Deep-history issues are applied to prehistoric cave art and mobile figurines in Europe from 40,00... more Deep-history issues are applied to prehistoric cave art and mobile figurines in Europe from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago, as evidence of inner-theatre projections, experienced personally and shared collectively. Prehistoric rites are also investigated with built “temples” and statues at Gobekli Tepe, ’Ain Ghazal, Catalhoyuk, and Malta, regarding public and domestic spaces, animal and human figures, and possible projections of a metaphysical theatre. Relations between inner, social, and spiritual audiences are then explored with San Bushman trance-dances, providing insights about prehistoric cave rites and later “temples.” The political dynamics of territorial, hierarchical, and playful drives are considered, too, with theatrical scripts from ancient Egyptian temple dramas and Nile River ceremonies. Further examples of Middle Eastern ritual dramas are mentioned from Cyprus, Anatolia, Sumer, and Akkadia (Mesopotamia).
This chapter considers characteristic aspects of African theatre, through artists in Anglophone c... more This chapter considers characteristic aspects of African theatre, through artists in Anglophone countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa (with black and white artists fighting apartheid). It explores theatre in Caribbean and Latin American nations: Martinique, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. It maps distinctive developments in Canada, including French Canadian and “physical theatre” artists. It considers indigenous theatre in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. It maps major developments in Asian-Pacific countries: Australia and New Zealand (including feminist, queer, and ethnic theatre), India, China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. It explores theatre across the Middle East, in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Israel.
This chapter investigates possible Minoan and Mycenaean cultic theatres, 2600–1100 BCE. Then it c... more This chapter investigates possible Minoan and Mycenaean cultic theatres, 2600–1100 BCE. Then it considers the development of ancient Greek theatre with the dithyrambic chorus honoring Dionysus, with Thespis as “answerer” to the chorus, and with the further emergence of many elements in the Western art form, including the Greek theatron, in the 500s–200s. And it explores ancient Roman performances, from theatre spaces and the plays of Seneca, Plautus, and Terence to the violent, mass spectacles of arena games, including the schedule of events, mythic characters, and costumes and props of gladiators—sometimes involving emperors and Christian martyrs as actors.
This chapter maps various realistic and anti-realistic styles, providing a chart of the latter. I... more This chapter maps various realistic and anti-realistic styles, providing a chart of the latter. It relates challenges to traditional views of self, society, and cosmos, from Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Einstein, to psychological realism’s use of the well-made play and naturalism’s study of the human animal. It considers Stanislavski’s acting method, with ties to American artists, plus the propaganda aspects of socialist realism and Nazi marches. It investigates neo-Romantic symbolism, parodied by Jarry. It explores dada as anti-war protest, expressionism as showing social pressures through scenographic distortion, African-American stars emerging through that style, futurism glorifying war and technology, and surrealism drawing on classical myths, personal dreams, and “automatic” writings. It concludes with minimalist and eclectic directors, meta-theatrical playwrights, early book musicals, and improvisational therapies.
This chapter explores the re-emergence of formal theatre in Western Europe, after the fall of the... more This chapter explores the re-emergence of formal theatre in Western Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire (and restrictions in Byzantium), with English monks performing liturgical drama and the Saxon canoness Hroswitha writing miracle plays in Latin. It considers vernacular biblical plays inside and outside churches, along with an early morality play by the nun, Hildegard von Bingen. It explores the full development of miracle, biblical, and morality plays with specific examples, plus various performance practices, including Jewish Purim plays. It maps distinctive premodern rituals and entertainments in Africa (Malawi, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe). And it considers the deep history of indigenous performances in Australia (with corroborees) and the Americas (in Adena and Cahokia cultures, ancestral Puebloans, Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas).
This chapter explores Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, drawing the audience toward the actor “signali... more This chapter explores Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, drawing the audience toward the actor “signaling through the flames,” and Brecht’s epic theatre of alienation effects (some developed with Piscator) to distance the audience at key points, toward thinking critically and changing society. It considers existentialist and absurdist playwrights, expressing a postwar flattening of metaphysics. It investigates American realism, with Stanislavski’s system taken in different directions, and Odets’s agitprop and domestic plays. It contemplates the poetic, selective realism of Williams and Miller, realized through Mielziner’s scene designs. It also looks at McCarthyism pressuring theatre artists. It concludes with other American developments, including musicals, black revues, Living Newspapers, and extensions of theatricality through the new media of radio and film, especially with Welles.
