Political theatre

Dieser Aufsatz liest das während des Ersten Weltkriegs begonnene Lustspiel-Fragment Timon der Redner als einen Versuch HofmannsthaIs, ausgehend von der Geld-thematik und Figurentypik bei Shakespeare zu einer kritischen Inszenierung des mo-dernen Massenstaates und dessen Sozialdynamiken zu gelangen. Hierbei stützte er sich auf sozialpsychologische Studien Sigmund Freuds und Gustave Le Bons sowie auf Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie. Als Wirkungsabsicht hinter dieser Ironisie-rung des allegorisierten Masse-Führermodells zeichnet sich die Re-Etablierung von legitimen Autoritätsstrukturen im Faszinosum der Dichtung ab, welche das Politi-sche authentisch gestaltet. This survey interprets Hofmannsthal's fragmented adaptation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens as a comedy on the masses of modernity. Combining contemporary theories of the crowd (Freud, Le Bon, Weber) with the staging of the political and economic sphere in Shakespeare's works, HofmannsthaI tried to elaborate critical poetics of the modern state and its most urgent dangers. His ironical dramatization of brute anarchy versus corrupted aristocracy tended to re-establish a consciousness of true authority-which should be found in literature. »Hofmannsthai sehnt sich nach dem extensiven, vielseitigen und polyphonen Leben Shakespeares, des alten englischen Dramas.« (Georg Lukacs, 1911). »Nie in meinem ganzen Leben hat das productive Element diesen Raum ein-genommen, von unten her mit solcher Kraft sich nach oben gedrängt, meine bürgerliche Lebensführung so erschwert und gewissermaßen ironisiert wie in diesen Jahren seit 1916. Das was nach oben will, sind Massen, die ich natürlich seit weit längerer Zeit in mir trage.« (HofmannsthaI an Hermann Bahr, 15.VI. 1918).1 Timon der Redner gehört zu den vergleichsweise wenig beachteten Arbeiten Hugo von Hofmannsthals. 2 Aus den überlieferten Materialien des schon 1975 1

In 2017, performance licenses for two shows in the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival were denied just days before their opening. Undressing Room Naked Ladies were flagged for ‘excessive nudity which included scenes of audience-participants stripping naked, and graphic depictions of exposed genitalia.’ Such acts of naked censorship are not uncommon yet the call to censor these performances came from a Facebook group, ‘Singaporeans Defending Marriage and Family’, who labelled these performance as ‘pornography disguised as art’. This chapter considers this curious shift in biopolitics and examines the place of the body as the site of political inscription where ‘Asian values’ are appropriated as means of continued oppression. Yet, as these performances prove, the body also presents possibilities of revised narratives of multiculturalism in contemporary Singapore.

This article discusses two of Harold Pinter's political plays, One for the Road and Party Time as examples of dystopian drama which criticise the contextual background of 1980s Turkey and 1990s Britain respectively. This reading illustrates that dystopian images observed in Harold Pinter's political plays, One for the Road and Party Time are used as responses to certain socio-historical problems of two different locations. While the panorama of a military state in One for the Road provides a criticism of the political atmosphere of Turkey following the 1980 coup, the economically unbalanced and depoliticised society presented in Party Time resonates with the socioeconomic inequality of Britain during the Thatcher and Major periods. Unspecified settings of the plays, ambiguous characterisation, and hierarchical social structures presented in these works are viewed among the dystopian elements which help Pinter criticise the political atmosphere of Turkey following the 1980 coup and the unbalanced socioeconomic background of contemporary Britain. Discussing dystopian narrative elements-that are commonly studied in relation to the novel genre-in relation to dramatic texts offers the idea that although there is no reference to particular states or political figures in these plays, dystopian elements such as totalitarian regime and state violence derive their material from the real events of the two countries. By way of this dystopian perspective, it is aimed to discuss the necessity of observing the close relationship between Pinter's plays and their historical background despite their seeming distance from their political milieux. A reading of Pinter's works with an emphasis on their dystopian images also helps to interpret Pinter's detached attitude to the politics of his plays from an alternative perspective.

En France, est-ce injurier quelqu’un que de taxer son propos d’antiaméricanisme ? Voilà la question à laquelle l’auteur de cette communication entend apporter quelques éléments de réponse en passant par une analyse de la pièce de théâtre La putain respectueuse et du tollé que ses premières représentations, en novembre 1946, soulevèrent dans la critique parisienne. L’étude amènera en outre l’auteur à se pencher sur le type particulièrement brutal de relation que, dans sa volonté d’engagement, le théâtre sartrien établit avec son public.

In France, is it an offense to pretend someone’s comments are antiamerican ? This is the question the author of this paper intends to answer. To do so, he analyzes Jean-Paul Sartre’s play La putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) and the outcry started by its first representations in November 1946. The author also questions the particularly brutal kind of relationship Sartre’s theater, in its will to commitment, establishes with its audience.

Theatre critics and historians have done valuable work to canonize the scripts of Depression-era Living Newspapers, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the modes of contingent and affective labor that structured daily life for the Federal Theatre employees responsible for writing and staging those texts. This study examines a unique moment in American theatre history in which discursive tropes of uncertainty helped to frame the dramatic arts as symbols of a patriotic work ethic and the American democratic ideal. An investigation of the classed and gendered labor discourses of New Deal Federal Theatre Project administrators from 1935-39 reveals the creative strategies that they used to cope with their own professional and economic precarity. Although Federal Theatre employees encountered these demands within the framework of government sponsorship, their responses to such pressures resonate with patterns in industry, non-profit, and academic settings in the twenty-first century. Producing affect, reviewing performance, re-framing goals, and justifying expenses are all part of today’s late capitalist rubric of professional contingency, just as they were under the Works Progress Administration.

This article discusses a production of Shading the Crime by Christine Roberts, co-directed by the authors for Lusty Juventus Physical Theatre in 1998. The play is set in a Special Police Unit where gender-specific torture is used to humiliate, control and exert power over female 'political prisoners'.  The article explores how, as theatre-makers, we attempted to present a situation that was 'fixed' while simultaneously expressing a sense of agency.

Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance examines collective and devised theatre practices internationally--with emphasis on Russia, Europe, and North America--from the late 20th century, into the present. Building upon the authors’ previous work, A History of Collective Creation, this volume situates contemporary collective creation in a tradition which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and traces the aesthetic, social and political shifts that have marked this mode of theatre making, from mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, to present-day devising practices.

This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national identity. National identity is deployed here as denoting any given set of myths, stories and beliefs propagated to justify a dominant group in maintaining power and in the case of Zimbabwe such generated myths and images are sectarian. Institutions such as theatre must be established to protect, nourish, articulate and perpetuate such identities. What is emerging now in Zimbabwe is that even if the government has supported such institutions often posturing as independent of sectarian political expedience, the resultant public imagery is the official version of history which incriminates those who have different views as sell-outs. Political theatre in Zimbabwe is one of the mediums which generates public imagery that challenges or maintains the ZANU-PF version of national memory. I argue that the totality of the state is expressed in its monopoly of images of meaning that float in the public mind through the medium of theatre. Where such theatre is consistent with what Ranger calls ‘patriotic history’ it is protected as memory should be guarded against dissolution. However, national identity can be an umbrella for determining what speech and passion is permissible and what is not. Thus in Zimbabwe, national identity has become a camouflage for a series of political controls that occupy the creative space and deny the opportunity for a pluralism of views and freedom of expression.

In November 2011, on the brink of a new wave of conflict over Egypt’s future, an obviously energized audience crowded into Cairo’s Rawabet Theatre for The Tahrir Monologues, a documentary play celebrating the Eighteen Days leading to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Apparently a premature celebration, the show turned out instead to be a self-conscious nostalgia exercise meant to register the decay of revolutionary ideals. This essay analyzes Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unraveling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to an American University in Cairo production of Saadallah Wannus’ 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012-3. Why this play now?  The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion, and ultimately, I argue, its prophetic pessimism.

