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Author: Awam Amkpa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134381336
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.
Author: Awam Amkpa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134381336
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.
Author: Awam Amkpa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Author: Fintan Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136154868
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come ‘after’ identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions.
Author: Kris Salata
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136158111
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata posits Grotowski’s work as philosophical practice, and more particularly, as practical research in the phenomenology of being, arguing that Grotowski’s departure from theatrical productions (and thus critical consideration) resulted from his uncompromising pursuit of one central problem, "What does it mean to reveal oneself?" — the very question that drove his stage directing work. The book demonstrates that the answer led him through the path of gradually stripping the theatrical phenomenon down to its most elemental aspect, which shows itself through the craft of the performer as a non-representational event. This particular quality released at the heights of the art of the performer is referred to as aliveness, or true liveness in this study in order to shift scholarly focus onto something that has always fascinated great theatre practitioners, including Stanislavski and Grotowski, and of which academic scholarship has limited grasp. Salata’s theoretical analysis of aliveness reaches out to phenomenology and a broad range of post-structural philosophy and critical theory, through which Grotowski’s project is portrayed as philosophical practice.
Author: Ana Elena Puga
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113589924X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
In this timely study, Puga compares contemporary Southern Cone playwrights and their aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship; in the process, she traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory.
Author: Jan Cohen-Cruz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134351305
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal’s work is the first to look ’beyond Boal’ and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context. A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible. The ideas generated throughout A Boal Companion will: expand readers' understanding of TO as a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical discourses provide a variety of lenses through which to practice and critique TO make explicit the relationship between TO and other bodies of work. This collection is ideal for TO practitioners and scholars who want to expand their knowledge, but it also provides unfamiliar readers and new students to the discipline with an excellent study resource.
Author: Allana Lindgren
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317696158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 977
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Book Description
The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.
Author: Katrine K. Wong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136169695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.
Author: Judith G. Miller
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122800
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
The work of renowned Ivoirian playwright Koffi Kwahulé has been translated into some 15 languages and is performed regularly throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. For the first time, Seven Plays of Koffi Kwahulé: In and Out of Africa makes available to an Anglophone audience some of the best and most representative plays by one of Francophone Africa’s most accomplished living playwrights. Kwahulé’s theater delves into both the horror of civil war in Africa and the diasporic experience of peoples of African origin living in Europe and the “New World.” From the split consciousness of the protagonist and rape victim in Jaz to the careless buffoonery of mercenaries in Brewery, Kwahulé’s characters speak in riffs and refrains that resonate with the improvisational pulse of jazz music. He confronts us with a violent world that represents the damage done to Africa and asks us, through exaggeration and surreal touches, to examine the reality of an ever-expanding network of global migrants. His plays speak to the contemporary state of humanity, suffering from exile, poverty, capitalist greed, collusion, and fear of “the other”—however that “other” gets defined. Judith G. Miller’s introductory essay situates Kwahulé among his postcolonial contemporaries. Short introductory essays to each play, accompanied by production photos, contextualize possible approaches to Kwahulé’s often enigmatic work. Anglophone theater scholars and theater professionals eager to engage with contemporary theater beyond their borders, particularly in terms of what so-called minority theater artists from other countries are creating, will welcome this indispensable collection. Students and scholars of African studies and of global French studies will also find this work intriguing and challenging.
Author: Erika Fischer-Lichte
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317935837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent upon each other. While the term ‘intercultural theatre’ as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot adequately be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy ‘the West and the rest’ – where Western cultures are ‘universal’ and non-Western cultures are ‘particular’ – as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership. This volume uses international case studies to explore the politics of globalization, looking at new paternalistic forms of exchange and the new inequalities emerging from it. These case studies are guided by the principle that processes of interweaving performance cultures are, in fact, political processes. The authors explore the inextricability of the aesthetic and the political, whereby aesthetics cannot be perceived as opposite to the political; rather, the aesthetic is the political. Helen Gilbert’s essay ‘Let the Games Begin: Pageants, Protests, Indigeneity (1968–2010)’won the 2015 Marlis Thiersch Prize for best essay from the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.
