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This book provides key critical tools to significantly broaden the readers’ perception of theatre and performance history: in line with posthuman thought, each chapter engages Actor-Network Theory and similar theories to reveal a... more
This book provides key critical tools to significantly broaden the readers’ perception of theatre and performance history: in line with posthuman thought, each chapter engages Actor-Network Theory and similar theories to reveal a comprehensive range of human and non-human agents whose collaborations impact theatre productions but are often overlooked. The volume also greatly expands the information available in English on the networks created by several Argentine artists. Through a transnational, transatlantic perspective, case studies refer to the lives, theatre companies, staged productions, and visual artworks of a number of artists who left Buenos Aires during the 1960s due to a mix of personal and political reasons. By establishing themselves in the French capital, queer playwright Copi and directors Jorge Lavelli, Alfredo Arias, and Jérôme Savary, among others, became part of the larger group of intellectuals known as “the Argentines of Paris” and dominated the Parisian theatre scene between the 1980s and 90s. Focusing on these Argentine artists and their nomadic peripeteias, the study thus offers a detailed description of the complexity of agencies and assemblages inextricably involved in theatre productions, including larger historical events, everyday objects, sexual orientation, microbes, and even those agents at work well before a production is conceived.
Posthumanist discourse has exploded during the last decade, inviting a turn toward a post-anthropocentric, post-dualist approach to theatre studies. However, theatre still privileges anthropocentrism, as performance of human actors for a... more
Posthumanist discourse has exploded during the last decade, inviting a turn toward a post-anthropocentric, post-dualist approach to theatre studies. However, theatre still privileges anthropocentrism, as performance of human actors for a human audience.
With this dual collection of essays for performance studies scholars and practitioners, we aim to engage posthumanist thought to expand readers’ awareness, refocus their perspective, and reveal a broad spectrum of often silent non-human actors that remain unseen even as they interact with human performers. Performance studies have indeed included props, objects, and technology in their purview, but often with a historical or semiotic/symbolic approach that neglects the vibrant non-human agencies involved at several levels of scale.
Certain projects such as New Media Dramaturgy (2017) or ecological theatre studies have pointed to the imperative to de-center the human in contemporary theatre. However, our project takes stock of the methodological shifts necessary in theatre and performance to highlight non-human agency across historical and contemporary examples, and apply this thinking across the field moving forward. We bring a deep engagement with contemporary theories, as well as a dramaturgical understanding of theatre and performance that goes beyond the staged production to connect with the larger rhizomatic networks of actors involved.
Posthumanist discourse has exploded during the last decade, inviting a turn toward a post-anthropocentric, post-dualist approach to theatre studies. However, theatre still privileges anthropocentrism, as performance of human actors for a... more
Posthumanist discourse has exploded during the last decade, inviting a turn toward a post-anthropocentric, post-dualist approach to theatre studies. However, theatre still privileges anthropocentrism, as performance of human actors for a human audience.
With this dual collection of essays for performance studies scholars and practitioners, we aim to engage posthumanist thought to expand readers’ awareness, refocus their perspective, and reveal a broad spectrum of often silent non-human actors that remain unseen even as they interact with human performers. Performance studies have indeed included props, objects, and technology in their purview, but often with a historical or semiotic/symbolic approach that neglects the vibrant non-human agencies involved at several levels of scale.
Certain projects such as New Media Dramaturgy (2017) or ecological theatre studies have pointed to the imperative to de-center the human in contemporary theatre. However, our project takes stock of the methodological shifts necessary in theatre and performance to highlight non-human agency across historical and contemporary examples, and apply this thinking across the field moving forward. We bring a deep engagement with contemporary theories, as well as a dramaturgical understanding of theatre and performance that goes beyond the staged production to connect with the larger rhizomatic networks of actors involved.
How can a negative action, the decision to abstain from food, be enacted on stage? Examining hunger as a conscious choice to avoid food for spectacle rather than an unwanted need arising from lack of basic nourishment, this article... more
How can a negative action, the decision to abstain from food, be enacted on stage? Examining hunger as a conscious choice to avoid food for spectacle rather than an unwanted need arising from lack of basic nourishment, this article illustrates several ways to make hunger visible in performance. Through the critical lens of actor-network theory (ANT), hunger’s apparently scarce dramatic action is shown to be framed by and networked with the performance of several other human and non-human actors. Case studies chart a process of “translation” of the typical hunger artist performance from its historical examples to its contemporary theatre-within-the-theatre adaptations.
In the West, self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment more distinctly in the late nineteenth century, when living skeletons and hunger artists were shown at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks, and produced income for themselves and their impresarios. Franz Kafka’s short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist,” 1922) looked back at the history of the profession, identifying the main components of the spectacle of hunger. Polish playwright Tadeusz Różewicz turned the short story into a play, Odejście głodomora (The Hunger Artist Departs, 1977), exploring the potential for dialogic interactions at the textual level and developing side-characters only implied by Kafka. By contrast, the contemporary NYC-based company Sinking Ship created A Hunger Artist (2017), an adaptation that expanded the short story’s theatricality around a single performer who plays multiple characters with the aid of all the resources of theatre, from puppets to audience members “enrolled” in the show.
