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Wandering Games by Melissa Kagen, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2022, 216 pp., £20.10 (paperback), ISBN 978-0262544245
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'From the Finishing School of Marisa Carnesky: Lessons in Doing It Together' in Obsessions of a Showwoman: The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky, ed.
Get PDFThis is Not A Game/Learn to Play the Game: Metamodern Malaise and Postdigital Performances of Belief
Get PDFThe political crises and technological accelerationism over the past two decades have made the possibility in a secure and stable future feel unimaginable (Žižek 2024). This has manifested as a crisis of belief that democratic politics can build a more just world. However, individuals are paradoxically turning towards concepts such as betterment, self-actualisation and universal truths (Drayton 2024; Radchencko 2019) whilst simultaneously understanding the unreality, falsity, and frailties of these concepts (cf. Vermeulen & van den Akker 2010). This metamodern form of belief (cf. Ceriello 2018; 2022) – or what we call performances of belief – is not only manifest in the cultural elements already devoured by late-stage capitalism (neo-craft industries, the wellness market, and the experience economy [Gerosa 2023]), but in people’s participation in extremist and conspiracy communities online.
This paper draws on research into internet theatre (Lavender 2017; Scott 2022) to examine how the digital world turns citizens into data subjects who participate in democracy – as bio-techno hybrids (Dunne-Howrie 2022) – through the dissemination of political (dis)information. Understanding the QAnon conspiracy as an Alternative Reality Game (ARG) (Berkowitz 2020), we treat this postdigital participation as symptomatic of the post-millennial desire to gain control over truth in a political (offline) reality that participants have little agency within. The power of participatory, performative storytelling in the QAnon ARG rests in each individual participant being able to do ‘the research’ and find ‘the truth’ themselves – whilst also working as part of a collective identity who are preparing for a civilizational war (Houck & Allan 2022). This recentring of both individual and collective power over the chaos of contemporary reality fabricates a ‘main-character’ sensibility that ‘further blurs the lines between lived and constructed realities’ (Ceriello 2018: 108).
We use theories of post-immersive (Lopes Ramos et al. 2020) and metamodern theatre practice (Drayton 2024) to examine how participatory performance strategies in postdigital spaces enable users to rehearse, perform and participate in extremist ideologies as avatars and embodied subjects. The online performance Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy (The Civilians 2020) and the hybrid performance R△bbit Hole (Feral Theatre 2021) act as case studies to argue that audience participation within the far-right digital world embodies the metamodern desire for centrality of narrative (Radchenko 2019) and, therefore, the re-imagining of participants' selves as the main characters – or part of the hero's team – in apocalyptic role-play
One exercise I always return to: the dactyl and the gruppirovka.
Get PDFAn exercise I return to routinely is the dactyl of Meyerhold’s Theatrical Biomechanics. This short sequence (as described by various authors and seen in Gennadi Bogdanov’s Workshop Demonstration of 1996) encapsulates within it all of the core principles of Theatrical Biomechanics. It involves the key phases of the Acting Cycle (otkaz - preparation, posil - sending, tochka – full stop); the central role of rhythm in Theatrical Biomechanics; and the actor’s ability to connect to their stage partners and to work ensemble. But the one principle that I think the dactyl particularly elucidates for the actor is the rarely mentioned gruppirovka
A Sense of Direction: the directionality of light and the creation of meaning and feeling on stage
No full textThe direction light comes from is one of its fundamental properties, alongside brightness and colour. However, the directionality of light on stage – the qualities, effects and affects that arise from its directional property – has received little critical attention. In the UK and the English-speaking world more broadly, the discussion of directional light in professionally focused textbooks is generally based on an historical model from the mid twentieth century, developed by Stanley McCandless. This model prioritises a certain type of visibility of the actor, and has little or nothing to say about how directionality can contribute to the expressive content of the performance. In this article, I provide a brief overview of directionality from the time European theatre moved indoors, and a critique of the McCandless ‘method’ and lighting systems that derive from it, which are still influential. I go on to propose a new approach to directionality, rooted in the relational – the relationships among light, audience, performer, character, space, the wider cultural context, and changing theatre-making practices. My approach is a phenomenological one, drawing on the experiences of practising lighting designers, to create an initial essay of how we might a reconceptualise directionality and how it can create meaning and feeling on stage
The Progressive Case for Populism
Get PDFBOOK REVIEWED: Performing Left Populism: Performance, Politics and the People, edited by Goran Petrovic Lotina and Théo Aiolfi. London:
Methuen Drama, 2023
Dunne-Howrie, Joseph, 'Review of "Adam Alston, Staging Decadence: Theatre, Performance, and the Ends of Capitalism"' London: Methuen Drama, 2023. 248 p. £76.50. ISBN: 978-1-350-23704-9.
Get PDFPinkwashing Islamophobia in Performance
No full textDV8’s 2012 verbatim dance show ‘Can We Talk About This?’ prefigured today’s culture war arguments over free speech and multiculturalism. Why did a politically radical theatre company ally with conservatives to defend ‘liberal values’
Dancing on a Knife’s Edge: Performing Violent Co-Dependency in Bryony Lavery and Frantic Assembly’s Stockholm
Get PDFStockholm (2007) is the result of a collaboration between playwright Bryony Lavery and theatre company Frantic Assembly, acclaimed for their usage of expressive movement to develop narrative and character. Using devising methodologies, Artistic Directors Scott Graham and Stephen Hoggett wanted to explore a romantic relationship where both members love each other, but are caught in a cycle of insecurity, manipulation and abuse.
Tod and Kali embody the ‘couple goals’ that many young, modern Westerners aspire to, but underneath the sophistication of their home, cookery and travel plans lurk destructive tendencies. Whilst they dance their way through the preparation of Tod’s birthday dinner, there is an undercurrent of violence, both within their movement and the ‘dangerous’ environment in which they operate. At the centre of the relationship is an intense physical attraction to each other which is initially depicted on stage as an ‘accomplished and elegant sex act’ (according to Lavery’s stage directions) which then evolves through the course of the play into something more dark and violent, explored in large part through interpretive physical movement.
This chapter explores the process of developing the play, which included two actors, two dancers (who did not appear in the staged version), Lavery, Graham and Hoggett, alongside a critical evaluation of how these processes manifested on the page and stage. Drawing on research undertaken for my PhD, but with a particular and new focus on scenes which depict or suggest sexual acts, I argue that the intention of the collaborators was to create a performance which made the audience feel they were complicit within the action, through competing senses of attraction and horror. Close examination of both process and product reveals the collaborators’ dual goals of portraying the complexity of passionate, but abusive romantic relationships whilst enabling the audience to question how they might respond to a similar situation