This chapter maps American postmodernism, de-centering the modernist authority of the text and un... more This chapter maps American postmodernism, de-centering the modernist authority of the text and universal values toward audience collaboration with fragments and diverse truths. It considers various directions: politics, philosophies, puppetry-animation, clowning, and anthropologies. It investigates the Living and Open Theatres, rock musicals, Blau’s companies and theories, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet, and Mabou Mines, plus Akalaitis, Taymor, and Irwin. It considers Schechner’s “environmental theatre” and anthropological “performance studies,” plus “post-dramatic” offshoots. It explores Kaprow’s happenings regarding later performance artists. It contemplates the disorienting spectacles of Foreman and Wilson—and other avant-garde artists. It considers Spolin’s “theatre games,” regional theatres, off-off-Broadway, and musical innovations. It also maps the major directors and playwrights of the last half-century, plus various ethnic, feminist, and queer theatre developments.
This chapter investigates ties between nationalist movements, Marxist and Darwinist discoveries, ... more This chapter investigates ties between nationalist movements, Marxist and Darwinist discoveries, Romantic tragedies, and popular melodramas in Europe. It considers various theatre riots in London, Paris, and New York—and different acting styles: natural-inspired or grand-flamboyant (Romantic), studied-declamatory or studied-domestic (Classical), and sincere-realistic. These contending styles, with star actors becoming director-like managers, relate to the emergence of the Dracula figure as well. The chapter looks at black actors performing in whiteface and the development of a systematic emotional acting method (by Delsarte), plus the well-made play formula (by Scribe). It explores various melodramatic types, blackface minstrel shows, and Wild West tours in the US, involving popular, yet demeaning stereotypes—related to “total artwork” directors, vaudeville variety shows, and new technologies for violent spectacles.
This chapter considers the emergence of Italian humanism, through ancient influences, with neocla... more This chapter considers the emergence of Italian humanism, through ancient influences, with neoclassical rules, perspective scenery, Torelli’s scene-changing device, opera, commedia dell’arte, and new theatres, including Teatro Olimpico, which still has its original set for Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Then it investigates the adoption of neoclassical rules, scenic devices, and commedia by French theatres, plus court ballets and machine plays. It explores the tensions that developed between moral restraint and pleasurable spectacle, political order and satirical insight—in the French Academy’s critique of Corneille’s Le Cid, other attacks on Moliere’s Tartuffe, and the king’s expulsion of the Comedie Italienne.
Cinema, television, videogames, and the Internet have extended theatre’s ghosts into new projecti... more Cinema, television, videogames, and the Internet have extended theatre’s ghosts into new projective technologies. Yet those screen fantasies still hinge upon the communal expression of ghosts within each spectator’s mind: a linking of cranial computers and internal displays to produce a shared illusion. Theatre within the mind, extending to stage and screen performances, manifests the Other in the actor and the specter of the spectator. The persistence of ghosts and gods, in various dramatic media today, can be traced not only to the early history of theatre, in its emergence from communal rituals (as considered in the next chapter), but also to the evolution of the human brain, with its internal stages and screens. Likewise, a long tradition of mind/brain (or soul/body) dualism in Western philosophy, which reached its climax in the early modern, Cartesian Theatre of the mind’s cogito (“I think” therefore I exist), is now being reconsidered, through new views of ghosts in the machinery of the brain. How did the human brain become an internal theatre—and is there a central director or playwright in charge?
Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has discovered certain ghosts in the human brain that serve to ill... more Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has discovered certain ghosts in the human brain that serve to illuminate the persistent metaphysics of the mind’s theatre, from ancient stages to postmodern screens. Ramachandran argues that the brain does not function like a computer, sending information in a one-way cascade from sense organs to the higher brain centers. His research shows that brain “connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 56). He has used mirrors and other devices to help amputees who feel pain and movement in a missing limb. Seeing the illusion of that phantom limb—in a mirror reflecting the patient’s actual arm and hand on the other side—gradually affects a permanent change. It heals the feedback system between the missing limb and the brain’s body-image areas, which had caused phantom sensations with “no countermanding signals … [against] stored pain memories” (54). Ramachandran has also devised experiments for non-amputees, giving them the sensation of a three-foot nose or of a tabletop as the extension of their hands. Ramachandran thus demonstrates that the body image is surprisingly malleable. “Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience” (58). He argues that the body image is partly genetic and partly experiential: “the brain has a dual representation, one of the original body image laid down genetically and one ongoing, up-to-date image that can incorporate subsequent changes.”1
Deep-history issues are applied to prehistoric cave art and mobile figurines in Europe from 40,00... more Deep-history issues are applied to prehistoric cave art and mobile figurines in Europe from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago, as evidence of inner-theatre projections, experienced personally and shared collectively. Prehistoric rites are also investigated with built “temples” and statues at Gobekli Tepe, ’Ain Ghazal, Catalhoyuk, and Malta, regarding public and domestic spaces, animal and human figures, and possible projections of a metaphysical theatre. Relations between inner, social, and spiritual audiences are then explored with San Bushman trance-dances, providing insights about prehistoric cave rites and later “temples.” The political dynamics of territorial, hierarchical, and playful drives are considered, too, with theatrical scripts from ancient Egyptian temple dramas and Nile River ceremonies. Further examples of Middle Eastern ritual dramas are mentioned from Cyprus, Anatolia, Sumer, and Akkadia (Mesopotamia).
