contemporary theatre essay

The German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English

JCDE: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

JCDE is an international journal published by De Gruyter with CDE.

The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English focuses on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. It renegotiates the understanding of contemporary aesthetics of drama and theatre by treating dramatic texts of the last fifty years. The peer-reviewed journal publishes essays that engage in close readings of plays and also touch upon historical, political, formal, theoretical and methodological aspects of contemporary drama, theatre, and performance.

JCDE appears twice a year: the first issue is based on the annual international conferences held by CDE, the second issue invites individual essays on contemporary theatre and drama in English. The journal also contains a review section.

Editors : Anette Pankratz (Bochum, Editor in Chief), Chris Megson (London), Kerstin Schmidt (Munich), Merle Tönnies (Paderborn, Reviews), Clare Wallace (Prague)

Advisory Board : Mireia Aragay (Barcelona), Ute Berns (Hamburg), John Bull (Reading), Johan Callens (Brussels), Jill S. Dolan (Princeton), Tobias Döring (Munich), Lynette Goddard (London), Nicholas Grene (Dublin), Stephen L. Lacey (Glamorgan), Martin Middeke (Augsburg, Founding Editor), Deirdre Osborne (London), Dan Rebellato (London), Anthony Roche (Dublin), Annette J. Saddik (New York), Elizabeth Sakellaridou (Thessaloniki), Aleks Sierz (London)

Publisher : De Gruyter (Berlin/Boston)

Essays should be no longer than 8,000 words (including notes and bibliography) and should be formatted according to MLA style (7th edition). Please also refer to JCDE’s stylesheet .

Essay manuscripts should be sent to the editor-in-chief , suggestions for reviews to the reviews editor .

2024, 12.1 (May): Theater and Community . Eds. Johanna Hartmann, Ilka Saal. [ table of contents, online access ]

2023, 11.2 (November): From Page to Stage . Eds. Kerstin Schmidt, Julia Rössler. [ table of contents, online access ]

2023, 11.1 (May): Theatre and the City . Eds. Cyrielle Garson, Xavier Lemoine, Anna Street. [ table of contents, online access ].

2022, 10.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2022, 10.1 (May): Critical Theatre Ecologies. Eds. Martin Middeke, Martin Riedelsheimer. [table of contents, online access]

2021, 9.2 (October): [table of contents, online access] .

2021, 9.1 (May): Performing the Future. Eds. Anette Pankratz, Merle Tönnies. [table of contents, online access]

2020, 8.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2020, 8.1 (May): Theater of Crisis: Contemporary Aesthetic / Responses to a Cross-Sectional Condition. Guest eds. Nassim Winnie Balestrini, Leopold Lippert, Maria Löschnigg. [table of contents, online access]

2019, 7.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2019, 7.1 (May): Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama and Performance . Guest eds. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, James McKenzie, Daniel Schäbler. [table of contents, online access] .

2018, 6.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2018, 6.1 (April): Nation, Nationhood and Theatre . Guest ed. John Bull. [table of contents, online access] .

2017, 5.2 (October): [table of contents, online access] .

2017, 5.1 (April): Theatre and Mobility . Guest eds. Kerstin Schmidt, Nathalie Aghoro. [table of contents, online access] .

2016, 4.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2016, 4.1 (May): Theatre and Spectatorship . Guest eds. Mireia Aragay, Enric Monforte. [table of contents, online access] .

2015, 3.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2015, 3.1 (May): Theatre and History . Guest ed. Ute Berns. [table of contents, online access] .

2014, 2.2 (December): [table of contents, online access] .

2014, 2.1 (May): Theatre as Political Intervention . Guest eds. Ondřey Pilný, Clare Wallace. [table of contents, online access]

2013, 1.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2013, 1.1 (May): Bodies on Stage . Guest eds. Anette Pankratz, Ariane de Waal. [table of contents, online access]

Contemporary Theatre Review

Contemporary Theatre Review is an international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Encompassing a wide variety of theatre forms, from new playwrights and devisors to theatres of movement, image and other forms of physical expression, from new acting methods to music theatre, live art and multi-media production work, the journal encourages contributions on physical theatre, opera, dance, design and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the physical and the visual arts.

We aim to publish essays that face the challenge of finding innovative critical approaches to match artistic experimentation, and to encourage scholarly work that transcends established categories of academic practice. This may involve a focus on productions that bring together different artistic traditions, or a consideration of how theatre engages with social and political realities, or an engagement with the format of the academic essay in a bid to reflect the performance being analysed. The journal examines trends in contemporary theatre and performance, and seeks to explore how theatrical vocabularies are shifting to accommodate and reflect global and local cultures.

As well as research articles, the journal publishes book reviews, and makes space for production notes, designs, manifestos and interviews by emergent and established theatre-makers, which are collected in a Documents section. Meanwhile the journal’s Backpages section strives for a greater degree of immediate, topical engagement than is usual in academic drama publishing, and aims to present a more expansive view of theatre and performance than is usually offered in general review-based print and digital media. The journal’s website offers online Interventions , responding to current developments in the field and extending discussions from the print journal through a variety of writing formats and multimedia. Further information on the scope of the journal can be found here.

Contemporary Theatre Review is edited and published with the support of Queen Mary University of London. The journal is published quarterly by Routledge Journals, an imprint of Taylor & Francis.

Peer Review Policy: All research articles published in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by at least two anonymous referees.

Submissions for the journal

We accept submissions for the print journal by online submission through ScholarOne Manuscripts: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gctr . Please read the guide for ScholarOne authors before making a submission. You can also find specific guidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to Contemporary Theatre Review on the Taylor & Francis website, and more general support is offered by Taylor & Francis’s Author Services website .

Editorial board

Editors David Calder, University of Manchester, UK ( Book Reviews ) Broderick Chow, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London ( Interventions ) Maria M. Delgado, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK Maggie B. Gale, University of Manchester, UK Bryce Lease, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Caridad Svich, dramatist and scholar, USA ( Backpages ) Sarah Thomasson, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ

Consultant Editor Aoife Monks, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Editorial Assistant Clio Unger, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK James Rowson, University of Essex, UK

Editorial Associates Paul Allain, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK Len Berkman, Smith College, USA Peter Boenisch, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK Stephen J. Bottoms, University of Manchester, UK Marvin Carlson, City University of New York, USA Jill Dolan, Princeton University, USA Jen Harvie, Queen Mary University of London, UK Nadine Holdsworth, University of Warwick, UK Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London, UK Patrick Lonergan, National University of Ireland, Galway Paul Rae, University of Melbourne, Australia Dan Rebellato, Royal Holloway University of London, UK Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Philippines Joanne Tompkins, University of Queensland, Australia W. B. Worthen, Columbia University, USA

Advisory Board Khalid Amine, Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Morocco Sarah Bay-Cheng, Bowdoin College, USA Jacqueline Bolton, University of Lincoln, UK Mateusz Borowski, Jagiellonian University, Poland Gavin Butt, Northumbria University, UK Michelle Liu Carriger, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Kate Dorney, University of Manchester, UK Jennifer Doyle, University of California Riverside, USA Bishnupriya Dutt, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Stephen Farrier, University of London, UK Karen Fricker, Brock University, Canada Jean Graham-Jones, City University of New York, USA Milena Grass Kleiner, Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile Stephen Greer, University of Glasgow, UK Deirdre Heddon, University of Glasgow, UK Amelia Jones, University of Southern California, USA Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency, UK Joe Kelleher, University of Roehampton, UK Ric Knowles, University of Guelph, Canada Tavia Nyong’o, Yale University, USA Mark Ravenhill, playwright, UK Alan Read, King’s College London, UK Heike Roms, University of Exeter, UK Graham Saunders, University of Birmingham, UK Lara Shalson, King’s College London, UK

Interventions editorial team

Broderick Chow, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Sharanya Murali, Brunel University London, UK Ella Parry-Davies, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK Bella Poynton, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA Stefanie Sachsenmaier, Middlesex University, UK Azadeh Sharifi, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany Liyang Xia, Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Norway

Interventions was initially conceived and edited by Theron Schmidt. Previous editors have been Adam Alston, Elyssa Livergant, Johanna Linsley. Aneta Mancewicz, and Eleanor Roberts.

Mimesis Journal

Scritture della performance

Home Issues 2, 2 Attori del XXI secolo - Le nuove ... Contemporary theatre in the Phili...

Contemporary theatre in the Philippines

The Filipino contemporary culture (in this case also theatre) can be seen as a great example for anyone who would like to speak about the postcolonial identity of the nation. The Philippines – because of the difficult and complex history of the country – cannot be con-sidered in a binary differentiation: “Asian” vs. “Western”. Moreover, we should not forget that this country – according to Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco in Situating Philippine Theatricality in Asia  – «is not only an amalgamation of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial cultures». There is no point in calling for the “authenticity” or the “pureness” of the postcolonial theatre forms (and postcolonial sacral performances), or in the accusation of being “polluted” by foreign influence, as long as the major aim for the Filipino theatre makers is to redefine their own artistic identity. In this article I proposed the distinction between the group identity and the individual identity, being aware of the fact that both of them stay in a constant dependency and each of them negotiates its own importance. If the theatre group is more concerned about social and/or political issues, the individual identity of an actor is not any more so easy to achieve. In the same time, even if we discuss the “common good”, the artistic freedom does not have to be limited. However, we may observe similar situations in other postcolonial countries, I do believe that the Filipino case – because of its double colonial identity – deserves particular attention.

Index terms

Keywords: .

1 The culture of the Philippines, an island country in the South-East Asia, represents a huge range of very outstanding and fascinating traditions. Nevertheless, for anyone who would like to discuss the issue of the Filipino contemporary theatre, the difficult and very complicated postcolonial history of the country appears as one of the main challenges. The Philippines were first colonized by Spain (1565-1898) and later (in the 20 th century) by the USA. People in the Philippines used to say that they had spent 350 years in the convent and 50 years in Hollywood. But as long as we can speak about a strong influence, which both of those countries had on the Filipino nation and culture, we cannot forget that we can never speak about the entire removal of local traditions and aesthetics.

1 It is very popular to write about “Spanish tradition” vs. “American influence”. This kind of divisi (...)

2 Most scholars (both in the Philippines and in foreign countries), who try to describe Philippine theatre, divide those dramas and performances into three groups: the indigenous theatre, the theatre based/founded on Spanish colonization, and the theatre influenced (in the 20 th century) by the Americans. 1

3 I would like to propose in this article a different perspective, a discussion on two kinds of Philippine theatre identities: the first one, the group identity (national, social, political etc.), and the second one, the individual identity (of one actor/one particular performance group), where all of those three kinds of theatre traditions exist. I do believe there is plenty of tensions between the group identity and the individual identity, and each must be seen as the important element of the second one.

4 This essay does not tend to be a brief introduction, a full guide through Filipino §theatre traditions. It should be rather seen as another voice in a wide discussion about the state of contemporary theatre in the Philippines, the theatre of a country which shares with many others the experience of being postcolonial, but in the same time it keeps its uniqueness and must be considered under its own particular history.

5 However, it should be admitted that this research has been made by a Polish theatre scholar, who was raised up in a different social and cultural environment (not in the Philippines) and who tried to understand a different theatre reality and tradition, being always aware of her “alien” perspective.

6 Moreover, in this article the term “theatre” will not only refer to particular plays staged in official theatre buildings in the Philippines. I would rather prefer to speak about the “theatricality”, the notion of culture shown by the theatre pieces.

1. What does it mean “the Filipino theatre”?

7 One of the most difficult questions is how the “actor” is categorized and understood in the context of Philippine theatre. Considering the fact that the Philippine nation still needs to deal with its postcolonial identity, terms, such as “theatre” or “actor”, based on the Western cultural tradition, cannot be easily taken for granted.

8 In the postcolonial reality it is impossible to distinct the “original tradition” from the one “influenced” by foreign cultures. The postcoloniality might preconceive that particular tradition is a kind of amalgamation, where original roots have been changed and influenced under hundred years of foreign colonial rules. Then, after the process of decolonization, identity must be re-established and rebuilt on the new foundation, where even the most simple question, such as «what our past does contain?», may provoke particular problems.

9 James F. Kenny in Tagalog Movies and Identity. Portrayals of the Filipino Self focuses on the issue of Filipino identity in the context of the cinema. His article shows how the fact of being a postcolonial nation projects particular questions about the self-identity:

2 James K. Fenny, Tagalog Movies and Identity. Portrayals of the Filipino Self , «The Humanities Bulle (...) Filipino academics and critics often speak of the need to project Filipino values and culture in their popular media. They argue that it is the most popular of these media, television and the cinema, which have been most dominated by western produced programs and films and by locally produced imitations of these. However, in this post colonial climate most Filipinos’ sense of a “truly” Filipino self remains dubious at best and many have found the task of self-discovery elusive. The problem may indeed be that after four hundred years of domination the cultural conceptions and values of their former colonizers have become inextricably enmeshed in the national psyche. In a sense Philippine recorded history and nationhood began with its colonizers. This is not to say that a Filipino self does not exist or will not emerge as a mature, independent entity in the future, but only that its representations in the film medium must be viewed in light of its colonial past. 2

3 According to Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, who quotes Nicanor G. Tiongson’s seminal essay What is Philip (...)

10 We can find similar approaches when we try to speak about postcolonial Filipino theatre, where the inner negotiation of being a (post)colonial country is still vivid. However, this kind of questioning the “postcolonial identity” assumes that the contemporary culture might be seen as the “authentic” one or, on the other hand, “polluted” by foreign influences. 3

11 I personally believe, that any kind of “searching for the authenticity” is a very tricky attitude, especially in the postcolonial (and highly globalized) world, where many traditions interfere. To rise up a question, if something is “authentic” or “polluted”, is supposed to mean, that someone is able to set up the intransgressible features of a particular culture.

