Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed rep... more Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed reportage on the mid-20th-century director/actor's hardworking life in the theatre. The only child of British actors Dame May Whitty and Ben Webster, Webster was a product of the "born in a trunk" upbringing common to theatre families. She launched her career as a young character actress in Britain. After a series of fortunate if somewhat accidental events, Webster landed her first job as a theatre director in Britain, and went on to gain prominence as a director of stage classics in the United States. In the 1940s, her productions of Shakespeare's less-produced history plays (Henry VIII, Richard II), as well as the more popular tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), attracted the attention and approval of mainstream audiences and critics across the U.S. Webster made her name directing for the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, as well as for numerous "bus and truck" touring companies, including the short-lived Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She was pioneering in her risky, radical choice to cast black actors in classical productions in the early 1940s (including Paul Robeson as Othello); in the late 1940s, with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford, she established the illfated American Repertory Theatre, which was dedicated to producing seasons of classics. Throughout her career, Webster took on challenging acting roles in addition to directing and producing.
Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed rep... more Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed reportage on the mid-20th-century director/actor's hardworking life in the theatre. The only child of British actors Dame May Whitty and Ben Webster, Webster was a product of the "born in a trunk" upbringing common to theatre families. She launched her career as a young character actress in Britain. After a series of fortunate if somewhat accidental events, Webster landed her first job as a theatre director in Britain, and went on to gain prominence as a director of stage classics in the United States. In the 1940s, her productions of Shakespeare's less-produced history plays (Henry VIII, Richard II), as well as the more popular tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), attracted the attention and approval of mainstream audiences and critics across the U.S. Webster made her name directing for the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, as well as for numerous "bus and truck" touring companies, including the short-lived Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She was pioneering in her risky, radical choice to cast black actors in classical productions in the early 1940s (including Paul Robeson as Othello); in the late 1940s, with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford, she established the illfated American Repertory Theatre, which was dedicated to producing seasons of classics. Throughout her career, Webster took on challenging acting roles in addition to directing and producing.
Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinle... more Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinley, who is leading a wave of performance scholarship that might be characterized as music studies without the musicologists, sees this old question in a new light. For her, the blues aspires to the condition of theatre. Her ambitious aim is "to shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practice as central, rather than secondary" (7). In four deeply researched and compellingly written chapters, she makes a powerful case that theatricality was indeed central not only to the birth of the blues, but also to its fundamental meaning as a performance practice. Staging the Blues begins at the turn of the 20th century with tent-show variety acts in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and other crossroad sites in the Delta region. It ends at the turn of the 21st century with international blues tourism, also in Clarksdale. In between, exploring venues as geographically diverse as the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the retrofitted Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester (UK), McGinley renovates some widely held presumptions about the blues as an American "folk" art. Sophisticated professional show people put on all the performances she treats. Her argument unfolds step by step through her patient dismantling of an anti-theatrical master narrative of blues' direct-from-the-cotton-patch authenticity.
As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it re... more As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it relates to theatrical activity, I am struck by the fact that this question has both micro and macro-cosmic implications. Certainly, we must address the far reaching ideological concerns that permeate any performance, but within specific parameters, within the confines of a particular performance, the interrelationship of material components demands that we deal with the physical presence that appears before us. This essay grapples with this problem of theatrical presence through adiscussion of visual perception.
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Jan 9, 1997
In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics sc... more In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics scrambling to identify the root cause of our current malaise, it is imperative for live performance artists like Karen Finley to point out what is really to blame—politics and religion. In her most recent performance piece, The American Chestnut, Finley rails against religious hypocrisy, political oppression, male aggression, her own classification as a" source for raising money for candidates," 2 and the depressed state of the arts. Certainly, ...
In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by... more In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by stating, ‘I'm really interested in being a medium.’ It is with this simple remark that she illuminates the most compelling aspect of her work as a performance artist. Finley's work is both frustrating and enlightening, and it is the conflicting tensions her performance style evokes within me as male spectator that I find so engaging. I am drawn into the performance via the bodily exhibitionism that permeates so much of her work, only to be pushed away by the tone and subject matter of her narration. At the end of her performance I am left with no easy answers, only disturbingly caustic questions.
At first glance the title of this essay may cause you to ask yourself the same question: "Wh... more At first glance the title of this essay may cause you to ask yourself the same question: "What does chaos theory have to do with art?" Or, more importantly, what does it have to do with performance analysis? Certainly, these are fair questions which will be addressed within the body of this paper. I must begin by stating that I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and that the mathematics involved in the evaluation of chaotic systems (although relatively simple) tend to make my head spin. I am not interested in drawing scientific conclusions from theatrical practice, but in employing the philosophical ramifications of the systematic study of chaos to allow a unique perspective on the modern theatre.
Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda's multimed... more Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda's multimedia design for Intolleranza, the convergence of chaos theory and performance, Karen Finley's deconstructive technique, and ambient space in twentieth-century theatre.
