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Performing That Which Exceeds Us: Aesthetics of Sincerity and Obscenity During 'The Refugee Crisis'
No full textFocusing on examples from theatre (On the Move festival, London International Festival of Theatre/Royal Court Theatre, London 2016), film (Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuoccoamare, 2016) and the visual arts (Ai Weiwei’s Safe Passage, Berlin 2016), this article proposes that in order to think through questions of efficacy and value of performance that seeks to engage with the pain of others, we must consider the interrelation of migration and excess. I explore the multiple meanings and performances of excess in artistic practice and interrogate the contradictions and potentialities that emerge in works that perform excess as a form of what Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou have defined as ‘political responsiveness’. In an attempt at understanding excess as a sensibility that underpins the ethics and politics of performance in response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the article focuses on two interrelated areas: the aesthetics of the sincere and the obscene. In doing so, I attempt to offer a way of thinking of the performance of ‘refugee crisis’ as excess in the logic of the neoliberal system, which perpetuates that system
Advice to the Players: Peter Hall, Shakespeare and Antipathy to the Method
No full textIn modern naturalistic drama, the feeling is often more important than the form. – Peter Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players
The style of the play requires a different kind of expression, but the reality of feeling remains the same. – Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion
Truth is that in which we can sincerely believe. – Stanislavsky
In Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, Peter Hall repeatedly critiques Stanislavskyan acting approaches as both useless and indeed harmful when applied to Shakespearean performance. His criticisms coalesce around the idea of ‘Stanislavski’ rather than particular Stanislavskyan practices; he conflates differing interpretations of Stanislavsky – particularly the American Method as taught by Lee Strasberg – with the work of the Russian master. Where he is specific about the elements of Stanislavsky’s work he particularly abhors, it is either the supposed Stanislavskyan predominance of feeling over form, or else the rather numinous practice of ‘improvisation’.
While neither Hall’s magisterial grasp of Shakespeare, nor his importance in setting a style of Shakespearean acting for several decades, can be denied, his understanding of Stanislavskyan principles seems both muddled and attenuated.
Hall’s insistent anti-Stanislavsky rhetoric created something of an orthodoxy, outside of specialist circles, that Stanislavskyan principles are inapplicable to Shakespearean performance; he also weaponised traditional British antipathy to Method acting to support his argument. In this, I believe he fundamentally misunderstood or misrepresented not only Stanislavsky and the Method, but also the performance concerns of Early Modern actors
Come Hear the Music Play: The Politics of Queer Failure and Practices of Survival
No full textThis chapter explores contemporary debates surrounding queer failure as a productive framework through which to examine drag performance work. Starting by questioning the politics and ethics of discussing queer failure, the chapter insists upon recognising the increasing homophobia and transphobia in the USA and the UK, despite statistics refuting this. The chapter destabilises Anglo-American and imperialist discourses of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, before arguing that the quotidian lived experience for queer citizens in these countries provide clear indicators of the increase in homophobic and transphobic violence.
Turning to the intellectual grounding for understand queer failure, the chapter argues for a focus on how local forms of resistant might emerge in the form of queer failure in relation to these national and global narratives of homophobia and transphobia. To highlight these local forms, we turn to drag performance, and in particular the work of a London-based drag performer called Fagulous. Examining Fagulous and their performance practice, this chapter argues that queer performance that embraces failure offers one site in a broad constellation of resistive practise in which queer citizens can engage in order to refuse an increasingly homophobic and transphobic present and instead find practices of survival
The Creature Methodology: Reflexivity and the Applied Theatre Practitioner in Training
No full textThis article focuses on the Creature Methodology, a tool to enable students to critically frame and analyse the imposition of their social constructs onto those they work with. This article will unpack the pedagogical approach for this drama in education strategy noting the possibilities it presents for promoting reflexive practice
Menu Degustation: We Insist the Entire Table Participates: An Introduction to On Taste
No full textThis article introduces the special issue of Performance Research ‘On Taste’, arguing for the value of considering gustatory taste within a context of looking at performance work. It situates current discourses around sense and affect, articulating the framing of this issue and contextualising the collection of essays within the contemporary moment and key philosophical and political questions
Review: The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov.