4 A good example in this case might be the discussion on many websites, e.g.: http://ask.metafilter.c (...)

12 A good example of how the postcolonial “inheritance” affects today the culture of the Philippines can be found in the issue of mestizo . Anyone who lived (even for a short period of time) in the Philippines might have caught a glimpse of a particular tendency. Most of the famous Filipinos – especially actors who work in television productions (the “Pilipino stars”) – tend to have a particular appearance. What is the most coveted is the fair skin. On the market there is a whole range of cosmetic products – soaps, creams, make-up foundation – which make the skin brighter. However, the desire to look as mestizo / mestiza should be seen in the contemporary context rather than as a cultural tendency. A similar trend can be observed e.g. in Europe, even if Europeans behave in a quite opposite way, most of the people try to be as much suntanned as possible. Nevertheless, one should not forget that the roots of mestizo appearance are traced back to the Spanish colonial caste system, related to i.a. taxation purposes. Since the Philippines won the independence from Spain, all the citizens started to be called “Filipino”, and any racial differentiation became officially forbidden. What surprises even more, is the fact that we may find people, who think that their “ mestizo look” can destine their artistic career per se. 4

13 Even though one would like to distinguish the original “Philippine-ness” or “Filipino self”, or to find out “the Filipino roots”, it should not been forgotten that every culture is shaped in a long-time process; it is not an artefact, a “monument” – once designed and set up – but it is always performed by a particular group of people, in an intensively changed and vivid process, very responsive to social, political and economic tensions.

5 Ferdinand Marcos was the President of the Philippines (1965-1986). He was famous for his anti-Japan (...)
6 Cfr. Kenton J. Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898-1916. An Inquiry into the A (...)

14 The second half of the 20 th century (especially after the fall of Marcos government in 1986) 5 was the time when many Philippine scholars and artists started to ask about their national identity. After several centuries of being dominated and ruled by Spanish, and later American colonizers, who not only tried to set up their own religion as the major one (with Spain Catholicism, with the USA mostly Protestantism), 6 or some forms of culture expressions (e.g. Spain introduced theatre forms like i.a. sarsuela , the USA actors’ style mostly shaped in Hollywood), but first of all: the language and the educational system. That is why there is no simple answer for the question if the Philippine culture should been seen more as the “Asian” or more as the “Western” one.

15 Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco’s article Situating Philippine Theatricality in Asia. A Critique on the Asian-ness/Philippine-ness of Philippine Theatre(s) is, in my personal opinion, one of the most important voices in the contemporary discussion about the identity of Filipino theatre. Tiatco shows that the binary system – Asian vs. Western tradition – is a cul-de-sac for anyone, who would like to analyse and make a research on the theatre tradition in the Philippines. If one considers Filipino theatre as the “Asian”, he/she assumes that “Asian culture” is a homogenized, essential form, that culture of e.g. the Philippines and Iraq belongs to the same aesthetic system. According to Tiatco:

7 Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, Situating Philippine Theatricality … cit. p. 142. the theoretical discourse must not be based on a construction of a Philippine theatre identity or the reconstruction of a Philippine theatre identity but on the affirmation of Philippine theatre identities. As language appears to be political, “Theatres in Asia” I guess is more apt in the nature of this discourse or the “theatres in the Philippines” in the case of the Philippines. 7

16 Personally I believe that the plural form, proposed in Situating Philippine Theatricality in Asia. A Critique on the Asian-ness/Philippine-ness of Philippine Theatre(s) , sheds new light on the issue of Filipino postcolonial identity. The fact of being colonized in the past cannot be seen as the reason to perceive the country’s culture a less “Filipino” nowadays. The requirement of being – so called authentic and pure (in this meaning to choose the “Philippine-ness” instead of the “Philippine-nesses”) – occludes the artistic freedom of self-expression and the independence of a particular artist.

2. Sacral performances and the question of the performer’s individualism

8 I decided to focus mostly on Catholic sacral performances, because of my personal experience, acqui (...)

9 Barangay is a district or a village, the smallest administrative division.

17 In the Philippines one may find a long and very diverse tradition of cultivating sacral performances. Especially Christmas and the Holy Week, of course for the Christian communities, 8 is the most important time within the year, when the majority of inhabitants of particular barangay 9 or town work together to cultivate special, religious and sacral dedicated, theatre forms.

18 However, theatre forms like the Passion play re-enactment, or the pabasa (reading/chanting of the Passion) might be considered as the “inheritance” of Spanish colonization, we should not forget about its postcolonial identity, so also its inner diversity and the tension of the “Philippine-nesses” included.

19 In my personal opinion, one of the most important foundation for Filipino society is the need for solidarity and cooperation in micro and macro-communities. The role of the family, as well as any other kind of community, is visible both in everyday life and in any sort of extraordinary celebration. Of course, I do not claim that in Filipino society there is no space left for individualism, but in this case, I would like to emphasize the importance of the community notion.

20 Besides many other reasons, those who prepare and who participate in sacral performances try to express their religious commitment and to follow the tradition, which bond together a particular community. As long as one of the main features of the tradition is its inner resistance for too precipitate changes, it stays alive only when it responses to the present reality. In this meaning, sacral performances have been constantly changing and their display has been always negotiated within the community.

10 I had the chance to participate in both of them during the Holy Week in 2009 and 2011.

11 In this context the term “performer” or “doer” should be understood in the meaning proposed e.g. by (...)

21 I would like to describe also two examples of Filipino sacral performances, (both of them can be considered as postcolonial, as a result of Spanish Christianisation), 10 where the individual identity of the performer/actor struggles with the group identity. But before I elaborate this issue, it must be underlined that, although particular items (costumes, a light-set, often a scenery) used in sacral performances refer to the theatre tradition, we should be aware, that the “doer”/“performer” 11 cannot be easily considered just as the theatre “actor”. Sacral performances refer to religious rituals and the religious vow, to the sacral sphere of “communication” with God. The theatre settings should be rather seen as the medium, the tool to express the religious involvement of a particular person or the whole community.

12 In every region it may be performed on a different day during Semana Santa .

22 The Catholic ritual of pabasa is the chanting/reading of life, passion, death and resurrection of Christ, which take place during the Holy Week. 12 Most of the time it is organised by local religious organizations, performed either by two chanters or two groups of chanters. As long as it is assumed as a group activity, it should be considered by every member as his/her personal vow. Even though it is an activity of the whole community, in some cases we can find out that it turns into a kind of competition for the performers. Each performer tries to create a piece of art, not only for God, but also for the whole community.

13 Cfr. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20090407-198285/Pabasa-is-for-medit (...)

23 Moreover, especially in recent years, people try to change the old tradition and to make it more suitable for the younger generation. One of the most curious examples is the rap version of performing the pabasa . 13

14 Cfr. Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, Amihan Bonifacio-Ramolete, Cutud’s Ritual of Nailing on the Cross: Pe (...)

24 Another case is the sinakulo (named also cenakulo or senákulo ), a Filipino traditional Passion play, performed in the majority of Catholic communities during the Semana Santa (the Holy Week). In 1955, in San Fernando Cutud (Pampanga province), Ricardo Navarro (often called also Tatang Temyong) wrote his own version of the Passion play, Via Crucis o Passion y Muerte . This drama became for the local community a foundation for a performance, in which one can participate also today. However, in 1961 Navarro decided to intensify his panata (the religious vow) by performing during the sinakulo the self-flagellation ( pamagdarame ). The following year, Tatang Temyong became the first Filipino who crucified himself and in the next decades he has found many followers. On every Good Friday this little town in Pampanga is crowded by people (Filipinos, as well as foreign tourists) who would like to participate in (or just watch) the performance of the self-flagellators, sinakulo , and people being crucified in Kalbaryo . 14

25 The decision to deepen the religious vow may be considered as the transgression of the tradition. The personal choice of Ricardo Navarro, however negotiated within the community, has completely changed the way of thinking how the Good Friday is supposed to be celebrated.

3. Social and political commitment

26 The 20 th century in the Philippines has been strongly marked by political events. It was the time of the fight for national independence and in the same way the beginning of contemporary discussion on postcolonial Filipino identity. The fight did not only concern the decolonization process (from Spain and later from USA), but also more domestic problems, e.g. how the country and the nation should be leaded after the overthrow of Marcos’ rule.

27 Among many other scholars, Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo points out that the second half of 20 th century for the Filipino culture was the time of being strongly inspired by the theatre tradition of Bertold Brecht (and his concept of Lehrstücke ) and Augusto Boal ( Theatre of the Oppressed ). However, the biggest input, I would argue, should be rather seen in the intellectual inspiration, in the new way of thinking about theatre as an important tool in the fight for political and social changes.

28 In my personal opinion, the most significant changes should not be easily considered just as a result of staging particular plays e.g. of Brecht (Philippine Educational Theater Association’s translations of The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Life of Galileo ), but rather as the effect of a long-time process of adaptation, reinterpretation and application of foreign theatre concepts in the field of a local theatre. According to Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo:

15 Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo, Philippine Political Theater: 1946-1985 , «Philippine Studies», 4 1994 (...) the multidimensional language of the theater is used [in the 1960s] to improvise oppressive situations they find themselves in and search for alternatives. This way, they become aware of the manifestations of an unjust social order and are able to articulate a longing for justice and faith in change. Theater then serves as a creative platform of social issues and a harbinger of hope. 15

29 But if the main reason to create a political theatre is the social change, is there any space left for the actor to focus on his/her own identity? That means, what is more important in the political theatre, the individual or the group identity?

16 However, we should consider the fact that also within three years of Japanese occupation (1942-1945 (...)

30 I do not assume, that in the theatre practice, which tends to be political, revolutionary and calling for social and/or governmental changes there is no space left for the individual identity of a particular actor, director or playwright. Names like Aurelio Tolentino, Juan Abad or Juan Matapang Cruz (well-known playwrights, who created at the turn of the 19 th and the 20 th century, the time of the fight against Spanish and later American oppression) 16 are not to be ever forgotten.

17 The term has been used by American colonial power authorities. It referred to the revolutionary cha (...)

31 But of course Filipino political theatre did not end up by the time of the “seditious plays”. 17 As I mentioned above, the second half of the 20 th century (and the fight for full independence and democracy) should be also seen as a very crucial moment.

18 The term was used by Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo to describe the Filipino theatre movement and the (...)

32 The 1960s – or especially the “Theater of Social Concern” (1965-1968) according to Del Rosario Castrillo 18 – became a crucial moment for those theatre practitioners who questioned themselves about their own goal in the fight for real social and political change:

19 Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo, Philippine Political Theater … cit., p. 530. Counter cultural dependence, theater content, style and purpose changed. Poverty, injustice, oppression, graft and corruption became common themes during this period. Plays featured the labourer and farmer, slum dweller and scavenger using social realism, i.e., the mode that utilizes theater as a lecture platform for purposes of mass education. 19

20 Cfr. Maria Luisa F. Torres, Brecht and the Philippines: anticipating freedom in theater , in John Fu (...)

33 Even “simple” things as deciding if a particular play should be staged in English or in Tagalog, Cebuano or Ilocano became meaningful. 20 It is worth pointing this out, that this kind of decision is constantly undertaken even today. English language has not been seen any more as the definitive choice for Filipino theatre makers as it was before.

34 In the context of questioning the national self-identity, as well as about the tension between the individual and the group artistic identity, Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, the Filipino “culture caregiver”, might be a good example. In 1967 this young Filipino woman, who studied in the USA, came back to her country and created one of the most significant Filipino theatre group ever. The Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) became:

21 Cfr. http://petatheater.com/about-peta/ , accessed on 28.10.2013. an organization of creative and critical artist-teacher-cultural workers committed to artistic excellence and a people’s culture that fosters both personal fulfilment and social transformation. It roots its foundation in the use of theater that is distinctly Filipino as a tool for social change and development. The company has lived by this principle as it continues to evolve with the changes that have occurred within and around it. It continues to push for first-rate quality theater while never taking for granted that the art it produces and teaches always serves a greater purpose. 21

22 Cfr. http://petatheater.com/about-peta/ , accessed on 30.10.2013.

35 This group, and its social and political concern, did not end up with i.e. the fall of Marcos government. Until now, PETA has created ca. 400 performances, made by hundreds of the most important Filipino actors and directors. Nowadays PETA leads several theatre educational programs (i.a. The School of People’s Theater), trains young people (PETA Metropolitan Teen Theater League Program, Children’s Theater Program, Arts Zone Project) and first of all, its performing arm – the Kalinangan Ensemble – regularly stages plays in the PETA Theater Center in Quezon City. 22

23 Rajah Sulayman was the open theatre in the ruins in the Fort Santiago in Intramuros, Metro Manila ( (...)

36 However, the PETA’s educational impact in contemporary Filipino culture is incontrovertible, in the context of this particular article the question of the individual identity of those artists, who created their performances in Dulaang Rajah Sulayman, or later in the PETA Theater Center, 23 should be risen up. PETA has always been concerned rather as a theatre group than a constellation of Filipino stars. For all of those artists, who worked together in those hundreds of performances, the common aim was to achieve social and/or political changes. Even if we would like to point out particular actors or directors, PETA’s activity will be always seen as the group cooperation.

37 The social and political commitment requires from artists to focus rather on the collaborative goal, and to shape together the group identity, then to centre upon his/her own shine.

1 It is very popular to write about “Spanish tradition” vs. “American influence”. This kind of division shows that even nowadays it is uneasy to clarify how the Philippine dependency on the USA in the 20 th century should be seen, as it was rather a political and/or cultural influence or a hidden effective colonization.

2 James K. Fenny, Tagalog Movies and Identity. Portrayals of the Filipino Self , «The Humanities Bulletin», 4, 1995, p. 108.

3 According to Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, who quotes Nicanor G. Tiongson’s seminal essay What is Philippine Drama? , «polluted theories» were those ones which had influenced Filipino theatre during the Spanish and American colonization. For Tiongson those «polluted theories» should be avoided in the process of reconceptualization of the contemporary Filipino culture. Cfr. Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, Situating Philippine Theatricality in Asia. A Critique on the Asian-ness/Philippine-ness of Philippine Theatre(s) , «Jati: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies», 16, 2011, pp. 131-132.

