Peter Brook

Représenter Sade au cinéma ne revient pas à choisir un sujet
parmi d’autres : les metteurs en scène qui y travaillent s’engagent
à livrer des images qu’on ne peut que qualifier d’intolérables.
Le cinéma sadien se construit et raisonne autour de deux
interdits : la mort et la petite mort, l’orgasme. Questionnant
l’impasse de la représentation qu’implique l’adaptation d’une
pareille production littéraire, Alberto Brodesco revient sur les
enjeux esthétiques, thématiques, philosophiques et narratifs
des textes, entre autres à travers les espaces sadiens, pour
mieux définir les dispositifs de vision élaborés par l’écrivain,
lesquels mettent au défi l’art cinématographique.
Le livre ne se contente pas d’enchaîner pour les décrire les différentes
transpositions de l’oeuvre du divin marquis ; il développe
une réflexion sur les passages de l’écrit à l’écran, sur les
théories s’intéressant aux relations entre images et violence (la
violence dans l’image, la violence de l’image), sur les positions
spectatorielles, sur les tensions entre réflexion et perceptions
sensorielles, sur le cinéma voué au corps (du body art au body
horror)…
S’il met en avant Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Brook,
Jess Franco, Jan Švankmajer, l’auteur puise dans de nombreux
exemples internationaux, y compris dans le champ plus
contemporain de la médiasphère, pour dégager un panorama
le plus large possible. Et son appareil critique, conséquent,
montre qu’il a assimilé de nombreuses lectures sur le sujet pour
dégager une approche synthétique vive et renouvelée.

Con este artículo me propongo pensar las complicidades que se dan entre teatro e historia a partir del concepto de pueblo por-venir (peuple à venir) de Gilles Deleuze y de las imágenes del film Marat/Sade de Peter Brook. Concepto e imagen ayudarán a la hora de dilucidar qué puede significar ficcionalizar el común y desde qué propuestas ontológicas, políticas y estéticas puede plantearse. Así, la tensión entre estética y política atravesará el texto, ayudando a pensar lo común como aquello que no sucede ni desde el pensamiento representativo, ni desde una consideración de lo histórico entendido como el proceso de las grandes revoluciones. Ambas propuestas se complementarán y me ayudarán a pensar qué puede significar un común por-venir.
This article deals with the limits between history and theatre, starting from the deleuzian concept of people to-come (peuple à venir) and from the images of the Peter Brook's film Marat/Sade. Both, concept and image will contribute to understand which is the meaning of fictionalizing the common and from which ontological proposals can it be considered. The tension between aesthetics and politics will constantly appear through the text, and will help us to think about a concept of "common" which may not pass either by a representational thought, neither by a regard which considers the historical process as the place of big revolutions. This proposals will complete one each other and will help me to think a common world-to-come.

Dans la plupart de ses mises en scènes liées au « théâtre sacré », Peter Brook fait appel à deux remarquables comédiens : Yoshi Oida e Sotigui Kouyaté. Les deux comédiens, originaires de deux mondes apparemment distants (l’un japonais, l’autre africain), partagent une approche presque spirituelle à la scène, conçue comme une véritable pratique libératrice nécessairement liée à chemin spirituel. Elevés dans un univers de rituels et de cérémonies, ils sont capables de concrétiser la dimension du sacré à travers des images. Ils rendent visible l’invisible, sans jouer, ni représenter : ils croient et ils deviennent. Leur praxis du jeu nie la fiction scénique et entraîne un processus de transformation. Le miracle de l’incarnation de l’invisible, tant recherché par Brook, passe à travers la force de leur foi dans Le Mahabharata (1985), La Tempête (1990), Tierno Bokar (2004).

L’article retrace les origines de l’attrait de Brook pour l’Afrique et les principes qui motivent cette affinité : du premier voyage du Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale en 1972, au spectacle Sizwe Banzi est mort, présenté à Avignon en 2006. On analyse les spectacles issue de cette passion : Les Iks, histoire d’un tribu des chasseurs nomades, L’Os farce de l’ecrivain sénégalais Birago Diop, le « cycle sud-africain » constitué par Woza Albert !, Le Costume et Sizwe Banzi est mort, pour finir avec Tierno Bokar, portrait de l’Afrique au début du XXème siècle.

