Wanna Play? Dries Verhoeven and the Limits of Non-Professional Performance

In October 2014, Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer (HAU)—one of Germany’s most influential performance venues, programming and often co-producing work by artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart and Gob Squad—opened its new season with a festival called Treffpunkte (meeting points).1 Conceptually, the month-long festival was located at the intersection of some of the major trends in contemporary Western theatre and performance, particularly the interest ‘in curating intimacy in public’ (Walsh 2014: 57; Read 2008), the renegotiation of theatre’s place in the public sphere (Balme 2014; Haedicke 2013) and the relation of socially engaged performance, in the broadest sense, to late global capitalism (Jackson 2011; Harvie 2013). Its explicit aim was to explore, through the means of performance, ‘the status of the private in the public sphere’ (den Status des Privaten in der öffentlichen Sphäre) and to find out whether ‘intimacy’ (Intimität)—equated with an authentic ‘communication between people’ (Kommunikation zwischen Menschen)—was still possible ‘in an age where the public space has been entirely pervaded by market conformity’ (im Zeitalter der totalen Durchdringung des öffentlichen Raumes durch das Marktförmige) (Vanackere 2014: 2).

Power, Sect and State

Review of A. Maria A. Kastrinou, Power, Sect and State in Syria: The Politics of Marriage and Identity amongst the Druze. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016

From talking to silence: a confessional journey

This article provides an account of work created by Adrian Howells over the duration of his AHRC Creative Fellowship. Howells provides a creator's perspective; Heddon, a spectator's perspective. Both chart the shift from confessional performances anchored around speech, to the use of silence as a way to engage intimate connections between performer and audience

On Not Being Porn: Intimacy and the Sexually Explicit Art Film

Since the mid-twentieth century, we have passed from a time where sexual frankness was actively obstructed by censorship and industry self-regulation to an age when pornography is circulated freely and is fairly ubiquitous on the Internet. Attitudes to sexually explicit material have accordingly changed a great deal in this time, but more at the level of the grounds on which it is objected to rather than through a general acceptance of it in the public sphere. Critical objections now tend to be political or aesthetic in nature rather than moralistic. Commercial cinema still seems wary of a frank exploration of sexuality, preferring to address it tangentially in genres such as the erotic thriller. In Europe, an art house canon of sexually explicit movies has formed, starting with Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the French-produced In the Realm of the Senses (1976). This article looks at the steps taken since the 1970s to challenge out-of-date taboos and yet at the same time differentiate the serious film about sex from both pornography (operating in parallel with mainstream cinema but in its shadow) and the exploitation film. After reviewing the art film’s relationship with both hard and soft core, two recent films, Intimacy (2000) and 9 Songs (2005), are analyzed for their explicit content and for the way they articulate their ideas about sex through graphic depictions of sexual acts. Compulsive and/or claustrophobic unsimulated sexual behaviour is used as a way of asking probing questions of intimacy (and its filmability). This is shown to be a very different thing from the highly visual and staged satisfactions of pornography

Awake remembrance of these valiant dead : Henry V and the politics of the English history play

'A PROPAGANDA-PLAY on National Unity: heavily orchestrated for the brass' was how A. P. Rossiter summed up Henry V in 1954. (1) The assumption that this play is complicit with the promonarchical, nationalist rhetoric of the Chorus, and with the particular myth of Englishness it propounds, has persisted. In recent years the most cogent articulation of this view has come from Richard Helgerson, who sees the play as the culmination of Shakespeare's gradual tightening of his "obsessive and compelling focus on the ruler" during the writing of his English history cycle, at the cost of occluding the interests of the ruled

Intimacy and Antipathy: Ukrainian–Russian Relations in Historical Perspective

Explores what the complex entangled histories of Russia and Ukraine can teach us about their trouble relationship today

The literary kiss: gestures of subterfuge

A complex, polyvalent phenomenon, the kiss, once embedded in a literary text, is first and foremost a cipher to be decoded. Texts effectively expose its many-sidedness: not merely its potentially seductive power or ostensible expression of affection, but, no less compellingly, its risky demeanors, its capacity to establish dominance, to terrorize, to subdue, to belittle, to ingratiate, even to infuriate. Variously bestowed, retracted, avowed, disavowed, meaningful, meaningless, the kiss can become, as it does in the work so named by Kate Chopin, a multi-layered form of contrivance, the incarnation of tempting, albeit ultimately invidious, non-realities. Though, perhaps, not manifest at first blush, a careful reading reveals that each occasion marked by the “joining of lips” yields an odd sequence of awkward and oft deleterious, consequences: motion is superseded by motive, candor by disingenuousness—all in an unending slew of backward and forward slippages. Thus is engendered the metaphorization of an altered reality—structured all but exclusively upon the relentless deceits it proffers. Jubilation and despair come and go, as though wholly inter-changeable; acceptance and rejection, promulgation and rescission are converted into mere variants of the same gestures of ambivalence, if not of travesty. One might thus conclude that the kiss adopts significance worthy of note only as a metonym for and of factitiousness, vacuity and thinly-veiled distortion. Chopin’s script adeptly explores the multifarious comportments and consequences of the kiss: an act fashioned as a “weapon” of dubious value, as a tactical strategy, as a play-act borne of ulterior objectives and, which, as such, deftly prostitutes itself, willingly, nefariously. In the given context, the kiss-act lays bare the heroine’s ostensible “liberation” to be more imagined than real. Her would-be triumph over gendered subjugation exists, if at all, as but an ill-conceived romantic daydream—destined to slake gradually into a woeful destiny of loneliness and imprisonment. Chopin’s brief narration center-stages betrayal, challenges authenticity and valorizes consummate illegitimacy