Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Pro-photographic Gestures
No full textIt could be said that both Roland Barthes and Vilém Flusser were interested in accounts of the “pro-photographic” – those acts that are occurring in the slice of the world that is placed in front of the camera eye before it becomes “image.” Its mise en scène. This practically refers to everything that appears before the camera and how it is arranged, including composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, lighting. Protagonists and their actions constitute a pro-photographic event in front of the camera in a pro-photographic space that can be seen from the camera, while the position and angle of the camera determine the perspective and point of view of the audience of what eventually appears in the image. While the camera alters how we perceive the photographed scene, it turns the actor into a character by splitting the image from its referent in the world
A Concise Introduction to: Complicité
No full textThis is a synoptic overview of internationally acclaimed theatre company Complicité. It covers the history of the company, methodology, influences and approaches and provides a reading list
Between Smart Technologies and Soviet Guns: Imaging the New Heroic Figure in Postdigital Warfare
No full textIn March 2017, I travelled to the frontline between the Ukrainian army and Pro-Russian separatist forces in the Donbass region, East Ukraine, as part of a research project into the return of 20th century weapons in digital culture across Europe. While embedded in a patrol with soldiers of the Ukraine Volunteer Corps, an organization affiliated with the nationalist Right Sector movement, I ended up in a firefight on the edge of the no man’s land. I documented how the soldiers alternatingly operated Soviet-era Kalashnikov assault rifles and contemporary consumer technologies, such as smartphones an action cameras.
I will read the simultaneous performance of the soldiers with weapon and consumer technologies from different eras from the perspective of Russell Davies’ concept of the post-digital, in relation to selfie practices and microcelebrity performance in networked culture. In this context, I will reflect on Alain Badiou’s concept of the soldier as ‘heroic figure’. In response to Badiou’s claim that the traditional soldier is no longer an effective symbolic trope in a highly technologized culture, I will reflect on the – embodied and digitally networked – soldiers I accompanied as possible heroic figures of the post-digital
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama's Joel Anderson on What Dramaturgy Is and How it is Taught
No full textIn this article, Joel discusses dramaturgy - what it is, what it entails, and how it is taught
Polyphonic Characterisation in Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Night Just Before the Forests: An Exploration of Michael Chekhov’s Feeling of Form.
No full textBernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989) was the greatest French playwright of his generation, and Night is one of his most captivating and unsettling texts. The story of an isolated young immigrant in a hostile city, Koltès said he wrote it like a musical composition, whose motifs and variations evoke a profound sense of restless yearning and disorientation. Sinéad Rushe discusses her pathbreaking production in a new translation into English that reimagines the original monologue as a polyphonic work for five performers of different nationalities and genders, a chorus of fragmented parts that resonate with each other in harmony and dissonance. She discusses this in relation to Michael Chekhov’s principle of Feeling of Form
Letters to Lila and Dramaturg's Notes on Future Memory: Inheriting Dance's Alternative Histories
No full textStarting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing. The preponderance of the re- in contemporary choreographic creativity points to the operational value of reenactment in dance as synonymous with cultural production itself inasmuch as culture is engaged with the re-appropriation of signs, citationality, and intertextuality. Collectively, these chapters theorize choreographic reenactments’ potential not only to re-arrange the relationship between past, present, and future, but also to destabilize singular authorship, to unleash choreographies’ multiple meanings, to challenge the linearity of dance history, to rewrite and re-inscribe dance canons, and to the highlight the dancing body’s agentive status as arch
Presence and Memory: Tadeusz Kantor’s Living Puppet Theatre 1
No full textadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) was a Polish visual artist, writer, and theatre director, who can be placed among a select group of the twentieth century’s most influential performance practitioners. The breadth and diversity of his artistic endeavours align Kantor with such varied figures as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Marcel Duchamp, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Oskar Schlemmer, Antonin Artaud, Jackson Pollock, Jerzy Grotowski, Allan Kaprow, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, and Robert Wilson. In significant ways, Kantor’s work with the Cricot 2 company and his theories of theatre consistently challenged and expanded the boundaries of traditional and non-traditional theatre forms
Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the Magic Mike Series
No full textThis essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). As several pieces about the series have argued, the filmmakers align making oneself an object of desire with an ideology of the ‘entrepreneurial subject’—a versatile and flexible subject suited for a post-Fordist economy—through the figure of ‘Magic’ Mike, a contemporary factotum, played by the charismatic Channing Tatum. Influenced by a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Key to my reading is the concept of ‘magic’, part of Mike’s nom de strip. Mike, the hegemonically masculine, heterosexual, white male protagonist, is magic because he is magnetic and effortlessly talented, in such a way that even the material world seems animated by his thrusting pelvis. Magic functions as an ideological device that attempts to hide the labour of training and performance as well as the structures of production in which this labour takes place. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour. While the narrative does not confront the appropriation of black labour directly, an analysis of the performances of striptease shows the film working through the issue on another level, in the complex entanglement of flesh and fantasy, agency and objectification, and racial and gendered desire
What Can We Do With These Associations? Production, Organisation and Materiality in the Work of Tino Sehgal
No full textWhat We Know and What We Want to Know: A Roundtable On Butoh and Neuer Tanz
No full textThe Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh.
Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices.
This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts