Archive, Stage and Private Values: Textile, Dress and Costume

The teaching team on the Costume with Textiles BA at the University if Huddersfield proposes a 20 minute panel comprising of three research project presentations which take different approaches to exploring and documenting the communication of meaning through dress in performance. Although the three research projects focus individually on specific facets of costume and textiles, and use different creative and unusual methodologies to explore them, we have identified overlaps in the investigation of the historical, social, anthropological, physical and psychological aspects of cloth and costume design and making. The projects intersect at the point of their potential impact in higher education and consequent value for the performance industry in general, where the significance of the contribution of costume design in storytelling often still goes unrecognised. It is a noteworthy occurrence that for the first time in Western social history Costume Designers are beginning to become household names to audiences (such as Janie Bryant and Colleen Atwood), and the broad body of knowledge in these three projects together (from cloth creation to garment and character design and making to data collection and archiving) could at the same time impact upon and enhance the understanding in academia of the value of ‘costume’ as a burgeoning research area for which there is currently very little academic scholarship in existence, indeed, a ‘vacuum in discourse on costume’ (Barbieri, 2012)

Theatre Noise Conference

Three days of Performances, Installations, Residencies, Round Table Discussions, Presentations and Workshops More than an academic conference, Theatre Noise is a diverse collection of events exploring the sound of theatre from performance to the spaces inbetween. Featuring keynote presentations, artists in residence, electroacoustic, percussive and digital performances, industry workshops and installations, Theatre Noise is an immersive journey into sound

Re-Gendering the Libertine; or, The Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the Early Nineteenth-Century London Stage

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites

Transformation in Chinese Theatre Work's The Legend of White Snake

This thesis examines Chinese Theatre Work's The Legend of White Snake as a case study of intercultural performance. As an overseas non-profit organization in NYC, CTW creates production aims to “transform” to intercultural performance that “bridges Eastern and Western theatrical aesthetics and forms” and also shows “aspects of the contemporary Chinese experience from slowly changing roles.” Attempting to achieve these goals, CTW created hybrid Kun opera production that featured English narration, shadow puppetry, and intercultural casting. Utilizing Schechner's theory of multiculturalism, fusion, and interculturalism with Pavis and Lo and Gilbert's model to analyzing CTW's performance, this thesis examines both “he story” and “the telling” parts and unveils an imbalance between their Chinese and American source cultures and the unexpected result of their “functional transformation.&rdquo

REMAKING THE ICONIC LULU: TRANSFORMATIONS OF CHARACTER, CONTEXT, AND MUSIC

Using Alban Berg’s opera Lulu as a case study, this dissertation explores the fluid nature of cultural artifacts as they are reborn within new socio-cultural contexts. By examining several Lulu productions, this inquiry seeks to understand the changes of meaning that have occurred through the transformation of canonic works in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Central to this project is the shifting nature of the character of Lulu, not only in Berg’s opera, but also in various artistic genres that preceded and affected his own conceptions, as well as her appearances in selected productions. This study contrasts modern Lulu productions with the composer’s intentions for the opera, using Berg’s operatic text as a basis for comparison. These assessments will be made through a semiotic analysis of various staging elements, musical and textual analysis of archival materials, and consideration of past Lulu scholarship. Relevant features of the political, cultural, and social climate of each production are also be investigated. Two Werktreue productions are examined: the Austrian première of Lulu at the Theatre an der Wien (1962) and the Metropolitan Opera staging by John Dexter (1977). Several Regietheater productions are also studied, including the three-act 1979 première at the Paris Opera—complete with Friedrich Cerha’s third act—as well as stagings at the Glyndebourne Festival, Opernhaus Zürich, the Royal Opera House, the Theater Basel, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Although much scholarship has been written on Lulu, directors have implemented some of the most radical changes to the opera. Building on Lydia Goehr’s definition of the work-concept in The Imaginary Museum of Historical Works, this project examines the role of these radically altered stagings as challenges to the work-concept of Lulu. In order to assess the portrayal of Lulu in the above-listed productions, this dissertation investigates the origins of her character, tracing the genesis of Lulu and the numerous artists who molded her, including Félicien Champsaur, Frank Wedekind, Leopold Jessner, and G. W. Pabst. Finally, this dissertation considers a work that goes beyond modifications of orchestration, setting, and staging in Regietheater productions. Olga Neuwirth’s opera, American Lulu, represents the ultimate authorial challenge, functioning as both an adaptation of Berg’s text and as a newly composed work. This inquiry explores the transformed mise en scène and re-imagined characters of American Lulu, investigating Neuwirth’s politicized changes and the effect that these alterations have on the story of Lulu. In addition to analyzing her score and libretto, this study examines the performance and depiction of race and sexuality in two American Lulu productions, at the Komische Oper Berlin and the Young Vic in London. Several Lulu performances discussed in this study explore an area which, even as recently as the publication of Roger Parker’s Remaking the Song, was called “untouched”: the alteration of the operatic text itself. Whether these updated works and radical stagings are considered a passing trend or true innovations, the effect of staging on operagoers is undeniable. Like the shifting interpretations of the iconic character herself, the complex history of Lulu reflects the development of canonic works over time, as they are altered, transformed, and reborn in new environments

Reclaiming the Human: Creolizing Feminist Pedagogy at Museum Frontiers

In this paper we reflect, together with a group of international students, on the affective and political power of texts and contexts. Our starting point is Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda, a text whose form, setting, and narrative structure render productive moments of “Relation” (Glissant), in which individuals and their historical experiences – rooted in colonial oppression – establish connection to each other through difference rather than commonality. We outline a series of collaborative teaching workshops designed with Andy McLellan, the Head of Education and his colleague Salma Caller at the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford, which provided fresh ways to engage our students in the transnational space inherent in Imoinda, as well as in the tangible and intangible heritage that the Pitt Rivers Museum houses. The paper discusses how study of Anim-Addo’s libretto at a frontier site between the university and the museum can enhance understandings of the text and the context from which the work was created. Specifically, we argue that the value of such frontier work lies in progressing critical thinking, although Relation here is not simply cognitive, but vitally allows emotional and sensory re-connections with musical forms and art from around the globe to enrich intercultural knowledge. A major focus is on the development of a creolized feminist pedagogy at the museum frontiers that, without being naïve to hierarchies of power and control in the wider world of lived experience beyond institutions, is responsible. Such practice is dialogical in essence. It privileges careful listening and speaking amongst all participants – teachers and students – and strives to raise diverse voices through the embodied learning that multisensory activities with museum objects can promote. Most importantly, the interculturality of Imoinda in terms of text, music and context, reading, writing and witnessing creates another “contact zone” of sorts (to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term) which demands a re-examination of our paradigms for the analysis of subject formation and representation outside conventional binaries and across the Black Atlantic