4 A good example in this case might be the discussion on many websites, e.g.: http://ask.metafilter.com/145758/Can-I-really-become-famous-in-the-Philippines , accessed on 25.10.2013.

5 Ferdinand Marcos was the President of the Philippines (1965-1986). He was famous for his anti-Japanese guerrilla activity during WWII, his presidency became one of the hardest time for the Philippines. Marcos was strongly supported by American government, but in the same time within twenty-three years he created his own regime. In 1986 the Philippines’ external debt exceeded $28.3 billion and in the same time the country was strongly corrupted. Marcos was also involved in the murder of his opposition leader, Benigno Aquino. In February 1986 Marcos and his wife, Imelda Marcos, had to escape to Hawaii (with American support).

6 Cfr. Kenton J. Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898-1916. An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality , Urbana, Chicago 1986.

7 Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, Situating Philippine Theatricality … cit. p. 142.

8 I decided to focus mostly on Catholic sacral performances, because of my personal experience, acquired during the theatre research conducted in the Philippines. Nevertheless, one should be aware, that the Philippines cannot be considered only as a Catholic country. There is a whole range of many other sacral performances, cultivated in non-Catholic Filipino communities, which might be as well described in the context of the tension between individual and group identities. However, I made the decision to focus on those examples, which I had a chance to observe while my staying in the Philippines.

11 In this context the term “performer” or “doer” should be understood in the meaning proposed e.g. by Jerzy Grotowski.

13 Cfr. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20090407-198285/Pabasa-is-for-meditating-not-loud-wailing , accessed on 02.11.2013.

14 Cfr. Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco, Amihan Bonifacio-Ramolete, Cutud’s Ritual of Nailing on the Cross: Performance of Pain and Suffering , «Asian Theatre Journal», 3, 2008, pp. 58-76; Nicholas H. Barker, The Revival of Ritual Self-Flagellation and the Birth of Crucifixion in Lowland Christian Philippines , Nagoya University, Nagoya 1998.

15 Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo, Philippine Political Theater: 1946-1985 , «Philippine Studies», 4 1994, p. 532.

16 However, we should consider the fact that also within three years of Japanese occupation (1942-1945) there was plenty of Filipino theatre plays, which became a significant voice against the political oppression of Japan.

17 The term has been used by American colonial power authorities. It referred to the revolutionary character of dramas and plays staged by Filipinos in the beginning of the 20 th century. Cfr. Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo, Philippine Political Theater … cit., p. 528.

18 The term was used by Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo to describe the Filipino theatre movement and the plays staged in 1965-1968.

19 Pamela Del Rosario Castrillo, Philippine Political Theater … cit., p. 530.

20 Cfr. Maria Luisa F. Torres, Brecht and the Philippines: anticipating freedom in theater , in John Fuegi (ed.), Brecht in Asia and Africa, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 1989, pp. 134-154.

21 Cfr. http://petatheater.com/about-peta/ , accessed on 28.10.2013.

23 Rajah Sulayman was the open theatre in the ruins in the Fort Santiago in Intramuros, Metro Manila (in the past Spanish military barracks). In 2005 PETA has moved into its new building, PETA Theater Center, located in Quezon City, Metro Manila.

Bibliographical reference

Maria Delimata , “ Contemporary theatre in the Philippines ” , Mimesis Journal , 2, 2 | 2013, 48-56.

Electronic reference

Maria Delimata , “ Contemporary theatre in the Philippines ” , Mimesis Journal [Online], 2, 2 | 2013, Online since 01 December 2013 , connection on 23 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mimesis/342; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/mimesis.342

About the author

Maria delimata.

Ph.D. candidate in Drama, Theater and Performance Department (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland). Her Ph.D. dissertation considers eroticism as an aesthetic in contemporary art and culture. In 2008-2009 studied in University of the Philippines Diliman. In 2011 made additional theater and cultural fieldwork in the Philippines (mostly on Luzon) to finalize her M.A. thesis Crucifixions in San Fernando Cutud as a sacral performance . Besides teaching contemporary drama and theater, in her scholar work she focuses mostly on postcoloniality, gender studies and the connection between history, memory and post-memory, visible in her conference experience and several written articles.

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Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

Online ISSN: 2195-0164
Print ISSN: 2195-0156
Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
First published: May 24, 2013
Publication Frequency: 2 Issues per Year
Audience: researchers in the field of drama and theatre studies, cultural and English studies

Tanghal Kultura

Usapang Kultura, Usapang Pamana: Writings on Culture, Performance and Heritage

Derivatives, Entanglement and the Dramaturg: Contemporary Theatre in Manila (Part Two: Entanglement)

This essay originally came out in Philippine Panorama: Sunday Magazine of the Manila Bulletin Volume 44 (12): 8 – 11, 2016. [Cover Photo: a scene from the children’s play Umaaraw, Umuulan, Kinakasal ang Tikbalang, a children’s story by Gilda Cordero-Fernando, adaptation by Rody Vera, directed by Jose Estrella; Photo courtesy of Dulaang UP].

Considering these issues of imitation and this commentary on inauthenticity, I felt at first that our theater had little to contribute to knowledge of theater internationally. But looking closely at these issues, I realize that our theater scene is more complex. Some social commentators remarked that the performing Filipino, for instance, is a master imitator. At the same time, these commentators assert that the imitation is almost the same as that which is imitated (or almost a perfect replica). With this, the praxis of mimicry is not just a simple imitation but also a complicated strategy of aesthetics and poetics.

Considering all these scenarios, I believe one should think of Philippine contemporary theater as entangled. Besides, entanglement is looming in the nation’s socio-historical and socio-cultural dispositions. At the same time, entanglement is also found in its geographical surroundings.

Entanglement is a condition of juxtapositions. It is about the blending or mixing of different elements together. On the surface, theater artists in Manila for instance are engaging in techniques of mixing and matching performance genres and forms ranging from Western (colonial) influences to archipelagic encounters (or the traditional performance genres from other regions). Simply put, many theater artists in the metro are putting different elements together in their theater works.

A good example is Dulaang UP’s Rizal X staged at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theatre in 2011 for the sesquicentennial celebrations of Jose Rizal . This performance is an entanglement of performance genres and other art forms based on what the production’s director Dexter Santos described as “fragments.” Another example is the 2013 staging of José Estrella ’s Adarna where the narrative of this corrido , adapted by Vlad Gonzales , combined puppetry, singing, and dancing.

This is not to say, however, that local theater artists are intentionally captivated by the poetics and aesthetics of mixing and matching as part of their creative strategies in creating theater. Looking at the works of many local theater artists, there seems to be a degree of comfort with entanglement, even if they do not intentionally recognize it as part of their artistic endeavors. Nonetheless, the complexity of entanglement possesses a danger of being entrapped in a muddled situation, often producing a sense of disorder and even chaos. With this, the idea of entanglement often carries a negative connotation. Despite the promise of entanglement as a possible key concept toward the identification of the state of contemporary Philippine theater, entanglement has its own limitations, especially since many artists unintentionally overuse entanglement (i.e., pastiche, fragments) in their theater making. Because of such complications, there is a tendency for theater works to unintentionally sensationalize their chosen subjects.

Many contemporary theater works in the Philippines are social dramas touching social issues and realistic in approach. In the book Palabas , Doreen Fernandez has provided an overview of what she considers the state of Philippine theater today. She notes that it is Philippine life that fires our playwrights. She is convinced that local theater artists do not need to hear of the latest trends in writing techniques or directing techniques in order to want to write and stage a play in like manner. What’s important for theater artists in the country is to thematically write anything that represents social Filipino reality.

Fernandez is reinforcing the fact that dramatic tradition dominates the theater scene in the metropolis or anywhere else in the country. Following this line of inquiry, the primary conditions in doing theater are coherent narrative and representations of social life. Fernandez also adds that in the thematic concern of Filipino playwrights and players (directors and actors), the vitality of theater is in its urgency. By urgency, Fernandez notes that Philippine theater is used to represent social concerns of the time and therefore provides a commentary on the state of things at that time. On a more discursive reading of such plays, these productions may sometimes easily be identified with television shows because they present topical issues (such as migrant workers, poverty, homosexuality, the disintegrating family, to name a few) and such issues are somehow editorialized.

Because of this, many artists engage in dramaturgy or the study of dramatic composition in order to look for problems imbedded in the performance, especially since local plays seek to perform a coherent narrative and representations of local social life. Dramaturgy is an emerging creative field in Philippine theater. Often, Filipino theatre artists associate dramaturgy with academic research. This is why dramaturgs are popularly thought of as researchers who introduce the play through program notes called dramaturgical notes. While this is one of the many responsibilities of the dramaturg, his role is more than academic. He is also a creative leader, responsible for several artistic decisions that a director might consider for the betterment of a play. In the words of performing arts curator Gideon Lester , the primary task of a dramaturg is to make theater better.

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques

The IATC journal/Revue de l'AICT – June/Juin 2017: Issue No 15

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre

Edited by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Greg Homann 392 pp. London and New York: Bloomsbury

Reviewed by Temple Hauptfleisch * (South Africa)

The aim of this volume of essays is to provide insights into theatre in South Africa since the first democratic elections. It seeks to do so by focussing on new plays written, developed and produced in the country since 1994. This is an ambitious and praiseworthy enterprise, and has resulted in a sizable publication (384 pages of closely set print) containing a most interesting collection of twenty focussed essays written to a well-wrought template by a formidable list of fine critics, artists and academics. Containing discussions of more than a hundred South African plays, the book in fact goes a long way to realizing the basic aims outlined by the three editors in their Introduction . A well constructed and impeccably edited overview of some of the more significant work produced in the period under review, the volume provides some fresh and thought-provoking insights into the work of a whole range of South African playwrights and theatre-makers.

Besides the contextualizing Introduction , the essays fall into two broadly defined groups. The first group consists of a miscellaneous set of six studies looking at a range of alternative forms (for example, physical theatre, community theatre, one-person plays) as well as plays/productions created through various processes of what has recently come to be referred to as “playmaking”—that is, creation through improvisation and workshop processes. This, as they point out, is essential when considering the divergent creative processes that have evolved in South African drama, theatre and performance.

The section is introduced by Sarah Roberts’s article on “The Pioneers,” a piece largely limited to the invaluable transitional work done by the late Barney Simon, some playmakers involved with him at the Market Theatre (such as, Gcina Mhlope and Mbongi Ngema) and the work of Phyllis Klotz and Smal Ndaba. No doubt constrained by the space allocation, this can only offer a rather limited interpretation of the notion under discussion, though there were any number of other innovative companies and individuals at work in those transitional years—some of them are discussed later in the volume, but many others not at all.

The need to be selective is of course an inevitable result of trying to compile an overview of a country’s whole theatrical output and the system that produced it, since space to expand on issues (for instance, provide a bit more of a context for the issue under discussion, or say more on the antecedents for the activity being reported on) is always going to be limited.

Emma Durden’s exploration of what she refers to as “popular community theatre” is another good case in point. She really has little to say about the theoretical distinction she makes between “community theatre” and “popular community theatre,” or about the longer term history of the whole applied theatre and community movement in the country, from its roots in the 1970s, through the very fruitful 1980s and 1990s, to today. The article basically looks at two late examples as case studies. It seems to me this is a major undervaluation of very powerful influence on the nature of theatre and theatre-making in the country. A pity, since what we do have here is excellent.

However, the rest of the essays in the section are less constrained in scope and generally substantial and well researched, foregrounding some very important trends in South African performance. For example, Veronica Baxter manages to fit quite an inclusive overview into her wonderful exploration of the nature and practice of theatre making in “One-Person Format,” while Robyn Sassen’s discussion of the establishment, evolution and role of what we now refer to as “Physical Theatre” is happily free of jargon and one of the most lucid pieces I have read on this issue for a long while. Likewise, Yvette Hutchison’s erudite analysis of the theoretical and practical impact of Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek’s Magnet Theatre on theatre-making practice in the country is a fine example of cultural research. By contrast, Jane Taylor’s insider view of the creative processes involved in some of the renowned productions done by the fabulous combination of Taylor herself, William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company is an enjoyable look at the minutiae of their type of collaborative creation.

The second set of fourteen chapters is more narrowly devoted to in-depth studies of individual playmakers and/or playwrights (still) active and writing predominantly in English in the period since 1994. The section predictably begins with a somewhat generalised overview by Dennis Walder of the phenomenal career of South Africa’s most celebrated playwright, Athol Fugard. Then come a series of insightful essays on some of the other major playwrights from the era: Reza de Wet (by Anton Kreuger), Paul Slabolepszy (by Adrienne Sichel), Zakes Mda (by Kene Igweonu), Lara Foot (by Loren A. Kruger), Mike van Graan (by Brent Meersman), Craig Higginson (by Michael Titlestad), Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom (by Muff Andersson) Brett Bailey (by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr), Pieter-Dirk Uys (by Mervyn McMurtry), Fatima Dike (by Miki Flockemann and Rolf Solberg) and Yaël Farber (by Marcia Blumberg). The writing is almost universally good and the research thorough, critically sound and well documented—making this a very useful reference book for critics and students alike. These essays are followed by an account of some “Emerging Playwrights and Significant Plays” by co-editor Greg Homann, focussing specifically on John Kani, Juliet Jenkin and Neil Coppen, after which the book concludes with Homann’s interview with the theatre manager and playwright Aubrey Sekhabi.

It is a very imposing range of writers and texts, and the collection gives one a real sense of the immense creativity—as well as the occasional sense of frustration—alive among theatre makers in the new open and “democratic” South African environment, from the euphoria of 1994 on into the more turbulent and less assured first decades of the new millennium and the slowly evolving new social and political concerns about the country over the past ten years.

Equally impressive, but perhaps less easy to categorise and discuss objectively, is the implicit “conversation” taking place between the various critics and commentators involved, as they analyze and discuss their assigned playmakers and their works. In the process, they tend to refer to or cite each other, and comment on the critical writing of colleagues, as they each pursue their own distinctive arguments. The result is a pleasing sense of connectedness that pervades much of the volume. In view of this, it is rather a pity that the editors decided against providing brief biographical details of the various contributing authors, for even though it is a very impressive team, they are not all universally known.

