1,720,973 research outputs found
Herakles on Chesil Bank: The Archers, Disavowable Classicism, and The Small Back Room
Get PDFThe film The Small Back Room was written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and released in 1949. It is the wartime tale of an injured and embittered back-room scientist, who is recruited to help combat a new kind of explosive device. Based on Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, the film significantly alters the story’s climactic sequence so that the wounded Sammy Rice successfully disarms the mysterious device and, in so doing, restores his own self-esteem, while gaining the respect of the military personnel who witness his achievement. In this way, a downbeat source-text is transformed into a mutedly redemptive narrative of loyalty, friendship, and unconventional heroism. Hentzi (2008) identifies Powell and Pressburger’s adaptation of Balchin’s novel as ‘telling a version of the legend of Philoctetes’. This chapter builds upon Hentzi’s argument, together with Moor’s (2005) discussion of ‘magical spaces’ in Powell and Pressburger’s films, to analyse the strategies by which the pair infuse a recurring sense of quasi-mythic male friendship, and miraculous healing, into a film which is most often understood as one of their rare excursions into filmic realism. In the process, it formulates a new approach to reading The Archers’ classical reception during the later 1940s, focusing on their cultivation of deliberately ambiguous scenes and images whose classical influences could be swiftly disavowed by filmmakers under pressure to conform to the demands of realist cinematography
Staging a Transforming Great Britain: Tamlane, The Social Turn, and the 2014 Referendum
No full textThis chapter emerges from the energies and aspirations of the years leading up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, and explores three dramas created during this period: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (David Greig, 2011), The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project (Northern Stage, 2013) and Rantin (Kieran Hurley, 2013). It borrows the mythic figure of the ballad-hero Tamlane (shape-shifting, multiform, and elusive) to reflect on the ways in which national identities have been asserted, subverted, challenged, and re-made (across several centuries) through the medium of Scotland and England’s traditional songs. The chapter specifically focuses on the ways in which these three modern theatre works sought to activate the convivial, participatory performance interactions associated with traditional song practices. In this way, it highlights the value of traditional ballads and songs for politically engaged performance-makers in both England and Scotland during a turbulent, uncertain, and ebullient historical moment
The Paper Cinema's Odyssey and The Factory, The Odyssey
No full textThis extended review highlights an increasingly important aspect of the contemporary performance reception of the Odyssey in the UK, with growing numbers of practitioners and companies moving away from the straightforward dramatisation (or revisionist dramatic contestation) of Homer’s epic tale, and towards a deepening engagement with epic storytelling as a distinctive category of performance practice. These projects have increasingly foregrounded the techniques and practices, and the active audiences, of epic storytelling, as well as the tales being told, opening up new landscapes for the exploration of ancient epic in live re-performance. Two productions currently playing in London are here taken as typifying this trend, demonstrating a developing focus on the flexible narrative structures and in-performance composition of Homeric epic, as well as the ripping yarn of the Odyssey’s plot
"It Happens in Ballads": Scotland, Utopia, and Traditional Song in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
No full textIn the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads, who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, Prudencia’s perspective is challenged by her late-night encounter with the sinister Nick, whose own passion for collecting forces Prudencia to revise her sense of the ballad’s nature, and potential functions. In Greig’s drama, the ballad’s protean form proves to be both infectious, and transformative, and this process isn’t necessarily limited to the play’s characters. This chapter highlights the ways in which the ballad, in the course of the drama, becomes a catalyst for live, collective vocalisation. It contends that via processes of ‘musicking’ (as defined by Christopher Small) and ‘presencing’ (as described by James Porter, and recently elaborated by Mairi McFadyen), the show’s audience is also offered its own experience of ballad performance. Taking David Greig’s evocation of an imaginatively transformative ‘rough theatre’ as stimulus, the chapter also reflects upon the value of the traditional ballad for politically-engaged theatre more broadly, utilising Jill Dolan’s descriptions of a ‘utopian performative’ to consider how and why contemporary theatre artists might choose to borrow from of the sociable, participatory dynamics of the ceilidh. It concludes that Greig’s playful exploration of the ballad not only offers a stomping evening’s entertainment, but can also be located within a wider project of promoting a lively, popular and multi-vocal debate concerning Scottish identity and destiny
Speech, Silence and Epic Performance: Alice Oswald's Memorial
