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Surviving, But Not Thriving: The Politics of Care and the Experience of Motherhood in Academia
No full textThe Intuit: An Investigation into the Definitions, Applications, and Possibilities offered by Intuitive Applied Theatre Practice with Vulnerable Youth
No full textThis article offers insights into what might constitute intuition in applied theatre practices with vulnerable youth in London. The study will explore the approaches of five theatre companies working with children and vulnerable youth. A lead practitioner from each company has been interviewed, and the interpretation of the data they have provided has offered new insights into the role of intuition as an approach to ensuring applied theatre is responsive to young people living precarious lives. The research identifies two aspects of intuitive practice, one that resides with the actions and thoughts of the practitioner, and the other with the acceptance of intuitive creative offers by participants. The study has also revealed the potential heightening of intuitive responses for practitioners who share history, culture, location or identities with their participants. Altogether the findings from the research offer useful potential considerations of key qualities for an intuitive practitioner, or the Intuit, working specifically with young people in contexts of uncertainty
The Theatre of Photography: Dialogues
No full textTaking as a starting point the opposition of this journal's title, this introduction takes the form of a dialogue that is also an encounter between photography and theatre, a vantage point from which conceptual frameworks can be challenged and even collapsed. In the domains of photography and of theatre, much is made of artifice, authenticity, likeness, and liveness. Photography criticism has often emphasized the possibility or impossibility of veracity, the truthfulness or deceptiveness of photographs, with performance seemingly offering one escape route. Theatre, from the conceptualization of naturalism from the end of the nineteenth century to the challenge posed to it by performance art, has, despite itself being constituted of an eclectic technological representational apparatus, been seen to struggle with media, sometimes seeking refuge outside it. This introductory dialogue seeks to cast light on the various meeting points of the Theatre of Photography, then further explored in the co-written duologues in this volume
A Poetics of Memory on the Madrid Stage (2018)
No full textThis article presents reviews of a number of stage productions in Madrid that negotiate issues of memory: Lluís Pasqual's staging of Federico García Lorca's Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) performed by Nuria Espert at Teatro de la Abadía; Alfredo Sanzol's staging of Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Luces de bohemia (Bohemian Lights) presented by the Centro Dramático Nacional at the Teatro María Guerrero; Ernesto Caballero's staging of José Ramón Fernández's Un bar bajo la arena (A bar beneath the sand) presented by the Centro Dramático Nacional at the Sala Princesa
The Return of the Repressed: The Ghosts of the Past Haunt Barcelona’s Stages
No full textThis article presents a number of reviews of productions presented in Barcelona's theatres that deal with the difficulties of engaging with a contentious or controversial past: El pan y la sal (Bread and Salt), an edited script (by Raúl Quirós) of Baltasar Garzón's 2012 trial for investigating human rights abuses in Spain directed by Andrés Lima and presented at the Teatre Lliure by Madrid's Teatro del Barrio; Iván Morales' staging of Martin McDonagh's A Skull in Connemara at the Villaroel theatre; Claudio Tolcachir's Catalan-language staging of La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family's Omission) in a translation by Jordi Galcerán at the Teatre Romea
Theatre & Cancer
No full textThis book confronts the difficult relationship between theatre and cancer. It explores representations of cancer in fictional worlds and autobiographical performances while also highlighting work that reimagines and reinvigorates the genre of ‘Cancer Performance’. Challenging conventional narratives which rely on the binary of tragedy versus survival, Brian Lobel argues for an alternative approach to understanding cancer in relation to theatre
Between Art and Criticism: A Phenomenological Poiesis
No full textDiana Damian Martin proposes in this chapter that performance criticism operates as a kind of “phenomenological poesis”—an emergence that is itself a form of creative production. Damian Martin is navigating here the channels the interlink action, perception and thought, and she draws on Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the very nature of appearance to aid in that navigation. Here, as elsewhere, the argument concerns ways of knowing that are always emergent, particularly as Damian Martin’s chief focus is on “live writing”—criticism which responds to the performative event as it unfolds, and as such not only forms part of the performance it is “perceiving”, but, in Damian Martin’s words, “marks its own eventness”
Michael Chekhov's Acting Technique: A Practitioner's Guide
No full textMichael Chekhov's Acting Technique: A Practitioner's Guide is a textbook for actors, directors and teachers seeking in-depth analysis and explanation of the Michael Chekhov acting technique. It provides a complete overview of the whole method, offering clear explanations of the principles, practical exercises and application of the exercises to dramatic texts. The book is both a toolkit for practitioners who have not trained in the method, as well as a comprehensive reference book for those who have. Part One explains the concept of pyscho-physical acting with reference to primary texts, interviews with Chekhov practitioners and a range of sample exercises to practise on. Part Two explores the more detailed work of creating a character with a selection of examples of how to apply the psycho-physical exercises in Part One directly to character or scene work. Also included are a selection of exercises taught by other practitioners (with their permission) that were not developed by Chekhov himself in his book, but which follow his principles and yield great results, such as: the ghost exercise (Joanna Merlin); expanding and contracting the five senses (Lenard Petit); the palace of beauty (Mel Shrawder); the belief closet (Mel Shrawder); and imaginative character biography on your feet (Mel Shrawder). The book features the application of Michael Chekhov principles throughout to characters and scenes in Gabriel Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing
War Museums in Postwar Lebanon: Memory, Violence, and Performance
No full textThis article examines three museums that address Lebanon's history of conflict: the newly opened Beit Beirut on the capital's former Green Line, the Hezbollah-run Mleeta Resistance Tourist Landmark in south Lebanon, and Umam Documentation and Research's online archive 'Memory at Work.' Each testing the parameters of what the term museum can mean in Lebanon today, these cases highlight the still-contested nature of war narratives. While many Lebanese youth express desire for a shared national history of the civil war, the affective complexities of recuperated memorial sites and the inconsistent involvement of the state suggest that the possibility of publicly staging such a history is far from secure