The foregoing is really a minor matter, of course, but there is another, far more disturbing, aspect to this otherwise admirable publication; a problem highlighted (and perhaps even caused) by the particular choice of title for the volume.

By describing the work as a “Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre” the editors set up a number of expectations about the publication that they ultimately do not—and perhaps cannot—meet. For example, the use of the term “South African theatre” implies an overview not only of playwriting, even “playmaking,” but also of play production processes and, perhaps, even aspects of the broader theatrical polysystem (and its range of sub-systems)—which, of course, would encompass far more than playwrights/playmakers and their products only. The narrower focus on writers/playmakers and new South African plays evinced by this volume, therefore, pays scant attention to the many significant directors, translations, festivals and other systemic factors that go to make up the complex entity we experience as “South African theatre.” This is really a major issue—and would have been problematic no matter what country you were talking about.

In fact, the Introduction acknowledges the point to some extent by saying that “. . . the country’s rich tradition of drama is not predominantly grounded in playwriting, nor is it a theatre that has historically been driven by the interests of playwrights.” However, the editors stop short of acknowledging the full implications of that very true statement, though I do appreciate that the first six essays do constitute a real attempt to at least address some of the lacunae .

The situation is further exacerbated by the conscious choice they have made to only focus on writing and performance in English language (or work predominantly in or translated into that language). The choice to ignore all plays and performances in the other ten South African languages is perhaps understandable given the probable market for the book, but the approach can be suggestive of a worrying kind of linguistic myopia in critical thinking. This would have been a problem in any multilingual (or non-English) country, but is a particularly sensitive issue in South Africa today—as it has long been.

So, the question that arises is: why change the format of the title in the first place? The other volumes in the fine series (those for Ireland, America and Britain—all edited for Methuen by Middeke and Schnierer) read “Guide to Contemporary . . . Playwrights,” why not this one? Surely, that is what the volume is really about— though the term “playwright” perhaps needs to be a bit more broadly defined than in other countries (to encompass group creation, facilitators and playmakers). Not changing the format would already have taken a substantial part of the sting out of the issues discussed above, and revising the title to read something like The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary English Playwriting in South Africa would probably have avoided these pitfalls completely.

In conclusion, then, while The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre does not represent the entire spectrum of theatre and performance in the post-Apartheid period, it is, nevertheless, a very useful overview of English-language theatre practice in the country and, as such, is undeniably a most important and pleasing contribution to South African theatre studies. It is, however, a book to be read and used with some caution, particularly by anyone unfamiliar with the broader scope of arts and culture in South Africa.

* Temple Hauptfleisch is a Professor Emeritus of Drama at Stellenbosch University and a co-founder and editor of the South African Theatre Journal. A long-time director of the Centre for South African Theatre Research, he is a former member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Critical Stages.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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Modern Theatre and Film Industry Essay

The modern theatre and film industry have helped familiarize people with the reality of the world, emotions people go through and happy, as well as sad situations. Historically, one of the first forms of entertainment which evolved into movies today was theatre.

People went to all the plays that were in their towns and greatly valued this form of art. At the same time, there were many prejudices that were a part of the society, which today might seem harsh and unacceptable. One of these is the way gender and races were viewed by the theatrical population and people viewing the plays.

The present society has seen many advances in the way people are treated and how the differences between individuals are viewed. Today, people are given an equal opportunity to participate in theatre and media, but even though there are laws that prohibit discrimination due to race or gender, there is still prejudice and stereotyping.

In the past, women were not allowed to perform plays. Men would play their parts and from one perspective, this enforced the common views that were abusive towards a certain group. Even though it changed the atmosphere of the theatre, people were not aware that anything could be different, so they accepted it as it was.

It would be reasonable to assume that women realized how unfair and humorous it was that men had to play women’s roles, but the dominant social views could not allow anything different. The same can be said about different races, as people were not used to people who stood out from the crowd. Their own insecurities and fear led them to believe that they must not allow anyone who looked different into the industry.

Right now, the world has changed and the theatres, as well as other forms of entertainment have become greatly “colorblind”. It is obvious that the theatre culture is more old fashioned, so prejudices still exist there, but other forms of media and entertainment, especially in the western world, are a clear example that people from all cultures can become successful and accepted.

Hollywood has seen many prosperous and world famous people from other races, who are loved and respected all over the world. The theatre is slowly adjusting to the change and this is most obviously seen in relation to gender. Women’s roles are played by women and it would be ridiculous to even image a man playing a woman’s role in the modern world. The society needs diversity in all its parts of entertainment, as people should realize that everyone is equal and there are no real differences between people.

Everyone wants to do what they love and have a talent for, and entertainment industry has shown that there are many actors who are of same or even greater talent in relation to “white only” population. The mixing of all societies into one will allow for greater acceptance and cooperation, and because theatre and other media are viewed by so many people, it would be most beneficial to display the unity there.

Even though the times are changing slowly, it is clear that gender or race should not matter in theatre or films. The whole world must see that entertainment comes from emotions and people’s soul and looks are unimportant, as people should be judged by their character and not how they appear to be.

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IvyPanda. (2019, January 17). Modern Theatre and Film Industry. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/

"Modern Theatre and Film Industry." IvyPanda , 17 Jan. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Modern Theatre and Film Industry'. 17 January.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

1. IvyPanda . "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

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Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Letizia Fusini’s review essay, “Theater and Politics in Socialist China,” which treats recently published books on modern Chinese drama by Maggie Greene, Siyuan Liu, and Xiaomei Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fusini/ . My thanks to Jason McGrath, our soon-to-be-former book review editor for media, film, and drama studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Resisting Spirits , by Maggie Greene Transforming Tradition, by Siyuan Liu Performing the Socialist State , by Xiaomei Chen

Reviewed by Letizia Fusini MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 260pp ISBN: 9780472074303 (hardcover)

Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 472pp. ISBN: 9780472132478 (hardcover); 9780472128723 (ebook)

Xiaomei Chen, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 384pp. ISBN: 9780231197762 (hardcover); 9780231552332 (ebook)

Nearly a decade ago, in Autumn 2016, I had the opportunity and the privilege to teach an undergraduate survey course on the history of Chinese theater, the only one of its kind in the UK back then. I was a freshly minted PhD graduate and that was my first teaching post. Aside from developing my lecturing skills, the main challenge was to find creative strategies to make the subject more accessible to students who were majoring in theater studies and knew almost nothing about Chinese culture and history. The task became even more daunting when, due to time constraints, I had to condense the history of the rise of modern drama ( huaju 话剧) and the transformations of classical theater ( xiqu 戏曲) throughout the late-Qing, Republican and early socialist epochs within the space of a couple of hours. Since I wanted to avoid information overload, I began to look for a unifying thread that could hthelp me connect these three periods and, in my research, I came across an excerpt from a text written by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 in 1904, where the future founder of the CCP eulogizes theater as the best “vehicle for social reform” (120), tracing the paternity of this idea to Confucius, who once said that “nothing is better than yue [乐, the performing arts lato sensu ] at transforming social conventions” (118). These thoughts, written just before the dawn of the Republican period and yet rooted in the Confucian tradition, prefigured the Zeitgeist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, which, in turn, would be lauded by Mao Zedong in his essay “On New Democracy” as “having pioneered an unprecedentedly great and thoroughgoing cultural revolution” (361) whose only fault was that it failed to serve the interests of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Through these connections, I was able to visualize the (r)evolution of Chinese theater in the first half of the twentieth century as a tree growing out of Confucian roots and projecting its branches and foliage in a Marxist direction culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. My goal was to convey to my students the impression I had gotten vis-à-vis that short statement by Chen Duxiu about the power of theater to effect social change. The fact that in China, the attribution of a pedagogic and political function to theater is a traditional concept rather than a twentieth-century novelty, hence not an exclusive prerogative of the Communist period or of the Cultural Revolution, was the unifying thread I was looking for. What was initially a mere perception on my part, found confirmation in Richard Schechner’s foreword to the collection in which I originally found Chen Duxiu’s text, where he notes that “the roots of Mao’s attitude—that theater is an excellent educator and that rulers ought to use it as such—go deep in Chinese history. From an early date, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read” (x).

Schechner’s remark can open up an intellectual space for conceiving and understanding the transformations of Chinese theater(s) in the modern era as a holistic phenomenon that bridges different epochs. Quite recently, arguments that endorse and further develop this kind of perspective have been advanced, in a more extensive manner, by eminent scholars of Chinese drama and performance in three book-length studies published between 2019 and 2023. These are, by order of publication, Maggie Greene’s Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC (2019), Siyuan Liu’s Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s (2021), and Xiaomei Chen’s Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (2023).

Although they focus largely on the theater of the high socialist period (1949-1966), these studies ultimately regard the latter as coterminous with the drama reform of the Republican age, as foreshadowing the model operas of the Cultural Revolution period, and as extending its legacy into the post-Mao era (which they also touch on).

Before undertaking a comparative commentary of these books, I provide a brief summary and a preliminary evaluation of each, with a particular discussion of the extent to which their findings appear to converge, as well as highlighting the specificities of their critical approaches.

Greene’s monograph Resisting Spirits reconstructs the vicissitudes of ghost opera (鬼戏) during the high socialist period (1949-1966), and, more succinctly, in the early post-Mao era when literary ghosts started to reappear on Chinese stages following an almost two-decade ban (issued in 1963). More specifically, Greene examines the reception of three different adaptations of a Ming-dynasty canonical play titled Story of Red Plums whose original plot involves, among other things, the execution of a young concubine (Li Huiniang 李蕙娘) who returns to the earth post-mortem in ghostly form to avenge herself on the ruthless prime minister who had condemned her to death. Two of the dramatic texts under scrutiny in this study are Ma Jianling’s 马建翎 1953 Wandering West Lake (游西湖) and its 1958 revised version, while the third is Meng Chao’s 孟超 Li Huiniang 李蕙娘, which premiered in 1961 and, together with Wu Han’s 吴晗 Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (海瑞罢官) and Tian Han’s 田汉 Xie Yaohuan 谢瑶环, contributed to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the book’s final chapter is devoted to probing the afterlives of Li Huiniang at the dawn of the postsocialist age, particularly through analysis of an award-winning 1981 production starring Hu Zhifeng 胡芝风 and the related critical reviews. As Greene explains in the introduction, although ghosts and ghost plays are the titular subject matter of the book, they play an auxiliary role in her analysis, which is primarily aimed at opening up new views on how cultural workers reinterpreted and reused valuable material from China’s classical literary canon to suit the needs of a society that was transitioning into a new era as well as the demands of a ruling party that looked suspiciously at what it considered to be the relics of a feudal past. As a matter of fact, Greene selected ghost opera because it “had occupied an important role in the cultural and political discussions between 1949 and 1963” (12), thereby providing “a fascinating lens through which to view the high socialist period” (13). In other words, ghost opera and the intellectual discourse generated by its reuses as a form of new historical drama in the early years of the PRC is employed as a method to shed light on a particular area of drama reform which, however limited in scope, can provide further insights into broader cultural discussions concerning the distinction between superstition and mythology, and the relevance of ghostly characters to the promotion of class struggle among the laboring masses.

The volume makes an important contribution to questions of historical periodization as regards the PRC’s transition from a revolutionary to a post-revolutionary society. It effectively challenges the pre- and post-Great Leap Forward divide and debunks the myth of the Cultural Revolution as an isolated period in the history of the PRC. It also contributes, to a degree, to “depoliticizing” the received narrative of drama reform and cultural transformation in the high socialist period by telling what Greene defines as “the other side of the story”—that is, by laying bare the creative and aesthetic efforts of writers and critics in forging a new socialist literature that was meant to be not only ideologically correct, but also artistically satisfactory. She convincingly shows that cultural elites had a genuine interest in protecting the national literary heritage from being severely pruned, if not totally eradicated, which was not at all an easy task given that it entailed a constant negotiation among ever-shifting party policies, colleagues’ criticisms, collective concerns, and individual aspirations. Moreover, on account of the selected case studies, Greene’s book effectively foregrounds ghost opera as having played a major role not only in determining the direction of drama reform in the mid–twentieth century, but also, albeit indirectly, in contributing to the radicalization of the political atmosphere in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution.

Siyuan Liu’s volume Transforming Tradition is a monumental study tracing the origin and development of the CCP-led xiqu reform campaign during the high socialist period. As Liu’s thorough and impeccably researched analysis shows, this largely top-down reform process resulted, within a relatively short time span of seventeen years, in a radical alteration of the nature of classical Chinese theater’s dramaturgies and performance methods as well as in mutilating what he terms “ xiqu ’s entire ecosystem” (329). The book provides a comprehensive documentary history of this phenomenon, which Liu interprets through a multifarious theoretical framework combining concepts of historicism, gentrification, and colonial modernity with “additional influences from Marxist materialism and the Soviet Union” (18). Consisting of six ultra-dense thematic chapters, which examine the main initiatives aimed at purifying xiqu from its allegedly feudal, primitive, bourgeois, and even colonial elements and in a spirit (and language) that consistently echoed May Fourth intellectuals’ semi-iconoclastic critiques, the book identifies a thread of continuity between two ideologically divergent periods of China’s twentieth century, the Republican and the Communist eras. As a matter of fact, attempts at making xiqu , and particularly jingju (京剧), more “modern” and “realistic” in its content and stage design yet without sacrificing its distinctive and time-honored art had been tentatively implemented through the collaborative efforts of Mei Lanfang 梅兰芳 and Qi Rushan 齐如山 over two decades between the late 1910s and the early 1930s. Through meticulously reconstructing the dynamics of what was presented in 1951 as a project based on a “three-pronged approach” (改人, 改戏, 改制, i.e. reforming practitioners, repertoire, and organizational structure), Liu cogently shows that the CCP-affiliated reform leaders took over from where Mei and Qi had given up. Their strategy was partially informed by cultural and diplomatic aspirations reminiscent of those underlying the May Fourth intellectuals’ advocacy for a theatrical (r)evolution, which would later result in the emergence of spoken drama, and of those of the Mei-Qi duo who, in an attempt to refashion jingju as China’s national theatrical tradition par excellence, sought to accentuate its quintessential characteristics, especially its visual appeal, to help refashion China’s image in the West. Nevertheless, unlike Mei Lanfang who, as a fully trained jingju actor had become increasingly aware of the risks associated with modifying the fundamental principles of xiqu , their lack of technical and artistical expertise prevented them from predicting the negative effects of a reform that was de facto not only ideologically biased but also totally disconnected from the practical realities of xiqu .