This chapter considers characteristic aspects of African theatre, through artists in Anglophone c... more This chapter considers characteristic aspects of African theatre, through artists in Anglophone countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa (with black and white artists fighting apartheid). It explores theatre in Caribbean and Latin American nations: Martinique, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. It maps distinctive developments in Canada, including French Canadian and “physical theatre” artists. It considers indigenous theatre in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. It maps major developments in Asian-Pacific countries: Australia and New Zealand (including feminist, queer, and ethnic theatre), India, China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. It explores theatre across the Middle East, in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Israel.
This chapter investigates possible Minoan and Mycenaean cultic theatres, 2600–1100 BCE. Then it c... more This chapter investigates possible Minoan and Mycenaean cultic theatres, 2600–1100 BCE. Then it considers the development of ancient Greek theatre with the dithyrambic chorus honoring Dionysus, with Thespis as “answerer” to the chorus, and with the further emergence of many elements in the Western art form, including the Greek theatron, in the 500s–200s. And it explores ancient Roman performances, from theatre spaces and the plays of Seneca, Plautus, and Terence to the violent, mass spectacles of arena games, including the schedule of events, mythic characters, and costumes and props of gladiators—sometimes involving emperors and Christian martyrs as actors.
This chapter maps various realistic and anti-realistic styles, providing a chart of the latter. I... more This chapter maps various realistic and anti-realistic styles, providing a chart of the latter. It relates challenges to traditional views of self, society, and cosmos, from Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Einstein, to psychological realism’s use of the well-made play and naturalism’s study of the human animal. It considers Stanislavski’s acting method, with ties to American artists, plus the propaganda aspects of socialist realism and Nazi marches. It investigates neo-Romantic symbolism, parodied by Jarry. It explores dada as anti-war protest, expressionism as showing social pressures through scenographic distortion, African-American stars emerging through that style, futurism glorifying war and technology, and surrealism drawing on classical myths, personal dreams, and “automatic” writings. It concludes with minimalist and eclectic directors, meta-theatrical playwrights, early book musicals, and improvisational therapies.
This chapter explores the re-emergence of formal theatre in Western Europe, after the fall of the... more This chapter explores the re-emergence of formal theatre in Western Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire (and restrictions in Byzantium), with English monks performing liturgical drama and the Saxon canoness Hroswitha writing miracle plays in Latin. It considers vernacular biblical plays inside and outside churches, along with an early morality play by the nun, Hildegard von Bingen. It explores the full development of miracle, biblical, and morality plays with specific examples, plus various performance practices, including Jewish Purim plays. It maps distinctive premodern rituals and entertainments in Africa (Malawi, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe). And it considers the deep history of indigenous performances in Australia (with corroborees) and the Americas (in Adena and Cahokia cultures, ancestral Puebloans, Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas).
This chapter explores Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, drawing the audience toward the actor “signali... more This chapter explores Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, drawing the audience toward the actor “signaling through the flames,” and Brecht’s epic theatre of alienation effects (some developed with Piscator) to distance the audience at key points, toward thinking critically and changing society. It considers existentialist and absurdist playwrights, expressing a postwar flattening of metaphysics. It investigates American realism, with Stanislavski’s system taken in different directions, and Odets’s agitprop and domestic plays. It contemplates the poetic, selective realism of Williams and Miller, realized through Mielziner’s scene designs. It also looks at McCarthyism pressuring theatre artists. It concludes with other American developments, including musicals, black revues, Living Newspapers, and extensions of theatricality through the new media of radio and film, especially with Welles.
This chapter maps American postmodernism, de-centering the modernist authority of the text and un... more This chapter maps American postmodernism, de-centering the modernist authority of the text and universal values toward audience collaboration with fragments and diverse truths. It considers various directions: politics, philosophies, puppetry-animation, clowning, and anthropologies. It investigates the Living and Open Theatres, rock musicals, Blau’s companies and theories, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet, and Mabou Mines, plus Akalaitis, Taymor, and Irwin. It considers Schechner’s “environmental theatre” and anthropological “performance studies,” plus “post-dramatic” offshoots. It explores Kaprow’s happenings regarding later performance artists. It contemplates the disorienting spectacles of Foreman and Wilson—and other avant-garde artists. It considers Spolin’s “theatre games,” regional theatres, off-off-Broadway, and musical innovations. It also maps the major directors and playwrights of the last half-century, plus various ethnic, feminist, and queer theatre developments.
