The man who mistook Marat for Sade: 'living' memory and the video archive

Digital video archives, which are growing at an exponential rate, will become increasingly important to Theatre History and Performance Studies, and questions of how scholars negotiate the relationships between memory, technology and performance events in theoretical and practical terms will become crucial. Indeed, there is already a considerable body of scholarly material on this topic. This article considers these questions with specific reference to the relationship between video records deposited in digital archives and human memory. First and foremost, this article raises questions about the authority of the archive and the ways in which archival technologies, in the words of Maaike Bleeker, 'transform how we remember, how our and others' memories are entangled in the here-and-now, and, in the end, even how we think and imagine'.

The silent screen (1895-1928)

In chapter 1, Victoria Duckett introduces the silent screen years (1895–1927) by investigating the American poet Vachel Lindsay’s claim in 1915 that European stage acting was unsuited to film. This critique held sway for decades, during which commentators celebrated American, as opposed to European, contributions to the new craft of motion picture acting. European acting became associated with mannered staginess in contrast to a more subtle American style. Building on recent scholarship that questions this dichotomy, Duckett skillfully analyzes the screen performances of two women actors: the French Sarah Bernhardt, arguably the most famous late nineteenth-century actor, who electrified theater audiences but made relatively few film appearances, and the American Lillian Gish, who began her career as a child in stage melodramas but whose fame derived from her appearances in films. Duckett’s nuanced reading of Bernhardt’s performance in the film Camille (Film D’Art, 1911) and Lillian Gish’s in Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) reveals that despite their differences, they both used their bodies expressively to convey meanings and emotions.

Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film

The most famous stage actress of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed a surprising renaissance when the 1912 multi-reel film Queen Elizabeth brought her international acclaim. The triumph capped her already lengthy involvement with cinema while enabling the indefatigable actress to reinvent herself in an era of technological and generational change. Placing Bernhardt at the center of the industry's first two decades, Victoria Duckett challenges the perception of her as an anachronism unable to appreciate film's qualities. Instead, cinema's substitution of translated title cards for her melodic French deciphered Bernhardt for Anglo-American audiences. It also allowed the aging actress to appear in the kinds of longer dramas she could no longer physically sustain onstage. As Duckett shows, Bernhardt contributed far more than star quality. Her theatrical practice on film influenced how the young medium changed the visual and performing arts. Her promoting of experimentation, meanwhile, shaped the ways audiences looked at and understood early cinema.

Myriam Muniz: uma pedagoga do teatro

Pós-graduação em Artes - IA

Direção teatral na perspectiva de Anne Bogart

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Pulsar da Medusa: um experimento de criação cênica e estudo da expressividade do corpo-voz a partir dos fatores do movimento de Rudolf Laban

Pós-graduação em Artes - IA

Pulsar da Medusa: um experimento de criação cênica e estudo da expressividade do corpo-voz a partir dos fatores do movimento de Rudolf Laban

Pós-graduação em Artes - IA

Devising: Pioneering Uncharted Territory in Theater

Throughout theatre history, styles of theatre have come in and out of favor in response to the zeitgeist of the period. Neoclassical, Melodrama, Naturalism, all have their place in history offering enlightenment, passion and truth each in tune with the values of the culture in which it was created. As society transforms, so too does the stage, offering new ways to reflect, interpret and challenge our assumptions about the changing world. Our current society wrestles with a ‘shrinking world’, a world consumed with technological advances that fan the fire of the growing interconnectedness of human beings all over the earth. This ‘shrinking world’ phenomenon has the effect of an‘expanded world awareness’. That is to say, now more than ever we question all assumption regarding singular perspectives and cultural convictions. What our new society values is diversification of insight and a myriad of experiences from which to draw our conclusions about the world in which we live. The kind of theatre that fills this need is Devised Theatre. Theatre is a collaborative art form by nature. Theatre cannot be practiced alone. One must partner other artists as well as an audience in order to create a theatre performance. Theatre is a dialogue which can take many shapes. Devised Theatre is a process of making theatre that enables a group of performers to be physically and practically creative in the sharing and shaping of an original product that directly emanates from assembling, editing and reshaping individual’s contradictory experiences of the world. A devised theatre product is a work that has emerged from and been generated by a group of people working in collaboration. There is an emphasis on a way of working that values an accumulation of ideas. (Oddey)

Hole in the Head: a Play, Accompanied by a Conspectus of Knowledge, Both Repressed and Researched, that Directly Influenced the Playwright in Her Development of a New Work