Transforming his early life experiences as a drifter, thief, prostitute, and inmate with the power of imagination and undeniable literary skills, Jean Genet (1910–1986) developed a unique artistic trajectory and found recognition by... more
Transforming his early life experiences as a drifter, thief, prostitute, and inmate with the power of imagination and undeniable literary skills, Jean Genet (1910–1986) developed a unique artistic trajectory and found recognition by shocking conventional French society. His often-bewildering stories of criminals, convicts, and queer characters explore the power of deception, betrayal, abjection, and intense homosexual desire through non-linear plots, sudden shifts of point of view, and complex metatheatrical structures. As a precursor of an absurdist sensibility, Genet unsettles the reader and spectator by plunging them in the midst of “strange” and “unique” worlds, only imperfectly illuminated and yet potently alluring. The chapter analyzes the arc of Genet’s oeuvre, focusing on his novels Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, The Thief’s Journal, and Funeral Rites, and his plays Deathwatch, The Maids, Splendid’s, The Pope, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. Moving from deeply personal matters to more grandiose architectures, Genet’s work displays a gusto for defying expectations, an eagerness to contradict the assumptions of bourgeois morality, and a constant reminder of the power and fragility of simulacra in the private and political arena. Despite the disappearance of many of Genet’s world coordinates, his creations still offer exciting and unique dilemmas that his readers and spectators are compelled to unravel.
The introduction of Pirandello’s works to Latin America started in earnest after the controversial Italian success of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), then staged by Dario Niccodemi’s company in Buenos Aires (1922),... more
The introduction of Pirandello’s works to Latin America started in earnest after the controversial Italian success of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), then staged by Dario Niccodemi’s company in Buenos Aires (1922), Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro (1923). When Pirandello’s newly-established Teatro d’Arte found itself in serious financial trouble in 1927, it welcomed the proposal by the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires for a tour that promised to cover the deficit. On his first trip to South America the author sparked a fervor that made him the tour’s protagonist while dispelling the perception of his theatre as simply a conduit for Fascist propaganda. Pirandello’s second trip to Argentina in 1933 saw the author directing the successful world premiere of When One Is Somebody, which had not yet found an Italian production due to its autobiographical content and heavy technical requirements. An important connection between Pirandello and the Buenos Aires professional theatre scene was actor Luis Arata, whose company systematically offered his plays between the 1930s and 40s. Over time, Pirandellian productions gradually spread across the official, commercial, and independent circuits and Pirandellian tropes have continued to influence Argentine playwriting to this day.
Over the past fourteen years, the highly successful reality TV competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race has popularized drag as the male performance of an idealized female form. Current scholarship on the show mostly investigates its human... more
Over the past fourteen years, the highly successful reality TV competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race has popularized drag as the male performance of an idealized female form. Current scholarship on the show mostly investigates its human components in terms of race, body types or social networks, but the plethora of not necessarily gendered non-human actors that contribute to drag performance remains underappreciated. Drawing on actor–network and assemblage theories in a posthuman framework to acknowledge the shared and convergent agencies of humans and things, this article focuses on three major areas: first, the progressive opening of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s runway to creatures whose gender becomes less relevant because they can no longer be viewed as human or were not human to start with; second, drag performance that relies on crucial assemblages of human and non-human co-stars; third, the monetary incentive that pervades the show and becomes one of its most powerful actors.
This chapter examines El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984) by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939) as... more
This chapter examines El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984) by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939) as examples of how theatre-fiction provides access to a broader historical awareness of the intertwined genealogies of artistic work and private events that influence theatre but remain otherwise mostly invisible. Unrestrained by the immediacy of a staged performance, these works expand their chronotopic scope to encompass whole lives and diverse locales: not only do both Blasco and Cozarinsky jump freely between the present and the past, but they also evoke a variety of places on both sides of the Atlantic spanning from the city of Buenos Aires to the Argentine provinces, from the tropical forest of Venezuela to the steppes of Eastern Europe.
What is hope in a posthuman framework? A posthuman lens asks us to account for the material reality of our history, present environment, and future entanglements between human and non-human agents. Rosi Braidotti calls for an “affirmative... more
What is hope in a posthuman framework? A posthuman lens asks us to account for the material reality of our history, present environment, and future entanglements between human and non-human agents. Rosi Braidotti calls for an “affirmative politics” as an element of posthuman subjectivity: “We should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative and hopeful future, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mindsets and established values” (Posthuman Knowledge, 2019). In line with this call toward drastic changes in perception, we focus on less visible human/non-human alliances.