Revue électronique d'études sur le monde anglophone 12.2 | 2015 : 1. La syntaxe du discours direct en anglais / 2. " The Dyer's Hand " : Colours in Early Modern England Abstracts Français English Produite en 1916 par les Provincetown Players, la pièce Trifles de Susan Glaspell, considérée comme la « mère du théâtre moderne américain », met en scène le dévoilement de l'invisible. Un crime a été perpétré dans la ferme des Wright et des officiels, accompagnés de leur épouse, viennent trouver les preuves leur permettant de condamner Mrs. Wright pour le meurtre de son époux. Pièce de détection ayant le clair-obscur comme principe structurel, Trifles est une oeuvre dans laquelle Glaspell littéralise la métaphore de l'invisibilité sociale pour dénoncer l'oppression par la norme et ainsi encourager les spectateurs à réfléchir aux sur les mécanismes qui sous-tendent la société patriarcale du début du XX ème siècle. Produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, defined by scholars as " the mother of the Modern American theatre, " stages the unveiling of the invisible. A crime has been committed in the Wrights' farm and the representatives of the law, accompanied by the wives, have come to find evidence to convict Mrs. Wright of the murder of her husband. In this detective play, the chiaroscuro effect appears as a principle which structures this work in which the playwright literalizes the metaphor of social invisibility to denounce patriarchal oppression and encourage the audience to reflect upon the mechanisms underpinning the norms on which the society of the beginning of the 20 th century was based. Mots-clés : visible/invisible, théâtre de détection, théâtre politique, féminisme

There is some hesitation in theatre scholarship to confront and engage with the resurgence of political theatre in the 21st century, despite the vast numbers of political plays that have been performed in a variety of genres on the British stage in the last decade. This article considers the rejuvenation of political theatre in the 21st century and focuses in particular on Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). I argue that these plays rehabilitate explicit political comment for the stage as well as discover fresh theatrical languages to represent what are often familiar political narratives. The discussion borrows from the writings of Jacques Rancière to help identify strategies Churchill’s plays use to find innovative ways of producing new forms of political subjectivity in audiences.

This article is an adapted version of a text originally published in Turkish in the historical materialist journal PRAKSIS in 2016, and translated into English by the author. It focuses on performative protest acts and the role of the performing artist in Turkey in the context of the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013. The article examines how some of Gezi's performative protest actions evidence a larger cultural transformation, of which we can see a continuation in new theatre playtexts.

This article examines the potential role that media technology can play in the presentation of documentary material onstage. Using Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail/The Last Caravanserai (2005) as a case study, this article focuses on the ‘intermediality’ of the production and on the various media and digital technologies that are used in performance to both mediate and mediatize the accounts of asylum seekers that are transposed to the stage. By situating Le Dernier Caravansérail as an ‘intermedial’ performance, I am hoping to open up an interdisciplinary framework that draws on concepts from media studies and communication theory in order to provide a more nuanced discussion and analysis. Two concepts emerging from these fields that I focus on are the notions of ‘hypermediacy’ and ‘credibility’. Focusing on Théâtre du Soleil’s anti-realist aesthetic, I argue that the digital technologies used in the production not only work to highlight the artifice of the theatrical event by foregrounding the production’s own processes of representation and mediation, but they can also procure ‘hypermedial’ effects of propinquity and engagement. While ‘credibility’ has been theorized in the fields of media studies and communications for more than 50 years, it remains a particularly neglected concept in the fields of performance and theatre studies. Discussing credibility as a combination of trustworthiness and expertise, I argue that by engendering hypermediacy and credibility in the production, Théâtre du Soleil enlists the craft of make-believe, persuading audiences to take a closer look at those excluded and silenced by the state

The Hotel, Leonard Woolf’s only play, was published in 1938. Despite his best efforts, Woolf never succeeded in having his play performed. Woolf’s work brings to the forefront such essential debates as the question of the individual’s responsibility in shaping collective destiny or the necessity of dialogue and collaboration in a highly complex and globalized world. This paper analyses Woolf’s choice of the hotel as both a meeting point and an echo chamber. This will be examined through the theories of ‘logic of place’ and ‘action-intuition’ developed by the Japanese philosopher Kitarô Nishida. The play’s connection with the political avant-garde theatre will also be explored through its link with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre of Action.

