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24 Performance practices and conflict resolution: Jo Berry and Patrick Magee’s Facing the Enemy Verity Combe It has been said that ‘for every one year of conflict we need ten years of reconciliation’.1 Contemporary conflict resolution differs from the more traditional kinds because it now emphasises post-conflict processes that generate solutions and is much more inter-disciplinary in its scope. Conflict resolution is both an academic and a practical field and a branch of international relations dedicated to alleviating and illuminating sources of conflict
This book examines how new performance practices from the 1990s to the present day have been driven by questions of the real and the ensuing political implications of the concept's rapidly disintegrating authority. The first part of the book addresses the existing poststructuralist narrative of radicalism that currently dominates contemporary performance theory, and seeks to deconstruct its conclusions. It first traces the artistic and philosophical developments that laid the ground for the sustained twentieth-century interrogations of theatrical representations of the real. It examines the emergence of the discursive act which aligned the narrative of radicalism exclusively with such interrogations. The book also examines how key strands of Derrida's poststructuralist critique have been applied to performance practice to strengthen the ideological binary opposition between 'dramatic' representations of the real and 'postdramatic' deconstructions of representational practice. The second part of the book embarks on an ideological examination of a wide spectrum of performance models that share an engagement with the problematics of representation and the real. It directs this investigation specifically towards an analysis of the representations of 'real' people in performances which adopt verbatim methodologies drawn from the documentary theatre tradition. The book continues to explore performance environments that break down the dichotomy of performer/spectator and seeks to replace mediated representations with experiential realities.
This collection of essays offers new perspectives that foster our understanding of the crucial role the Bible played in medieval culture as well as in the wake of the Reformation across Europe. The thirteen essays open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on periodisation, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework and adapt the biblical source material. Special emphasis is placed on multitemporality, transnationality, and the modalities of performance and form in relation to the uses of the Bible in medieval and early modern drama. The three aspects are intertwined: particular modalities of performance evolve, adapt and are re-created as they intersect with different historical times and circumstances. These intersections pertain to aspects such as dramatic traditions, confessional and religious rites, dogmas and debates, conceptualisations of performance and form, and audience response – whenever the Bible is evoked for performative purposes. The collection thus stresses the co-presence of biblical and contemporary concerns in the periods under discussion, conceiving of biblical drama as a central participant in the dynamic struggle to both interpret and translate the Bible.
1 Discourses of resistance: representation and the real in the twentieth-century avant-gardes Before embarking on an investigation of performance practice and theory from the 1990s onwards, it is necessary to take a look back over the twentieth century at the practices and theories that laid the ground for such work and that are still visibly influential in the later period that is the focus of this study. This chapter will argue that the new performance practices that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s are predominantly categorised by artists and scholars as
witnessing begin to reveal is the diverse ways in which testimony is being adopted within many performance practices to explore different lived experience and identities. Within these new performances, testimony has been loosened from its framing as an act that retrieves a past event through Conclusion 183 a narrative form. Rather, it emerges as a dramaturgical element that interweaves with the presence of the actor’s body, dialogically working together to debate and explore the issues the production examines. By disrupting the narrative structure and chronology of
performances can be caring, responsive and attentive but also how social, medical and ecological practices of care can be understood as being artful, aesthetic, rehearsed and performative. Correlatively, the critical discussions in this book also call for reflection on performance practices that are uncaring , that are not constructed around an affective attentiveness towards the other and that devalue relationships of interdependence; for example, practices that instrumentalise participation or that inadvertently predetermine or enforce certain narratives of change and
Afterword If Derrida’s deconstructive imperative demonstrates the ‘counterviolence of solicitation’; that ‘every totality can be totally shaken … can be shown to be founded on that which it excludes’ (Bass, 2001: xviii), then this study has committed itself, above all, to shaking the potentially totalising narrative of radicalism that has long been applied to performance practices that seek to challenge the dramatic model of theatre. The poststructuralist imperative, I have argued, rather demands a radical practice that is not based on the reification of its own
perspectives, that were to underpin the philosophical and political characteristics that define the historical period of this study, began to develop and inform each other in the latter part of the twentieth century. Whilst, throughout the subsequent chapters, I draw on a wide range of theoretical influences in relation to particular trends in performance practice in the 1990s and 2000s, a re-examination of the discourse of Derridean poststructuralism is most central to the book’s concerns. Discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 3, Derrida’s project set out to deconstruct the
is clear from their content and topics, their structure, the extent of specific musical terminology, descriptions of performance practice (including singing and techniques of playing musical instruments), titles of tunes in some of the rubrics, and the presence of partial music notation in the form of unheighted neumes, that is, neumes on a single horizontal plane, thus not indicating the rise and fall of the melodic line. The collection also contains specific texts pertaining to music theory and to singing exercises, for some of which transcribable notation
comprises actors with a range of performance practices and processes. What is clear is that for some actors the demands of Barker’s texts release an intensity of communicative ability, while for others the inevitable defeat, resulting from an attempt to pull the text towards the prosaic, is exhausting and frustrating. But behind the text there are challenges to actors which are unique in their demands. These are not technical, though they involve technique. They are not emotional, though they involve emotion. They are challenges of theatrical consciousness. Classical text