We invite participants to consider the following questions in relation to the conference theme:

• How can a posthuman perspective highlight the complexity of collaborations or interferences between human and non-human agents involved in the creation and sustaining of hope?
• Historically, what imagined performances or practices hoped for in the past are possible now thanks to the availability of new technologies and other non-human collaborators, or remain as yet utopian and unrealized?
• What are the material networks that construct the affective response of hope, in and outside of the performance space?
• How do performances or play texts point to hope for a peaceful cohabitation with and reciprocal improvement of human and non-human entities, at all levels of intelligence, from nature to AI-driven robots or other technologies?
• What are other possible sides to hope, such as hope for the end of unwanted and destructive assemblages with agents like viruses or pollution?
• Certain posthuman thought focuses on being after or without the human, where the human becomes obsolete. What is hope, without the presence of humans?
• What new configurations of assemblages between humans and non-humans do you hope to manifest?

Continuing the generative meeting of the 2022 working group, we invite scholars interested in reframing current theatre studies methodologies to attend to a broader spectrum of non-human actors and the crucial ways they exert agency in the performance event. We invite participants to think broadly about a variety of agents such as everyday and performing objects, robots, machines, technology, algorithms, media, natural phenomena, hyperobjects, microbes, assemblages, ensembles, institutions, capital, historical events, religion, ideology, audiences, or affect.

We hope to provide a forum for discussing works-in-progress, posthumanist theoretical frameworks, and methodologies such as Actor-Network Theory, Assemblage Theory, New Materialism, Feminist New Materialism, Object Oriented Ontology, Flat Ontologies, Ecology, Dramaturgy.

