Carnival of the Mundane: Red Oktober at England’s National Tramway Museum

This paper is a consideration of two complementary curiosities: the first is Red Oktober, an annual event held at the National Tramway Museum in Crich, Derbyshire which imagines urban Eastern bloc communism in the heart of rural middle England. The second curiosity is Mikhail Bakhtin’s paradoxical reflection that the medieval carnival is both irredeemably lost to modern (and post-modern) sensibilities, while he asserts, at the same time, that its ‘true festive character is indestructible’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.9). Assessments of the carnivalesque remain divided on its efficacy whether as a space of political liberation or a space of reactionary catharsis. My argument here returns to Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnival as critically neither, but an open space whose ‘true festive character’ is an immersive second-life which he defines as ‘hostile to all that was immortalized and completed’

Similar hats on similar heads: uniformity and alienation at the Rat Pack’s Summit Conference of Cool

This article considers the nightclub shows of the Rat Pack, focussing particularly on the Summit performances at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, in 1960. Featuring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, these shows encompassed musical, comic and dance routines, drawing on the experiences each member had in live vaudeville performance. The discussion outlines these individual histories, and draws attention to a shared fascination with impersonation, which forms an explicit and implicit part of the act, as the performers’ stage personas are already emulatory. In addition to the influence of vaudeville, the construction of the Rat Pack also draws on the structures of blackface minstrelsy, with the interactions of the five members being patterned on a fluid variant of the interlocutor-endmen relationships. The interweaving of these influences and performance styles underpins a dominant concern of the troupe, as the comic material frequently negotiates the racial, national and religious identities of the individual performers. In particular, this deals with their shared status of having immigrant ancestry, a status which I term as being ‘hyphenated-American’, suspended between historical, public and aspirational identities

MASHED and SHAMED: a new approach to the acronym

Eleonora Belfiore has recently argued that ‘socio-economic impact has so far failed to successfully ‘make the case’ for arts funding and to provide a credible solution to the justification issue … [T]he same outcome is likely for humanities research unless a sustained attempt is made to broaden the debate from impact to public value’. In this semi-playful provocation, I suggest that a key strategy for asserting the value of both research and practice in the arts would be to reconfigure the mechanisms of the debate, as much as its terms and terminology. The Warwick Commission has argued persuasively, and with some effect, that the acronym STEM which has recently fixed educational priorities should be adjusted to STEAM to incorporate the arts. Although a successful pragmatic strategy, the deployment of acronyms here, I would argue, maintains a corporate politics that is allied to the agendas of impact and instrumentality. Acronyms, however, are not merely the simple, and prosaic, mnemonics they appear to be. In their poetic dimensions, they open up polysemic possibilities that – read through an arts and humanities lens – circulate in much more pleasurable yet much less stable ways. For example, in its metaphorical aspect, STEAM may evoke attractive images of power, toil, frustration and energy. Yet it also conjures a counter-productive spirit of the industrial and historical, which (ironically) emphasises the scientific, technological, engineered and mathematical. To reconsider the role and value of the arts and humanities within the current debate, I offer two new acronyms – and two new types of acronym – for consideration: the anti-acronym MASHED; and the dialectical acronym SHAMED

Heroism as the aesthetic dimension of solidarity

This paper speculates about whether the concepts of heroism and heroic action have any residual relevance for both practice and research in applied theatre. I say residual in order to note from the outset that there are legitimate points of resistance and concern with regard to the heroic; that it can promote a form of worship within human relations that obscures rationality and equality; that, as such, it can be used as a source of ideological complicity, smuggling hegemonic ideas into mainstream consciousness; and that, in particular, it can distort the politics of representation and identity, most notably with regard to gender but also, from my own field, disability, in which the demarcations of hero and villain are too often observed as non-disabled and disabled respectively

Conference Review: Heroism and the Heroic in Applied and Social Theatre

In March 2014, the TaPRA Applied and Social Theatre Working Group held a research day at the Royal Central School Speech and Drama (RCSSD) exploring the significance and implications of the notion of heroism in socially engaged theatre practice. Heroism as a theme emerged from discussions at the end of the last annual TaPRA conference in Glasgow in 2013, which led the working group convenors (Sylvan Baker, Dave Calvert, Alison Jeffers & Katharine Low) into discussions on risk and bravery in applied and social theatre from which have emerged ideas about care and protection, both of participants and of practitioners. Another strong theme to emerge from our conversations on heroism was the notion of leadership; different models of leadership, and changing perceptions of self in leadership roles. Is heroism always epic or can we identify small acts of everyday heroism and is it at all helpful to think in these terms? Does thinking about heroism lead to a certain romanticisation of applied theatre

