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Stefano Boselli
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Theatre, Faculty Member
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.
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.
Research Interests:
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.
Research Interests: Absurdism and Jean Genet
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.
Research Interests:
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.