In 1962 James Baldwin writes Another Country, which narrates the tragic life and impossible loves of a bisexual jazz drummer, Rufus Scott, who—confused by jealousy, sexual disorientation, and racial inhibitions—tortures and maddens his white beloved, Leona; then, half-mad himself, he commits suicide. Thirty years later Toni Morrison’s Jazz tells the sinister story of a love triangle in which middle-aged, married Joe Trace, bewildered by his neurotic wife, Violet, and a never-ending nostalgia for his long-lost mother, falls in love with eighteen-year-old Dorcas and murders her so as not to lose hex. In Another Country the horn of a terrific saxophone player keeps screaming: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” (16), and characters wonder: “How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?” (327), while the crucial question2 of Jazz remains: “Who is the Beloved?” (Naylor 208), For Baldwin and Morrison alike nursing to the tune of jazz, longing itself seems to predominate over the potential for fulfillment. Both novels are tales of love, jealousy, and death that take place in the symbolic City—place of (re)birth and death, source of the jazz music inciting, fueling, and soothing all inherently unappeasable and unspeakable loves and fugitive desires constantly displaced in narratives of quest for the self? the other, and love. However, the aim of this chapter is not so much to analyze the thematic points of intersection between the two texts, but rather to highlight the stylistic parallels in their ingeniously subversive language.

The initial idea was to write a kind of (Alaska, to quote Pinter) a philosophical, post-apocalyptic and dystopian play. A formal experiment with drama where characters are rather undefined, apparently bi-dimensional and simple but through interaction reveal themselves, layer by layer, like peeling an onion. The same goes for the story. The narrative isn't necessary linear or logic. The sense of time and space is stretched to the point of giving the sensation that none is real and these characters might be trapped in some sort of loop.

Influences from theatre of the absurd from Ionesco to Pirandello, the existentialism of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, Oh Happy Days), the outrageous Heiner Müller (Hamletmachine) and other following post-dramatic theatre experiences. The plays of Caryl Churchill have always had a great impact on me and my theatre-making (Far Away, Love and Information, Top Girls). In literature, the obvious Franz Kafka and Günter Grass, and I pay explicit homages to them by borrowing symbolic elements usually associated to them.

The writing process of this play is entrenched into the visualization of it in terms of mise-en-scene. The words create and suggest how the set design, lighting and sound should be. In terms of the acting and staging of it, it aligns with the exploration of basic human needs and emotions. Worth mentioning the work of Jerzy Grotowski, his concept of poor theatre and physical actions to reach the essence of theater and Anne Bogart with her Viewpoints and Composition techniques applied to playwright and directing. Other ' Bs' that are part of my artistic body, mind and soul are Barba, Brook and Boal, who thought, felt and made theatre in their own terms and going beyond the restrains of the form, expanding the concept of dramaturgy and theatre-making.

Purple Onions is stageplay about many things: how do we live alone, in our own bubbles and fictional worlds. How do we relate to other people on a very primal basic emotional level? How does one get to enter another's person world and open up their own as well? It's about needs - and the most important of them is the need for self-realization - a subjective feeling that we know when we have it, when we feel it and it cannot be fully achieved unless we accept your own limitations and flaws.

Dreams and art create, reinvent and defy realities. is this 'crazy' story happening in her mind? is it Earth? If so, is it a remote past or a dystopian future? theatre is the realm where imagination is the main force to construct these alternative scenarios or dimensions, and it is thanks to imagination that we embark on the journey too, thus making it real it for us too, outside the character's (or the author's) head. A leap of faith and a strong belief in the power of words and the signs of drama.

