Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica
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Theatre Within and Against Postmodernist Aesthetic: Book review: Rădulescu, Domnica. Theatre of War and Exile: Twelve Playwrights, Directors and Performers from Eastern Europe and Israel. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015.
No full textWritten on the Walls: The Hungarian-Romanian Transfer of the National Theatre Building from Kolozsvár/Cluj
Get PDFThe 1918 Great Union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania had direct consequences on the theatrical landscape of the province. The present paper reconstructs the controversial transfer of the building that at the time hosted the Hungarian National Theatre from Kolozsvár/Cluj (currently Cluj-Napoca2) to the newly formed Romanian state, as recounted by its manager, Hungarian theatre and film director Jenő Janovics, and by Ștefan Mărcuș, Romanian opera singer and arts historian
Romanian Theatre Criticism during the Stalinist Era. Construction and Deconstruction of the Critical Discourse
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to capture the way theatre criticism changed once the communist regime was finally established in Romania. The focus is on the years of Stalinist reign, as they might be considered the most oppresive, especially in the cultural domain. The article aims, on one hand, to draw a historical context in which the change occured, while, on the other, it analyzes the various ways Socialist Realism affected critical thinking, substituting aesthetics for ideology in drama reviews and forcing critics to concentrate almost obsessively on the dramaturgy, in the detriment of the performance itself
In Search of the Theatrical Unit of Meaning: Exploring Mnemonic by Simon McBurney
Get PDFThe author is searching for the theatrical unit of meaning exploring the way Simon McBurney builds up the performance in Mnemonic, a Complicite Theatre production created for the 1999 Salzburg Festival. Inspired by headdriven phrase structure grammar and Chinese pictograms, the paper looks for verbs and actions that define a matrix, where each element determines the complex theatrical sign. Any change of one single sign-element causes the meaning of the whole to change
Tribunal Plays and Verbatim Theatre
Get PDFThe paper’s aim is to offer an overview on a diverse and dynamic phenomenon, as documentary theatre in Britain, with accents on two of the most visible directions, that it follows on the last decades: verbatim and tribunal theatre. Since the mid ‘90s, a period dominated by apathy and detachment, these formulas have been proving their efficiency, on the one hand, by investigating and researching some current, urgent, national and international topics, and on the other hand by calling new strategies for addressing and engaging the audience. Meanwhile these practices based on ”the truth” that comes from documents and interviews generate particular questions about the relationship between ethic and esthetic, between objective and subjective, between real and fictional. Documentary theatre, and particularly verbatim theatre deals with a dilemma: how to create a theatrical viable experience, without distorting the documentary source
Devised Theatre – a Short Introduction
Get PDFThe aim of the following article is to define the concept of devised theatre, as well as outlining a brief history, and providing a description of the main elements which constitute a collective performance. It also brings in discussion the member roles in a group that practices devised theatre, and the technique they use in creating a performance
“Only if you know what makes plays work, will it be possible for you to go beyond and experiment with more modern forms of playwriting”: Interview with Dr. Kirsten Hertel, Lecturer in English literature, Playwright, Director and Producer of the Hot Shorts - Short Play Festival from Heidelberg, Germany
No full textThe present interview with Dr. Kirsten Hertel, the director and producer of Hot Shorts - Short Play Festival organized by the Schauspielgruppe des Anglistischen Seminars, e.V. at the Theatre im Romanischen Keller (Theatre from the Roman Cellar), Heidelberg University, was conducted by e-mail in July 2016, immediately after the first international edition of the Hot Shorts festival (2-9 July) drew its curtain. Our discussion focuses on the organization of the short play festival, its impact on the participants and the future projects of the organizers, as well as on the high educational value of such an event, on the importance of familiarizing students not only with the craft of playwriting, but also with the rigor of the stage
La culture pour tous, théâtre public, théâtre privé, les règles françaises du jeu
