Dramaturgies of Humour in the Performance of Protest

The article analyses three instances of artistic activism from the 21st century in terms of their dramaturgies of humour. The cases examined are the procession of "the human gorging society" by Viennese collective Rebelodrom in 2013, the 2012 lecture-performance "The Return of Border Brujo" by Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the ongoing Tracking Transience project by US-American artist Hasan Elahi. By extending the concept of dramaturgy from theatre theory to the study of protest and activism in the public sphere, and by interpreting the chosen artistic actions as protest, the article seeks to contribute to humour research from a perspective that focuses on its performative dimension, rather than on its functions or effects alone. The term "dramaturgies of humour" refers here to both principles of ordering as well as of unfolding an idea, which inform an act as humorous. In these instances of artistic activism, humour does not simply mark one characteristic or component of protest, but is indeed the embodied, performed means through which the protest is constituted. The article employs a reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque, and in doing so, adapts the concept originally developed in relation to literary texts to the study of artistic activism. Such a focus on the dramaturgies of humour leads to two notable insights: first, that protest using a ludic aesthetic creates and sustains a highly ambivalent relation between activists and their opponents, specifically through a playful questioning of the logic of protest in terms of opposition. Second, the dramaturgy of humour in protest reveals a strong historicity: each of the examples reference the past in sophisticated ways, and the shifting narratives of memory are integral to humour as a link between memory and imagination

Time-resolved single-crystal X-ray crystallography

In this chapter the development of time-resolved crystallography is traced from its beginnings more than 30 years ago. The importance of being able to “watch” chemical processes as they occur rather than just being limited to three-dimensional pictures of the reactant and final product is emphasised, and time-resolved crystallography provides the opportunity to bring the dimension of time into the crystallographic experiment. The technique has evolved in time with developments in technology: synchrotron radiation, cryoscopic techniques, tuneable lasers, increased computing power and vastly improved X-ray detectors. The shorter the lifetime of the species being studied, the more complex is the experiment. The chapter focusses on the results of solid-state reactions that are activated by light, since this process does not require the addition of a reagent to the crystalline material and the single-crystalline nature of the solid may be preserved. Because of this photoactivation, time-resolved crystallography is often described as “photocrystallography”. The initial photocrystallographic studies were carried out on molecular complexes that either underwent irreversible photoactivated processes where the conversion took hours or days. Structural snapshots were taken during the process. Materials that achieved a metastable state under photoactivation and the excited (metastable) state had a long enough lifetime for the data from the crystal to be collected and the structure solved. For systems with shorter lifetimes, the first time-resolved results were obtained for macromolecular structures, where pulsed lasers were used to pump up the short lifetime excited state species and their structures were probed by using synchronised X-ray pulses from a high-intensity source. Developments in molecular crystallography soon followed, initially with monochromatic X-ray radiation, and pump-probe techniques were used to establish the structures of photoactivated molecules with lifetimes in the micro- to millisecond range. For molecules with even shorter lifetimes in the sub-microsecond range, Laue diffraction methods (rather than using monochromatic radiation) were employed to speed up the data collections and reduce crystal damage. Future developments in time-resolved crystallography are likely to involve the use of XFELs to complete “single-shot” time-resolved diffraction studies that are already proving successful in the macromolecular crystallographic field.</p

Politics of humour in extremis: Cabaret and propaganda in the Netherlands during the Second World War

