Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the (...) experienced qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

The work aims to comprehend, share and “build memory” around an educational practice experienced in a municipality of the earthquake zone of Abruzzo, therefore, in a context of social crisis by means the storytelling of a social and community theatre experience. The focus is more specifically on the nexus between the artistic and pedagogical work and the potentialities of a functional development of the community which spreads out, in a perspective of applicativity. The educationalist, as educational process (...) and relationship professional, can offer his/her specific contribution to such above mentioned processes in attempt to recover and/or strengthen both individual and common well-being. (shrink)

From the Federal Theater Projects of the Great Depression to the disruptive performances of the 1960s and 1970s, theater has played an important role in American radicalism. This special issue of_ _Theater_ reports on socially conscious, politically active theaters in the United States. Despite the evaporation of Cold War passions and the rise of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, such theater work remains a persistent and evolving presence on the political landscape. Since the first inauguration of George W. Bush, (...) new opportunities have arisen for political performance and for significant new challenges to these artists. T_heater and Social Change_ not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text. _Contributors include:_ Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, creating a durable, civil public world was of utmost importance. Though many have discussed Arendt's relevance to the contemporary work of politics, Eric Gorham is the first to examine her ideas of the "space of appearance" in the context of the university classroom. In The Theater of Politics, Gorham examines in detail Arendt's dramaturgical theory of politics and her method of political criticism and maintains that politics can be observed in the classroom, in which students are future (...) political actors and spectators in training. Using Arendt as a theoretical platform, Gorham offers innovative ideas for politicizing the classroom and for reconceptualizing faculty and student community service: If professors and administrators can imagine their tasks in light of lessons learned from classical theater, then students will benefit from a renewed emphasis on teaching. Gorham moves to redraw the basis of political citizenship, criticizing arguments offered by civic republican and communitarian theorists and crafting a richer, more judicious concept of citizenship—one that can be learned and practiced in the political science classroom in particular and in the university in general. (shrink)

Purpose: Studies of reactive and proactive modes of inhibitory control tend to show age-related declines and are accompanied by abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex. We explored which mode of inhibitory control would be more amenable to change and accrue greater benefits following engagement in a 4-week theater acting intervention in older adults. These gains were evaluated by performance on the AX-CPT task. We hypothesized that an increase in proactive control would relate to an increase in AY errors and a decrease (...) in BX errors. In contrast, an increase in reactive control would be associated with a decrease in AY errors, no change in AY reaction time, and an increase in BX response time. Further, we posited that an increase in behavioral proactive control would accompany greater cue versus probe activity for previously identified regions in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, an increase in behavioral reactive control would be accompanied by greater probe activation in these identified brain areas.Materials and Methods: The participants were 179 community-dwelling adults aged 60–89 years who were on average, college-educated. Participants were pseudo-randomly assigned to either an active-experiencing acting intervention condition or the active control condition ; participant assignment was subject to time of enrollment. Participants in both groups were trained by theater-actor researchers with expertise in acting interventions. In contrast to the active control participants who attended a course on theater acting, the acting-intervention group was required to consistently deploy proactive and reactive control mechanisms. Both groups met two times/week for 75-min for 4 weeks. Participant brain-behavioral performance on the AX-CPT task was evaluated prior to and after this four-week period.Results: No intervention effects were found in favor of proactive control. Behavioral evidence in favor of reactive control was weak. Brain-related benefits to reactive control was illustrated by greater probe-activation in Brodmann areas 6 and 8, relative to controls and pre-intervention.Conclusion: We found some evidence for improvements in reactive control via brain measures, attributed to engagement in the acting intervention. (shrink)

The article is the first exploration of Mārganāṭyam, a new tradition in the performing arts of modern India, created from the beginning of the XXI century by an outstanding researcher of musical, theatrical and dance culture, Kalamandalam Piyal Bhattacharya and his students. It is based on the many years of the author’s personal observations, interaction, interviews and discussions with the participants of “Chidakash Kalalay. Centre of Art and Divinity”, an artistic community based on the direct transfer of knowledge and (...) skills from teacher to students, which has developed around Piyal. The features of the method of reconstruction of the ancient Indian theater, the flexible application of the legacy of the past in modern conditions are under study. Particular attention is paid to the artistic interpretation and comprehension of the Indian philosophical heritage, and above all the concepts and worldview of Nyaya and Vedanta systems, transferring them to the space of scenic images. The presented material demonstrates that an integrated approach to the artistic heritage, a metatheater, combined with individual pedagogical unfold of the personality of the artists, creates the possibility of recreating the long-vanished tradition and complex philosophical issues in a way that is well understood today, relevant and reflects the essential needs of modern creators and viewers of the Indian theater at large. (shrink)