We ask participants to submit abstracts of their research. We will then place participants in small groups organized around themes in order to share drafts of works-in-progress for feedback prior to the working group meeting. In addition, before we meet, each participant will prepare an introduction to one other paper in their subgroup in order to facilitate conversation. When we gather, we will allow these introductions to forge connections and aim for an organic discussion with group members and observers. We will conclude by articulating a series of questions and gathering resources that can drive our investigations forward.
American Society for Theatre Research Conference “Catastrophe” New Orleans, November 3–6, 2022.
Pirandello Society of America Conference, Hunter College, 16 September 2017
Chair: Lisa Sarti – BMCC, The City University of New York, Fellow at Harvard University, Fall 2017 “Pirandello and Satire. The Imaginary Journey of Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff with Four Authors without a Character” Stefano Giannini... more
Chair: Lisa Sarti – BMCC, The City University of New York, Fellow at Harvard University, Fall 2017

“Pirandello and Satire. The Imaginary Journey of Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff with Four Authors without a Character”
Stefano Giannini – Syracuse University

“Pirandellian Post-Truth: Humor and Resistance”
Laura Lucci – Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

“Suicide Adolescents in Pirandello’s Short Stories”
Nicole Paronzini – The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

“Pirandello: Life and Form Revisited”
Filippa Modesto – Brooklyn College, The City University of New York

Respondent: John DiGaetani, Hofstra University
Chair: Stefano Boselli – City College, The City University of New York “Pirandello Translates Pirandello” Giuseppe Faustini – Skidmore College “Petrarch and Pirandello: The Sense of an Ending” Jane Tylus – New York University “The... more
Chair: Stefano Boselli – City College, The City University of New York

“Pirandello Translates Pirandello”
Giuseppe Faustini – Skidmore College

“Petrarch and Pirandello: The Sense of an Ending”
Jane Tylus – New York University

“The Metamorphoses of The Jar”
Andrea Baldi – Rutgers University

“Vital Images: Metaphors and Visual Thought in Luigi Pirandello’s Works”
Lisa Sarti – BMCC, The City University of New York, Fellow at Harvard University, Fall 2017

Respondent: Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni – Baruch College, The City University of New York
Chair: Michael Subialka – University of California, Davis “Pirandello’s Modern Times” Giuseppe Gazzola – Stony Brook University “Jorge Lavelli and Pirandello: A Year with Six Characters between France and Argentina” Stefano Boselli –... more
Chair: Michael Subialka – University of California, Davis

“Pirandello’s Modern Times”
Giuseppe Gazzola – Stony Brook University

“Jorge Lavelli and Pirandello: A Year with Six Characters between France and Argentina”
Stefano Boselli – City College, The City University of New York

“A Stage Onstage: The Meta-Theatricality of Balconies in Pirandello and Genet”
Becky Gould – Columbia Teachers College

“Luigi Pirandello as Maese Pedro in his Theatre of Puppets: A Pirandellian Reading
of Miguel de Cervantes’s Episode of Maese Pedro”
Maria (Mara) Theodoritsi – University of Ottawa

Respondent: Susan Tenneriello – Baruch College, The City University of New York
Italian Permanent Section M/MLA 2011: Chair: Stefano Boselli Secretary: Daniele Fioretti Panel A 1. Giusy Di Filippo ‘Signore, fuor di scena io non so fingere’: le commedianti riabilitate nel teatro goldoniano 2. Stefano Boselli... more
Italian Permanent Section M/MLA 2011:
Chair: Stefano Boselli
Secretary: Daniele Fioretti

Panel A
1. Giusy Di Filippo
‘Signore, fuor di scena io non so fingere’: le commedianti riabilitate nel teatro goldoniano
2. Stefano Boselli
From Stage to Page: Wordplay in Achille Campanile's Tragedie in due battute.
3. Chiara De Santi
Identities in Transition via Handball in Uberto Pasolini’s Machan
4. Erika Conti
“Me lo dici, babbo, che gioco è?”: Dynamic Equivalence and Creative Mistranslations in Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella

