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How Javaad Alipoor’s Fourth World Trilogy Disrupts What We Think We Understand About History, Politics, and the Internet
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Dreams of a Fourth World: Performance After Capitalism in the Work of Javaad Alipoor and Tim Crouch
Get PDFThe instability of the present political juncture makes the future a difficult place to imagine. Javaad Alipoor’s intermedial performance Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2022) frames the Internet as an analogue for a possible postcapitalist future. The dramaturgy resonates with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s concept of the Fourth World: a ‘conceptual place’ with ‘no place for static identities, fixed nationalities, or sacred cultural traditions’ (1993). The intermedial scenography makes the political struggles that effectuate revolutionary change visible through the expression of what Alipoor calls subaltern knowledge: the experience of living in the space between the world we want to live in and the world we are forced to live in. Taking an explicitly oppositional position to technological mediation in performance, Tim Crouch’s performative evocation of virtual reality through text in Truth’s A Dog Must to Kennel (2023) acts as a memorial for collaborative acts of imagining worlds into being through live, embodied performance. This aspect of the theatrical event is described in the play as a vision of democracy that risks being effaced by digital social atomisation and the concomitant decline of communal experiences. This paper will discuss how both pieces situate digital technology as the generative material of all possible futures, utopian and dystopian alike. Despite their antipathetic ideological positions, I argue that Alipoor and Crouch narrativise a postcapitalist democracy as one characterised by transcultural interconnectivity either engendered or inhibited by digital technology, respectively. Theories of Fourth World aesthetics (de León 2021) will contextualise my analysis of the heterodox narrative of futurity Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel claim as theatre’s cardinal social responsibility in our age of permacrisis. The conflicting visions of Alipoor and Crouch act as valuable case studies to investigate how theatre can represent a refuge from and incubator of digital democracy
The Canon Project: promoting a cross-European understanding of the history of technical theatre
Get PDFThe Canon Project, which ran between August 2019 and December 2022, was funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ and involved eight partner organisations: seven education institutions from six countries across Europe and the Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague (the parent organisation of the Prague Quadrennial). The project asked what the history of technical theatre (including design and architecture) can mean to us today, how we preserve it, how we teach it, and how we communicate it to various audiences.
The article outlines the five project outputs: a database, a 'Canon' of 100 stories, teaching tools, teaching methods and a network. It also describes the project process and the key findings of the project
LIFT and the London 2012 Olympics: spectacular experiences
Get PDFIn 2012, London staged the Olympic Games and the associated Cultural Olympiad which produced the ‘London 2012’ Festival, funding a wide series of events including many of the London International Festival of Theatre’s (LIFT) productions. A decade on, this article considers the impact of these overlapping events during a period of unprecedent austerity in the United Kingdom, and how arts events might be considered to be colluding with the government’s own agenda. The connection between neoliberal governance with its programme of increased privatisation, rapid gentrification and opportunistic marketing of diversity is examined with reference to increasing nationalism through Olympiad displays together with the increasing influence of the ‘experience economy’ as defined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a Lecturer in Theatre and Social Change at Rose Bruford College. This is the second article for New Theatre Quarterly derived from Patey-Ferguson’s PhD on LIFT in its social, cultural and political context following ‘LIFT and the GLC versus Thatcher: London’s Cultural Battleground in 1981,’ published with an accompanying interview with LIFT’s founding Artistic Directors in Volume 36, Number 1, February 2020.
Key Terms: London International Festival of Theatre, festivals, Olympic Games, Cultural Olympiad, London 2012, experience economy, multiculturalism, sociology of theatre, spectacle
Playwriting Manuals, 1888–1925: Jerome K. Jerome, Alfred Hennequin, Agnes Platt, and Moses Malevinsky
Get PDFSince the 1990s, there has been a large number of ‘how-to’ manuals published in English for aspiring playwrights. By and large, these texts treat the pedagogy of playwriting as a recent phenomenon. However, a series of relatively unknown books from the mid-nineteenth century were written with the purpose of teaching the craft of dramatic writing, emphasizing the importance of a hands-on understanding of the theatre and the individual roles within it. This article argues that, while these books are representative of the historical context in which they were written, they also contain advice which is still useful for playwrights, along with fascinating individual characteristics. Texts featured include one of the earliest manuals discovered, written by the anonymous ‘A Dramatist’; a text by the first (known) woman to write a how-to manual in English; and a book which uses a mathematical formula as a foundation for writing a script. Karen Morash is Lead Academic Tutor on the BA Theatre Studies at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. She is a playwright and poet, and works as a dramaturg with the theatre company Head for Heights
Resituating the Writer’s Workshop: Collective Strategies for Playwriting Pedagogy
No full textGeorge Pierce Baker introduced the idea of the “writer’s workshop” in his Harvard English 47 class in the early twentieth century, and since then it has become an entrenched pedagogical model for training playwrights. Contemporary manifestations of the workshop, however, have resulted in writers who have become isolated from other theatre artists and are therefore potentially ignorant of their creative processes. This article looks at the history of the writer’s workshop and makes an argument for a new model, which is both collaborative and accessible, and better responds to contemporary performance practice
Living Room
Get PDFLiving Room is an inter-disciplinary research project exploring how we can turn a(ny) room into a room that can host and support a performance, facilitated by a better understanding of theatre scenography (staging/set/lighting/sound). How can we use the arts to improve the way we use the spaces we work in?
Living Room brings together a range of academics and practitioners from the humanities and science who are all interested in exploring how and where they perform: a primary teacher, a surgeon, a puppeteer, a judge. Performance is understood in its widest context, so from performing a play to performing an operation, a teaching event, or a court case. The room might be a studio theatre, a classroom, a doctor’s surgery or any other room where we perform for others.
We ask: how can we turn a room into a room that actively supports our performance