It is a rare opportunity to see a forty-year-old masterpiece under the direction of its originato... more It is a rare opportunity to see a forty-year-old masterpiece under the direction of its originator. Rarer still is the chance to witness a production seen by such luminaries as Barrault, Brook, Mnouchkine, and Grotowski. Such is the case with Tadashi Suzuki's The Trojan Women, first performed in 1974 and recently presented as part of a symposium on Suzuki's work titled "Transformation through Training" in honor of the SITI Company's twentyfifth anniversary. Performed before an audience that included Suzuki devotees as well as the merely curious, the production was, without question, a timeless and timely event. Centering on the static nature of Euripides' drama, it offered powerful commentary on the aftermath of warfare-a situation we persistently need to address.
While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like... more While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are postmodern, asking the same folks to agree upon this categorization for Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard might be more challenging. Stephen Watt address this issue of classification with regards to drama, which for Watt excludes “performance,” to concentrate on “what writers write”(4). This is not an easy task since, as Watt points out, the very idea of postmodernism dissolves “ ...
CJO Search Widget (Theatre Research International) What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Onlin... more CJO Search Widget (Theatre Research International) What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xviii + 238. $16.99 Pb. ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xviii + 238. $16.99 Pb. ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London ...
Tim Miller's solo performance Us begins before the artist hits the stage. As the audience is... more Tim Miller's solo performance Us begins before the artist hits the stage. As the audience is treated to The Ethel Merman Disco Album, Tim enters through the back of the house and heaves a large suitcase into the performance space already defined by a row of fifteen suitcases at the rear of the stage. Those familiar with Miller's 1999 piece Glory Box, which dealt with the immigration problems faced by his partner Alistair—who, due to America's policies concerning same-sex marriages and green card status, remains in visa limbo— ...
Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed rep... more Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed reportage on the mid-20th-century director/actor's hardworking life in the theatre. The only child of British actors Dame May Whitty and Ben Webster, Webster was a product of the "born in a trunk" upbringing common to theatre families. She launched her career as a young character actress in Britain. After a series of fortunate if somewhat accidental events, Webster landed her first job as a theatre director in Britain, and went on to gain prominence as a director of stage classics in the United States. In the 1940s, her productions of Shakespeare's less-produced history plays (Henry VIII, Richard II), as well as the more popular tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), attracted the attention and approval of mainstream audiences and critics across the U.S. Webster made her name directing for the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, as well as for numerous "bus and truck" touring companies, including the short-lived Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She was pioneering in her risky, radical choice to cast black actors in classical productions in the early 1940s (including Paul Robeson as Othello); in the late 1940s, with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford, she established the illfated American Repertory Theatre, which was dedicated to producing seasons of classics. Throughout her career, Webster took on challenging acting roles in addition to directing and producing.
Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed rep... more Milly S. Barranger's biography of Margaret Webster (1905-1972) is a straightforward, detailed reportage on the mid-20th-century director/actor's hardworking life in the theatre. The only child of British actors Dame May Whitty and Ben Webster, Webster was a product of the "born in a trunk" upbringing common to theatre families. She launched her career as a young character actress in Britain. After a series of fortunate if somewhat accidental events, Webster landed her first job as a theatre director in Britain, and went on to gain prominence as a director of stage classics in the United States. In the 1940s, her productions of Shakespeare's less-produced history plays (Henry VIII, Richard II), as well as the more popular tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), attracted the attention and approval of mainstream audiences and critics across the U.S. Webster made her name directing for the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, as well as for numerous "bus and truck" touring companies, including the short-lived Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She was pioneering in her risky, radical choice to cast black actors in classical productions in the early 1940s (including Paul Robeson as Othello); in the late 1940s, with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford, she established the illfated American Repertory Theatre, which was dedicated to producing seasons of classics. Throughout her career, Webster took on challenging acting roles in addition to directing and producing.
Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinle... more Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinley, who is leading a wave of performance scholarship that might be characterized as music studies without the musicologists, sees this old question in a new light. For her, the blues aspires to the condition of theatre. Her ambitious aim is "to shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practice as central, rather than secondary" (7). In four deeply researched and compellingly written chapters, she makes a powerful case that theatricality was indeed central not only to the birth of the blues, but also to its fundamental meaning as a performance practice. Staging the Blues begins at the turn of the 20th century with tent-show variety acts in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and other crossroad sites in the Delta region. It ends at the turn of the 21st century with international blues tourism, also in Clarksdale. In between, exploring venues as geographically diverse as the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the retrofitted Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester (UK), McGinley renovates some widely held presumptions about the blues as an American "folk" art. Sophisticated professional show people put on all the performances she treats. Her argument unfolds step by step through her patient dismantling of an anti-theatrical master narrative of blues' direct-from-the-cotton-patch authenticity.
As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it re... more As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it relates to theatrical activity, I am struck by the fact that this question has both micro and macro-cosmic implications. Certainly, we must address the far reaching ideological concerns that permeate any performance, but within specific parameters, within the confines of a particular performance, the interrelationship of material components demands that we deal with the physical presence that appears before us. This essay grapples with this problem of theatrical presence through adiscussion of visual perception.