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society’s structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure—a culture’s use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics—explains much about why, when, and (...) how theatre has transformed. (shrink)

This paper addresses a growing concern within the medical humanities community regarding the perceived need for a more empathically-focused medical curricula, and advocates for the use of creative pedagogical forms as a means to attend to issues of suffering and relationality. Drawing from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I critique the notion of empathy on the basis that it erases difference and disregards otherness. Rather, I propose that the concept of empathy may be usefully replaced with that of (...) ethical responsibility , which suggests a shared sense of humanity outside the boundaries of presumed knowledge of the other. To illustrate this argument, I theorize the importance of theater within medical education. Theater, I argue, may engender ethical responsibility in the Levinasian sense, and thus may allow learners to differently engage with the experience of the suffering other. As such, I examine Margaret Edson’s widely used play Wit as a platform for such an ethical encounter to occur. Thus, rather than working to understand the value of theater in medical education in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition, I theorize that its primacy within medical curricula arises from its ethical/relational potential , or potential to engender new forms of inter-human relationality. (shrink)

(1992). Community solidarity fees: A case study of Sabac national theatre. World Futures: Vol. 33, Culture and Development: European Experiences and Challenges A Special Research Report of the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 61-66.

In In Praise of Theatre, an interview with Alain Badiou held by Nicolas Truong, Badiou answers questions about his ideas on the value and purpose of theatre. He explains that he takes ‘real theatre’ to be theatre that consists of performances that aim at making the members of the audience to reflect critically on what they have just heard or seen and, more importantly, the possibilities that were only implied by the performance. Contrary to disciplines such (...) as philosophy, politics and literature, Badiou argues, theatre is uniquely suited for this purpose, because it takes place in a ‘here and now’ that is shared by performers and audience, which places the audience in a position to ‘grasp the relation between immanence and transcendence from the view of the idea’. In addition, it uses an indirect mode of representation, instead of a direct mode of teaching. While accepting Badiou’s claim that theatre performances form a valuable means to question social conventions by communicating and transforming subjectivity, in this article I will argue that Badiou’s enthusiasm about the possibilities of theatre lead him to exaggerate its uniqueness in relation to philosophy, politics and literature. That is to say, he stretches the differences between these disciplines too far by portraying them as opposites or even rivals. In what follows, I will show for each of the comparisons that Badiou makes between theatre and these other disciplines, that they are founded on a misunderstanding of theatre’s unique position when it comes to transforming subjectivity through communication. (shrink)

Contagion is more than an epidemiological fact. The medical usage of the term is no more and no less metaphorical than in the entire history of explanations of how beliefs circulate in social interactions. The circulation of such communicable diseases and the circulation of ideas are both material and experiential. Diseases and ideas expose the power and danger of bodies in contact, as well as the fragility and tenacity of social bonds. In the case of the theatre, various tropes (...) of contagion are to be found in both the fictional world on the stage and in many theories defining the rules of interaction between theatre audiences, fictitious characters and/or performers. In consequence, the historically changing concept of contagion has in many respects influenced how mimesis was conceived and understood. The main goal of my article is to demonstrate how the concept of contagion has changed over the last few decades and how it may influence our understanding of the idea of mimesis and participation in performative arts. This will be achieved in two steps. Firstly, I will compare the concept of contagion as the outbreak narrative that had influenced, among others, Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and the Plague with the more recent and dynamic concept of epidemic structured around the tipping point. Secondly, I will look for performative art forms with similar structure of audience responses, analyzing Mariano Pensotti’s project Sometimes I Think, I Can See You, in order to demonstrate new forms of performativity and presentation. (shrink)

Readers’ Theater is a unique vehicle for introducing ethical, cultural, and social issues in medicine to academic, professional, and community audiences. It brings alive the characters in a story in a way that silent reading or reading a story aloud cannot. Audience members experience what is, in essence, a case report acted out “on stage” rather than reading or hearing someone report on a situation second hand. RT has an immediacy about it, a compelling aspect, that makes listeners pay (...) attention and mentally participate in the action. It draws people into the story, engages them. The oral reading and subsequent open discussion combine to educate audience members about the topic of the story and the variety of ways one can interpret the story’s message. This article describes the long-standing RT program at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University and some of variations on RT that people have developed around the country. (shrink)