Liu’s study, which relies on a rich array of textual and visual archival sources never previously referenced in anglophone research, illuminates a complex example of a politically driven, all-encompassing theater reform and its problematic legacy that affects present-day practice. It achieves this goal by documenting in-depth the theoretical basis and practical aspects of the reform process, giving equal attention to content and form as the true pillars of xiqu ’s edifice, and devoting adequate space to exploring ways in which regional genres ( difangxi 地方戏) were also targeted. Aside from making a substantial contribution to advancing the field of Chinese and theater studies, the volume also offers valuable insights into the landscape of global intercultural theater studies. Specifically, Liu develops Min Tian’s (2008) view of Chinese theater’s interculturation of Western theater in the twentieth century as a case of cultural displacement that entails both constructive and destructive effects on the tradition. “Displacement,” according to Tian, is the result of a process whereby “the Other is inevitably understood, interpreted, and placed in accordance with the aesthetic and artistic imperatives of the Self pertaining to its own tradition and its placement in the present, irrespective of the extent of the Self’s true knowledge of its Other” (Tian 2008: 6). In the case of Communist-era xiqu reform, as Liu insightfully shows, not only was the Other (i.e., Western realism, Marxian historical materialism, and the Stanislavsky’s system of psychological realism) displaced in an attempt to “gentrify” the indigenous tradition, but it was that very same tradition that was originally displaced, or misinterpreted. Quite fittingly, in defining the mid-century xiqu reform as a case of “gentrification,” Liu points out that, while the various targeted components of xiqu can be equaled to “displaced residents” of a “deteriorating area that needed salvation,” “it may be more accurate in many cases to describe the components as being decentered rather than displaced” (2). Liu’s meticulous analysis of how CCP reform policies weakened the centrality of the actor in the creative process of xiqu and in determining audience appeal, provides confirming evidence of and further elaborates on Min Tian’s earlier observations on the detrimental consequences of imposing a “naturalistic modernization” (173) on xiqu acting style through an ideological use of the Stanislavski system.

Moving on from xiqu to its “modern” counterpart, Xiaomei Chen’s monograph Performing the Socialist State is a two-part critical history of huaju from its beginnings in the late-Qing and Republican period to the twenty-first century. As its title suggests, the bulk of the book is devoted to the theater and film culture of the high socialist period and its impact on the post-Mao age. The Cultural Revolution period is not included in the discussion because the author has already dealt with it in a previous publication (Chen 2002) and because of the abundance of excellent scholarly studies on the topic. However, before delving into the minutiae of “Chinese Socialist Theater and its afterlife” through an intriguing selection of so far less-studied genres, plays, and topics, the author devotes the first three chapters that constitute Part I to reconstructing the lives and careers of the three individuals who are officially considered to be the founding fathers of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han (1898-1969), Hong Shen 洪深 (1984-1955), and Ouyang Yuqian 欧阳予倩 (1889-1962). Grouping these playwrights together as “a unique trio” (8) allows Chen to highlight the various ways in which they contributed to bringing theater closer to the people well before the Communist takeover, and how they continued to put their creativity and their individual initiative in the service of the socialist cause and for the betterment of Chinese society. By starting off with an examination of the three founding fathers’ respective achievements as eclectic representatives of the hybridized literary, theatrical, and cinematic culture of the early Republican age, Chen lays the foundation for the ensuing discussion in Part II, where she essentially argues that Chinese socialist theater was born from the leftist cultural tradition the three “partially” created (8). Furthermore, their works and those of other leading Republican-era playwrights are mentioned at various places in part II as well, in connection with analogous plays of the socialist and postsocialist periods, to show the extent to which the latter can be said to have perpetuated and further developed a set of pre-existing genres, styles, and thematic concerns born out of the experimental practices of the early decades of the twentieth century. Hence, although the book is primarily focused on emphasizing the legacies of three key figures of the huaju tradition, whose personal stories are used as “threads for discussion between various periods, histories, and ideologies,” the book is not as “limited” (12) as the author laments, for at least for two reasons. First, Chen manages to include an impressive range of other important twentieth-century playwrights and plays that constitute the history of huaju , hence interspersing the discussion with a wealth of comparative links. Second, she has further enriched it with an interdisciplinary perspective, first by opening each of the eight chapters with a classic red song—ranging from “The March of the Volunteers” to “The Internationale”—and then by discussing the interweaving relationship between mediascapes and soundscapes in the transition from a pre-revolutionary to a post-revolutionary China. The book’s final chapter, which examines the reception of “The Internationale” and its constant repurposing over the course of 100 years, not only shows the extent to which a single text can be adapted to express opposing ideologies or to critique the dominant discourse, but also provides further confirmation of the formidable power of the Confucian concept of yue in forging a collective spirit of adherence to the status quo and, at the same time, promoting new cultural impulses that seek to challenge that very status quo.

Chen’s volume has an impressive breadth and depth that the title and cover image do not adequately anticipate. Although a substantial part of the book is indeed about theater and film culture of the socialist age, the title and cover, which may be important from a marketing perspective, fail to capture what is arguably the heart of its narrative—namely, the consistent references to how Tian Han’s, Hong Shen’s, and Ouyang Yuqian’s artistic endeavours in the Republican era paved the way for the creation of a socialist performance culture that has not vanished despite the PRC’s transition to a capitalist economy and the advent of a consumerist society. This is all the more true given that, as the author asserts, one of the main goals of the book is to deconstruct the ways in which the image of the three pioneers of huaju has been distorted in post-Mao Chinese-language scholarship, where they are seen alternatively as perpetrators or as victims of the socialist regime. Among the many insights that can be gleaned from this study, the most noteworthy one in my opinion is the revelation that there exists a profound link between, on the one hand, the aesthetic liberalism and critical realism of the Republican age and, on the other, the commitment to ideological purity and political correctness of the high socialist period, an indissoluble binary that continues to inform contemporary Chinese theaters into the new millennium. As the chapter on Meng Bing’s 孟冰 soldier plays and history plays shows, huaju , in its contemporary incarnation, has not relinquished its original mission of creatively enacting a social criticism while still appealing to a mass audience. As in Meng’s specific case, the legacy of his three illustrious predecessors has been carried forward by expanding the socialist realist tradition as a means of exposing, in an ingenuously subversive yet aptly surreptitious way, the CCP’s inability to fulfil the promises of freedom, equality, and democracy that motivated, amongst other things, the rise of modern drama over a century earlier.

A major common denominator of these books is that they view the developmental trajectory of Chinese theater (both classical and modern) during the high socialist and, to a degree, postsocialist periods as largely a continuation of the reform projects advocated by intellectuals of the early Republican period that were predicated on a tradition/modernity divide. Throughout the twentieth century, whether it was about reforming xiqu or inventing and perfecting a new genre such as huaju , intellectuals, playwrights, and cultural workers had to navigate a complex and unstable social, cultural, and political environment that required them to balance the competing demands of artistic innovation and political correctness, with uneven results.

These studies employ different methodologies that help rethink the commonly accepted standards of periodization of China’s twentieth-century drama and performance culture.

Greene’s text-based analysis of how ghost plays were revised and discussed between the 1950s and the early 1960s is informed by the methodology of “surface reading,” which “accounts for what is in the texts without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation” (Best/Marcus 2009: 12). As opposed to “symptomatic reading,” which actively looks for a meaning that is not explicitly stated by the text or the author, surface reading does not wrest meaning out of a text and does not assume priority of subtext over text. By looking at the surface of the discourse on ghost opera and by interpreting ghostly characters as literary fantasies rather than as carriers of implicit political messages, Greene convincingly questions the claim that ghost play adaptations written in the early 1960s—like Meng Chao’s Li Huiniang —were meant primarily as vehicles for veiled criticism in regard to the catastrophic consequences of the Great Leap Forward. Although she does not deny that these plays may have also been created to express their authors’ political views, she is right in cautioning against the reductionism that may develop from such an interpretation, because it fails to acknowledge not only their literary quality, but also the fact that a large part of the debate was focused on tackling cultural and ideological issues that were unrelated to the economic policies of the time. Hence, this method allows Greene to situate the debate on ghost drama within a “longer literary time that connects the Mao era with a deeper cultural past” (16) and to disentangle it from the various political campaigns of the high socialist period.

Liu, too, views the reform of traditional theater in the Communist era as part of a much broader phenomenon that predates the Communist takeover and whose roots go back to the Self-strengthening Movement of the late-Qing period, which led to the systematic study of Western culture, opening the doors to a wealth of fresh ideas, styles, and critical approaches, including a new vision of history as a linear and teleological process. Nevertheless, his interpretation of the mid-century xiqu reform campaign as “a case of historicism” and “as part of the global modernity project” (18) is potentially problematic, not only because “historicism” is a highly elusive concept, but because the definition he relies on, which is drawn from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), connects historicism with European Enlightenment, a connection that is contradictory. The fact that xiqu was considered old and stagnant during the May Fourth era, and vulgar, formalist, and ideologically immature in the high socialist era, and therefore needed to “evolve” or, as Liu contends, to be “gentrified,” by following the example set by Western theater and by incorporating Western elements, can be better explained as a case of cultural Darwinism (paired up with historical materialism). Unlike the Enlightenment, which aspired to find “some eternal and universal Archimedean standpoint by which they could judge all specific societies, states and cultures” (Beiser 2011: 11), historicism argues against the existence of such universal values and aims to trace “the historical development of specific cultures rather than . . . the construction of a grand evolutionary account of the progress march of Culture” (Smith, “Historicism”). In my view, it would be more appropriate to replace (or integrate) the historicist frame with one based on cultural Darwinism, along the lines of the “adaptive comparative method” proposed by Sowon S. Park to study the Westernization of East Asian literatures in the modern era. Such a frame, which proposes to interpret Westernization as a means of gaining a competitive edge over the West rather than as a form of submission to colonial imperatives, would allow for a better understanding of the reasons why Republican-era and Communist-era discourses on the necessity of xiqu reform can be said to represent two faces of the same reality or, better still, two different stages of the same program of artistic development and cultural acquisition. When Hu Shi 胡適 stated that China lacked a sense of literary evolution and that Chinese theater could be reformed only by engaging with the most advanced forms of foreign drama, which would have to be examined through a comparative perspective and with the aim of injecting “some youthful blood from Western literature” (Hu Shi 1996: 116), he was not endorsing a colonial vision of literary evolution but was proposing that Chinese culture voluntarily adapt to Western standards in order to survive and thrive. As such, he was laying the foundation of Mao’s later advocacy for a new democratic culture that “opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation” (367), a formulation which, as Liu notes, set the tone of the debate guiding the 1950s xiqu reform campaign.

Although she does not explicitly acknowledge a specific theoretical and methodological framework for her analysis of the development of modern Chinese drama, Chen explains why she decided to adopt “a holistic view that bridges the Republican and PRC periods” (7) and a thematic approach in lieu of a strictly chronological one. Essentially, her goal is to offer a multifaceted and interdisciplinary critical history that is accessible to a nonspecialist readership and includes a range of authors, works, and practices. As she notes in the introduction, one of her main motivations for attempting what she calls “an almost impossible task” (7) is the realization, through her teaching and research, of the continuous relevance of early huaju works to contemporary times as attested by the many productions and rewritings of The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven (黑奴吁天录), a rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that is one of the foundational pieces of Chinese spoken drama, through the socialist and postsocialist periods. It seems to me that the choice of case studies for part II is also instrumental in strengthening the effectiveness of Chen’s holistic perspective. In chapter 4, for example, she examines the rise of one-act satirical comedies (独木讽刺戏剧) of the mid-1950s as an example of “socialist critical realism” and views them as carrying forward the legacy of Yang Jiang’s 杨绛 and Chen Baichen’s 陈白尘 comedies of the Republican period, which exposed the hypocrisies and corruption of Chinese society under the Nationalist regime. Similarly, in chapter 5, which focuses on the representation of women characters in a series of red classic films and performances, she shows how these works are steeped in the tradition of early-twentieth century feminist theater inspired by Ibsen’s Nora and nurtured by burgeoning leftist ideologies, and how they were resurrected and refashioned in the postsocialist period in an effort to combine aestheticization with a renewed revolutionary spirit. The remaining chapters are organized, again, around a particular genre or theme that is examined across the socialist and postsocialist periods and are interspersed with references to the pre-1949 era history and performance culture.

Another aspect that emerges from a comparison of these three studies is that, despite the gradual tightening of the political and ideological climate over the course of the high socialist period, the debates on drama reform and the creation of new dramas went on undeterred, albeit in a cyclical, nonlinear manner, until the start of the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that artists and critics managed to find a space to exercise their freedom of expression despite party-imposed restrictions. They were perhaps aided by the fact that until the early 1960s there was considerable ambiguity as to the direction in which the CCP intended to steer cultural production and as to how to interpret Mao’s early recommendation “not to reject the legacy of the ancients” and later encouragement to criticize the wrongdoings of CCP officials. As Chen points out, the early 1950s saw the creation of several plays that cannot be categorized as fully “red” but that embody “all colors, red, gray, black, and every other spectrum in between” (153). On a similar note, Greene’s analysis shows that the debate on ghosts was multifarious and dynamic. It encompassed competing views, and, over the years, the focus shifted from discussing the suitability of supernatural literature and drama to determining how ghostly characters should be presented to audiences, whether as role models of class struggle or as symbols of feudal and bourgeois enemies. The CCP-led reform of xiqu , too, was implemented amid several rounds of debates and generated criticisms and negative reactions from artists, intellectuals, and audiences, though they did not manage to mitigate the disastrous effects of the top-down decisions taken by reform leaders and (often irresponsibly) enforced by local cadres. As a matter of fact, while the process had a fluctuating course as it shifted between radical and liberal phases (the latter occurred in 1957 and between 1960 and 1962), in general, it followed a unilateral trajectory that resulted in an excessive accentuation of the didactic and ideological function of theater and in a reduction of its most spectacular and ludic aspects.