No full textA review of The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov. Edited by Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu and Yana Meerzon. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xxi + 433 + 25 illus. £148/30.56 Pb
The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show
No full textThe Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show was performed on 13 October 2017, at the Anatomy Museum, Kings College London. This one-off performance event brought together athletes and artists to explore the history of physical culture on the theatrical stage. This film, documenting the entirety of the performance, was made by Alexandros Papathanasiou. Credits Director/Writer/Performer: Broderick Chow Assistant Director/Performer: Jonathan Hinton Performers: Philip Bedwell, Daniel Crute, Adam Johnson, Peter Moore, Phoebe Ransome, Jack Robinson Coach: Kristian McPhee Musical Director: Sally Goodworth Technical Manager: Jelmer Tuinstra Technical Assistant: Jamie Russell-Curtis Technical Manager (KCL): James Hare AHRI Producers: Laura Douglas, Vicky Bowman, Madeleine Ryan Weightlifting Equipment: Courtesy of Kristian McPhee Wrestling Mats: Get Set Hire (GSH) Videographer: Alexandros Papathanasiou Post-Show Response and Discussion Chair: Kélina Gotman Director’s Notes by Broderick D.V. Chow On 30 November 1901, the Congregational Memorial Hall in Ludgate Circus, Farringdon, EC1 hosted the Health & Strength Physical Culture Display, which promised to be “the finest and most interesting event of its kind.” The performance featured exhibition wrestling, boxing, musical displays of exercises with dumbbells and Indian Clubs, the strongwoman act of Giantella, a world-record weightlifting attempt by 18-year-old J. Langhorn, and the finale, “a series of Classical Poses in an Illuminated Posing Frame” by Mr. Launceston Elliott, among a total of fourteen turns. Memorial Hall may be gone, replaced in 1969 by British Telecom’s Caroone House, but the influence of such displays can be seen just a few yards away at the Farringdon branch of Gymbox, where boxers, wrestlers and gymnasts train alongside weightlifters, powerlifters, and bodybuilders, and where I find myself training at least five times as week. The relation across time, even in a single site like Farringdon, London, between the physical culture display of the past and fitness culture in the present, is what drives the Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show and my current research. In September 2016 I was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant to investigate physical culture and the performance of masculinities. I had been involved with Olympic Weightlifting for a few years, and gym culture in general for much longer, and I had a hunch that there was indeed a link between theatre and performance and physical culture. Diving into the archives, I have found that theatre and performance is not only related to modern fitness culture, but is the site of its birth. As much as writers on fitness culture like to imagine some connection to the ancient Greeks, it was in the popular theatre of the 19th and early 20th century that many of our contemporary forms of training were invented, popularized, and disseminated. The Health and Strength Display of 1901 was not an outlier—the physical culture show was ubiquitous, from the weightlifting displays at local clubs, to the strongman turns of British Music Hall and American variety, the gymnastics and bodybuilding displays of Muscle Beach performers Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, Jack Lalanne, and Steve Reeves, to the world of professional wrestling. But this rich history has been almost entirely forgotten, on both sides of the fence. Rarely does the theatrical history of physical culture warrant more than a mention of “theatre strongmen” in the work of sport scholars. Conversely, Victorian and Edwardian theatre historians might sometimes mention Eugen Sandow, but mainly as a kind of curiosity, ignoring the fact that he a) was an artist, and b) invented an entire body culture. This conspicuous forgetting of this sport/performance history is probably related to the non-overlapping magisteria of our Western disciplines, where being good at art means you’re bad at sports, and vice versa. But I think it also signifies something deeper: the objective, scientific culture of heath and fitness is haunted by its history in the theatre, the place of fakery, illusions, and shadows. Fitness culture must disavow its association with the theatre, lest its prescriptions for ideal health seem like mere “performances.” Furthermore, consider that physical culture, which is so often associated with a kind of straight, white, bourgeois masculinity, was born in a place and culture so often associated with femininity and sexual deviance. The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show is intended to bring this buried history back into public discourse, not by re-enacting the past, but by “flexing” memory, as it were. Working with a group of performers, each with a very different background in physical culture and sport, the company has created a practice-as-research methodology combining autobiographical performance, verbatim theatre, physical performance, dance, and live art. The resulting show, I hope, is entertaining (and at times, astonishing!) but also provides an embodied perspective on fitness and physical culture, which is so often surrounded in stereotypes
Compassionate Mobilities: Towards a Theory for Negotiated Living
No full textCompassionate mobilities works towards a theory for negotiated living inspired by urban practices like parkour, art du déplacement, breakin’ and graffiti. It explores compassionate ways of being together, in a shared place. The need for compassionate mobilities might be seen most clearly in the hypercompetitive pursuit of upward income mobility through education in Singapore. Fear is the main political affect that drives this hypercompetitiveness. There is now an opportunity for Singaporeans to actively shape a more hopeful and compassionate narrative of future Singapore. However, this imagination of the future is hindered by a deep sense of loss. Compassionate mobilities is an emerging theory that proposes how we might live together, in a place shaped by fear and loss, negotiating different hopes for this shared place. Compassionate mobilities works towards tempering these hopes (an imagination of the future that compels interventions in the present) with compassion and proposes an imagination of the future as multispatialities (a term I use to describe a way of imagining the future as multiple places, holding multiple narratives, coexisting in the same location).
Observations of parkour, art du déplacement, breakin’ and graffiti offered some initial ideas towards compassionate mobilities. Over 25 workshops in London and Singapore, these urban art-inspired place practices formed the basis of a theory of compassionate mobilities. These workshops were undertaken with young people between the ages of 15 and 25, mostly in school settings. Part I will focus on establishing the theoretical and contextual basis for compassionate mobilities. Part II will offer some ideas for the negotiation of place using urban art-inspired place practices to initiate compassionate relationships and alternative imaginations of the city that are not constrained by fear and loss
