Books by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
Anglophone Theatre and Performance Practices on the Spanish Stage, 2022
Theatre and Performance Studies in English, 2021
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
With a Foreword by Dan Rebellato, this book offers up a detailed exploration of Scottish playwrig... 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.
Book Chapters by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
Stained: An Anthology of Writing about Menstruation, 2023
Towards Digitalism, Ed. Feryal Cubukcu, 2021
Escriptures de pandèmia. Eds. Marisa Siguan, M. Loreto Vilar, Cristina Alsina Rísquez, 2021
Routledge Companion to Audience and the Performing Arts, edited by Matthew Reason, Lynne Conner, Katya Johanson and Ben Walmsley. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 516-21. , 2022
The New Wave of British Women Playwrights: 2008 – 2021, edited by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 35-56. , 2023
This chapter puts Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland (2021) and Ellie Kendrick’s and RashDash’s Hole (2018)... 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.
Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre, edited by 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., 2022
2022: “Theatre of Migration: Uncontainment as Migratory Aesthetic”, Crisis, Representation and Re... 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.
Of Precariousness: Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-Century British Drama and Theatre. De Gruyter., 2017
De fronteres i arts escèniques, Punctum, 2015
Articles by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
Anglophone Theatre and Performance Practices on the Spanish Stage, 2022
Humanities 9 (21): 1-15., 2020
This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis... 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.
Contemporary Theatre Review 26(1):88-96, 2016
David Greig's playwriting career began in the early 1990s with Suspect Culture, the company he co... 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.
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 7(2): 242-258, 2019
This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theor... 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.
Platform: Journal of Theatre and the Performing Arts, 10 (1): 29-52., 2016
Scottish experimental theatre company Suspect Culture was co-founded by Graham Eatough, David Gre... 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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Books by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
Book Chapters by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
Articles by Dr Verónica Rodríguez
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.