The flood of events rivetingthe Great Lakes Region since the late 1980s hasattracted much attention. Countries in thisregion have been in a proverbial greenhousehighlighted by the well-publicized crimesagainst humanity in Rwanda. In Burundi to date,more than 200,000 have died as victims of thepower struggle. While Burundians and theinternational community analyze the best waysto bring the country back on the developmenttrack, the primarily agrarian nation wrestleswith its new and fragile institutions. Thosenew institutions replaced elements that onceserved as a social cement (...) for the Bahutu,Batutsi, and Batwa. Resulting from thissituation are "killing fields'' instead ofgrounds for planting and harvesting. Anassessment of some root causes of the currentcrisis in Burundi can be seen by a briefdescription of some of the country's historywith conflicts. The implications of some of themajor elements at play (e.g., Burundi's civilsociety, NGOs, etc.) can be seen more clearlywith the help of this description. There arefive strategies that might help to alleviatethe civil unrest and war theaters endemic tothis country. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Examples of Civic Responsibility:What Community-Based Art Centers Teach Us about Arts EducationJessica Hoffmann Davis (bio)Introduction/QuestionThroughout the United States, beyond school walls, there struggles and soars a sprawling field of community art centers dedicated to education.1 Most frequently clustered on either coast in bustling urban communities, these centers provide arts training that enriches or exceeds what is offered in schools. They serve artists who need space (...) for work or performance, students who crave instruction and direction, and the broader community that enjoys attendant cultural enrichment. At the core, they create safe havens for arts learning that has been marginalized elsewhere.Unfettered by the demands and constraints of school administrations, these self-designed centers have been of considerable interest to arts education researchers over the last twenty years.2 Largely conceived and staffed by artists, they demonstrate artful alternatives to mainstream education: creative visions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Moreover, the positive impact these centers have had on students considered at risk across a number of variables has caught the attention of researchers looking for better ways to serve our youth.3The location of these centers beyond school walls, like their operation beyond the hours of the school day, would naturally seem to cast them as positive opportunities for extending arts learning that goes on in school. But with school art curricula scarce or in danger of elimination, supplementary options can seem threatening to school arts specialists. Administrators have regarded the opportunities that outside artists and centers provide as sufficient substitutes for a school-based course of sequential instruction in the arts. While vital funding sources encourage and sustain collaboration, a tension persists between the autonomy of outsider arts centers and the integrity [End Page 82] of insider school arts programs. For students disenfranchised from schools, the "otherness" of centers has a certain cachet. For centers unable to afford their own space, school classrooms in after-school hours offer a home base for their offerings and easy access for students. The back and forth across school walls raises opportunities and concerns that have resulted in a range of creative solutions.4 But my interest here is not in the cross-wall meeting of services, but rather in the differences in arts learning on either side of school walls. In the pages that follow, I pose the question, What can schools learn from the arts education provided in the community?In addressing this question, I first mark the differences between arts learning in schools and in the community as a need for justification versus an opportunity for demonstration. I then describe the research from which my thinking and discussion draw and offer a brief overview of the history of community art centers as inspired by and illustrative of civic responsibility. With an eye to what educators and advocates can learn from these community-based efforts, I focus next on three common objections to prioritizing the arts in our schools: value, measurement, and autonomy. Each objection is introduced from a school-based perspective and then reconsidered in light of community-based attitudes and activities.5 In conclusion, I delineate the insights derived from a consideration of community arts education as stimulus for the redirection of educational objectives and advocacy rationales for arts learning in schools.Justification vs. DemonstrationIn its struggle for recognition and place in school settings, arts education has sought justification in terms of its potential to serve the broader educational scene. We ask of classes that provide mounting skills in visual arts, music, or theater, "Yes, but what else does arts learning do? Can it improve student skills in reading, mathematics, or any other subjects that are more traditionally valued?" Such demands may seem unfair. When has math ever been defended for its ability to improve arts performance? Beyond a sense of injustice, claims for arts learning's causal impact on measurable extraneous outcomes (such as improvements in test scores in nonarts academic subjects) are at best most difficult to prove.6In community centers where art is the chosen heart of the matter, students come specifically to study the arts and to benefit from their enhancement of more generalized experience... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article describes our experience using art and theatre to engage rural communities in western Cambodia to understand malaria and support malaria control and elimination. The project was a pilot science–arts initiative to supplement existing engagement activities conducted by local authorities. In 2016, the project was conducted in 20 villages, involved 300 community members and was attended by more than 8000 people. Key health messages were to use insecticide-treated bed-nets and repellents, febrile people should attend village malaria workers, (...) and to raise awareness about the risk of forest-acquired malaria. Building on the experience and lessons learnt in the year prior, the 2017 project which was conducted in 15 villages involved 600 community members and attracted more than 12,000 people. In addition to the malaria theme, upon discussion with local health authorities, secondary theme was added to the 2017 project. We learnt the following lessons from our experience in... (shrink)