Hacking – improving software through a process of trial and error – is a mode of rehearsal. Such is the claim made by Miguel Escobar Varela in this article, which he furthers by exploring the similarities between the ways theatre makers and software programmers speak about their crafts. Understanding software programming as an essentially creative process should be of interest for theatre scholars, who are constantly searching for modes of academic discourse that are sensitive to the specificity of theatre. By offering examples from interface design for the study of Javanese theatre, Escobar argues that creating software, through an iterative process of trial and error, can become part of the methodological palette of theatre scholars. Miguel Escobar Varela is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, and has worked as a theatre researcher, computer programmer and translator in Mexico, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Singapore. His articles on the intersection of digital technology and theatre studies have been published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and are forthcoming in TDR and Theatre Research International.

Talk given at Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Conference, 17 November 2018.

The image of an exotic, Oriental other has inhabited the imaginaries of European theatre audiences and practitioners for centuries. This paper proposes to trace the genealogy of Orientalist tropes in European – specifically French – theatre, by looking at the trajectory of the first Chinese play translated into a European language, Ji Junxiang’s Zhao shi gu er [The Orphan of the house of Zhao]. Translated by Joseph de Prémare in 1731, the work inspired ‘exotic’ plays by Voltaire, in France, and Arthur Murphy, in Britain. The play has experienced several ‘revivals’ over recent years, leading to various debates and critiques around diversity, cultural stereotypes and appropriation. Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine was performed in France in 2007, with little questioning of the Orientalist aspects of the 1755 play by the production team. In 2012, an adaptation of the play by James Fenton performed at the RSC caused controversy due to the white-washing of the cast. These productions reveal how colonial, Orientalist and racist stereotypes remain in Western art forms. The talk will also discuss the more recent history of ‘borrowing’ from Asian theatre styles by European practitioners, which saw its peak in the later-half of twentieth-century with the emergence of intercultural theatre troupes led by Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook. Although emerging from a desire to embrace the ‘universality’ of theatre, works by these practitioners have tended to perpetuate cultural stereotypes about the ‘East’. The talk will end with a brief overview of current representations of the ‘Oriental Other’ in the French media and culture.

This article responds to the question posited by the editors of this compendium – what does performance philosophy look like? With a focus on illumination within a performance environment the article examines several areas of investigation that contribute to answering the editor's question.

The seminal work Empty Space (1968) by English theatre director and researcher Peter Brook, examines the notion of the theatre through a lens that posits the idea that any space, with an actor and an audience, results in a theatrical engagement. This paper will examine this position, with particular focus on light and lighting. There is a well-known theatrical adage that if you cannot see an actor then you cannot hear them. In this way Brook’s thesis of theatrical engagement – that is connected to space and the bodies within that space – is, technically, divorced from lighting. Yet, if you cannot see an actor and, in turn, cannot hear them, is there a genuine theatrical engagement? This paper argues that the illumination of a space is a prerequisite for such theatrical engagements, or transactions, that while space is an assumed quality in a theatre it is light that realises the space: thus making the stage, and the actors who adorn it, real. Moreover, this paper will explore the various roles of the space, the body and the light in the construction of a theatre experience in which both actors and audience are equally engaged.

This paper will examine some of the roles that illumination plays within a performance, with particular emphasis on the body and on space, through an examination of the lighting design for Epicentre Theatre Company’s October 2014 production of Reginald Rose’s seminal play Twelve Angry Men (performed at the Zenith Theatre, Sydney). The requirements of the lighting design appear simple enough – a drab, nondescript room on a hot New York summer’s evening without air-conditioning – where a group of twelve male jurors debate the fate of a young man on trial for murder. The lighting does more than just illuminate. It is the role of the lighting to interact with the stage (the space) the actors (the body), as well as time to support and reinforce the communication within the performance environment in the theatrical transaction of performer and spectator. It is in this transaction of performer and spectator that the illumination has a dual purpose as both an intermediary conveying, without modifying, a range of visual information that has been carefully curated by the production team to an audience who are willing recipients in the transaction and simultaneously the lighting fulfils the dual role of an additional player in the transaction, adding additional direction, emphasis and meaning to the stage presentation. The duality of theatrical lighting for performance will be briefly compared with architectural illumination to demonstrate the universality of the dual role of lighting as both an intermediary and as an additional player in a visual transaction relating to constructed spaces and bodies located within the influence of the built environment.