This chapter investigates ties between nationalist movements, Marxist and Darwinist discoveries, ... more This chapter investigates ties between nationalist movements, Marxist and Darwinist discoveries, Romantic tragedies, and popular melodramas in Europe. It considers various theatre riots in London, Paris, and New York—and different acting styles: natural-inspired or grand-flamboyant (Romantic), studied-declamatory or studied-domestic (Classical), and sincere-realistic. These contending styles, with star actors becoming director-like managers, relate to the emergence of the Dracula figure as well. The chapter looks at black actors performing in whiteface and the development of a systematic emotional acting method (by Delsarte), plus the well-made play formula (by Scribe). It explores various melodramatic types, blackface minstrel shows, and Wild West tours in the US, involving popular, yet demeaning stereotypes—related to “total artwork” directors, vaudeville variety shows, and new technologies for violent spectacles.
This chapter considers the emergence of Italian humanism, through ancient influences, with neocla... more This chapter considers the emergence of Italian humanism, through ancient influences, with neoclassical rules, perspective scenery, Torelli’s scene-changing device, opera, commedia dell’arte, and new theatres, including Teatro Olimpico, which still has its original set for Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Then it investigates the adoption of neoclassical rules, scenic devices, and commedia by French theatres, plus court ballets and machine plays. It explores the tensions that developed between moral restraint and pleasurable spectacle, political order and satirical insight—in the French Academy’s critique of Corneille’s Le Cid, other attacks on Moliere’s Tartuffe, and the king’s expulsion of the Comedie Italienne.
Cinema, television, videogames, and the Internet have extended theatre’s ghosts into new projecti... more Cinema, television, videogames, and the Internet have extended theatre’s ghosts into new projective technologies. Yet those screen fantasies still hinge upon the communal expression of ghosts within each spectator’s mind: a linking of cranial computers and internal displays to produce a shared illusion. Theatre within the mind, extending to stage and screen performances, manifests the Other in the actor and the specter of the spectator. The persistence of ghosts and gods, in various dramatic media today, can be traced not only to the early history of theatre, in its emergence from communal rituals (as considered in the next chapter), but also to the evolution of the human brain, with its internal stages and screens. Likewise, a long tradition of mind/brain (or soul/body) dualism in Western philosophy, which reached its climax in the early modern, Cartesian Theatre of the mind’s cogito (“I think” therefore I exist), is now being reconsidered, through new views of ghosts in the machinery of the brain. How did the human brain become an internal theatre—and is there a central director or playwright in charge?
Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has discovered certain ghosts in the human brain that serve to ill... more Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has discovered certain ghosts in the human brain that serve to illuminate the persistent metaphysics of the mind’s theatre, from ancient stages to postmodern screens. Ramachandran argues that the brain does not function like a computer, sending information in a one-way cascade from sense organs to the higher brain centers. His research shows that brain “connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 56). He has used mirrors and other devices to help amputees who feel pain and movement in a missing limb. Seeing the illusion of that phantom limb—in a mirror reflecting the patient’s actual arm and hand on the other side—gradually affects a permanent change. It heals the feedback system between the missing limb and the brain’s body-image areas, which had caused phantom sensations with “no countermanding signals … [against] stored pain memories” (54). Ramachandran has also devised experiments for non-amputees, giving them the sensation of a three-foot nose or of a tabletop as the extension of their hands. Ramachandran thus demonstrates that the body image is surprisingly malleable. “Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience” (58). He argues that the body image is partly genetic and partly experiential: “the brain has a dual representation, one of the original body image laid down genetically and one ongoing, up-to-date image that can incorporate subsequent changes.”1
Gibson’s film extends a long tradition of Euro-American passion plays and martyr dramas, related ... more Gibson’s film extends a long tradition of Euro-American passion plays and martyr dramas, related also to the ritual sacrifice of “god-actors” in other cultures. Yet, the extreme violence of this popular religious movie involves the devotional dangers of cinematic sadomasochism and melodramatic paranoia, with Jews, Romans, and devils as villainous stereotypes–as well as the potential value of tragic catharsis–on a vast scale for today’s mass-media audience, especially in the post-9/11 context.
... is only "intended to open a door to cognitive studies for theatre and performance ... an... more ... is only "intended to open a door to cognitive studies for theatre and performance ... and empirical research about the mind's embodiment: how "having a human body guarantees that people's minds will produce a certain number of unchanging, cross-cultural, perhaps even ...
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