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Jan 9, 1997
In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics sc... more In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics scrambling to identify the root cause of our current malaise, it is imperative for live performance artists like Karen Finley to point out what is really to blame—politics and religion. In her most recent performance piece, The American Chestnut, Finley rails against religious hypocrisy, political oppression, male aggression, her own classification as a" source for raising money for candidates," 2 and the depressed state of the arts. Certainly, ...
In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by... more In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by stating, ‘I'm really interested in being a medium.’ It is with this simple remark that she illuminates the most compelling aspect of her work as a performance artist. Finley's work is both frustrating and enlightening, and it is the conflicting tensions her performance style evokes within me as male spectator that I find so engaging. I am drawn into the performance via the bodily exhibitionism that permeates so much of her work, only to be pushed away by the tone and subject matter of her narration. At the end of her performance I am left with no easy answers, only disturbingly caustic questions.
At first glance the title of this essay may cause you to ask yourself the same question: "Wh... more At first glance the title of this essay may cause you to ask yourself the same question: "What does chaos theory have to do with art?" Or, more importantly, what does it have to do with performance analysis? Certainly, these are fair questions which will be addressed within the body of this paper. I must begin by stating that I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and that the mathematics involved in the evaluation of chaotic systems (although relatively simple) tend to make my head spin. I am not interested in drawing scientific conclusions from theatrical practice, but in employing the philosophical ramifications of the systematic study of chaos to allow a unique perspective on the modern theatre.
Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda's multimed... more Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda's multimedia design for Intolleranza, the convergence of chaos theory and performance, Karen Finley's deconstructive technique, and ambient space in twentieth-century theatre.
It is a rare opportunity to see a forty-year-old masterpiece under the direction of its originato... more It is a rare opportunity to see a forty-year-old masterpiece under the direction of its originator. Rarer still is the chance to witness a production seen by such luminaries as Barrault, Brook, Mnouchkine, and Grotowski. Such is the case with Tadashi Suzuki's The Trojan Women, first performed in 1974 and recently presented as part of a symposium on Suzuki's work titled "Transformation through Training" in honor of the SITI Company's twentyfifth anniversary. Performed before an audience that included Suzuki devotees as well as the merely curious, the production was, without question, a timeless and timely event. Centering on the static nature of Euripides' drama, it offered powerful commentary on the aftermath of warfare-a situation we persistently need to address.
While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like... more While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are postmodern, asking the same folks to agree upon this categorization for Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard might be more challenging. Stephen Watt address this issue of classification with regards to drama, which for Watt excludes “performance,” to concentrate on “what writers write”(4). This is not an easy task since, as Watt points out, the very idea of postmodernism dissolves “ ...
CJO Search Widget (Theatre Research International) What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Onlin... more CJO Search Widget (Theatre Research International) What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xviii + 238. $16.99 Pb. ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xviii + 238. $16.99 Pb. ... Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. By Nick Kaye. London ...
Tim Miller's solo performance Us begins before the artist hits the stage. As the audience is... more Tim Miller's solo performance Us begins before the artist hits the stage. As the audience is treated to The Ethel Merman Disco Album, Tim enters through the back of the house and heaves a large suitcase into the performance space already defined by a row of fifteen suitcases at the rear of the stage. Those familiar with Miller's 1999 piece Glory Box, which dealt with the immigration problems faced by his partner Alistair—who, due to America's policies concerning same-sex marriages and green card status, remains in visa limbo— ...
This book will help anyone who is serious about lighting design to think more deeply about the "w... more This book will help anyone who is serious about lighting design to think more deeply about the "why" of what we do when we put light on stages and elsewhere, which can only be a good thing.' NICK MORAN, Central School of Speech & Drama and The Association for Lighting and Production Design, UK What properties of light can be manipulated for aesthetic effect? What role does the perception of the audience play in how stage information is received and processed? How do changes in technology affect methods or approaches to design and practice? This book is designed to introduce key ideas about light and to generate questions and perspectives that will encourage readers to explore light in the theatre more fully in their own critical and creative practices. Examining the theories behind stage lighting practice to help students learn to analyse the aesthetic and critical impacts of light in performance, this book traces the development of lighting practice by focusing on important shifts in technology and aesthetics from the classical period to the modern era. Central to this study are ideas developed by 'New Stagecraft' theorists and designers Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig and Robert Edmond Jones. Case studies include semiotic approaches to Loïe Fuller's combination of light, movement and costume, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach and Tadashi Suzuki's The Trojan Women. Further case studies, including the installation work of James Turrell and Refik Anadol, the Winston Salem Light Project and David Byrne's American Utopia, examine the use of light in theatrical and non-theatrical spaces by focusing on phenomenology, community engagement and the evolution of lighting technology. DEAN WILCOX is Professor of Theatre History, Dramatic Literature and Humanities in the Division of Liberal Arts at The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, USA.
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