This article examines politicized humour in totalitarian regimes by conducting an analysis of the radio programme ‘Zondagmiddagcabaret van Paulus de Ruiter’ (‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret by Paulus de Ruiter’), which was aired between 1941 and 1943 in the Netherlands under German occupation. The radio programme in the occupied Netherlands is exceptional in that it was explicitly designed as a ‘political cabaret’, whereas propaganda in Nazi Germany generally aimed to indirectly influence the audience through so-called light entertainment. The focus on dramaturgies of humorous strategies and on Althusser’s concept of interpellation allows for a distinction of different scenes of interpellation as staged by the ‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret’. Even though the study of National Socialist programmes can be distressing for both the researcher and the reader, the aim is to analyse the workings of humour without necessarily characterizing humorous strategies in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but instead paying attention to the way humour works on socio-political imaginaries. During the first period of the broadcast, the ambivalent character of humour aimed at shifting ideological frames, to redefine socio-political imaginaries. Later on, the performed dramaturgy of humour redefined the scene of interpellation as a scene of exclusive racial national identity, even before the German National Socialist authorities started to implement measures for the persecution and annihilation of Jewish citizens in the Netherlands at the beginning of 1942

Politics of humour in extremis: Cabaret and propaganda in the Netherlands during the Second World War

This article examines politicized humour in totalitarian regimes by conducting an analysis of the radio programme ‘Zondagmiddagcabaret van Paulus de Ruiter’ (‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret by Paulus de Ruiter’), which was aired between 1941 and 1943 in the Netherlands under German occupation. The radio programme in the occupied Netherlands is exceptional in that it was explicitly designed as a ‘political cabaret’, whereas propaganda in Nazi Germany generally aimed to indirectly influence the audience through so-called light entertainment. The focus on dramaturgies of humorous strategies and on Althusser’s concept of interpellation allows for a distinction of different scenes of interpellation as staged by the ‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret’. Even though the study of National Socialist programmes can be distressing for both the researcher and the reader, the aim is to analyse the workings of humour without necessarily characterizing humorous strategies in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but instead paying attention to the way humour works on socio-political imaginaries. During the first period of the broadcast, the ambivalent character of humour aimed at shifting ideological frames, to redefine socio-political imaginaries. Later on, the performed dramaturgy of humour redefined the scene of interpellation as a scene of exclusive racial national identity, even before the German National Socialist authorities started to implement measures for the persecution and annihilation of Jewish citizens in the Netherlands at the beginning of 1942

Challenging grand narratives: Performing canonical texts in Dutch TYA

Considering the ongoing debates concerning grand narratives and canonical texts it is of interest that several theatre for young audiences (TYA) productions in the Netherlands critically investigated ancient Greek tragedies or national narratives. By discussing the two Dutch TYA productions Iphigenia, King’s Child (1989) and Anne and Zef (2009), the authors focus on the following: first, the image of childhood in recent history; second, the representation of violence, which is often considered unsuitable for children, though frequently inherent in heroic and national narratives; and third, the critical production of historical knowledge as expressed in the two plays

Editorial: Humour in Art and Activism

This special issue of EJHR results from the proceedings of an exploratory workshop that took place in September 2013 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) titled "Humorous Approaches to Art and Activism in Conflict".[i] While not all contributors to the workshop are part of this issue, and not all contributors to this issue were part of the workshop, the exploratory gathering of scholars, artists, and activists served as a point of departure for an ongoing research project, the initial findings of which are presented in this volume. Interestingly, none of the contributors would strictly classify themselves as "humour researchers", and the disciplinary divergences between the essays certainly do not end there. Yet it seemed fitting to position these varying interpretations of humour in relation to art and activism, particularly in sites of conflict, in a journal dedicated to the study of a field that already boasts of several decades of research. The issue addresses the intersection of art and activism by investigating humorous interventions in socio-political conflict situations. Most research related to the arts in conflict zones, both from a social science perspective, as well as from a community arts perspective, tends to emphasize the emancipatory, therapeutic, or reconciliatory attributes of art in conflict, paying attention to how art contributes to conflict resolution, bridges social inequalities, or serves to ease tensions between communities in conflict and overcome trauma. The contributions in this volume discuss the more neglected, "non-serious" aesthetic strategies, such as those employing ironic, grotesque, absurd, frivolous, carnivalesque, and humorous forms of cultural and artistic intervention in conflict settings. [i] We thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) for their institutional and financial support