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Puppetry for Development
No full textAfter the success of the book The Puppet – What a Miracle ! published by the Puppets in Education Commission, it was decided to prepare another book. It was published and presented during the UNIMA Congress of Chengdu in 2012.
All talks presented by the Commission members at the Ljubljana Conference have found their place in the book as well as the contributions of other members and corresponding members of the Commission.
The authors are : Edi Majaron ("Art as a Pathway to the Child"), Ida Hamre ("Affective Education through the Art of Animation Theatre"), Helena Korošec ("Playing with Puppets in Class – Teaching and Learning with Pleasure"), Livija Kroflin ("The Role of the Puppet in Language Teaching"), Cariad Astles ("Puppetry for Development"), Matt Smith ("The Politics of Applied Puppetry"), Meg Amsden ("Being Carbon Neutral") and Barbara Scheel ("Puppets and the Emotional Development of Children – an International Overview")
Environmentalism, Performance and Applications: Uncertainties and Emancipations
No full textThis introductory article for a themed edition on environmentalism provides a particular context for those articles that follow, each of which engages with different aspects of environmentalism and performance in community-related settings. Responding to the proposition of Bottoms that there is a lacuna in the field of applied drama and environmentalism, we suggest that the more significant lack is that of ecocriticism. As the articles in this journal testify, there are many examples of applied theatre practice; what is required is sustained and rigorous critical engagement. It is to the gap of ecocriticism that we address this issue, signalling what we hope is the emergence of a critical field. One response to the multiple challenges of climate change is to more transparently locate the human animal within the environment, as one agent amongst many. Here, we seek to transparently locate the critic, intertwining the personal ourselves, human actants with global environmental concerns. This tactic mirrors much contemporary writing on climate change and its education, privileging personal engagement a shift we interrogate as much as we perform. The key trope we anchor is that of uncertainty: the uncertainties that accompany stepping into a new research environment; the uncertainties arising from multiple relations (human and non-human); the uncertainties of scientific fact; the uncertainties of forecasting the future; and the uncertainties of outcomes including those of performance practices. Having analysed a particular turn in environmental education (towards social learning) and the failure to successfully combine art and reality in recent UK mainstream theatre events, such uncertainties lead to our suggestion for an emancipated environmentalism. In support of this proposal, we offer up a reflection on a key weekend of performance practice that brought us to attend to the small but not insignificant and to consider first hand the complex relationships between environmental grand narratives and personal experiential encounters. Locating ourselves within the field and mapping out some of the many conceptual challenges attached to it serves to introduce the territories which the following journal articles expand upon
Meisner in Practice
No full textA step-by-step introduction to the key features of the Meisner Technique, including a full set of practical exercises.
The Meisner Technique is at the forefront of actor training today: with its radical simplicity it has the power to reconnect actors with their bodies and emotions.
Developed by the teacher and actor Sanford Meisner, the technique places emphasis on truthful interaction between actors. The aim is for the actor ‘to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’ – to remain truly ‘in the moment’.
In Meisner in Practice, Nick Moseley offers actors a step-by-step introduction to the salient features of the technique, and puts these to the test through a succession of increasingly challenging practical exercises. He also addresses certain pitfalls and problems that he has encountered over many years of teaching Meisner in drama schools
Gloom: Scenography as Praxis of Imperceptibility
No full textHow and what can we discern through the aesthetic production of hazy phenomena? Although historically secreted from architectural formats and protocols, scenography deviated from them by advancing visual attenuations, the evanescence of spatial borders, and the malleability of imperceptibility, up to making black box theatre spaces.
Intersecting practices and theories from various spatial arts, the thesis inquires into the precedents and legacy of this scenographic gloom to advance an understanding of its sensory and cognitive difficulties. In particular, the work explores how the blurring of bodily and spatial substances pertains to a phenomenal domain of transformative and interactive spatio-corporeality or bodily space. In this fluctuating field, the crisis of visual legibility exerts pressures on perception, representation and language bringing them down to a speculative threshold.