The subject of intercultural exchange is complex and demands that we keep the basic issues that shape our views of the world in mind. And one of these basic issues is what we mean by “European identity.” The ideological concerns over the norms of identity became necessarily entangled in the post-1989 interests and agendas of Europe’s various nations. So the great challenge for us as academics as well as for the policymakers in Brussels and Strasburg is to focus on these (...) dialectics. European identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed, one of the battles within it is between the advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex that is irreducible to a unified identity. In this article I explore how the theatre, in the aftermath of the Second World War, served as a laboratory for the investigation, analysis, and constuction of dramatic models that became a means of transcultural communication. As attested by the continuing success of the experimental approaches of Brecht, Grotowski, La Mama, and Suzuki, this endeavour reflected the struggle of people from different cultural backgrounds to understand and accept each other. One of the reasons the theatre continues to have the potentiality to promote transcultural integration is that it deals in concrete particulars with universal resonances. As I will demonstrate with examples from my own work in various countries, the production and directing of plays by these and other dramatists shows that it is only in the performance—by transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar, by making the habitual and customary seem strange and unexpected—that the motives, relationships, and events enclosed in the written play are released so as to stimulate the audience to re-examine their own contemporary realities. Transcultural theatre thus creates dramatic experiences that are adequate and responsive to the changing world of migration and mobility in which both practitioners and audiences actually live. As such it offers the kind of transcultural education that promotes communication and understanding and that fosters an open-eyed and open-hearted attitude to the changing realities of Europe. (shrink)

At the height of the Nazi Holocaust in 1942, children in an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto performed Rabindranath Tagore’s 1912 play Dak Ghar (The Post Office). They were in the care of Janusz Korczak, a socialist, pedia­trician, and one of the world’s first child rights advocates. The play centers on a young boy, Amal, who is confined in quarantine and on his death bed. This article attempts to understand why Korczak may have chosen Dak Ghar and how this play (...) may have resonated in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he confronts two painful questions: is there anything worse than death? And, how to prepare children for death? This essay draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of play, Han Jonas’s concept of eternity, Tagore’s expansive sense of humanity, and Korczak’s philosophy of child rights to argue the following: that in choosing a play from another time and place, Korczak empowers the children of the Warsaw orphanage to experience the radical unity of all humanity as inhabitants of this earth—and our arts as a way to transcend the boundaries of space and time. In consequence, the children may have tasted eternity through a play and memorialized in community that which would be denied by the Nazis—their deaths and, thus, their existence. (shrink)

Theatre, commonly seen as an audiovisual art, has performance at its core. Performance is mainly narrative through language, movement, dance, music, art and other forms to create an artistic image for the stage, which contains verbal and non-verbal elements. Non-verbal elements have crucial implications for theatre practice and theoretical perception. The present research investigates non-verbal performance in theatre based on semiotics and non-verbal communication theory. The study found that non-verbal performance includes (not limited to) posture, movement, gestures, (...) props, and costumes. To make a more comprehensive analysis of non-verbal performance in theatre, a mixed research method combining textual analysis and questionnaire survey to collect data was employed, comprehensively investigate non-verbal performance in theatre, and comprehensively discuss the definition, classification and characteristics of key elements of non-verbal performance in drama based on the research design of analytical study, and reveals how non-verbal performances are expressed in theatre. Then, it provides ideas for the theatre creation and education. (shrink)

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to (...) resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity. (shrink)