Get PDFThe theater has always been a privileged partner of the political Power, to be protected and/or monitored, depending on each type of society. In France, the idea of having the arts and culture supported by the State had already germinated at the dawn of the French Revolution, but it was necessary to wait until the end of the 19th century to witness a real awareness and a new distribution of “roles” between institutionalization and democratization. After a quick historical review, following in the footsteps of André Malraux, Jean Vilar or Jack Lang, until today, we can identify the principles of a cultural policy, shared between the State and the local authorities. An important particularity of this system is that this policy integrates, to different degrees, the public and private sectors. More concretely, we define what the French theatrical system is made of both public and private, and in the latter, which is more fragile and relatively uncontrollable, we recall the situation of the socalled “intermittents du spectacle” and their permanent struggle to consolidate or wrest their rights. A representative case is thus the confrontation between the two branches of the Festival d'Avignon, the IN and the OFF, at the turn of the health crisis, from which the theater has managed to emerge alive.The theater has always been a privileged partner of the political Power, to be protected and/or monitored, depending on each type of society. In France, the idea of having the arts and culture supported by the State had already germinated at the dawn of the French Revolution, but it was necessary to wait until the end of the 19th century to witness a real awareness and a new distribution of “roles” between institutionalization and democratization. After a quick historical review, following in the footsteps of André Malraux, Jean Vilar or Jack Lang, until today, we can identify the principles of a cultural policy, shared between the State and the local authorities. An important particularity of this system is that this policy integrates, to different degrees, the public and private sectors. More concretely, we define what the French theatrical system is made of both public and private, and in the latter, which is more fragile and relatively uncontrollable, we recall the situation of the socalled “intermittents du spectacle” and their permanent struggle to consolidate or wrest their rights. A representative case is thus the confrontation between the two branches of the Festival d'Avignon, the IN and the OFF, at the turn of the health crisis, from which the theater has managed to emerge alive
Contemporary Theatre Directors About the Art of Directing and Theatre Pedagogy
Get PDFIn order to have a view as broad as possible on contemporary theater making, including theatre and directing pedagogy, I thought of a few questions to be answered by theater professionals, answers that would give a consistent image of the state of facts and of future openings for theatre/stage directing
How do Cultural Houses and Cultural Hearths Matter? Towards a New Immagination of These Institutuions
Get PDFWhether resembling vacated shells or remaining fully functional, either commercially repurposed or relatively busy with paid or unpaid ‘leisure activities’; cultural houses and cultural hearths are still present throughout Romania.
Easily identifiable due to the centrality of their location and large scale, institutional names boldly written in distinctive fonts ranging from the acutely contemporary through to ‘nostalgic typographies’ from the 30s, 40s, or any other era up to the 80s. The signage is still there, just above the entrance and front doors that remain open or firmly closed.
During the period of ‘actual existing socialism’ these state-funded institutions were designed to centralise cultural and informal educational activities within a socio-geographic area. Consequently, they enabled regional authorities to both survey the leisure time of the population along with providing a foundation for the production of the ‘new’ multidimensional socialist subject within a collective context.
Their ubiquitous presence has been (re)perceived for a while. Immediately after 1990 they were seen as either a nuisance or a historic reminder that needed to be turned into an absence, a void: the epic but invisible institution.
The article makes a case for why they deserve another chance in a punctual and specific re-evaluation that ultimately desires to insert a number of critical points for a possible re-imagination of these models of organization in which both stable and transitory communities collectively produce what we may call culture. It provides an extended timeline/lineage that opposes one-dimensional readings of the institutions as objects of communist propaganda. It argues that the ways in which they were planned during 1955-1989 counteracts contemporary monetarist visions towards the role of such cultural institutions. Ultimately, cultural houses were part of a national plan that considered culture as central to the ‘common good’ rather than a laissez-faire approach that places economic efficiency above all else. An open and flexible institutional format that could accommodate known or unknown actions has largely been replaced by a much narrower vision of what can be officially scheduled by cultural managers and governing authorities. Paradoxically more contemporary versions of cultural houses and hearths are often far more restrictive that their early predecessors.