Antigone’s Choice: Tragedy and philosophy from dialectic to aporia

Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre. &nbsp

The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside of their cultural and historical contexts

Antigone’s Choice: Tragedy and philosophy from dialectic to aporia

Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre. &nbsp

Gender, sexuality and the body in comedy: performance, reiteration, resistance

Comedy has an important political role in entrenching or overturning existing hierarchies of power, and these are identified through reading strategies that take seriously questions of representation. This was the logic behind the organisation of ‘Mock the Weak: Comedy and the Politics of Representation’, the conference that birthed the papers collected in this special edition. Co-organised by Dr Helen Davies and Dr Sarah Ilott (that’s us!), the conference took place at Teesside University and Stockton Arc in September 2016. Collected here are some of the best papers on the topics of gender, sexuality, and the body originally produced for the conference

LMDA New & Noteworthy, November 2016

Contents include: A Note from the President; Dramaturg as Producer Kelly Kerwin; Dramaturgy/Publication Magda Romanska; Audience Engagement Bakersfield Mist; Odds & Ends.https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/lmdanewsletter/1005/thumbnail.jp

Travels of a Rayed Head: imagery, fiber, structure and connotations of early textiles from the South Central Andes

The rayed head image has long been identified as a central symbol associated with the Paracas tradition, also called the sun face 1 and associated with the concept of Oculate Being developed by the Berkeley School. 2 Prominently repeated on the central ground of the famous Paracas Textile at the Brooklyn Museum, this image has much earlier antecedents in the region. Scholars disagree on the extent to which many Paracas, Topara and early Nasca images with large round eyes, grinning mouths, and serpentlike appendages emitting from the head and body may also be manifestations of a particular Oculate Being or of more general concepts of natural or supernatural power. Recently, contemporary textiles found in the Sihuas valley to the south (see Haeberli in this volume) challenge us to reexamine the similarities and distinctions among rayed heads. One of the great challenges of the history of material culture, envisioned as a history of philosophical concepts, social values and cultural practices through their inscription in material objects, is the degree to which a recurrent image, pattern or special arrangement reflects a similar idea. A number of quite different images have been associated with the concept of an Oculate Being proposed by John Rowe and others of the Berkeley school based on their analysis of Ica valley ceramics and Ocucaje gravelots in the 1950s. I here trace the rayed head or sun face image as it occurs over at least 500 years in the region of Ica and Paracas. I then briefly consider its relationship to other contemporary imagery and later imagery featuring ray-like elements emitted from the head, both in the same contexts where the rayed head appears, and in other cemeteries to the south in southern Peru and northern Chile. All the imagery discussed here is associated with a period between about 450 BC and AD 450 called the Formative in the South Central Andes (Bolivia and northern Chile) and called the Early Horizon (or late Formative) and Early Intermediate (or Regional Development) Period in the Central Andes. Most of the images I discuss are created on textiles. While only recovered from burials on the desert coast, textile materials draw on relationships of production and exchange that spanned the Andean cordillera to the montane rainforest to the east, and stretched to the north and south. Either as clothing or cargo, textiles themselves traveled and were no doubt a primary source of non-local imagery. I do consider related images on non-textile artifacts. I compare textile based imagery with contemporary imagery on engraved and painted ceramics and gourds to try to distinguish among design features specific to medium, style and iconography

Funny walking : the rise, fall and rise of the Anglo-American comic eccentric dancer

This article will attempt to reposition comic eccentric dance as a metamorphic form that still, surprisingly, exists, and is to be found with reasonable ubiquity, in renewed incarna-tions within twenty first century media. Tracing the origins of comic eccentric dance through examples of earlier comedy performance, and drawing from Bergson’s comic theory of body misalliance, this article will dis-cuss this particularly ludic fusion of music and comedy. Further changes to the form affected by modernist preoccupations during the new Jazz Age at the turn of the twentieth century will be suggested. Finally, ways in which the formulation lives on in twenty-first century in-carnations in the comedy work of, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Ricky Gervase, and in popular television shows such as Strictly Come Dancing (BBC 2004 - ) and Britain’s Got Talent (ITV 2006 - ) will be posited

Opheliamachine

The paper is the italian translation of the Opheliamachin

Trauma and Testimony: Heather Raffo\u27s 9 Parts of Desire / الصدمة المفجعة والشهادة: تسعة أجزاء للرغبة بقلم هيذر رفّو

[This article analyzes a recent play, 9 Parts of Desire (2003) by Heather Raffo—an Iraqi American—which deals with the tragic conditions of Iraq as expressed by nine Iraqi women of different backgrounds and age groups. The performance of the play, often featuring one actress playing the nine roles, was successful in the US. The author finds parallelism between Iraqi trauma marked by repression, sanctions, and wars, and narrated by women, and other catastrophic events and testimonies. She links staged discourse with traumatic syndromes and dramatic theory. The article raises issues related to representation of the Other and identification. تقدم هذه المقالة مسرحية بعنوان تسعة أجزاء للرغبة وهي عن الوضع العراقي الكارثي. وفي المسرحية تتحدث تسع نساء عراقيات يُقدمن شهاداتهن عن وضعهن ومآسيهن تحت القمع والحصار والغزو. وقد نجحت المسرحية جماهيرياً عند عرضها في الولايات المتحدة، وكثيراً ما كانت ممثلة واحدة تقوم بالأدوار التسعة. وتوازي صاحبة المقالة ذهنياً بين الفجيعة العراقية وفجاﺋﻊ تعرفت عليها من خلال خلفيتها البولندية، وتربط بين التحليل النفسي والتنظير الأدبي للصدمة الجماعية وٳحساس بطلات المسرحية. كما أنها تقدم نبذة عن اﻟﻤﺆلفة الأمريكية ـ العراقية التي توزعت بين ﺍﻧﺘﻤﺎﺋﻬﺎ ٳلى بلدين متخاصمين. وتطرح المقالة ﺃﺳﺌﻠﺔ عن مدى توفيق العمل في التماهي مع الآخر، وٳن كانت ترى أنه يثير التأمل في آليات التفاعل الثقافي وفي تمثل الآخر .

Grotowski and Kantor. Theatre and theory

Since 1989, there has been a significant shift in the field of Slavic studies, from the purely historiographic research favored for many years, to critical theory, including a broader, interdisciplinary view of Central and Eastern European history, now being reexamined through the prism of trauma studies and postcolonial theory, with particular emphasis on the cultural hybridity of Polish national identity. The shift, which began in historical research, has affected the field of literary stud..