PANEL B
5. Christina Petraglia
What a Wicked Game You Play: A Battle of Ego(s) in Arrigo Boito’s “L’alfier nero”
6. Daniele Fioretti
Labyrinths made of Words: Italo Calvino’s Il castello dei destini incrociati and Edoardo Sanguineti’s Il giuoco dell’oca.
7. Jennafer Alexander
“Replacing a Lost Center: Love, Knowledge and Play in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics”
8. Tania Convertini
Play with literature in L2: Stefano Benni’s Stranalandia
Session A 1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia 2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico... more
Session A
1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia
Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia
2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore
Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico
3. Lina Wertmüller regista-burattinaia
Federico Pacchioni, University of Connecticut-Storrs

Session B
4. Manzoni’s Count of Carmagnola and Kleist’s Prince of Homburg: History between Fiction and Factuality
Maria Giulia Carone, University of Wisconsin-Madison
5. Teatro e teatralità nella poesia del primo Palazzeschi
Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin Madison
6. Mario Luzi’s Plays: A Plurality of Voices
Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Session C
7. Distinctive Nature of Masques of Commedia dell’Arte in their Relationship with Food in 18th Century
Paola Monte, Royal Holloway, University of London
8. Arlecchino is Lying: Deconstructing Goldoni’s II bugiardo
Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College
9. The Spectator in Dario Fo’s Performances: From the Foyer to the Post-Performance Debates
Marco Valleriani, Royal Holloway, University of London
Philip Balma, “Translating Italian Dialectal Literature: Thinking Outside the Box” Gloria Pastorino, “Can Performance Save Meaning? Trying to ‘Stick to the Original’ in Fo, Pirandello, Costa, Mayorga” Stefano Boselli, “The Multiple... more
Philip Balma, “Translating Italian Dialectal Literature: Thinking Outside the Box”
Gloria Pastorino, “Can Performance Save Meaning? Trying to ‘Stick to the Original’ in Fo, Pirandello, Costa, Mayorga”
Stefano Boselli, “The Multiple Realities of the One-Act Play in Translation: Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in His Mouth”
Viola Miglio (respondent)
Organizer and Chair: Stefano BoseIIi (Gettysburg College) 1. Valeria Petrocchi (Universita per Stranieri di Perugia), Atys: una piccola rivista d'avanguardia nel panorama cosmopolita dell'ltalia ai primi del Novecento 2. Stefano Adami... more
Organizer and Chair: Stefano BoseIIi (Gettysburg College)
1. Valeria Petrocchi (Universita per Stranieri di Perugia), Atys: una piccola rivista
d'avanguardia nel panorama cosmopolita dell'ltalia ai primi del Novecento
2. Stefano Adami (Independent scholar), La cosa prima. Traduzione di libretti d'opera e
problemi di rappresentazione
3. llaria Serra (Florida Atlantic University), Adaptation in Italian Cinema
Organizer and Chair: Stefano BoseIIi (Gettysburg College) 1. Stefano Boselli (Gettysburg College), The lntertextual Double-Bill: An Example on Verismo School 2. William Leparulo (Florida State University), If comico-grottesco del... more
Organizer and Chair: Stefano BoseIIi (Gettysburg College)
1. Stefano Boselli (Gettysburg College), The lntertextual Double-Bill: An Example on
Verismo School
2. William Leparulo (Florida State University), If comico-grottesco del teatro di Raffaele
Viviani
3. Cristina Perissinotto (University of Ottawa), Binario illegale: if treno net teatro di Marco
Paolini
Topic: Italian Experiences of Reality's Representation Between Literature and Cinema Chair: Simone Dubrovic, Kenyon College Secretary: Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College Session A 2:15 -3:45 p.m. (Wabash Cannonball) l. The... more
Topic: Italian Experiences of Reality's Representation Between Literature and Cinema
Chair: Simone Dubrovic, Kenyon College
Secretary: Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College