s English Français In 1968, Jean Vilar invited the Living Theatre to the XXII th edition of the Avignon Festival. This invitation of the American anarchist company was part of the new policy of Vilar who was eager to open his festival to the younger generation and to new theatrical forms. Yet, in the wake of the revolution of May in Paris, Vilar's festival was debased as a " cultural supermarket " by Jean-Jacques Lebel and the enragés with whom the Living Theatre sympathized and a second revolution took place that summer 1968 in Avignon. The Odéon and Avignon crises of May and July, when theatres became the stages of spectacular heated debates about the creation of a new society, demonstrated the synergy between the political and the theatrical by simultaneously enhancing the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatre. Interestingly (and paradoxically), in spite of the importance of the part played by The Living Theatre in this French Revolution of 1968, official history has been oblivious of the involvement of the American company. This amnesia is symptomatic of the trauma of the lost utopian dreams which 1968 came to represent. The fifty anniversary of the revolution of 1968 is the occasion to lift the veil on the forgotten episodes of this historical moment, to turn back the clock and further discover about the participation of The Living Theatre. En 1968, Jean Vilar invita le Living Theatre à participer à la XXII ème édition du Festival d'Avignon. Cette invitation de la troupe anarchiste américaine s'inscrivait dans la dynamique d'ouverture initiée par Vilar désireux d'ouvrir son festival à la jeune génération et à l'expérimentation théâtrale. Cependant, suite à la révolution de mai à Paris, le festival de Vilar fut rabaissé au rang de « supermarché de la culture » par Jean-Jacques Lebel et les « enragés » dont le Living Theatre était proche et Avignon devient alors le théâtre d'une seconde révolution en cet été 68. Les conflits de mai et juillet à l'Odéon puis au Festival d'Avignon, où les théâtres devinrent les scènes de spectaculaires débats passionnés sur la mise en place d'une nouvelle société, ont démontré non seulement la synergie entre le politique et le théâtral mais ils ont également mis en lumière la dimension théâtrale de la politique. En dépit de l'importance du rôle joué par le Living Theatre lors de cette Révolution française de 1968, la participation de la compagnie américaine n'a pas été retenue par l'histoire officielle. Cette amnésie est symptomatique du traumatisme des illusions perdues que 68 a fini par incarner. Le cinquantième anniversaire de 1968 est l'occasion

Open-air preaching is a neglected practice in much homiletical literature.This is also true in the literature which explores preaching as performance. It is, however, a long and varied practice. More than this, it can be explained as an example of radical street performance. Such performances are ideologically committed events which are performed in the streets in order to seek to bring about some form of transformation. In order to do this, performers have to contend with the streets as contested space. In such spaces they need to create audiences and negotiate a hearing. Viewing open-air preaching in this way creates a different perspective for exploring the value o f such preaching as an expression of Christian communication.

The primary concern of this essay is to trace the conditions of possibility for what we came to understand as non-representational approaches to performance. In particular, in its first part, the essay considers the emergence of the " non-repre-sentational " as belonging to the creative radicalism that conditioned and initiated the " turn to performance " in the late 1960s and 1970s. The second part goes on to explore a philosophico-theatrical " dialogue " between Jacques Derrida and Anto-nin Artaud. Written from within a critical framework that breaks with represen-tational theatre podiums, Derrida's (2001 [1978]) account of Artaud's " theatre of cruelty " still functions as a valuable theoretical instance that suggests a direct, non-deviated relationship between theatre and theory, while paving the way for rethinking a metaphysics of presence in performance practice.

The nature of surveillance is changing. It is becoming gamified. This article charts a shift in thinking about surveillance culture, from the panopticon models advanced by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to current analyses of the increasingly participatory and gamified models of surveillance in the age of big data. That shift is played out literally in Theatre Conspiracy’s immersive play Foreign Radical, in which participants are led through a game environment in which they reveal aspects of their online behaviour and judge each other in a way that replicates the kinds of social sorting that take place in both social media and in surveillance. The game leads them to deliberate on the case of an Iranian-Canadian man named Hesam, who stands accused of terrorism. As the case against Hesam comes to rest increasingly on his Middle Eastern and Islamic identity, the show reveals the role that racism and Islamophobia come to play in the interpretation of surveillance data. Although surveillance operates on a seemingly empirical basis, the stories it tells about people nevertheless remain fictions, assembled from statistical probability and speculation. In this way, surveillance adds to the sense that we live in a post-truth society.

