Embodying, imagining, and performing displacement and trauma in central Europe today

Published version deposited following SHERPA/RoMEO guidelines. Copyright CUP. Definitive version available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X08000031This article provides an illustrated description and analysis of Speaking Stones - a collaborative performance commissioned by Theatre Asou of Graz, Austria, with UK playwright Kaite O'Reilly and director Phillip Zarrilli as a response to the increasingly xenophobic and reactionary realities of the politics of central Europe. The account interrogates the question, the dramaturgical possibilities, and the performative premise which guided the creation of Speaking Stones. Phillip Zarrilli is internationally known for training actors through Asian martial arts and yoga, and as a director. In 2008 he is directing the premiere of Kaite O'Reilly's The Almond and the Seahorse for Sherman-Cymru Theatre and the Korean premiere of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis. He is also Professor of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter

Where the Hand [Is]...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 1987 University of Hawai'i Press

Katie Mitchell: feminist director as pedagogue

An Actor Prepares relates the reciprocal dialogue between teacher–director and actor to offer a pedagogical enquiry that moves beyond methodology to focus on the learning exchange. In the first decades of the twentieth century teacher–directors, predominantly male, were responsible for developing theatrical pedagogies. In the twenty-first century, it is rare to focus on the director as pedagogue or attend to the complex learning exchange between director and actor. Furthermore, curriculums continue to be dominated by predominantly male lineages. Yet a focus on pedagogical approaches allows us to look behind methodologies, what an actor does, to consider how an actor learns. What might a gendered consideration of rehearsal practices reveal about the particular features of acting pedagogy? How do feminist interventions reconsider aspects of Stanislavski’s approach? I turn to the developed pedagogy of Katie Mitchell to examine her work as a form of écriture féminine which creates a post-Stanislavski schooling for actors. Applying a methodology for observing pedagogic practice in the rehearsal room that has been developed over four years of research I consider her approach, drawing upon two extended interviews, observations across four rehearsal processes and interviews with the actors involved. I reflect on her process through a gendered lens as an evolved form of method of physical action, which I re-orientate as a method of feminist action. The particular features of this pedagogy map Mitchell’s contribution to developing twenty-first century actor training from a feminist position

Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

This paper sets out two main arguments. In part one, a description of the adherents of the various intellectual disciplines and religious faiths in premodern India is given, each having developed distinct and different imagined bodies; for example, the body described in Tantric circles had little or nothing in common with the body described in medical circles. In part two, an account is given of the encounter between Ayurvedic anatomy and early colonial European anatomy which led initially to attempts at synthesis; these gave way to an abandonment of the syncretist vision of the body and the acceptance of an epistemological suspension of judgment, in which radically different body conceptualizations are simultaneously held in unacknowledged cognitive dissonance

Psychophysical Approaches and Practices in India: Embodying Processes and States of 'Being-Doing': the traditions and practice of psychophysical performance in Kerala, India

Published version deposited following SHERPA/RoMEO guidelines. Copyright CUP. Definitive version available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X11000455This essay articulates a South Asian understanding of embodied psychophysical practices and processes with a specific focus on Kerala, India. In addition to consulting relevant Indian texts and contemporary scholarly accounts, it is based upon extensive ethnographic research and practice conducted with actors, dancers, yoga practitioners, and martial artists in Kerala between 1976 and 2003. During 2003 the author conducted extensive interviews with kutiyattam and kathakali actors about how they understand, talk about, and teach acting within their lineage of teaching/performance