Chemosensory communication as a form of time-based performing art has occurred in form of ideas in literary fiction and in occasional concepts of art or entertainment in the past. The history of patents on devices for such purposes since the beginning of the 20th century is full of failures and abandoned approaches, mainly because of chemical, technical, social, or cultural misunderstandings. With the project Smeller, we started to realize an artistic performative practice of storytelling with distinct and rapid sequences of (...) scents and smells, of and on during some thirty-five years. Only since 2012 could we introduce this practice with our novel technology Smeller 2.0 in public performances and enhance its possibilities ever since. Perfumistic algorithms can now generate endless variations of olfactory signals and smells, electronically controlled, and digitally composed for collective experience on a larger scale: Osmodrama. The practical application has soon ignited collaborations of neuroscientific research and therapeutical implementation with surprising discoveries. This essay is a personal review of the genesis and emergence of Osmodrama. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, there has been an extended debate among feminists and left-wing thinkers concerned with notions of justice and equality about the relationship between ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ in contemporary politics. In this article, I examine the ways in which the issues of redistribution of resources and recognition are articulated in plays by contemporary Black and Asian women playwrights such as Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, and Zindika. I shall suggest that their theatre work, and experience of working (...) in the theatre, produce a dynamic and interdependent model of the relation between redistribution and recognition that ultimately suggests the need for recognition as the continuing primary concern of Black and Asian communities in Britain. This is evident in the plays’ contents, the theatrical forms employed by Black and Asian women playwrights (often naturalistic and issue-based), and the funding and theatre policies with which they engage. These, as I shall argue, produce tensions between the collective identities which they hail, for instance, through the appellation ‘Black playwright’, and the individual identities the playwrights seek to assert, requiring negotiations between the empowering as well as constraining demands of collective identities and the post-‘cultural diversity’ aspirations of long-term theatre politics. (shrink)

This article tells the empirical story of women from seven villages of Kwale, the most southeastern county in the Coast Province of Kenya that borders with Tanzania—Lunga Lunga, Godo, Perani, Umoja, Maasailand, Mpakani and Jirani—as they searched for community health, equity, gender equality and peace on their own terms. This article shows that creative health initiatives can be successfully used as mechanisms for peace building. Since 2010, the Nikumbuke-Health by All Means projects from the University of Madison-Wisconsin in the (...) United States, have trained 57 health promoters and 32 female actors on disease prevention and health promotion that have outreached approximately 120,000 inhabitants around the county enhancing unity in diversity, and breaking down the walls of ethnic hostilities and prejudice. Because of its low cost and high effectivity, the United Nations awarded N-HbAM[1] the 2013 Public Service Award as a model of best practice in gender, community development and sustainable wellbeing. [1] In 2013, at the time of the UNPS Award the projects were still called Nikumbuke-Health by Motorbike. The name was changed in 2018 as the projects broadened in scope and geographical location. (shrink)

I argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks deserve to be read as works of philosophy and not just used as supplements to bring order and respectability to Kierkegaard’s other writings. There are at least three specific philosophical values in Kierkegaard’s journals – three ways in which the journals create philosophy within their own pages and therefore deserve to be read as independent works of philosophy and not just as supplements to Kierkegaard’s other writing: (1) The journals demonstrate what a true (...) work of existential philosophy looks like. (2) The journals contribute to Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication. (3) The journals create new philosophical concepts. All three of these are best understood as philosophical performances or a kind of philosophical theatre. The idea that philosophy can be a kind of theatre is inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly their book What is Philosophy? I draw from Deleuze and Guattari especially in section (3) to argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals create new philosophical concepts. (shrink)

Summary Theatre offers an opportunity for communities to think with and through fiction. We come together to hear and tell stories because it is moving, both in the literal and the figurative sense: it changes us. Theories from cognitive science of embodied cognition make clear that making sense of theatre is a full-bodied affair. In this essay, I argue that we can see moments when theatre invited its audience to think in new ways by shifting theatrical conventions. (...) I explore how a contemporary production of Hamlet, Pan Pan’s production of “The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane”, brings its audience to question the stability of the self and text by altering the conventions around casting and representation. This is theatre that I may not understand in a traditional way, but this gives me a way to understand a new way of thinking about the world around me. It is theatre I can use. (shrink)

In recent years, criticism of Slavoj Žižek has intensified at a frantic pace, to the extent that he has all but been erased from the public sphere. Alongside his exclusion from dominant media-platforms such as The Guardian and the The New York Times, the denunciation of his work by the academic community has reached an excessive level, with thinkers such as Noam Chomsky seeking to undermine the empirical validity of his thought in a surprisingly personalized manner.

