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4 Material witness History, belief, and the theatre of enactment Russia’s twenty-first-century documentary theatre artists draw upon the legacy of their country’s twentieth century in their search for new methods with which to stage collisions between theatre and everyday life. Chapter 2 illustrated how the artists of the Joseph Beuys Theatre and Moscow’s Sakharov Center use documentary theatre to make meaningful interventions in Russia’s culture of commemoration. Chapter 3 showed how the artists at Teatr.doc draw out important connections between the
5 Burden of proof New Sincerity and the performance of post-Soviet national identities Questions about the nature of trust, sincerity, and belief in contemporary Russian culture run throughout the country’s twenty-first-century documentary theatre repertoire. In their varied interpretations of the form, Russia’s documentary theatre artists create performances that speak directly to the country’s cultural tensions between history, memory, and national identity. Each of the plays discussed in this book explores the contours of how Russia’s conflicted relationship
and its histories, examining how this form of theatre is distinguishable from the documentary theatre that preceded it. In the second part of the book, I move on to focus on testimonial theatre and, by adopting an approach that is informed by philosophical engagements with testimony, witnessing and other forms of truth telling, I consider how different modes of witnessing are enacted in this type of theatre making. In this sense, instead of seeking to establish a finite definition of what constitutes verbatim or testimonial theatre, this book explores the
4 Representing the real: verbatim practice in a sceptical age Emerging out of the prevailing climate of scepticism in the final decade of the twentieth century was the revitalisation of documentary forms of theatre in the first decade of the twenty-first. This particular wave of documentary theatre tended to draw, most of all, on the tradition of verbatim or testimonial performance which can be seen to permeate all manner of theatrical practice across this period. Verbatim performance texts are created entirely from extracts of interview transcripts or
) by raising critical questions in the course of the play about participation in and responsibility for the realisation of the Nazi project and the individual and institutional culpability for the atrocities wrought as a result. Foregrounding testimonial text, and placing individual decision making and questions of personal accountability at the heart of the play, this new generation of post-war German playwrights adopted innovative and influential approaches to the dramaturgical construction of a documentary theatre that set out to 60 Verbatim theatre and its
), The Tricycle: Collected Tribunal Plays 1994–2012 ( London : Oberon ). Burke , G. ( 2010 ), Black Watch , 2nd ed. ( London : Faber ). Cantrell , T. ( 2013 ), Acting in Documentary Theatre
, testimonial performance can expose injustices and lay the groundwork for moments of potential alliance and communitas that are configured around newly forged acts of solidarity. As I have argued over the course of this book, it is the capacity for truth telling that distinguished the new forms of verbatim and testimonial plays that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century from the documentary theatre that preceded it. Rather than drawing on different forms of factual evidence, verbatim and testimonial theatre centres on the presence and utterance of the witness
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Parker, the producer of the BBC Radio Ballads (1958–64)—who were working for BBC Midland in Birmingham—went to see a performance of the Victoria Theatre’s first documentary theatre piece, The Jolly Potters , which was about the 1842 Staffordshire pottery riots. 3 They shot some scenes from the play but the footage was never broadcast. 4 The following year, however, Donnellan produced the BBC2