Theatre of Death Intro.pdf

2013

2016

2016

This article refers to the famous question of the politicization versus aestheticization of art, recently discussed by Boris Groys in terms of usefulness and uselessness, or “design” and “art proper,” and, by criticizing Croys’ dualist approach, shows that in the biopolitical framework of contemporary ideology, the usefulness and uselessness pass into each other and thus create a circle within which any art is presented as individual or social therapy, or a sort of pharmakon that is both poison and cure. In search for another conception of art, the article addresses to some radical avant­garde conceptions of theatre, such as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, and, reflecting through the ways of recombining elements and principles of what Alain Badiou characterized as a “leftist threat” for the theatre, demonstrates a rational political kernel of their destructive force.

2014

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2017

Curiously placed between the realms of science and supernaturalism, the phenomenon of the uncanny double has a distinctive presence in both. Another kind of duality is at issue in the imagined presence of the doppelgänger, as a figure in both physical and mental life. While the phenomenon of the Brocken spectre is one of the era’s most resonant manifestations of an uncanny mirroring of the body, later nineteenth-century developments in clinical psychology began to focus on the sense of an alien presence residing in unknown reaches of the human brain. As they did so, these clinical experiments involved an engagement with the interweave of mental and physiological expression. In Nicholas Royle’s words, the uncanny is associated with ‘a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural’. Somewhere between the conviction afforded by cognitive processes and the flickering sense intimated by the live wiring of the nervous system, new dimensions of reading and interpretation were opened up. My concern here is to explore how the overlay of scientific and supernaturalist frames is managed in some of the more influential literary and dramatic portrayals of uncanny mimesis. These include evocations of the doppelgänger in works by Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg, and Walter Scott, and in Henry Irving’s theatrical productions. Irving’s interest in the double consciousness of the actor is discussed in relation to psychological theories of dual consciousness, and their exploration in clinical practice with patients diagnosed as hysteric.

Death and dying are frequently represented on (and off) stage. Shakespeare offers no fewer than 74 deaths through stabbings, poisonings, snakes and bears. Chekhov and Ibsen both wrote of death and suicide. Audiences at modern musicals are no less spared death, be it at the hand of the barber's razor, crossing a barricade or crucified on a cross: the dispatch of a character can be a pivotal plot device. Audiences, too, are complicit in these theatrical acts of death. They assemble for a performance under an unwritten contract that they will suspend their disbelief for what is about to take place. Theatrical deaths are all tightly rehearsed and choreographed so the actor can still return to take their bows, yet for some the final curtain call comes sooner than expected. Molière took ill during a performance and died shortly afterwards while tenor Richard Versalle died mid-show at the Metropolitan Opera. The audience are not immune either with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. This paper considers the stage as a contested space, one in which the theatrical trappings of death are occasionally replaced by genuine expressions of grief. With a specific focus on the Sydney Opera House as a facilitator this notation will be examined to reveal some of the similarities in the presentation of death in a theatrical sense as well as in the broader community on stage.

2002

This book-length work offers a theatre-philosophy in the form of an ethics of appearing. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, such as Nancy, Derrida, Lingis, Lévinas, Blanchot, Badiou and Deleuze, it elaborates the theme of ‘becoming unaccommodated’. Within this theme, anomalous disturbances in normal ‘states of affairs’, both on and off-stage, are shown to give rise to a specifically ethical experience of audience. Pathognomy, the art of tracking the ephemeral or elusive across varied terrain, as opposed to the systematizing impulse of physiognomy and its logic of recognition, is revived as an approach to exploring this phenomenon. Its defining feature is its manifestation as an event, a key term in contemporary ‘Continental’ philosophy. Bringing together a wide variety of source material drawn from theatre and performance studies, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, the early chapters explore the experience of audience as the audience of experience. They examine particular forms of theatrical appearing and spectatorship, notions of fiasco and disaster underpinning performance, and an ethics of theatrical experience. Shifting in scale from the macro to the micro level, these concerns are then focused around an engagement with the face as the prime figure of appearance, elaborated in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and ‘disfigured’ in the garish symbol that stands for theatre – the masks of comedy and tragedy. The face and subsequently its oral/aural counterpart, the voice, are investigated via a logic of appearing or expression, a previously neglected and discredited concept. Expression is reanimated as an alternative to the tragic logic of representation. The anomalies of expression are explored via iconic images in artistic and scientific works deploying theatricalized presentations of human emotion, as well as via phenomenological consideration of other varieties of theatrical appearing, visual representation, everyday behaviour and non-linguistic utterance.

SubStance, 2002

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1.1, 2013