Session A
2:15 -3:45 p.m. (Wabash Cannonball)
l. The peripeties of Francesca da Rimini: D'Annuzio and Masnata from Decadentism to Futurism
Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College
2. Neorealismo e Decadentismo nella narrativa e nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini
Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin-Madison
3.ll Trionfo della morte: la collaborazione tra Gabriele d'Annunzio e il pittore Francesco Paolo Michetti
Lodovica Guidarelli, Colby College
4. The Science of (Con)Science and the Tomorrow of Moral Poets and Mammoth Unrest
Travis Landry KenYon College
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the assemblage as follows: “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms […], the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’” (Deleuze and... more
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the assemblage as follows: “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms […], the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 69). In theatre, this co-functioning is often self-evident but other times partially or completely hidden from the spectators’ eyes. Drawing from my recent monograph on a diasporic group of “Argentines of Paris,” in this paper I meditate on two types of surprising assemblages, the assemblage between ostensibly independent shows and the assemblage of theatre producers of opposing political views. These practical alliances and their motives could only be fully appreciated once hostile actors intervened to sever certain connections.
The first case illustrates how performance history needs to look beyond the boundaries of the single production to convey the full story in terms of assemblages. In March 1970, in Paris, Argentine playwright Copi’s controversial Eva Perón directed by Alfredo Rodríguez Arias and Michael McClure’s The Sermons of Jean Harlow & the Curses of Billy the Kid directed by Antoine Bourseiller could be attended at two separate venues, the Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois and the Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse respectively, about 25 minutes on foot from each other. The two shows, however, were co-functioning because they shared a performer, Jean-Claude Drouot, who first acted in the earlier show, quickly changed, and then briskly walked over to the other theatre to perform there. Such perfectly timed machine became evident only once it broke down, when a group of right-wing hooligans brutally attacked Copi’s play for political reasons. As a consequence, Drouot – caught up in the mayhem – could not reach the other theatre during the later time slot, and that show was cancelled.
In the second example, I look at the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of the producers for Copi’s Cachafaz, staged in 1993 at the Théâtre de la Colline under the artistic direction of Jorge Lavelli. Again staged by Arias, this queer-themed show involving anthropophagy gathered two producing entities apart from the host theatre: Arias’s TSE group and the Théâtre de l’Atelier, whose director, Frédéric Franck, hoped for returns from a potential French tour. The producers had initially converged on the assumption that TSE’s star Facundo Bo would play the lead. However, when Bo had to withdraw due to Alzheimer’s early complications – a hostile non-human actor that incapacitated him – and Arias found a less well-known substitute, Franck canceled the tour. Because TSE’s losses would be much larger, the group lobbied to retain the touring dates. What followed was a series of heated exchanges in person and in written communications – which I unearthed from the French National Archives – that brought to the surface ideological, political, and aesthetic differences that had originally been glossed over. If in this case the producers’ collaboration was declared on the playbills, their heterogeneous motives were only revealed once Alzheimer’s put a wrench in the show’s original assemblage.
Typically, a theatre performance entails an intricate network of agencies converging to create a communal experience. And yet, while watching a performance, the spectators are generally left with little detail as to how the production... more
Typically, a theatre performance entails an intricate network of agencies converging to create a communal experience. And yet, while watching a performance, the spectators are generally left with little detail as to how the production came together, who the performers really are, or what led them to appear in that particular venue, all genealogical elements that crucially influenced the final result.
Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. If some also wrote plays, others approached theatre through their fiction, making actors, directors, playwrights, and stages the protagonists of their narrative works. One of the roles of theatre-fiction is to illuminate not just a backstage dimension that may chronologically overlap with the creative process but also a broader historical awareness that embraces the multitude of agents, from living beings to material entities, that contribute to what is shown in front of the audience.