Taking as my starting point the assumption that art is a social practice, and how it is made and perceived is always determined by the socio-political and economic context, I would like to propose that a festival be regarded as an art institution – and consider the implications of that perspective. The political ontology of the festival; the political and economic entanglements of curatorial practices; economic (self-)censorship and its recent manifestations at theatre festivals in Poland will be the main facets of my study. I will also enquire about how the festival today can be ‘taken over’, regained a space for critical activity. My consideration of the institutional practices of present-day festivals will be based on my own experiences as a curator; they will also be situated in the context of practicable institutional-critical activity as proposed by Gerald Raunig, and take as their point of reference the concept of an institution as a common good. The concept of the ‘performativeness of the art world’ formulated by Ana Vujanovic will be of primary importance to my study.

I believe that a genuine and effective campaign for art as a democratic instrument can only succeed if the methods and conditions of producing art are rendered more democratic; and the programme of social emancipation ought to begin with a critical examination of the mechanisms, structures and internal relations in force within the organization we are responsible for. I am in no doubt that public arts institutions remain a priceless good, requiring care and attention, but in my view the campaign for their survival will only be efficient insofar as we reflect critically on how these institutions are organized, how they operate, and whom and what they realistically benefit. In this context, I understand institutional critique as a critical enquiry into the practices, structures and methods of working in art. I find it equally important to expose the institutional framework and the process by which it is delimited – in doing so, I am especially mindful of the fact that defining borders inevitably leaves out fragments of territory. I will attempt to answer the question about the practicability of institutional critique in the current socio-political and economic context, and address the issue of why this type of critique is more vital today than ever.

George MacLeod is best known as the founder of the Iona Community. In this article, however, I discuss the practice of his open-air preaching. To do this I draw upon performance studies and argue that MacLeod's open-air preaching was an event of performance and counter performance.

This essay deals with the life and work of distinguished Syrian playwright Sa'dallāh Wannūs with special emphasis on his concept of the theatre of politicization (masraḥ at-tasyīs) which
originated directly in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967. The paper concentrates on some of Wannūs’s most crucial ideas concerning the theatrical project which was to a certain extent inspired by techniques of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre and whose aim was to encourage the audience to engage freely in a discussion on important social and political matters. This essay also briefly introduces some of the author’s most famous plays, like Soirée for the Fifth of June as well as his other dramatic works written within the scope of the project, like The Elephant, Oh, King of Ages, The Adventure of the Mamluk Jābir’s Head or The King is the King. Since many of Wannūs’s plays include elements of Arabic popular narrative tradition, the paper tries to explore this aspect of his works as well.

"L'auteur de cet ouvrage explore l'écriture si particulière de René Kalisky, un des dramaturges belges les plus importants de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. Dans son théâtre, Kalisky prend l'histoire à bras le corps et n'hésite pas à mettre en scène des figures comme Hitler, Trotsky, Mussolini, Pasolini, Coppi, Saül ou le Roi David, tout en renouvelant les formes avec sa technique du « surtexte ».
Par une analyse méthodique et fouillée de l'ensemble des pièces, l'auteur montre comment René Kalisky a su tirer parti de la tradition ainsi que des innovations scéniques de son temps pour ériger un art qui lui était propre et en mesure de rendre compte du caractère tragique de l'histoire.

Les enjeux posés par cette dramaturgie s'éclairent grâce à la mise en valeur d'un élément essentiel : la dimension ludique. Jeu de l'acteur avec son rôle, du personnage avec son sort ou de l'homme avec l'histoire, l'étude nous rappelle en cela un principe essentiel : au théâtre, la recherche de la vérité est indissociable de celle du plaisir.
Contenu : Kalisky : quel héritage ? - Une oeuvre en perfectionnement - Étude dramaturgique de Dave au bord de mer - La rencontre avec Antoine Vitez - Les germes du surtexte - Le jeu avec les fantômes - Deux personnages au coeur de l'événement - Le surtexte dans ses dernières conséquences - Dans le monde de la prière - Le surtexte simplifié - Entre Shakespeare et les jeux de Pourim."

’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).