Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure
No full textThis book explores the role that particular dramaturgies play in our understanding of what is and what is not a political play within the context of contemporary British theatre. It asks the question why certain theatrical forms are identified as having political efficacy, while others are disregarded as non-political or politically irresponsible. It argues that, within a British context, there is a specific form of theatre, ‘serious drama’, that is commonly recognized as political. Serious drama yokes together the dialectical discussion of a political issue with a realist dramaturgy in a way that is thought of as producing political efficacy. This book argues that a range of recent British plays whose forms lie outside the realm of serious drama can also be thought of as having political efficacy on the basis of the politics of their form, even when they do not address an explicitly political issue in their content. This book analyses the politics of these plays in terms of the ways in which their dramatic structures re-imagine fundamental social structures (such as temporal, spatial and causal structures) through their form. As Bourdieu, Jameson and LeFebvre argue, concrete shifts in the political character of society involve a shift in the social structures that underlie it. In order to create political change, the social subject needs to be able to imagine how their social reality could be structured differently. A play that articulates a politics of form, re-imagining the structures of social reality through its structures, allows the social subject to access a vision of a social reality structured on fundamentally different principles. This book analyses the work of a range of British playwrights from the post-Thatcher era (including Churchill, Crimp, tucker green, Kane, Neilson, Pinter and Ravenhill) on this basis and argues that the innovative forms of their plays reflect shifts in the political character of contemporary British society
Postdramatic Theatre and Deconstruction: An Anti-Mimetic Approach to Contemporary Dramaturgy
No full textThe Unlikely Origins of Fitness Culture Could Give us a Different View on What It Is To Be a Man
No full textThe Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness After the Nation
No full textExile has received relatively little attention in dance studies, although forced migration in the mid-twentieth century reconfigured artistic and intellectual landscapes on multiple continents. This essay turns to German dance during and after the Third Reich, while drawing on theoretical and historical treatments of exile developed in other disciplines, as well as constructions of national identity. Such perspectives on displacement suggest that it is not the place of exiled artists, which needs to be reassessed within national dance histories; rather, these artists offer an opportunity to assess the contours of the historical narrations themselves and, with them, other forms of belonging. The case studies of Valeska Gert and Kurt Jooss highlight the micropolitics of exile’s transnational exchange. These intricate, personalized cross-currents were catalyzed by survival strategies that registered in the work itself and left traces in history, which can only be seen by engaging with multiple forms of otherness
Library of Unfinished Texts
No full textThe Library of Unfinished Texts is a digital library that gathers writing on and about performance, in collaboration with Something Other, a space for writing from, around and about performance. These are: texts that have not yet found their ending, forgotten paragraphs that drifted off, drafts never sent, and notebook scribbles with no home. The Library of Unfinished Texts draws a link between criticism as a mode of thinking, and the library as a site of investigation.
In Against Interpretation (1964), writer and critic Susan Sontag argues for a rethinking of the project of interpretation that allows the appearance, rather than usurping, of a work of art. Appearance, to Sontag, means 'experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself' (1964: 10). Elsewhere, in The Life of the Mind (1971), philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks of thinking as an essential activity of criticism. Sontag and Arendt both offer reflections on two fundamental processes of criticism: thought and interpretation. Where Sontag acknowledges the aesthetic, subjective and material possibilities of interpretation, Arendt examines the blurred boundaries between public and private inherent in our articulation of thought. Library of Unfinished Texts stems from the proposition that, by exposing and unmasking critical writing in-process, we may better understand the relationship between criticism, subjectivity and publicness. In the same manner in which Sontag argues for an unmasking of the work of art within criticism, Library of Unfinished Texts seeks to expose the incomplete, the fractured and the disoriented nature of thought in critical process.
The article positions these reflections alongside extracts and samples of unfinished drafts that led to its making, and from the project itself.
The Institute has no home per se, but it is a London-based project
Chapter 10: On the Performance of ‘Dissensual Speech’
No full textThis chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement (particularly as a means of understanding acts of protest). Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr
