The Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear

In today’s technology-driven and socially deprived world, human values are often exiled into the world of make-believe. As a result, art – and theatre in particular – cannot fulfil its (apparently) inherent social role. This contribution seeks to present the importance of socially and politically engaged theatre using the example of Elliot Leffler’s Tea Party: An Interactive Performance for the Election Year, staged at the University of Minnesota in 2012. The production offered open discourse about political issues using the format of Augusto Boal’s “forum theatre” while offering an intense theatrical and provokingly intellectual experience.

New Theatre Quarterly, 2015

In 2015 the concept of live performance as having efficacy to instigate political change is contested, yet some politically motivated performance has demonstrably facilitated change, and critical frameworks have been developed that account for performances that hold clear political stances. However, even where arguments exist for the enduring relevance of political performance, certain models of practice tend to be represented as more efficacious and sophisticated than others. In this article, inspired by her recent experiences of making political theatre, Rebecca Hillman asks to what extent prevalent discourses may nurture or repress histories and futures of political theatre. She re-evaluates the contemporary relevance of agitprop theatre made in British contexts in the 1960s and 1970s by comparing academic analyses of the work with less well-documented critiques by the practitioners and audiences. She documents also the fluctuation and transformation, rather than the dissipation,...

This book gauges the contemporary landscape of political theatre at a time in which everything, and consequently nothing, is political. That is, almost all theatres today proclaim a politics, and yet there is widespread resignation regarding the inevitability of capitalism. This book proposes a theory of political action via the theatre: radical theatre today must employ a strategy of “moving targets”. Theatrical actions must be adaptable and mobile to seek out the moving targets of capital and track down target audiences as they move through public space. In addition, political theatre must become a moving target to avoid amalgamation into the capitalist system of exchange. Reynolds approaches this topic through four primary case studies. Two of the case studies, Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping and the Critical Art Ensemble, are highly-regarded practitioners based in the United States. The other two case studies are lifted from the author’s own experience with Free Theatre Christchurch: an original production called Christmas Shopping and a devised production of Karl Kraus’ play The Last Days of Mankind. These case studies lead to the determination that creating aesthetic experiences and actions – as opposed to having explicitly political content – can be a strategy or foundation for a radical political theatre that resists, undermines, and at times transcends the seeming inevitability of consumer capitalism. In an age in which any political intervention is seen as senseless disruption, a form of pointless violence, this theatre has adopted the strategies of terrorist actions to have a disruptive effect without positing a specific alternative social structure.

Theatre Survey, 2018

Performance and the Politics of Space, 2013

During the last decade a new kind of political theatre has been established on European stages: Homeless, unemployed or disabled people, delinquents or refugees appear as themselves in front of middle-class audiences, representing the marginalized class of society. This raises the question to what extent theatre can serve as a democratic "space of others", as a social heterotopia, to make unheard voices heard. The article seeks to highlight the ambivalence of this political claim, as well as the ambivalence of the theatrical space itself as an in-between of the aesthetic and the social.

2012

One of key struggles of the globalised twenty-first century is against the disempowerment of the individual imagination. I believe that the challenge for the political theatre director is to stimulate and disturb the imagination of audiences in order to re-awaken critical thought. In so doing, audiences can picture what has been untold or become unimaginable, and thus, be prompted to action. By directing a theatrical production of War Crimes by Angela Betzien, I attempted to re-envision Brechtian techniques by fusing them with popular cultural forms in order to challenge and reawaken the imagination of audiences. In turn, I also attempted to subvert common assumptions about the form and content of contemporary political theatre. The accompanying exegesis provides an analysis of my creative practice and my thinking on the currency and relevance of political theatre, particularly for young audiences. I contextualize my practical work through an interrogation of the techniques I applied in my production of War Crimes in order to consolidate and affirm the role of political theatre in the twenty-first century.

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2017

Investigating the burgeoning field of contemporary theatre and performance, both Andy Lavender's monograph Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement and Florian Malzacher's anthology Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today examine the role theatre and performance play in the social, cultural, philosophical, economic, and political context of the twenty-first century, positing, with different emphases, an intricate relationship between the arts and society. Going beyond postmodernist assumptions of relativism and detachment, both contributions represent timely interventions as they explicitly re-engage with questions of meaning, politics, and commitment in the context of recent developments in theatre and performance studies. While Malzacher's contribution focusses specifically on political theatre, Lavender chooses a more expansive approach that also takes into account the relevance of performance theory for an analysis of contemporary culture. Thus, Lavender is interested in performance as a wider cultural phenomenon, asserting that "[t]he society of the spectacle became a multi-theatred communications zone" (195). Central to his argument, as the introduction and chapter 1 in part I, "Scenes of Engagement," cogently argue, is the assertion that society and performance have, in a new social commitment, taken a step beyond postmodernism into a new "age of engagement" (21). This turn towards engagement, which Lavender understands as both an investment in political processesan aspect which, however, remains largely unexplored in the bookand as an emphasis on personal experience and individual involvement, has been facilitated by the increasing availability of digital technologies, which have "extended the relativizing work of postmodernism, but also helped us to rediscover our voices and values, and our singular selves" (17). In this considerably transformed social and cultural context, theatre "has become more than itself, a compound of media" and has developed into "something other than an encounter between actors, or JCDE 2017; 5(2): 385-391

Theatre Topics, 2001

Let me start this argument for academic advocacy with three salient anecdotes: 1) A member of the acting faculty in my department at the University of Texas at Austin has a decal pasted on his office door designed in the ubiquitous Ghostbusters symbolic style that transliterates as "Don't Think, Act." Although I very much respect this man and his work with students and department productions, walking past this declaration of his values each day challenges everything I believe in as a theatre educator. 2) A theatre department colleague and I were recently asked to join a planning committee for a conference organized by UT's law school on questions of art and authenticity. One of their influential faculty members wants to address how a play's reception changes over time, citing, for example, the antisemitism of The Merchant of Venice as a "problem" for twenty-first-century audiences. In addition to pondering legalistic questions about intellectual property and copyright infringement, he wants to address the law as content in cultural representations. Although Holly Hughes had just been to campus, performing at a local theatre her newest performance piece, Preaching to the Perverted, the law professor didn't once refer to the legal challenge to the National Endowment for the Arts's decency pledge or its upholding by the Supreme Court. Neither did he suggest that the conference consider censorship as a legal issue that historically haunts performance and representation. While we're glad to be brought to the table for an intercollege, interdisciplinary event (with a budget, provided by the law school, of an astounding $100,000), we resent being asked to address other people's issues when they clearly have no knowledge of our own. Obviously, we will try to steer the conference conversations toward topics that are more germane to contemporary theatre and performance studies. But the invitation was extended through ignorance and presumption, and considered, once again, a theatre department as a service unit with no inherent history or critical discourse of its own.

Зборник радова Факултета драмских уметности, 2022