This paper examines El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867–1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984) by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939) as examples of theatre-fiction that, unrestrained by the immediacy of a staged performance, expands its chronotopic scope to encompass whole lives and diverse locales, jumping freely between the present and the past, while evoking a variety of places on both sides of the Atlantic spanning from the city of Buenos Aires to the Argentine provinces, from the tropical forest of Venezuela to the steppes of Eastern Europe.
Inspired by the theme “Hope,” I argue that, in certain circumstances, adversarial agents can be viewed as paradoxically beneficial for theatre groups or productions, as in the case of the Parisian stagings of Genet’s The Screens (1966)... more
Inspired by the theme “Hope,” I argue that, in certain circumstances, adversarial agents can be viewed as paradoxically beneficial for theatre groups or productions, as in the case of the Parisian stagings of Genet’s The Screens (1966) and Copi’s Eva Perón (1970), both targets of threats and violent attacks by the right-wing group Ordre Nouveau and other agents. In 1971, theatre critic Colette Godard noted how such malicious interferences were a boon for companies without a budget. Indeed, for the Argentine group TSE staging Copi, the event made the difference between oblivion and immediate success.
This approach stems from my upcoming book’s notion of “actor-network dramaturgy,” which articulates an expanded notion of agency in the context of Actor-Network Theory, establishing the uninterrupted continuity of the aesthetic with history at large. Because the network is a continuum of associations between “actors,” it makes no sense to distinguish artistic action from action per se. Thus, if “people know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (Foucault), actions chronologically preceding or parallel to the aesthetic ones can still be seen as pushing towards a theatre production, even without full awareness of their consequences.
This method invites researchers to develop a more comprehensive actor-network dramaturgical vision by including longer genealogies of humans, things, and events; more numerous types of actors, human and non-human; and both friendly and adversarial actors, successes and failures, as sources of exciting historical accounts.
In his plays The Balcony, The Pope, and The Screens Jean Genet critiques the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), i.e., the degradation of authentic social connections in favor of relations between images. This paper analyzes Genet’s... more
In his plays The Balcony, The Pope, and The Screens Jean Genet critiques the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), i.e., the degradation of authentic social connections in favor of relations between images. This paper analyzes Genet’s demonstration of how society employs simulacra as tools of power and how to potentially escape them.
Jean Genet (1910–1986) found recognition by shocking conventional French society. In this paper I analyze his three plays that more pointedly critiqued “the society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), the degradation of authentic social connections in favor of relations between their images.
In The Balcony (1955), the brothel of the title appears as a high-scale establishment dedicated to enacting perverse scenarios by regular men who seek the thrill of absolute power. Stage manager of this “house of illusions” is Madame Irma, who surveils its 38 studios. However, because her clients’ reenactments are nothing but simulacra of power, fundamentally blunting any desire to act in the real world, the bordello acts as one of the status quo’s institutions, against which a popular revolution is brewing. In the end, the rebels fail because, even after the real Royal Palace is blown up, a confrontation of allegories is displayed from the brothel’s balcony, with Irma and her clients silently embodying the archetypes of power just destroyed and yet desired by the masses as guarantors of order. When Irma dismisses the audience in the same way as her clients, hinting at a new rebellion the next day, she implicates the voyeuristic spectators as acquiescent to the mechanisms of power through spectacle.
With The Pope (1955), Genet applies his analysis to the highest position in the Catholic Church. In this playful and irreverent short piece, a photographer has made an appointment to capture the Pontiff’s ideal image for worldwide distribution, but this highly self-conscious Pope regrets gradually shedding all his “interior density” to finally become an empty vessel reduced to a “definitive image.” Indeed, he enters in the expected “long white robe […] a tall papal miter and a cross on his chest” but does so gliding on roller skates, while his behind remains naked because never officially visible.