By further interrogating this threshold practically and philosophically, the thesis unfolds a reconsideration of experiential and authorial subjectivity in embodied terms that constitute a vertiginous detournement of ontological and epistemological traditions. Resulting from such discursive disorientations, scenography is reposited as an architectural mise en abyme that is a mise en abyss where the gloom sheds light upon an ethical praxis of reciprocal and affective relations and beings
Collaborative Partnerships in Schools and Beyond : Learning Disabilities and Finding, Keeping and Protecting the Therapeutic Space
No full textAbsent Bodies and Objects
No full textThis chapter explores contemporary visual culture in Barcelona with a particular focus on puppet theatre, which has been significant in the development of Catalan movement towards independence since the last days of the Franco regime. The chapter will centre on Barcelona itself as a concrete locus of identity negotiation, and on the body as the specific site of that negotiation, through its presence in carnivalesque performance or by its absence, fragmentation or imprint
The Rise of Manipulating The Puppet as a Figure of the Other
No full textSince the beginning of the 1980s, artists such as Neville Tranter in the Netherlands, Philippe Genty in France, Ilka Schönbein in Germany and Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté in Belgium have developed a new form of performance that I call manipulacting. By interacting with puppets, performers enter the fictional world of the puppets and appear as their Others. This study argues that manipulacting is a new and distinct form of performance. Although manipulacting combines acting and puppetry, it differs from them because it discloses a human being and an object engaged in a relation of self to Other. Manipulacting is defined by this specific relation and not by a particular aesthetic or technique. The methodology of the thesis is framed by Practice-as-Research from a directorial perspective. The enquiry includes four personal research projects – Seaside (2007-08), Postalgia (2008), Urashima Taro (2007-09) and The Maids (2009-10) – that explore the relations between manipulactors and puppets through different dramaturgical and performative settings, interviews with Neville Tranter, Nicole Mossoux and Duda Paiva, and detailed analyses of Cuniculus (2008) by Tranter and Twin Houses (1994) by Mossoux-Bonté. The thesis proposes two areas of new knowledge. Firstly, it suggests a rethinking of the nature of the puppet and an understanding of it by way of its alterity. It discusses the ontological ambiguity of the puppet in manipulacting, by re-functioning phenomenological aspects of thought developed by Sartre in The Imaginary (1940) and 5 Being and Nothingness (1943), and by Levinas in Totality and Infinity (1961). Secondly, the thesis explores the specificity of manipulacting by looking at representations of the Other developed in dramatic and postdramatic performances. It explores the alterity of the puppet in relation to dramaturgical meaning, as well as the production of ambiguity in performance. It concludes by discussing the core dramaturgical and performative elements that constitute manipulacting
Two Aberystwyths
No full text[FULL CURATED PANEL ABSTRACT]
Connected communities? relational performances and cultural (in)articulations
Gerry Harris (UK)/Sally Mackey (UK)/Jane Milling (UK)/Roberta Mock (UK)
This discursive panel considers the potentials of conceptualising community as and through performance activity and paradigms. As Shannon Jackson has recently noted “a widened discourse of performance” may help us ‘to understand the stakes and limits’ of socio-political debates and practices, “especially when we foreground performance as a site of group coordination in space and over time” (2011). In this session, we will draw upon diverse examples of such sited debates and practices, including the effect of pre-WWI pierrot troupes on the construction of English coastal communities; Oldham Theatre Workshop’s current project with new refugee families; the 1972 amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Windsor Jewish Community Centre; and the female dominated audiences of commercial touring shows such as Dave Simpsons Naked Truth. By bringing together the research discourses of applied theatre, performance studies, and theatre historiography, thus employing performance as both an object of study and a model of enquiry, we aim to frame and analyse events, actions and behaviours as performative acts of communication and communal meaning-making. In doing so, we remain aware of models that problematize assumptions of community/performance as necessarily “positive” or “resistant”. Jean-Luc Nancy’s “inoperable community” (1982), for instance, rejects notions of being together in common, thus drawing attention to the limits of community. And, as Jon Mckenzie noted in Perform or Else (2001), performances can be equally effective in regulating and expressing social normalisation and reactionary impulses. In examining a range of communities that have expressed and manifested their senses of identity across a variety of performance registers (including aesthetic, popular, cultural and social forms of performance), we will locate the nature and articulation of community (perhaps problematically) in processes of re-enactment, cultural memory, emplacement, transmission and legibility. We will ask all participants to engage in a timed writing exercise and will together reflect upon not just what communities might do but how they might operate
Re: 'Enactment'
No full textScholars, amateur historians and actors have shaped theatre history in different ways at different times and in different places. This Companion offers students and general readers a series of accessible and engaging essays on the key aspects of studying and writing theatre history. The diverse international team of contributors investigates how theatre history has been constructed, showing how historical facts are tied to political and artistic agendas and explaining why history matters to us. Beginning with an introduction to the central narrative that traditionally informs our understanding of what theatre is, the book then turns to alternative points of view - from other parts of the world and from the perspective of performers in fields such as music-theatre and circus. It concludes by looking at how history is written in the 'democratic' age of the Internet and offers a new perspective on theatre history in our globalised world