Another aspect that links Greene’s and Liu’s studies concerns their shared findings on the paradoxical and ironic consequences of censorship and self-censorship processes aimed at bestowing a layer of ideological correctness on a canonical play’s content. Greene’s choice of case studies blatantly shows that an overzealous approach consisting in excessive plot excisions and modifications for the mere sake of achieving ideological purity could result in grossly distorting the nature of the text to a point verging on the absurd. As can be seen from Ma Jianling’s early attempt at producing a socialist-flavoured version of a pre-modern ghost play, his radical decision to eliminate the ghost to avoid fostering superstitious beliefs triggered a wave of severe criticism from various intellectuals who pointed out that in the original play the ghost was shown to stand up against injustice and feudal oppression and it was therefore imperative to keep it. Ironically, the old text, albeit anchored in pre-socialist culture, was deemed more ideologically sound than its modern-day version, which looked unreasonably mutilated. An analogous case is represented by the so-called badana (八大拿) plays, which formed part of the foundational repertoire of jingju wusheng (京剧武生) actors and were banned, like ghost drama, after 1963, after having been heavily abridged to expunge parts of the content that were considered reactionary and pernicious. The censoring of these plays’ contents, which entailed altering the plot and removing key scenes, resulted in an excessive simplification of the actors’ training practices, which, in turn, affected the artistic quality and believability of their performances. This is because xiqu is a totalizing kind of theater where content determines form and vice versa. As a matter of fact, the badana plays, which Liu intriguingly associates with Greek tragedy for their emphasis on portraying conflicts and dilemmas, attach great importance to the actors’ facial expressions and physical actions not as mere manifestations of skill but as a sophisticated means of conveying the characters’ nuanced psychologies. Similarly, as Liu rightfully notes, the ideological attack on xiqu ’s distinctive theatricality, which was erroneously equated with “formalism,” involved the further curtailing of fundamental scenes, the flattening of key characters’ personalities, and even the elimination of a range of centuries-old conventional performance techniques and gestures, which were replaced with a realist and lifelike performance style based on Stanislavsky’s brand of psychological realism. These measures proved detrimental to the integrity and authenticity of xiqu because they ultimately resulted in disconnecting form from content and, by depriving the actors of their ability to strike a balance between prescribed manners and personal inventiveness, made the art of xiqu degenerate into something artificial and incapable of achieving genuine characterization. The fact that the adoption of Stanislavsky’s realism failed to enhance xiqu actors’ impersonation skills and instead caused them to feel impeded and unnatural confirms Huang Zuolin’s insightful remark that the attempt to create a fourth wall, “an illusion of real life on stage . . . imposes limitations, restricting us by the framework of the stage and thereby seriously hampering creativity” (Huang 1999: 156). Min Tian, too, points out that although, and contrary to what Brecht assumed, xiqu actors do identify with the role, their way of combining “the ‘inner technique’ of introspection with the outgoing technique of representation,” as Huang Zuolin (1999: 157) put it, is not consistent with the principles of Stanislavsky’s realism because the latter does not aim for “beauty and refinement” (171). As Li Yu 李渔, an illustrious writer and drama theorist of the early Qing period stated in his monumental work Casual Notes on a Leisurely Mood (闲情偶寄, 1671), “there is a difference between manners in real life and those on the stage” (Li Yu 1999: 87).

On the whole, by foregrounding the continuities in the development of Chinese theater across distinct periods of modernity (Republican, socialist, and postsocialist) and by considering the impact of Communist-era theater reforms on contemporary performance culture (even if succinctly), these three studies variously testify to the complexities and contradictions of the relationship between art and politics and between tradition and innovation. Moreover, they give evidence of the extent to which censorship practices can or cannot sanction a definitive break with the past. Considering the first two aspects, Chen’s final chapters, especially the one on Meng Bing and the one on sonic theater, demonstrate that contemporary Chinese artists continue to be driven by the same ideals that motivated the founding fathers of huaju , while also seeking new avenues and strategies to express their vision and produce works that satisfy the authorities as well as audiences. As for ghost plays, as Greene illustrates in her final chapter, they never disappeared from the Chinese stages despite several attempts at casting them in a bad light that culminated in the 1963 ban. As the title of her book suggests, not only have these supernatural figures consistently embodied a spirit of resistance to evil and oppression, they are also part of an undying legacy that, although crippled during the high socialist period, has managed to regain its original status in the postsocialist era and is now associated more with the world of phantasy and entertainment than with the pedagogical function imposed on it between 1949 and 1962. The same, however, cannot be said for xiqu more generally. In the concluding chapter of his book, Liu offers a detailed analysis of a 1959 jingju production of The Battle of Red Cliff (赤壁之战) and of the ensuing debate as a means of assessing the results of the reform campaigns, given that in that year the CCP had announced the completed nationalization of private xiqu companies. The fact that this production was generally found disappointing due to the adoption of a historical materialist perspective that encumbered the pace of the story, weakened characterization, and destroyed entertainment, testifies to the failure of this reform process, which, as Liu repeatedly points out, was guided by ignorance of the true essence of xiqu and a wilful bias against its supposed primitiveness. Liu’s concluding remarks extend to xiqu ’s contemporary ecosystem, which he dismally but realistically defines as “the legacy of a seventeen-year tradition” (331) that managed to radically (and perhaps definitively) steer the course of an ancient art form. Finally, and contrary to received wisdom, these three books forcefully show the highly experimental and prolific nature of the theater activities of the high socialist period, which gave rise to equally prolific critical debates. Taken together, they paint a dynamic history made of lights and shadows, in which the past and the present mirror each other in (often) surprising ways.

Letizia Fusini SOAS University of London

Works Cited

Beiser, Frederick C. The German Historicist Tradition . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Best, Steven and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, 1 (2009): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Chen, Duxiu. “On Theater.” In Faye Chunfang Fei, ed./tr., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, 117-120.

Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.

—–. Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture . New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

Greene, Maggie. Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Hu, Shi 胡适. “Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang” 文学进化观念与戏剧改良 (The Concept of Literary Evolution and Theater Reform). In Hushi w encun 胡适文存 (Hu Shi’s writings), vol. 6. Hefei: Huangshan shushe; Xinhua shudian jingxiao, 1996, 106-116.

Huang, Zuolin. “On Mei Lanfang and Chinese Traditional Theater.” In Faye Chunfang Fei, ed./tr., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, 154-158.

Li, Yu. “Li Liweng on Theater.” In Faye Chunfang Fei, ed./tr., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, 77-87.

Liu, Siyuan. Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Mao, Zedong. “On New Democracy.” In Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power. Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949: New Democracy . Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004, 330-369.

Park, Sowon S. “The Adaptive Comparative.” Comparative Critical Studies 12, 2 (2015): 183-196. DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2015.0166

Schechner, Richard. “Foreword.” In Faye Chunfang Fei, ed./tr., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, ix-xiv.

Smith, Deanna, et al. “Historicism.” URL: https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/historicism/

Tian, Min. The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

In a modern “Così fan tutte,” love and fidelity is put to the test

Bienen School of Music

Cahn Auditorium has been the site of many dramas over the years. However, there hasn’t been one like Northwestern University Opera Theater is staging this week — a classic opera with all its twists and turns but told through the lens of a reality television show.

Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” premiered in Vienna in 1790. The 18th century story involves a wager between two friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo, and the cynical Don Alfonso — who is confident he can prove to the young men that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle. Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to have been called off to war, then return in disguise — each attempting to woo the other’s fiancée in a zany test of their fidelity.

For its Northwestern debut, the Bienen School’s Joachim Schamberger transformed the tale into a modern-day television reality show titled “Finding Amore.” Schamberger, the director of the production, describes the cast of characters, including Don Alfonso — the reality show’s producer — participants Ferrando and Guglielmo, and the unwitting contestants, Dorabella and Fiordiligi.

“The heightened emotional environment of being on reality television fits the sometimes-absurd comedy of the opera, as well as its more serious aspects,” Schamberger says.

“When the men test their new-found fiancées’ fidelity without their knowledge, we see the voyeuristic side of reality TV.”

Schamberger reveals the reality show experience ultimately impacts the characters’ friendships and relationships in expected and unexpected ways. To further create the feel of a live reality show, Cahn’s stage will have a large LED wall background with projections from live studio cameras.

Conductor Benjamin Manis leads the Northwestern University Chamber Orchestra in supporting the onstage action with Mozart’s timeless music for this production of “Così fan tutte.”

The opera, which runs from Thursday, May 23 through Sunday, May 26, will be performed in Italian with English supertitles.

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Critic's Notebook

Enhancing Broadway, by Any Bodily Means Necessary

The choreographers nominated for Tony Awards this year have a broader vision than usual of the possibilities of dance in theater.

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A group of performers rumble in a scene with falling rain and a gravel-covered stage; they all wear sneakers and casual clothes like jeans. One actor is aloft; it’s a fight that looks like a dance.

By Brian Seibert

In the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” something shocking keeps happening. It isn’t that the characters throw punches, or not exactly. These are teenagers who rumble, so it isn’t surprising that they’re violent. What’s shocking is the kinesthetic impact. You seem to feel the blows yourself.

The impact is electrifying, but it doesn’t operate alone. It serves the storytelling and engages the emotions of an audience by bodily means. This is what choreography at its best can do, and it isn’t limited to what you might think of as dancing.

The choreographers of “The Outsiders” and of the four other shows nominated for the Tony Award in that category this year understand this. None dole out the usual stuff. This broader vision of theatrical choreography is worth noticing and applauding.

Hell’s Kitchen

A loosely autobiographical jukebox musical of songs by Alicia Keys, “Hell’s Kitchen” takes place in the 1990s, in the Manhattan neighborhood of the title. Camille A. Brown’s choreography fits the setting. It looks, delightfully, like dancing that the people who live there would do, like regular folks getting their groove on.

But it’s also a throwback to an older, neglected mode of integrating dance into a musical, the tradition that Agnes de Mille inaugurated with shows like “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” in the 1940s. Like de Mille, Brown individuates the ensemble with detail: This guy is extra flamboyant; that gal pops her gum bubbles on the beat. Moving like this, the dancing chorus becomes the appealing community that draws the show’s 17-year-old protagonist, Ali, into the world — and out from the apartment building where her mother wants her to stay sheltered.

And also like de Mille, Brown externalizes the emotions of the main characters with dancer stand-ins. Ali sits shyly next to her crush as they sing a love song, but the feelings inside them are put into gestural motion by two dancers. This technique is more perilous; it can be too on-the-nose. But Brown, who has her own modern dance company and has been a Tony nominee twice before for in this category (“Choir Boy” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”), makes it work, communicating hidden emotion while connecting R&B hits to Broadway history.

Here Lies Love

“Here Lies Love,” which closed in November, similarly used dance to create community. But most unusually for Broadway, audience members did much of it themselves . The show, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. It transpires in one of her favorite haunts, a nightclub, or a Broadway theater converted into one by removing the orchestra seats.

A lot of the choreography, by the postmodernist Annie-B Parson, was crowd control. Wranglers in jumpsuits used wands and moving platforms to rearrange standing audience members, and even the spectators in the balcony seats were roped into simple line dances.

Parson’s choreography for the performers, which incorporated some of Marcos’s trademark moves, was close to satire, straight-faced but not intended to be taken straight. It put into question the illusions spun by the characters, and in Brechtian style, it commented on the action, prompting the audience to think.

The audience movement, though, was more distinctive. It didn’t just contribute to the party vibe; it also conscripted audience members into the story, like a crowd of extras. And in a story about dictatorship, assassination and revolution, that inclusion had implications. The choreography moved the audience into a zone of complicity. “Here Lies Love” made dance morally ambiguous.

Water for Elephants

Based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel, “Water for Elephants,” which was also adapted into a 2011 film, is set mainly among circus entertainers in the 1930s. The choreography, by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll, a founding director of the Montreal-based circus collective the Seven Fingers, is essentially cirque nouveau in vintage clothing .

It tumbles right out of the gate, but the acrobatics aren’t gratuitous as they were in all too many recent musicals (“The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “The Who’s Tommy”). They’re part of the milieu and help define it. As the ensemble members stack their upright bodies and toss and catch one another with seeming recklessness, they increase the carnivalesque fun — first jumping rope, then jumping rope with someone’s body as the rope. The action is true to a lyric from the show about what circus life is: “always in motion.”

The tricks, while thrilling, are never just tricks. It’s the trust they imply that establishes a sense of community here. Better than the predictable story, the circus elements impart real risk and danger: people spin wildly, hanging by a foot high above the ground; someone slides full-speed down a long pole and catches herself at the last millisecond. They supply the wonder, too, in stylized fashion, especially with a horse beautifully represented by an aerialist suspended by white silk ribbons.

The Outsiders

As a musical about fighting teenagers — it’s an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s beloved 1967 novel — this production perhaps inevitably evokes the classic “West Side Story.” And as Jerome Robbins did in that show, the “Outsiders” choreographers, the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, use dance to distinguish the rival groups. The rich “socs” move more stiffly in their period jitterbugging than the poor “greasers” do in their rougher, more acrobatic style. But everyone’s movement kicks up the rubber gravel that covers the stage. It creates an atmosphere by activating Oklahoma dirt.

What’s most special about this show’s movement, though, is the violence. The Kuperman brothers have a background in martial arts. They know how to use force and momentum, not shy away from them, as often happens in fight scenes that look tentative and fake. These performers really are throwing around one another’s weight, and this makes the fighting look more realistic, increasing the stakes of the drama.