Finally, combining his scathing assessment of white colonialism and the discourse on power achieved through simulacra, The Screens (1961) offers a sprawling, polyphonic epic that obliquely alludes to the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962), in which both sides rely on simulacra. On the one hand, the ruthless racist colonizers count on their constructed image to dominate the territory, such as wearing a fat suit to look more imposing, while the French soldiers seem more preoccupied with looking good than having better weapons; on the other hand, the insurgents – though able to win the war – simply substitute the older with their own oppressive power structures. This similar approach becomes evident once all warring characters end up in the same metaphysical “place” after death. The only way to escape this society of the spectacle is suggested by the Nettles family, when Saïd dies but does not reappear among the dead, so he will never be fixed in a hero’s image.
Overall, Genet’s work displays a gusto for defying expectations, an eagerness to contradict the assumptions of bourgeois morality, and a constant reminder of the power and fragility of simulacra in the private and political arena.
American Society for Theatre Research Conference “Catastrophe” New Orleans, November 3–6, 2022
This paper examines hunger as a form of artistic performance, a conscious choice to avoid food rather than an unwanted need arising from an emergency or lack of basic nourishment. Self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment... more
This paper examines hunger as a form of artistic performance, a conscious choice to avoid food rather than an unwanted need arising from an emergency or lack of basic nourishment. Self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment in the late nineteenth century, when so-called living skeletons / hunger artists were shown at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks and produced income for themselves and their impresarios. With several artists becoming famous in both Europe and America, this form of publicized, spectacularized hunger remained in vogue until about 1930, when it lost spectators to other forms of entertainment, although some hunger artists continued to appear until the early 1950s. Franz Kafka’s short story A Hunger Artist (1922) looked back at the history of the profession, Polish playwright Tadeusz Różewicz turned it into a play (The Hunger Artist Departs, 1983), and the contemporary NYC-based company Sinking Ship created a recent adaptation for human and puppet performers (2017). These works illustrate and reenact several ways in which hunger could become performance, even in a fundamentally static situation that entailed little dramatic action, but whose power hinged on the differential between the starving artists themselves and the context of their performance, populated by well-fed spectators.
Association for Asian Performance, 21st Annual Conference, August 2-4, 2021 Online
Latinx Focus Group. Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference “Theatres of Revolution: Performance, Pedagogy, and Protest,” Boston, August 1–5.
Performance Studies Focus Group. Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference “Theatres of Revolution: Performance, Pedagogy, and Protest,” Boston, August 1–5.
Research Interests:
Theatre and Performance Editor. Curator of “Pirandellian Dramaturgies III – Short Stories to Drama: Comical and Grotesque."
Theatre and Performance Editor. Curator of “Pirandellian Dramaturgies II – Short Stories to Drama.”
Theatre and Performance Editor. Curator of “Pirandellian Dramaturgies.” Special issue on Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Research Interests:
Translation Studies, Phonetics, Italian Studies, Translation theory, Social Justice, and 36 more
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, New York City.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, New York City.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A series of interviews with scholars, friends, and lovers of Pirandello and his works organized by the Pirandello Society of America. Follow the live events on our Facebook Page and YouTube channel. The recordings of the live events can... more
A series of interviews with scholars, friends, and lovers of Pirandello and his works organized by the Pirandello Society of America. Follow the live events on our Facebook Page and YouTube channel. The recordings of the live events can be viewed in the Video Archive on the Pirandello Society of America Website: https://www.pirandellosociety.org/

Events moderator and contact: Ana Ilievska, ailievska@uchicago.edu
The hybrid conference focuses on the main theme of Assemble. To assemble has multiple meanings: to gather in one place for a common purpose or to put together the parts of something. The section 77 focused on contemporary theatrical and... more
The hybrid conference focuses on the main theme of Assemble. To assemble has multiple meanings: to gather in one place for a common purpose or to put together the parts of something. The section 77 focused on contemporary theatrical and performative practices using the notion of assemble. It reconciders how to assemble, how to come together, to build, to imagine, to co-create in hostile conditions, and, conversely, what we need to disassemble, to take apart, to dismantle, to decenter, to unlearn.