Browsing by Subject "Modern drama"
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Item Aesthetic activism : the poetics of stage direction in the theaters of Apollinaire, Artaud, and Genet(2018-04-30) Swankie, Ryan James; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Picherit, Hervé; Cauvin, Jean-Pierre; Kornhaber, DavidThis dissertation explores textual stage directions (didascalie) in selected works of twentieth-century French drama, specifically, Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), Antonin Artaud's Les Cenci (1935), and Jean Genet's Le Balcon (1956). With close readings framed by current scholarship, I determine how theatrical properties of sound, appearance and gesture work to create dynamics between the modes of stage direction and performed dialogue. I argue that the authors' stage directions establish a poetics that undermine discourses of power voiced by characters who are figures of authority: hero, husband, father, judge, etc. The poetics of stage direction in these dramas are purposeful to challenge traditional power structures, provoke sociopolitical commentary, and transform a community. I define their poetic systems within the dramas as 'aesthetic activism,' that is the disruption of traditional forms of representation as a means of sociopolitical expression. I evaluate the textual dynamics between didascalic and dialogic modes, that results in the disruption of representation, alongside Jacques Rancière's concepts of 'mute speech' and 'aesthetic regime.' In doing so, I determine how the innovation of a 'mute but not silent' stage direction poetics work with discourses of power related to contemporary social contexts. Through manipulating the communicative system of stage direction--that seeks articulation between playwright and reader concerning material conditions and didactic commands--each author creates a space of interaction through work. This is purposeful to challenge the reader and make them question how power functions within the drama, as well as outside the text, off the stage, and in the real world. Aesthetic activism, as a theoretical approach to artistic forms, offers a multidisciplinary payoff for studies in aesthetics, literature, history, and activism. Moreover, mute speech poetics, like those of stage direction, offer contemporary directors, poets, scholars, and performers alternative approaches to social commentary within and around textual and discursive modes.Item Toward a theatre of empathy : violence in the plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Kane, and Marina Carr(2017-05) Massie, Courtney Alimine; Kornhaber, David, 1979-; Loehlin, James; Wojciehowski, Hannah; Carlson, Andrew“How and why do we represent violence onstage? This question perennially resurfaces for theatre practitioners and scholars alike. The choices that production teams make when staging violence reflect those teams’ ideological investments and affect spectators’ reception of a given performance. Various Western theatrical forms, from Greek tragedy to Jacobean revenge drama to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, adhere to specific conventions that telegraph the intent and desired impact of their attendant traditions’ representations of violence. In more recent years, as contemporary playwrights have engaged with these traditions, they have adapted or revised their predecessors’ methods of representing violence. This dissertation examines representations of violence in works by three such playwrights: Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Kane, and Marina Carr. These three dramatists—all women and all active on the London stage in the final two decades of the twentieth century—stage violence unflinchingly yet thoughtfully, in ways that merit contemplation of the dramaturgical purposes and implications of such representations. Extant criticism discusses how Wertenbaker, Kane, and Carr each stage violence, but rarely do scholars discuss the three playwrights together. Placing Wertenbaker, Kane, and Carr in conversation, this dissertation argues, reveals common dramaturgical goals that underpin their representations of violence. Each playwright adapts classical source material for contemporary purposes, and in doing so, calls attention to systemic social problems that enable the violence their plays depict. Though the playwrights’ methods of staging violence are unique, they all aim to enable spectator recognition of those systemic social issues through their representations of violence. Moreover, that recognition, as well as the processes of spectatorship that facilitate it, allows spectators to develop empathy for those harmed by systemic injustice—including victims of violence. Reading these playwrights’ works through theories of gender, spectatorship, and empathy, this dissertation articulates a theatrical practice designed to unsettle spectators, yet to do so within a controlled environment that allows for reflection on the circumstances that produce that unsettlement. These processes of unsettlement and reflection create space for the development of an empathy born from the recognition of difference.