1,721,161 research outputs found
Reversing the Process: Investigating Multi-Disciplinary Compositional Practices in The Fall of Icarus [2009]
No full textThe Fall of Icarus was a piece of music theatre created by director George Rodosthenous, writer Duška Radosavljević, and composer Demetris Zavros with an ensemble of performers in 2009 in Leeds, UK. The piece was commissioned by the Cypriot embassy in Berlin as part of the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” anniversary, and the commission included the participation of Greek Cypriot Lia Vissi.1 As a director/producer, Rodosthenous wanted to create a chamber musical that could tour with a cast of four specific performers, as well as an aesthetically strong space design to showcase the bodies and voices of the performers. Thus Rodosthenous knew how the musical would look before he knew how it would sound or how it would develop its narrative. This is not customary in making musical theatre work according to the traditional model, whereby the music and book precede the visual identity of the work, whether it is a concept album (American Idiot), novel (The Phantom of the Opera), or film (Billy Elliot). Radosavljević accepted the customary restrictions of the commission (the theme of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the composition of the ensemble), but she also generated her own aesthetic framework of restriction by eliciting five mise en scène images from the director as her starting point. The working process leading up to performance yielded some important discoveries, which this essay wishes to highlight. We will contextualize our findings in two ways: dramaturgically and epistemologically, emphasizing the notion of reversed methodology in both cases
Thinking Critical / Looking Sexy: A Naked Male Body in Performance
No full textTheatre as Voyeurism usefully (re)defines the notion of voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members in contemporary theatre and performance. Pleasure (erotic and/or aesthetic) is here privileged as a crucial factor in the way meaning is produced in the encounter with a theatrical work.
George Rodosthenous has drawn together an intriguing selection of authors and the ten chapters make a significant contribution to the overarching critical project of assessing the value of approaching theatre through – and as – voyeurism. The authors focus on a range of case studies including specific theatre artists such as Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Ann Liv Young, Olivier Dubois and Punchdrunk. This edited volume is therefore relevant to prospective readers interested in various aspects of visual experience in the theatre today
London Road: the ‘irruption of the real’ and haunting utopias in the verbatim musical
Get PDFThis is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Twenty-First Century Musicals From Stage to Screen, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315626123
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The use of documentary material appeared in musical theatre at least as far back as Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War, but it was not until London Road when the potential for a more experimental approach to the 'setting' of verbatim material was used in musical theatre. This chapter offers a slightly alternative perspective into the performance based on the belief that 'the reworking of speech into sung tunes' does not signal an absence as much as an 'irruption of the real' as discussed by Lehmann. It compares the stage and film versions of the musical in relation to their contiguity to the 'real' vs a utopian sensibility that accompanies the more traditionally escapist approaches to the film musical. The film audience becomes less able to viscerally and experientially appreciate the connection between the original and the aesthetic reconstitution that Lehmann so profoundly connects to the 'irruption of the real' in performance
TWO-SIDED SINGULAR CONTROL OF AN INVENTORY WITH UNKNOWN DEMAND TREND
Get PDFWe study the problem of optimally managing an inventory with unknown demand trend. Our formulation leads to a stochastic control problem under partial observation, in which a Brownian motion with nonobservable drift can be singularly controlled in both an upward and downward direction. We first derive the equivalent separated problem under full information, with state-space components given by the Brownian motion and the filtering estimate of its unknown drift, and we then completely solve this latter problem. Our approach uses the transition among three different but equivalent problem formulations, links between two-dimensional bounded-variation stochastic control problems and games of optimal stopping, and probabilistic methods in combination with refined viscosity theory arguments. We show substantial regularity of (a transformed version of) the value function, we construct an optimal control rule, and we show that the free boundaries delineating (transformed) action and inaction regions are bounded globally Lipschitz continuous functions. To our knowledge this is the first time that such a problem has been solved in the literature
Gathering Background Knowledge for Story Understanding through Crowdsourcing
Get PDFSuccessfully comprehending stories involves integration of the story information with the reader's own background knowledge. A prerequisite, then, of building automated story understanding systems is the availability of such background knowledge. We take the approach that knowledge appropriate for story understanding can be gathered by sourcing the task to the crowd. Our methodology centers on breaking this task into a sequence of more specific tasks, so that human participants not only identify relevant knowledge, but also convert it into a machine-readable form, generalize it, and evaluate its appropriateness. These individual tasks are presented to human participants as missions in an online game, offering them, in this manner, an incentive for their participation. We report on an initial deployment of the game, and discuss our ongoing work for integrating the knowledge gathering task into a full-fledged story understanding engine
The boxer–trainer, actor–director relationship: an exploration of creative freedom
No full textThe similarities between the way performance knowledge is transmitted for martial and theatrical artists have been examined by Phillip Zarrilli. Zarrilli argues that strips of codified behaviour present artists with restricted fields of choice, a precise vocabulary of techniques and strictly prescribed parameters within which to operate. We extend this argument to include combat athletes, particularly boxers, proposing a closer examination of choice, agency and creative freedom within the boxer–trainer and actor–director relationship. Drawing upon autoethnographic data, and participant interviews, we explore how trainers, boxers, directors and actors talk about creative freedom as it relates to their relationships. This co-authored article uses two discrete voices to explore this creative freedom: P. Solomon Lennox writes from a boxer’s perspective and George Rodosthenous from a director’s point of view
“It’s All about Working with the Story!”: On Movement Direction in Musicals. An Interview with Lucy Hind
No full textLucy Hind is a South African choreographer and movement director who lives in the UK. Her training was in choreography, mime and physical theatre at Rhodes University, South Africa. After her studies, Hind performed with the celebrated First Physical Theatre Company. In the UK, she has worked as movement director and performer in theatres including the Almeida, Barbican, Bath Theatre Royal, Leeds Playhouse Lowry, Sheffield Crucible, The Old Vic and The Royal Exchange. Lucy is also an associate artist of the award-winning Slung Low theatre company, which specializes in making epic theatre in non-theatre spaces. Here, Lucy talks to George Rodosthenous about her movement direction on the award-winning musical Girl from the North Country (The Old Vic/West End/Toronto and recently seen on Broadway), which was described by New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “superb”. The conversation delves into Lucy’s working methods: the ways she works with actors, the importance of collaborative work and her approach to characterization. Hind believes that her work affects the overall “tone, the atmosphere and the shape of the show”
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