Theatre, commonly seen as an audiovisual art, has performance at its core. Performance is mainly narrative through language, movement, dance, music, art and other forms to create an artistic image for the stage, which contains verbal and non-verbal elements. Non-verbal elements have crucial implications for theatre practice and theoretical perception. The present research investigates non-verbal performance in theatre based on semiotics and non-verbal communication theory. The study found that non-verbal performance includes (not limited to) posture, movement, gestures, (...) props, and costumes. To make a more comprehensive analysis of non-verbal performance in theatre, a mixed research method combining textual analysis and questionnaire survey to collect data was employed, comprehensively investigate non-verbal performance in theatre, and comprehensively discuss the definition, classification and characteristics of key elements of non-verbal performance in drama based on the research design of analytical study, and reveals how non-verbal performances are expressed in theatre. Then, it provides ideas for the theatre creation and education. (shrink)

This article analyzes the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht through the lens of the theatre, most especially as it pertains to the work of actors. It explores the forces of capitalism that determine how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. Following Adorno’s reading of Marx, actors are here posited as commodities whose labor is separated from the product they create for public consumption. This commodification raises various questions: How does a market economy shape the production and consumption (...) of art? What is technology’s function in the commodification of art? What is art’s sociopolitical role and how does it apply to theatre? To address these questions I juxtapose the cultural theory of Adorno and Benjamin with Brecht’s epic theatre. This comparison exposes the ritualistic potential of the theatre to bring an audience together as a community through sharing a socially enriching event. (shrink)

This essay investigates Gadamer's hermeneutic theory and its application to theatre. Attention to Gadamer's views of theatre and performative interpretation provides a foundation to theorize a more sustainable canon. Classics that constitute a sustainable canon operate within a tradition through a community of interpretation that continually returns to interpret them anew. This structure also describes the theatrical repertoire. Several of Gadamer's central themes find easy analogues on stage: play, the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), the participation of an (...) audience in the fusion of horizons, and art's making present continuity the past. Gadamer provides a framework for understanding the work of interpretation of a dramatic text as a shared participatory event. In particular, Gadamer's hermeneutic theory can make sense of the how performance history makes discoveries that "sticks" to a script, particularly as when and how it enters and influences the canon. Gadamer's hermeneutics help to interpret how innovative performance choices and stage spectacle are part of a play's meaning; these interpretive interventions in drama's reception history are significant and not simply ornamentation to some "truth of the play" accessed only via the reenactment of the original compositional context. Occasional reparative interpretations of the canon, in turn, help to sustain the community. (shrink)

This creative intervention draws on our recent work investigating the lived experiences of poor rural communities in Bolivia’s Chiquitania, a region deeply affected by wildfires in recent years. We share learning and materials from our project, Playing with Fire, situated at the interface of and combining Boal’s model of Forum Theatre and social science research. The aim and hope of the project were to use Forum Theatre to open up space for dialogue on the complex and entangled gendered, (...) social and cultural politics of wildfires. (shrink)

Over the past 30 years, the Australian state of Victoria has made numerous reforms to a set of jury directions purporting to address concerns that rape trials do not adequately respond to the reality of sexual offending in the community. Building on work identifying the predominant narratives mobilised in rape trials, in this article we consider whether the way in which a jury consumes information during a trial explains why the jury directions, positioned and utilised as they are, appear (...) to have been inadequate to the task of enabling juries to re-imagine evidence through alternative narrative frameworks. (shrink)

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. "The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics" explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid (...) development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels. (shrink)

Science and theatre are generally thought to share no common cognitive ground for the simple reason that the former appeals to the intellect, whereas the latter appeals to the emotions. Contrary to this view, I claim that like scientific texts, theatrical texts evince a cognitive intent and that, despite obvious differences, both types show similarities on three cognitive levels: (a) the use of equivalent systems of representation and communication; (b) the operation of a mode of thinking; and (c) the (...) embodiment of a rhetorical structure. (shrink)

