theatre: Space, Ethics and the Spectator”, consiste en llevar a cabo un extenso estudio monografico de la dramaturgia de David Greig y su imbricacion con... more
El objetivo principal de la presente tesis, titulada “Globalisation in David Greig’s Theatre: Space, Ethics and the Spectator”, consiste en llevar a cabo un extenso estudio monografico de la dramaturgia de David Greig y su imbricacion con el fenomeno de la globalizacion, poniendo un enfasis particular en cuestiones de espacio, etica y espectador. El corpus de este estudio engloba aproximadamente dos decadas, desde los anos 1990 hasta el momento actual. Especificamente, las obras estudiadas en relacion al tema delineado son Europe (1994), One Way Street (1995) [ambas en la parte titulada “Europe Plays”], The Architect (1996), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999) [ambas en la parte titulada “Vertical Plays”], Outlying Islands (2002), San Diego (2003) [ambas en la parte titulada “Bird Plays”], The American Pilot (2005), Damascus (2007) [ambas en la parte titulada “Encounter Plays”], Fragile (2011) y The Events (2013) [ambas en la par...
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Theatre and Performance Studies in English: An Introduction.
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Contemporary Scottish playwright David Greig’s dramaturgy has been concerned with the massive changes wrought across the world by neoliberal globalization in the last two decades. A political triple turn comprising ethics, the media and... more
Contemporary Scottish playwright David Greig’s dramaturgy has been concerned with the massive changes wrought across the world by neoliberal globalization in the last two decades. A political triple turn comprising ethics, the media and the spectator, and a shift between the notion “‘mediatized’ reiterative ‘expectator’” to “mediated performing spectator” within the “polethic” frame of ‘relationality’ in Greig’s works are argued in this article. It is further argued that the plays examined (Damascus, The American Pilot, Brewers Fayre and Fragile) use productive strategies like diffusion, reversibility and interchangeability, which foreground the asymmetries of the global/technologized age “polethically” mediating the global performing spectator.
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The chapter applies the notion of trouma (combination of hole in French—trou—and trauma), borrowed from Jacques Lacan via Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996) to the playwright/Paul,... more
The chapter applies the notion of trouma (combination of hole in French—trou—and trauma), borrowed from Jacques Lacan via Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996) to the playwright/Paul, Zakaria, Elena and the stage direction “news images of the current situation” in order to examine how trous, connected to the traumatic under globalization, render time, location and characters collapse into a sense of holed world, of “here” in Damascus (Traverse, 2007). I use trouma because when one looks at trauma, the multifarious concept reveals a traversed dimension, because trauma is indeed defined by a holed experience or an experience that metaphorically tears a hole (or holes) and to call attention to the traumatic across art and life.
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Scottish experimental theatre company Suspect Culture was co-founded by Graham Eatough, David Greig and Nick Powell in the early 1990s and produced work until the late 2000s, when their funding was discontinued. This paper aims at... more
Scottish experimental theatre company Suspect Culture was co-founded by Graham Eatough, David Greig and Nick Powell in the early 1990s and produced work until the late 2000s, when their funding was discontinued. This paper aims at tackling the intersections of text and performance – notions that crucially appear as undone and interpenetrated – in Suspect Culture’s work, and more particularly in One Way Street: Ten Walks in the Former East (1995).1 After a brief introduction that situates the paper in the context of Suspect Culture scholarship, the first part of the paper includes some theoretical remarks, tackles Suspect Culture’s positioning as regards the transgression of the textbased/non-text-based binary and argues for One Way Street as a piece that exemplifies an unloosening of boundaries between text and performance. Indeed, the specific argument of this paper is that Suspect Culture’s work – with One Way Street as a paradigmatic example – is interested in that space across t...