Get PDFAlice Oswald’s recitation of her 2011 poem Memorial is an intensely modest, self-effacing performance. Yet it is also one which invites us to consider key questions about the ancient practice, and modern re-performance, of epic poetry. Oswald explicitly cites the antiphonal lament of Homeric funerary ritual as an influence upon her re-inscription of the Iliad (Oswald 2011a: 1-2). Her own re-performance of the poem, however, draws on very different models of performance and spectatorship, creating a tension between ancient and modern modes of memorialisation, and changing relationships between the poet and her live audience. This article explores the complex interplay of speech and silence which characterizes Oswald’s text, and the ways in which this interplay is manifested and heightened in live vocalisation of the poem. Drawing on recent debates and insights in the fields of oral poetics, theatre studies and classical performance reception, it explores the links between Oswald’s ancient models of epic poetic performance, the modern poem on the page, and the complex dynamics of live vocal performance. It contends that even this least theatrical iteration of Homeric epic displays characteristics which highlight the poem’s status as a text created for (and through) performance, and which suggest new avenues for studying an ancient epic’s after-lives in contemporary re-performance
No Air Left in Your Lungs: Breathing with Kae Tempest's The Book of Traps and Lessons
Get PDFIt is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between semi-dramatised personae and myriad versions of a shifting self, Tempest rants, preaches, chuckles, snarls, jibes, sobs. Their South East London voicing carries a weight of cultural history, and personal identity. Rapper as well as poet, Tempest’s insolent, abrasive, insistently surging sound is ‘battle-born’, yet they’re equally capable of self- deflation, playful misdirection, and cheeky sleight- of-tongue. Now, though, newly attuned by Covid- 19, primed by weeks of news stories about ventilators and oxygen masks, I find myself fascinated in an unexpected way. This time, I start to watch the artist breathe
Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance
No full textThis chapter examines the impact of a putative oral Homer upon the work of recent performance-makers. The influence of oral-poetic theories is (as yet) an under-explored area of study, neglected by scholars whose literary expertise leads them to focus on dramatic texts and production histories, with each revisionary text or production regarded as a single, stable, and repeatable entity. The field of classical reception studies at present lacks the conceptual and theoretical means to engage effectively with works which deliberately exploit elements of ‘in-performance’ composition, and which positively value the qualities of fluidity and flexibility evoked by oral-poetic interpretations of ancient epic. However, the present work contends that a notional oral Homer informs a diverse array of contemporary theatre texts and performance practices, and that a full appreciation of the different ways in which oral-poetic theory can influence the creation of these depends upon an ability to identify and interpret the interplay between ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ elements both within particular performances, and within different iterations of the same production or event. Kate Tempest’s performance-poem Brand New Ancients is analysed as a striking recent example of creative interplay between such ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ elements
Physical Performance and the Languages of Translation
Get PDFOur lack of reliable information concerning the physical and choreographic aspects of ancient tragic performance permits modern writers to construct their own imaginative re-creations of the ancient text/body relationship in a wide variety of modes. The range of ways in which texts translated or adapted from ancient tragedy are capable of suggesting performative physicalities is accordingly broad. However, we often respond to these new theatre works as if they were linguistic artefacts, as if theatre translation were merely the replacement of one counter with another in a word game played out at the level of the printed text, and relayed to an audience without the crucial corporeal intervention of breath, bone, tissue and muscle. This chapter is concerned with what physically happens in that moment when the written text of a drama is filtered and resonated and shared though the medium of an actor’s body. It is also concerned with the opportunities presented by the multiple re-versioning of Greek drama in the contemporary theatre to explore the multiple ways in which the formal qualities of dramatic text, especially poetic texts, can influence the physical life of a performance
Athens: A Work-in-Progress
Get PDFThis provocation contests the familiar construction of classical Athens as an ideal exemplar of democratic politics through a focus on the city’s material fabric, its visual artworks, and the performances which took place within its public spaces. It highlights the city’s ongoing process of material re-building (particularly following the Persian invasion of 480 BCE), during which process many of its old artworks were appropriated or re-purposed to express democratic aspirations and anxieties. It also foregrounds the ongoing tensions given articulation through the city’s new showpiece building projects and performance events, including theatrical tragedy and comedy. The aim, throughout, is to challenge clichéd (and idealising) views of classical Athens as a unified and serene white-marble vista. Instead, this provocation cultivates an alternative vision of the democratic city as unfinished, insecure, and frequently disunited: a permanent “work-in-progress” in both a material and a political sense. In conclusion, the Athens of the fifth century BCE is re-positioned as a timely (though not a “timeless”) reminder to today’s politically-engaged artists, educators, and activists that democratic self-definition and practice can only be sustained through a vigorous, ongoing, and open-ended process of debate, confrontation, and contestation within the civic and creative spaces of the city
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