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

La québécité dans le théâtre contemporain Mythanalyse de Scotstown, Yukonstyle et Félicité

Ce mémoire aborde trois oeuvres du théâtre québécois contemporain, Scotstown de Fabien Cloutier, Yukonstyle de Sarah Berthiaume et Félicité d’Olivier Choinière dans le but de les comparer. Cette comparaison doit alimenter une réflexion sur le concept de québécité, que le présent mémoire définit comme la mise en place d’un traitement de l’identité qui encourage le développement d’une certaine ambivalence identitaire. En stipulant que les discours identitaires sont empreints de ce que Gérard Bouchard appelle les mythes sociaux, ce mémoire analyse le corpus proposé pour en extraire les parts rationnelles de ces mythes, mais aussi les parts émotionnelles, qui agissent comme fondation de l’identité au même titre que la raison. Ce faisant, ce mémoire a pour ambition de déplacer une perception de la québécité ancrée dans une tradition historique et politique influencée par le nationalisme pour ramener ce concept vers une définition plus large, mais aussi plus polysémique pour interpréter l’histoire de la dramaturgie québécoise, qui entretient depuis la Révolution tranquille un rapport ironiquement ambivalent à l’égard des discours identitaires.

La québécité dans le théâtre contemporain Mythanalyse de Scotstown, Yukonstyle et Félicité

Ce mémoire aborde trois oeuvres du théâtre québécois contemporain, Scotstown de Fabien Cloutier, Yukonstyle de Sarah Berthiaume et Félicité d’Olivier Choinière dans le but de les comparer. Cette comparaison doit alimenter une réflexion sur le concept de québécité, que le présent mémoire définit comme la mise en place d’un traitement de l’identité qui encourage le développement d’une certaine ambivalence identitaire. En stipulant que les discours identitaires sont empreints de ce que Gérard Bouchard appelle les mythes sociaux, ce mémoire analyse le corpus proposé pour en extraire les parts rationnelles de ces mythes, mais aussi les parts émotionnelles, qui agissent comme fondation de l’identité au même titre que la raison. Ce faisant, ce mémoire a pour ambition de déplacer une perception de la québécité ancrée dans une tradition historique et politique influencée par le nationalisme pour ramener ce concept vers une définition plus large, mais aussi plus polysémique pour interpréter l’histoire de la dramaturgie québécoise, qui entretient depuis la Révolution tranquille un rapport ironiquement ambivalent à l’égard des discours identitaires.

A voice unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's 'Sunless'

Mussorgsky's Sunless cycle is aesthetically and stylistically an anomalous member of his oeuvre. Its notably effaced, pared-down, and withdrawn qualities present challenges to critical interpretation. Its uniqueness, however, renders it a crucial work for furnishing the fullest possible picture of Mussorgsky as a creative artist. The author of its texts, Golenishchev-Kutuzov (whose relationship with Mussorgsky at the time of its writing possibly extended beyond the platonic) has been identified by recent scholarship as an essential eye-witness for those to whom Stasov's populist characterization of the composer does not ring entirely true. Golenishchev-Kutuzov believed that in Sunless Mussorgsky first revealed his authentic artistic self. According to Golenishchev-Kutuvoz, Mussorgsky regarded his signal achievement in Sunless to have been the eradication of all elements other than feeling. In other words, he had thrown off the stylistic shackles imposed by the aesthetics of realism and relied entirely on intuitive harmonic invention as the sole conveyor of a purely subjective, affective meaning in the cycle. This hypothesis forms the point of departure for an investigation of select numbers of the cycle. Analysis reveals that the affective aspect is riot the only significant element operative. Alongside remnants of the realist style, there is evidence, of varying degrees of subtlety, for a knowing use of symmetrical pitch organization. Mussorgsky not only adapted the usual referential attachments of symmetrically based chromaticism-typically found in Russian operas of the second half of the nineteenth century-he also, through extremely simple but effective means, synthesized the intuitive harmonic and rational symmetrical elements of the cycle's pitch organization so that the latter emerges seamlessly out of the former. This remarkable synthesis ensures the cycle's uniformity of tone while also allowing for a reading that extends beyond the generally affective to the symbolically more specific. This symbolic level of reading offers several interpretative possibilities, one of which may refer even to the relationship of the poet and the composer. Irrespective of such potentials for interpretation, the most significant achievement in the cycle remains the synthesis of the intuitive/affective and rational/symbolic elements of its organization. Songs 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the cycle are considered in detail.