In Worldly ShakespeareRichard Wilson proposes that the universalism proclaimed in the name of Shakespeare's playhouse was tempered by his own worldliness, the performative idea that runs through his plays, that if 'All the world's a stage', then 'all the men and women in it' are 'merely players'. Situating this playacting in the context of current concerns about the difference between globalization and mondialisation, the book considers how this drama offers itself as a model for a planet governed not according to (...) universal toleration, but the right to offend: 'But with good will'. For when he asks us to think we 'have but slumbered' throughout his offensive plays, Wilson suggests, Shakespeare is presenting a drama without catharsis, which anticipates post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Zizek, who insist the essence of democracy is dissent, and 'the presence of two worlds in one'. Living out his scenario of the guest who destroys the host, by welcoming the religious terrorist, paranoid queen, veiled woman, papist diehard, or puritan fundamentalist into his play-world, Worldly Shakespeareconcludes, the dramatist instead provides a pretext for our globalized communities in a time of Facebook and fatwa, as we also come to depend on the right to offend 'with our good will'. (shrink)

Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture. Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration. The present, rich collection shows how allegory, (...) incorporating the soaring of the spirit, offers highlights for culture, with its fluctuations and transformation. This collective effort, rich in ideas and intuitions and covering a vast range of cultural manifestations, is a pioneering work, retrieving the vision of the exalted human spirit, bringing together literature, theatre, music and painting in a variety of revealing perspectives. The authors include: M. Kronegger, Ch. Raffini, J. Smith, J.B. Williamson, H. Ross, M.F. Wagner, F. Divorne, L. Oppenheim, D.K. Heckerl, N. Campi de Castro, P. Saurez Pascual, M. Alfaro Amieiro, H. Fletcher Thompson, R.J. Wilson III, and A. Stensaas. For specialists, students and workers in philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetic phenomenologists and historians of art. (shrink)

Diogenes, Ahead of Print. The aim of this study is to elucidate the genesis of communality in the urban street. Although in the modern world cities have long been seen as research laboratories, in today’s context of globalization they are becoming more radical and dynamic; they are becoming experimental theatres of social change. Since the end of the twentieth century, the political and economic reorganization of the world order is producing dramatic changes in various societies throughout the globe. This is (...) bringing about changes which tend to standardize society and atomize individual subjects. These changes are seemingly connected, but they do exist alone, separately. In this complex situation, we are confronted with the fundamental question, how can people construct communality transcending differences among them? The present study looks for an answer to this question, paying special attention to collective violence in the urban street, where ‘emergent but real’ norms are constructed among the rioters and the communality genesis mechanism is activated. In order to make a case for this urban communality, the analysis focuses on events in the streets of Nairobi at the time of the Second Liberation of 1990s and during the Post-Election Violence of 2007–2008. People with different political and religious affiliation and ethnic identity were involved in violent urban riots. They were originally strangers, but they generated new social order and norms. In the street, they constructed and shared a provisional communality, which was emergent and fluid but also real and firm. (shrink)

For Deleuze, the creation and conveyance of meaning requires not a strict fidelity to an original idea, message or image but rather its deformation. The forces causing such disfigurations operate in gesture, vocalisation and text, with one level sometimes disrupting the others. Among them, gesture plays an especially important role, given Deleuze’s attention to bodily experience. He locates it in theatre, painting and cinema, particularly in the works of Carmelo Bene, Francis Bacon and Jerry Lewis. In these cases, instead (...) of conveying a recognisable message, a deformative gesture sends a shock wave that scrambles normal meaning assignments and codings. Yet, although gesture is a main channel for these communication disruptive forces, their origin may lie elsewhere, namely, in a ‘pick-up’ of influences resulting from an inter-affective encounter between heterogeneous bodies. (shrink)