Yet the production also isn’t afraid to go past realism. The sound design (by Cody Spencer) amplifies the blows and sometimes brings us inside the ringing of a concussion. The blasts of sound amp up the kinesthetic impact, connecting with the bodies in the audience. The climactic rumble becomes climactic through stylized slow-motion and blackouts, and if those methods, like the rain that accompanies them, are closer to clichés, they are executed uncommonly well.

That leaves “Illinoise,” the nominee that’s hardest to classify. On one level, it’s a concert rendition of Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 album. But it’s also a dance show, choreographed and directed by Justin Peck, that acts out the songs mutely and braids them into a narrative. Like the other nominees (except for “Here Lies Love”) it’s a coming-of-age story. The conceit is that a group of fragile young people gather by a campfire to read aloud entries from their journals — telling stories expressed through dance.

For dancers to carry the narrative while musicians and singers accompany them is fairly common in ballet and concert dance, but it hasn’t been tried much on Broadway, a notable exception being Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out.” This means that “Illinoise” is by far the most choreographically ambitious nominee, the one that asks dance to do the most.

The show has occasioned a curious split in critical reception. Theater critics generally found “Illinoise” innovative and affecting. Dance critics judged it sentimental and disappointingly tired.

How to account for this split? It could be a question of sensibility, though theater critics tend to be wary of sentimentality in other theatrical forms. It is certainly about familiarity. Peck, who won a Tony for his choreography for the 2018 revival of “Carousel,” is the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet. He has been making dances about late adolescence, often set to music by Stevens, for a long time. To many dance critics, including Peck fans like me, he has lately seemed to be stuck in a kind of arrested development.

From that perspective, the choreography in “Illinoise” is stunted. Although arranged with skill and tender care, the basic idiom is constricted, frantically alternating between holding in and reaching out. The dancers look like they’re trying to escape from straitjackets and failing. This might express an aspect of adolescence, but it hobbles these talented dancers too much, limiting their emotional range. Worse, Peck makes them all dance the same, as if trapped inside Peck avatars. When they break out, tangentially (Byron Tittle’s tap solo) or in a breakdown (Ricky Ubeda’s solo of angry grief), it’s a flash of missed potential.

The common language establishes a community but it’s a community that seems contrived from the start (where, outside of therapy, do young people sit around reading to one another from their journals?), achieved mainly through forced cheer and hugs. The big feelings that the show can invoke come from the music, despite the choreography’s limitations.

Ultimately, the split comes down to differing expectations of what choreography can do, on Broadway or anywhere else. The impact of “Illinoise” isn’t what it could be. Choreography can hit a lot harder.

Review: San Diego Musical Theatre's high-energy 'Legally Blonde' bubbles with fun

As stage musicals go, "Legally Blonde" has its pros and cons.

It's not quite as good as its source material (the 2001 novel and non-musical film of the same name), its characters have lost most of their subtleties and many songs are weak (like "Blood in the Water" and "Chip on My Shoulder").

On the other hand, it's a very funny and contemporary show and its "Malibu girl" vibe is hilariously channeled into songs like "Omigod You Guys" and "Bend and Snap."

San Diego Musical Theatre's production of "Legally Blonde," which is directed and choreographed by Xavier J. Bush, makes the best of the show's good qualities by amping up the energy in the dance scenes and rethinking the casting in a few roles.

Johnisa Breault, a local Filipino-American actress, is every inch Elle Woods, the flaxen-haired UCLA fashion merchandising student who follows her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School and discovers a new passion in the courtroom. Wearing a long blonde wig colored with dark roots to reflect her natural hair color, Breault has a charming and bubbly sweetness, a strong singing voice and the tall, lithe body and high kicks of a Radio City Rockette.

Another surprise is Eli Wood as Warner, Elle's self-centered boyfriend who dumps her to trade up for a politician's daughter at Harvard. Wood has a nice tenor voice and he doesn't play the role as the one-note pompous jerk I've seen in other stagings.

Bethany Slomka is wonderful and vulnerable as Paulette, the unassertive Cambridge hairstylist with a heart of gold whose rendition of "Ireland" (Paulette's dream destination) is the highlight of Act One. Also adding star power to the show is Robert J. Townsend, an excellent singer who oozes insincerity as law school Professor Callahan.

Dancer-singer Joy Newbegin thrills as the fitness trainer Brooke in the exuberant jump-roping dance scene "Whipped into Shape" in Act Two. Also enjoyable are Drew Bradford as Harvard law clerk Emmett and Vivian Romero as Warner's snooty girlfriend Vivienne.

Matthew Herman's all-pink scenic design and Chong Mi Land's costumes add color and fun to the production. Michelle Miles creatively designed the lighting and sound was co-designed by Jordan Gray and Cole Atencio. Lyndon Pugeda is the show's music director.

Rather than live musicians, the production has a pre-recorded score. It's better than most, but the sound at the performance I attended was occasionally loud and shrill.

While I'm not the biggest fan of "Legally Blonde: The Musical," this production is lively and entertaining and it has an especially likable leading lady in Breault.

'Legally Blonde'

When: 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m.. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through June 2

Where: San Diego Musical Theatre, 650 Mercury St., Kearny Mesa

Tickets: $30-$70

Phone: (858) 560-5740

Online: sdmt.org

[email protected]

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .

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What Matters in Contemporary Anglophone Cultures

Call for papers

Who/What Counts

“What Matters” is an invitation to rethink the weight of habits, established structures and validated categories. Arguing that someone/something counts goes against economic/budgetary/financial accounting, which is typically the work of a dominant power that keeps precise accounts, compiling or capitalising, trying to contain or control. What matters is an invitation to give an account of what does not seem to count , what is unthought of or invisible (Fricker 2007, Le Blanc 2009).

“What matters” therefore immediately raises a series of political issues relating to what counts /who counts: those whose lives count, in a singular way; those whose lives do not count or are not counted, or on the contrary, whose lives are counted only statistically (Bond et al. 2020, Butler 2009, De Leon & Wells 2015, Drakulich et al. 2021); the authorities (of various kinds) who carry out this accounting after encoding what counts /who counts or not (Callahan et al. 2006, Drakulich 2015, Thévenot 1983); the media(tisa)tions through which these operations of selection, differentiation, hierarchisation and discrimination circulate (Dixon 2004, Simmons 2017, Zhang et al. 2019); individual or collective actions aimed at ensuring that voices are recognized as counting, or on the contrary, at silencing them (Brown et al. 2021, Francis & Wright-Rigueur, Taylor 2016).

“What matters” is a question addressing the type of crisis that it reveals, or even triggers. During crises whose manifestations are directly accessible, “What matters” as a question is not immediately relevant because it presupposes that we are asking about what does not naturally appear to be important. “What matters” refers to the hidden or hollow presence, perhaps default-presence, of a problematic point. It is linked to the identification of blind spots. It attempts to determine the theoretical, ethical and political relevance of what matters even while it is not directly perceptible (Laugier 1999). It thus posits the very critical existence of a crisis characterised by a form of negative phenomenology (Le Blanc 2009).

In order to respond to "What matters", one needs to be able to perceive what counts while not being visible, audible, touchable, etc. so as to make up for the harm caused by invisibility, inaudibility, etc. Asking "What matters" means enquiring about frames of perception and intelligibility, in order to realise that they exist, and also to question their relevance. One must also be wary of adopting an approach that favours the visual over the acoustic or the haptic, in order to avoid perceptual bias and the prevalence of the visual in the detection of vulnerabilities. The question of the witness arises in many ways.

Repairing, Incarnating

From this stems the remedial function of asking about "What matters", which is concerned with a (lack of perceptibility affecting a) wrong done to someone or a group, and sets out to make up for it or rectify it. Faced with a perception deficit that creates a dispute, the ethical subject who asks what matters assumes responsibility for healing. From this point of view, the affinities with the ethics of care should not be overlooked (Tronto 2015). Asking the question of what matters (Diamond 1996) implies taking an interest in the other persons’ vulnerability, which means paying attention to particular situations and taking account of otherness in its singularity. Asking "What matters" means that we are driven by a desire to be concerned or responsible, which attests to a radical ethical stance.

Considering this affinity between “What matters” and the ethics and politics of care , one realises that the question of the body is central (Butler 1993, Dumouchel, Pfeifer & Pitti 2012). This perception/exposure of suffering and injustice is linked to a vulnerability that is ontological, embodied and situated. The body is not seen as sovereign, but as caught up in a web of interdependencies (or embeddings and entanglements, to borrow from the registers of the post-human, neo-materialism and environmental humanities) (Appleby & Pennycook 2017, Bogost 2012). Asking “What matters” therefore posits the relationality of the subjects, including and essentially that of the observer, the witness and the researcher.

Narratives, Archives, Testimonies

What matters seems to be not so much about understanding as about listening again to what is inaudible/invisible (in the world), or too little highlighted (in research) or too visible and familiar to be seen/recognized (hidden in plain sight). The issues raised by “What matters ” invite us to rethink what sometimes escapes the social world and what is the researcher’s task to reveal (Diamond 1995, Laugier 1999, Putnam 1996). It calls for a change in approach, bringing into play all the modalities of attention , particularly that of listening and its effects, in which mind and body are inevitably involved (Epstein 2016, Lanham 2007, Ganteau 2023).

The power of language to change the world, to obscure one part of it (backgrounding) in order to expose another in a (too) visible way (foregrounding), is of crucial importance for grasping what counts (for whom and for what purpose) and making one’s words count, but also for trying to free oneself from pre-established cognitive schemas (Khalil 2005, Talmy 2008).

Revealing what counts also means delving into the intimacy of stories of suffering from the internal viewpoint of their real actors. It means asking what power the narrative holds to redress injustices and bring people to account (Balkan & Masarwa 2022, De Leon & Wells 2015, Mbembe 2006). It means getting as close as possible to first- or second-person experience (Sorlin 2022) in order to show and hear what an apparently objective (third-person) approach cannot always grasp.

In this sense, archives are halfway between first-hand testimony and the fragmentation of a narrative whose contours are absent or dependent on what has been archived and what has not. They raise questions about what should count when looking at the history of individuals or social groups, and also make it possible to reconstruct, at the level of documentary sources, traces of the priorities asserted by individuals and groups in the social world (Boltanski 1990, Foliard 2022). At a time when literary forms are becoming increasingly immersive and participatory (Moslund et al. 2021), a phenomenology of reading and spectating needs to be established, highlighting the link between authors, actors, readers, researchers and the public (Caracciolo 2012, Hutto 2011). Is literature a counter-archive ? Are the new possibilities for mixing and matching, particularly in poetry (source-based poetry), the key to a new understanding? If the traces of past violence left in the present are deciphered through investigative methods such as anthropology or forensics, literature and the arts also form an ethical commitment that accompanies, supports and even triggers political action rooted in the past but looking to the future.

Historicity, Singularity, Agency

The question of testimony leads to the question of timeliness. As a research topic, “What matters” also needs to be examined from a temporal angle by highlighting the urgency of social and environmental crises, but also their historical causes and possible effects. However, the temporality of “ What matters” may not be subject to a strictly linear logic: it involves effects of latency and aftermath, loops and repeats.

Finally, one of the characteristics of the subject is linked to the implementation of a doubly particularist approach (Wittgenstein 1953, 1958, Cavell 1964, Laugier 1999). Asking “ What matters” implies an effort to detect singularities and describe them, but also implies an individual approach that calls on the responsibility of the ethical subject, the citizen and/or researcher. Far from any decalogue, the subject who asks “ What matters” breaks free from the grip of dominant frameworks (Butler 2009) to contribute to an ethical and innovative approach.

Embracing the issue of “ What matters” means taking a step to the side, questioning the various currents of thought and periodisations that have given shape to our productions, but also taking a step towards the experiential (Caracciolo 2012), as close as possible to the individuals in the concreteness of their daily experience.

Finally, “ What matters” is a response to what is challenging research , and a direct appeal to its agency to redefine the common space and what would be a (co-)habitable world. It invites us to grasp how research can make people act and react, and provoke awakening .

We are looking for papers in linguistic, literary, dramatic, historical, sociological, political, film and serial studies and, more broadly, cultural studies.

Papers may address the following issues (non-exhaustive list):

- the logics of making lives, individuals and groups, and experiences visible or invisible, and therefore also the political and artistic forms of struggle aimed at ensuring that voices are recognised as counting;

- the mechanisms, operations, devices, bodies and authorities that select, differentiate, prioritise and discriminate between what counts and what does not;

- the conditions and contexts that enable the very question “ What matters” to emerge; the frameworks of perception and intelligibility of what is or is not audible, visible, touchable, etc.; attention and its modalities;

- the power of language to change the world, to obscure one part of it and/or expose another; the power of narrative to redress injustices and render accounts; the role of sources and archives and that of literary counter-archives;

- the ethical issues involved in questioning “ What matters”, and in the attention to otherness, singularity and vulnerability; the interdependencies and relationality of subjects, including observers, witnesses and researchers; the temporal and contextual/particular dimensions of “ What matters” questioning and the way in which it challenges our categories of thought and research activity.

Keynote speakers :

Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University)

Sandra Laugier (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)

Fiona McCann (Université de Lille)

Organising team

Isabelle Brasme, Anne Crémieux, Karim Daanoune, Florence Floquet, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Marc Lenormand, Théo Maligeay, Eric Mélac, Nancy Nalbandian Niaz Pernon, Constance Pompié, Sandrine Sorlin

Advisory Board

Rosario Arias (Malaga) Giuditta Caliendo (Université de Lille)

Samuel A. Chambers (Johns Hopkins)

Claude Chastagner (Montpellier 3)

Vincent Dussol (Montpellier 3)

Marianne Drugeon (Montpellier 3)

Jane M. Gaines (Columbia)

Monica Michlin (Montpellier 3)

Judith Misrahi-Barak (Montpellier 3)

Claire Omhovère (Montpellier 3)

Susana Onega (Zaragoza)

Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne nouvelle)

Claudine Raynaud (Montpellier 3)

Olivier Tinland (Montpellier 3)

Pascale Tollance (Lyon 2)

Pieter Vermeulen (KU Leuven)

Bibliographie indicative / Select bibliography

Appleby, Roslyn, and Alastair Pennycook. “Swimming with Sharks, Ecological Feminism and Posthuman Language Politics.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 14-2.3 (2017): 239-61.