‘Everything has a fucking value’: Negative Dialectics in the Work of Back to Back Theatre

Back to Back theatre is an Australian ensemble of actors perceived to have learning disabilities. Its international profile has advanced substantially in recent years following touring productions of small metal objects (2005), Food Court (2008) and Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (2011). This article considers each of these productions, along with surrounding discourses, within a reflection on the political significance and formal innovations of the work. Motivated by restless dialectical enquiry, Back to Back’s approach to devising and performing is situated within a post-Brechtian lineage that resonates with Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics. The analysis centres on a metatheatrical episode in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich in which the audience is accused of indulging in ‘freak porn’. Analyses of the production frequently highlight the inescapable tension of this moment, while overlooking the unresolved contradictions that underpin it. These contradictions unsettle the imaginary concepts of actor, spectator and learning disability which inform the work’s production and reception. Building on broader analyses of Food Court and small metal objects, and invoking Adorno’s notion of the constellation, I argue that Back to Back’s dialectical procedures pursue the formal (and ultimately frustrating) limits of theatre’s capacity to affirm the extra-ideological value of its objects

Jokes as performance text: a close reading of Rat Pack banter

In September 1963, a live performance by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr was recorded at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas. This paper offers a close reading of a sequence of jokes from that performance: Frank: Better keep smiling, Sam, so everybody knows where you are. Sam: [laughing] You fellers go ahead. You ain’t got many rights left. Dean: No, but we sure got a couple of lefts. The uneasy, racial motivation of such humour is complex, fraught and historical. My analysis of the three jokes proposes that the documented material of the event opens up their complexity by contextualising the jokes as performance text, rather than as purely linguistic constructs. The paper argues that, while the necessary structure of the jokes assumes simplicity in order to realise comic impact, a full understanding of the material involves the unravelling of a network of elements. This includes the aesthetics of the Rat Pack as a performance form in its own right; the artistic and historical context of the event; the public and professional identities of the entertainers involved; the technical ability of the performers as comedians; and the responses of a live audience. The paper also proposes that the jokes do not form individual and closed statements in their own right. Rather, it is the open, fluid relationship between them that motivates comic understanding as meaning is constructed through the production and reception of the jokes as a sequence of competitive and dialogical challenges

Responding to Per.Art's Dis_Sylphide:Six Voices from IFTR's Performance and Disability Working Group

This submission by IFTR's Performance and Disability working group features responses by six participants – voices projected from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Wales, England and Australia – to Per.Art's production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7 July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR's conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group. Per.Art is an independent theatre company founded in 1999 in Novi Sad, Serbia, by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić, the company's artistic director. The company brings together people with learning disabilities, artists (theatre, dance and visual arts), special educators, representatives of cultural institutions, philosophers, architects and students to make work. This co-authored submission examines how the production responds to three important dance works of the twentieth century – Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (1928), Pina Bausch's Kontakthof (1978) and Xavier Le Roy's Self Unfinished (1998) – to explore normalizing and normative body concepts in dance theatre and in society, and how they have been migrating over the course of dance histories. The shared experience of witnessing the performance provoked discussion on the migration of dance forms across time and cultures, as well issues of access and (im)mobility, which are especially pertinent to a disability studies context

The low-resolution version of HadGEM3 GC3.1: development and evaluation for global climate

A new climate model, HadGEM3 N96ORCA1, is presented that is part of the GC3.1 configuration of HadGEM3. N96ORCA1 has a horizontal resolution of ~135 km in the atmosphere and 1° in the ocean and requires an order of magnitude less computing power than its medium-resolution counterpart, N216ORCA025, while retaining a high degree of performance traceability. Scientific performance is compared both to observations and the N216ORCA025 model. N96ORCA1 reproduces observed climate mean and variability almost as well as N216ORCA025. Patterns of biases are similar across the two models. In the north-west Atlantic, N96ORCA1 shows a cold surface bias of up to 6K, typical of ocean models of this resolution. The strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (16 to 17 Sv) matches observations. In the Southern Ocean, a warm surface bias (up to 2K) is smaller than in N216ORCA025 and linked to improved ocean circulation. Model El Niño/Southern Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability are close to observations. Both the cold bias in the Northern hemisphere (N96ORCA1) and the warm bias in the Southern hemisphere (N216ORCA025) develop in the first few decades of the simulations. As in many comparable climate models, simulated interhemispheric gradients of top-of-atmosphere radiation are larger than observations suggest, with contributions from both hemispheres. HadGEM3 GC3.1 N96ORCA1 constitutes the physical core of the UK Earth System Model (UKESM1) and will be used extensively in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6), both as part of UKESM1 and as a stand-alone coupled climate model