Issues of race have traditionally been addressed in medical school curricula in a didactic manner. However, medical school curricula often lack adequate opportunity for the application of learning material relating to race and culture. When confronted with acts of racism in clinical settings, students are left unprepared to respond appropriately and effectively. Forum Theatre offers a dynamic platform by which participants are empowered to actively engage with and become part of the performance. When used in an educational context, Forum (...) Theatre can be a powerful tool for students to interact with a wide variety of social issues. This paper describes the process by which one medical school designed a workshop in the Forum Theatre style to equip students to respond to racism observed in clinical settings. Based on real student experiences, the Responding to Racism in the Clinical Setting workshop was designed to give students an opportunity to combine cultural humility, communication theory and conflict resolution skills in order to prepare for interactions in clinical stages of medical education. As a result of workshop evaluations, surveys, and written reflections, the authors propose that Forum Theatre is a novel teaching modality for incorporating issues of race and culture into medical curriculum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005) 12-19 [Access article in PDF] Seeking the Aesthetic in Creative Drama and Theatre for Young Audiences Nellie McCaslin Introduction Is an aesthetic experience ever achieved in a creative drama class or in attending a performance of a children's play? If it is, how do I know and how can it be achieved? This is a question to which I have given (...) much thought and in so doing have been flooded with memories of my own passion for theatre in all its forms, first as a child and years later as a teacher. These memories have shaped my perception of the aesthetic presence, elusive but powerful, which comes in its own way and in its own time. The following is an account of revisiting those memories in the light of today's practices and objectives. The result is not a scholarly piece or approach to the question but simply a record of one person's journey through the theatre arts as she experienced it at a particular point in time, when the pedagogy and the terminology of today were nonexistent, or at least were not generally known. Nor, I might add, was the question.From that journey through time, I have reached a few tentative convictions. First among them is that the most important element in teaching creative drama or producing children's plays is the one too often marginalized by practitioners today in their pursuit of practical ends and contemporary issue-oriented scripts.1 It is the aesthetic. Is theatre an art form worth studying in its own right or is it an educational tool, appealing to administrators and producers because it is effective? I believe that it is an art and should be taught as an art form first and foremost, but that skillfully done, it can accomplish both objectives. The grey area between art and education is difficult for the inexperienced teacher to negotiate without the loss of one goal or the other. It is the intent that charts the course. [End Page 12] Early Recollections What was it that first drew me to the theatre? Was it the play? The players? Or the combined skills of all who were involved in the production whether it was a professional company in a theatre downtown; a puppet show at a community center; "dramatics" in the classroom, when the teacher allowed us to "act out" a history lesson or favorite story; or an assembly program put on by the eighth grade in the school auditorium? To me, they were all theatre, and theatre in whatever form it took was magic. To us, theatre was real, regardless of the performers or the venue. Even the puppets ceased to be inanimate figures in the hands of an artist who shared his belief in their reality with his young audiences. Indeed, the puppets assumed human proportions before our eyes and have remained so in my memory ever since. Was this not just as much of an aesthetic experience for us, the viewers, as the performance of living actors? I believe that it was, although at the age of eight I had never heard the word "aesthetic" or stopped to analyze my reactions.The reason, among others, for my lack of discrimination as a child was the fact that in America at that time no differentiation was made between what we did and what we saw, never mind who did it. There was a clear distinction between the amateur and the professional; it didn't concern us. We flocked to the few shows, both amateur and professional, deemed appropriate for children, and we made up shows of our own in our own backyards. Our shows were improvised (another term we didn't know then), but even minus a script, it was still theatre because we believed in it and so did the little ones on our block who were the audience.It was Winifred Ward, an American pioneer in the field, writing a few years later, who was to distinguish between process and product... (shrink)

Making reference to Luce Irigaray’s definitions of mimesis and mimicry, and the ways in which these concepts respectively reinforce and challenge the phallogocentric order, this article investigates the representation of the Troubles in the play Somewhere over the Balcony by Charabanc—a pioneering all-female theatre company which operated in Belfast in the 1980s and early 1990s. The article discusses the achievement of the company in the local context and offers a reading of Somewhere over the Balcony, Charabanc’s 1987 play which (...) depicts the lives of underprivileged working-class Catholic women in the infamous Divis Flats in Belfast. Showing the protagonists’ struggle with the everyday reality of sectarianism in Northern Ireland, it celebrates female creativity and jouissance. The article argues that the characters challenge the masculinist order by means of mimicry. Irigaray defines this strategy as a deliberate assumption of prescribed female roles, which involves a playful attitude to “mimesis imposed”—in other words, to the programmed repetition of socially sanctioned patterns. Mimicry, as well as other productive strategies help the female characters in the play to transform the balconies of their flats into an area of creativity and empowerment, which challenges binary thinking about the division into private and public space. Such a geopolitical reading of the play corresponds to the artistic agenda of the company, communicated by its very name. It also sheds light on Charabanc’s attempt to create a more inclusive and varied cultural space that would reach beyond gender, sectarian, and class divides in Northern Ireland. (shrink)