Balkan, Osman, and Yumna Masarwa. “The Transnational Afterlives of European Muslims”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 42.1 (2022): 221‑36. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9698255

Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect. Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History . New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2014.

Bogost, I. Alien Phenomenology; Or what It’s like to Be a Thing . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Boltanski, Luc. « Ce dont les gens sont capables. » L’amour et la justice comme compétences . Paris : Métailié (1990): 13-13.

Bond, Chelsey J., Lisa J. Whop, David Singh, and Helena Kajlich. « Now we say Black Lives Matter but... the fact of the matter is, we just Black matter to them .» Medical Association Journal 213.6 (2020): 248-251.

Brown, Nadia E., Ray Block Jr., and Christopher T. Stout. The Politics of Protest: Readings on the Black Lives Matter Movement. Oxon : Routledge, 2021.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex . London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is life grievable? London: Verso, 2009.

Callahan, Kathe, Melvin J. Dubnick, and Dorothy Olshfsky. “War Narratives: Framing Our Understanding of the War on Terror.” Public Administration Review 66.4 (2006): 554-568.

Caracciolo, Marco. “Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11.3 (2012): 367-384.

Cavell, Stanley. “Must We Mean What We Say?” In V. C. Chappell (ed.), Ordinary Language . Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964 [1958], 75-112.

Chambers, Samuel A. Capitalist Economics . New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

De Leon, Jason and Michael Wells. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland:University of California Press, 2015.

Diamond, Cora. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind . Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1995.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Film and Television After 9/11 . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Drakulich, Kevin M. “Explicit and Hidden Racial Bias in the Framing of Social Problems.” Social Problems 62.3 (2015): 391–418.

Drakulich, Kevin, Kevin H Wozniak, John Hagan, and Demon Johnson. “Whose lives mattered? How White and Black Americans felt about Black Lives Matter in 2016.” Law & Society Review 55.2 (2021): 227-251.

Dumouchel, Paul. Emotions. Essai sur le corps et le social . Paris : Les Empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 1999.

Epstein, Andrew. Attention Equals Life. The pursuit of the everyday in contemporary poetry and Culture . Oxford: OUP, 2016.

Foliard, Daniel. The Violence of Colonial Photography . Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2022.

Francis, Megan Ming, and Leah Wright-Rigueur. “Black Lives Matter in Historical Perspective”. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 17:1 (2021): 441-458

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing . Oxford and New York: OUP, 2007.

Gaines, Jane M. Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Champaign, Illinois:University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Gaines, Jane M. “Documentary Radicality.” Revue Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16, no. 1 (2007): 5–24.

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative . New York and London: Routledge, 2023.

Hutto, Daniel D. “Understanding fictional minds without Theory of Mind.” Style 45.2 (2011): 276-282.

Khalil, Esam N. “Grounding between figure-ground and foregrounding-backgrounding.” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3.1 (2005): 1-21.

Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention. Style and Substance in the Age of Information . Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007.

Laugier, Sandra. Du réel à l’ordinaire. Quelle philosophie du langage aujourd’hui ? Paris: Vrin, 1999.

Le Blanc, Guillaume. L’invisibilité sociale . Paris: PUF, 2009.

Macé, Marielle. Sidérer, considérer. Migrants en France, 2017 . Lagrasse: Verdier, 2017.

Mbembe, Achille. « Necropolitics ». Raisons politiques 21.1. (2006): 29‑60.

Michlin, Monica, Jean-Paul Rocchi (eds). Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Moi, Tori. Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Moslund, Sven Pulz, et al. How Literature Comes to Matter? Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020.

Pfeifer, Rolf, and Alexandre Pitti. La Révolution de l’intelligence du corps. Paris: Manuela, 2012.

Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Simmons Alicia D. “Whose Lives Matter?: The National Newsworthiness of Police Killing Unarmed Blacks.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 14.2 (2017): 639-663.

Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of ‘You’. Second-Person and its Pragmatic Effects . Cambridge: CUP, 2022.

Talmy, Leonard. “Aspects of attention in language.” In Peter Robinson and Nick C. Ellis (eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition . New York: Routledge (2008): 37-48.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . Chicago : Haymarket, 2016.

Thévenot, Laurent. « L'économie du codage social ». Critiques de l'économie politique 23-24 (1983) : 188-222.

Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care . London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Vermeulen, Pieter. Literature and the Anthropocene . Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form . Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations . (tr. G. E. M. Anscombe). Oxford: Blackwell. 1953.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books . New York: Harper and Row, 1958.

Zhang, Yini, Dhavan Shah, Jordan Foley, Aman Abhishek, Josephine Lukito, Jiyoun Suk, Sang Jung Kim, Zhongkai Sun, Jon Pevehouse, and Christine Garlough. “Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012–2014.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 24.4 (2019): 182–202.

Deadline for submission of 300-word proposals (+ bibliography): 8 November 2024.

Proposals to be sent to the organisers ( [email protected] , [email protected], [email protected] )

Notification to authors: early December 2024

Selected papers will be considered for publications.

River City Live

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2 river flood warnings in effect for 4 counties in the area

From the emotional to the outrageous, spring into the ‘untold stories’ of jacksonville at the florida theatre.

“Untold Stories,” now entering its third season, is a remarkable initiative brought to you by the nonprofit Florida Theatre.

The mission of “Untold Stories” is to honor the timeless tradition of oral storytelling in a contemporary setting.

Each quarterly story evening unfolds with its own thematic arc. The stage comes alive with personal and transformative tales from a diverse tapestry of voices, including natives and residents alike, all intimately connected to the culture of Northeast Florida.

From artists and tech enthusiasts to entrepreneurs, educators, and medical professionals, each storyteller unveils memories intricately interwoven and shaped by our unique environment.

Each evening features a curated musical journey by a guest artist, creating a dynamic and immersive experience for our audience.

The Artistic Director and host of “Untold Stories,” Barbara Colaciello of BABS’LAB, curates the evenings not merely as a collection of individual stories but rather as a cohesive whole, akin to a series of mini-plays taking the audience on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, from laughter to tears, from introspection to inspiration.

Join the Florida Theatre at 7 p.m. May 30 as it continues to celebrate the power of narrative and the vibrant cultural mosaic that defines Northeast Florida -- its people, its landscapes, and its history -- one story at a time.

More information: www.floridatheatre.com .

Click here to take a moment and familiarize yourself with our Community Guidelines.

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Factories in Pavlovsky Posad
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1900s architecture in Russia
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Geographic coordinates of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia

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Coordinates of Elektrostal in decimal degrees

Coordinates of elektrostal in degrees and decimal minutes, utm coordinates of elektrostal, geographic coordinate systems.

WGS 84 coordinate reference system is the latest revision of the World Geodetic System, which is used in mapping and navigation, including GPS satellite navigation system (the Global Positioning System).

Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

Elevation above sea level is a measure of a geographic location’s height. We are using the global digital elevation model GTOPO30 .

Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia

SSH-MOZHAYSK - FSSH-VOSTOK-ELEKTROSTAL head to head game preview and prediction

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Contemporary Theatre Review
Alan Read - Professor of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, Kings College, London ' Contemporary Theatre Review is unique among scholarly theatre journals in its deft combination of primary and secondary sources on current and recent theatre practice. That is, its scrupulously-edited, peer-reviewed critical essays are juxtaposed with ...
JCDE: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English
JCDE is an international journal published by De Gruyter with CDE.. The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English focuses on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. It renegotiates the understanding of contemporary aesthetics of drama and theatre by treating dramatic texts of the last fifty years. The peer-reviewed journal publishes essays that engage in ...
About
Contemporary Theatre Review is an international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Encompassing a wide variety of theatre forms, from new playwrights and devisors to theatres of movement, image and other forms of physical expression, from new acting methods to music theatre, live art and multi-media production work, […]
Contemporary theatre in the Philippines
4 This essay does not tend to be a brief introduction, a full guide through Filipino §theatre traditions. It should be rather seen as another voice in a wide discussion about the state of contemporary theatre in the Philippines, the theatre of a country which shares with many others the experience of being postcolonial, but in the same time it ...
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English
Objective The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English focuses on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. It renegotiates the understanding of contemporary aesthetics of drama and theatre by treating dramatic texts of the last fifty years. The peer-reviewed journal publishes essays that engage in close readings of plays and also touch upon historical ...
Derivatives, Entanglement and the Dramaturg: Contemporary Theatre in
This essay originally came out in ... Many contemporary theater works in the Philippines are social dramas touching social issues and realistic in approach. In the book Palabas, Doreen Fernandez has provided an overview of what she considers the state of Philippine theater today. She notes that it is Philippine life that fires our playwrights.
Full article: On Dramaturgy
Essays interrogate contemporary dramaturgy as an expanding field of tasks and skills, challenges and strategies. They explore a range of dramaturgical practices in contemporary theatre, dance, performance and media art and also draw attention to the personal and institutional aspects of dramaturgy.
PDF The Audience-Actor Relationship at Shakespeare's Globe
a contemporary theatre experience are exciting aspects of Paige Greco's excellent 2009 essay, "The Audience-Actor Relationship at Shakespeare's Globe." Her writing is clear, cogent, and very much alive. Over the years I have read many essays from students writing about historical aspects of theatre and theatrical conventions.
The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre
The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre. Reviewed by Temple Hauptfleisch * (South Africa) The aim of this volume of essays is to provide insights into theatre in South Africa since the first democratic elections. It seeks to do so by focussing on new plays written, developed and produced in the country since 1994.
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Sir Anril Pineda TIATCO. In this essay, entanglement is proposed as a conceptual idiom for the understanding of contemporary Manila theater where pista (f iesta) is used as model and Rizal X as example. Contemporary Manila theater via Rizal X is argued to be part of an intricate entanglement: representations, shared histories, relationships and ...
Classics and Contemporary Theatre
Abstract. Any discussion of ancient Greek and Roman drama on the contemporary stage must begin with a brief acknowledgment of both the radically increased worldwide interest in translating, (often radically) revising, and performing these plays in the past thirty-five years and the growing scholarly response to that development.
Modern Drama 101: Modernism and Theatre
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Contemporary theatre integrates movement, images, heightened physical expressions, being the self, acting, music, text, dance, objects, costumes, sound, lighting, sets, and vocal into a performance that is complex and interactive for the audience and performer. This type of theatre addresses issues for an example, Anorexia Caroline Horton's ...
Modern Theatre and Film Industry
The modern theatre and film industry have helped familiarize people with the reality of the world, emotions people go through and happy, as well as sad situations. Historically, one of the first forms of entertainment which evolved into movies today was theatre. We will write a custom essay on your topic. People went to all the plays that were ...
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In a modern "Così fan tutte," love and fidelity is put to the test
Mozart's "Così fan tutte" premiered in Vienna in 1790. The 18th century story involves a wager between two friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo, and the cynical Don Alfonso — who is confident he can prove to the young men that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle. Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to have been called off to ...
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Where: San Diego Musical Theatre, 650 Mercury St., Kearny Mesa. Tickets: $30-$70. Phone: (858) 560-5740. This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune. ©2024 The San Diego Union ...
cfp
March 13, 2025. full name / name of organization: University Paul-Valery - Montpellier 3. contact email: [email protected]. Call for papers. Who/What Counts. "What Matters" is an invitation to rethink the weight of habits, established structures and validated categories. Arguing that someone/something counts goes against ...
Contemporary Theatre Review: Vol 33, No 3 (Current issue)
Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2023) See all volumes and issues. Volume 33, 2023 Vol 32, 2022 Vol 31, 2021 Vol 30, 2020 Vol 29, 2019 Vol 28, 2018 Vol 27, 2017 Vol 26, 2016 Vol 25, 2015 Vol 24, 2014 Vol 23, 2013 Vol 22, 2012 Vol 21, 2011 Vol 20, 2010 Vol 19, 2009 Vol 18, 2008 Vol 17, 2007 Vol 16, 2006 Vol 15, 2005 Vol 14, 2004 ...
Elektrostal
In 1938, it was granted town status. [citation needed]Administrative and municipal status. Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is incorporated as Elektrostal City Under Oblast Jurisdiction—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, Elektrostal City Under Oblast Jurisdiction is incorporated as Elektrostal Urban Okrug.
Spring into Florida Theatre's Untold Stories
From the emotional to the outrageous, spring into the 'Untold Stories' of Jacksonville at the Florida Theatre Published: May 23, 2024, 10:42 AM Updated: May 23, 2024, 12:11 PM Tags: River City ...
Category:Gorodok factory
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Full article: 'Brecht in Practice': Critical Reflections on Staging
This article considers how contemporary theatre-makers might seek to activate Bertolt Brecht's writings on a politicized theatre. It is predicated on the categorical difference between theory and practice, which Brecht exploited to encourage practical experiment by setting a series of theoretical goals. I will be arguing that Brecht ...
Geographic coordinates of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia
Geographic coordinates of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia in WGS 84 coordinate system which is a standard in cartography, geodesy, and navigation, including Global Positioning System (GPS). Latitude of Elektrostal, longitude of Elektrostal, elevation above sea level of Elektrostal.
SSh Mozhaysk vs Fssh Vostok-Elektrostal Head to Head Preview, Team
The table below shows the extended goals stats for SSh Mozhaysk and Fssh Vostok-Elektrostal. The percentage numbers show the games with specific stats compared to the total games played by each team. First four stats shown in the table illustrate the total number of goals scored in each football ...

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Derivatives, Entanglement and the Dramaturg: Contemporary Theatre in Manila (Part Two: Entanglement)

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Geographic coordinates of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia

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Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia

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