Articles (Peer Reviewed) by Leah Sidi
THEATER TOPICS VOL31 Theater Essentials in Three Acts: Collaboration, Care, Time Shawn Chua, Sozita Goudouna, Adham Hafez, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Juliana Moraes, Malin Palani, Rumen Rachev, and Leah Sidi Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021
A Note from the Editor: Essentials John Fletcher
Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, ... more A Note from the Editor: Essentials John Fletcher
Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, pp. ix-xii (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
A Note from the Editor: Essentials
As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and space. That was in March 2020.
Essentials in Three Acts: Collaboration, Care, Time by Shawn Chua, Sozita Goudouna, Adham Hafez, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Juliana Moraes, Malin Palani, Rumen Rachev, and Leah Sidi
The following is not an article. Nor is it a play, despite its structure. To some extent, it is a performance and an experiment. It was written collaboratively over a three-month period by a group of performance-makers and performance scholars in response to the difficulties of writing and studying during the pandemic. Following a cancelled international conference, we wrote from five different continents in moments of crisis shaped by personal, political, and geographical particulari- ties. Meeting over Zoom, we shared our fears for our industries, our communities, and our personal griefs. We also sought to think together in response to Theatre Topics’ call for articles on “Theatre Essentials.” Prior to this work, many of us did not know one another, although some had worked together through other projects and academic gatherings. The call to consider the essentials of the- atre has opened possibilities for us to examine what remains of theatre and our own work, as well as how a discipline and field might coalesce when gathering in person is considered a dangerous act.
Papers by Leah Sidi
Routledge eBooks, Sep 6, 2021
Studies in the Maternal, Aug 1, 2017
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Studies in the Maternal, ... more This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Studies in the Maternal, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
New Theatre Quarterly, Jan 30, 2023
Following her suicide in 1999, Sarah Kane’s life and works have become the subjects of academic d... more Following her suicide in 1999, Sarah Kane’s life and works have become the subjects of academic debate and theatrical myth. Academic criticism remains shy of connecting Kane’s theatre with her experience of mental pathology. Those critics who address the theme of mental illness in Kane’s works tend to focus on her final play 4.48 Psychosis; either presenting it as a detached discursive critique of psychiatric discourse, or as a redemptive, prophetic communication from the depths of depressive experience. This thesis argues that both approaches miss the most original part of Kane’s project which lies in the interrelation between the theatrical form of all of her works and representations of mental distress. Using a combination of historical materialism, psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience, close reading and performance analysis, the thesis develops the framework of ‘dramaturgies of psychic life’ to show how Kane’s playtexts call for theatrical encounters which are shaped by the interior life of a single subject. Kane pushes the locus of her theatrical works into a dramaturgical space ‘in-between’ audience and artwork, in which they become radical invitations to endure and participate in the logics of trauma and psychosis. At the same time, I argue that her works call for a new kind of response to psychic pain, which is neither mediated by diagnostic labels nor structured around redemptive categories of socially generative empathy or cure. Providing a new framework for understanding and contextualising Kane’s theatrical works, this thesis also seeks to understand their recent resurgence in popularity. It uses Kane’s dramaturgy to explore the consequences of understanding psychic pain as spatially enacted, positioning her as an important voice in ongoing debates about the nature of mental illness
Medical Humanities, Aug 20, 2021
The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990... more The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990 in the form of the NHS and the Community Care Act. The Act ushered in the final stage of asylum closures moving the responsibility for the long-term care of mentally ill individuals out of the NHS and into the hands of local authorities. This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of 'objects of feeling' in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to generate objects of hatred and disgust for the reader, even as it performs a straightforward othering and distancing function. In these articles, the image of the asylum and its implicit separation of different types of madness into categories also do normative gender work as mental illness is represented along predictable gendered stereotypes. By performing the abolition of asylums, the 1990 Act appears to have triggered a dislodging of these narrative norms in the tabloid press. After 1990, 'asylum stories' are replaced with 'community care stories' which contain more contradictory and confusing clusters of feeling. These stories rest less heavily on gendered binaries while also demonstrating a near-frantic desire on the part of the mass media for a return of institutional containment. Here, clusters of feeling becoming briefly 'unstuck' from their previous organisations, creating a moment of affective flux.
Medical Humanities, 2021
The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990... more The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990 in the form of the NHS and the Community Care Act. The Act ushered in the final stage of asylum closures moving the responsibility for the long-term care of mentally ill individuals out of the NHS and into the hands of local authorities. This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of ‘objects of feeling’ in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to generate objects of hatred and disgust for the...
Studies in the Maternal
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Studies in the Maternal, ... more This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Studies in the Maternal, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
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Articles (Peer Reviewed) by Leah Sidi
Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, pp. ix-xii (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
A Note from the Editor: Essentials
As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and space. That was in March 2020.
Essentials in Three Acts: Collaboration, Care, Time by Shawn Chua, Sozita Goudouna, Adham Hafez, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Juliana Moraes, Malin Palani, Rumen Rachev, and Leah Sidi
The following is not an article. Nor is it a play, despite its structure. To some extent, it is a performance and an experiment. It was written collaboratively over a three-month period by a group of performance-makers and performance scholars in response to the difficulties of writing and studying during the pandemic. Following a cancelled international conference, we wrote from five different continents in moments of crisis shaped by personal, political, and geographical particulari- ties. Meeting over Zoom, we shared our fears for our industries, our communities, and our personal griefs. We also sought to think together in response to Theatre Topics’ call for articles on “Theatre Essentials.” Prior to this work, many of us did not know one another, although some had worked together through other projects and academic gatherings. The call to consider the essentials of the- atre has opened possibilities for us to examine what remains of theatre and our own work, as well as how a discipline and field might coalesce when gathering in person is considered a dangerous act.
Papers by Leah Sidi
Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, pp. ix-xii (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
A Note from the Editor: Essentials
As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and space. That was in March 2020.
Essentials in Three Acts: Collaboration, Care, Time by Shawn Chua, Sozita Goudouna, Adham Hafez, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Juliana Moraes, Malin Palani, Rumen Rachev, and Leah Sidi
The following is not an article. Nor is it a play, despite its structure. To some extent, it is a performance and an experiment. It was written collaboratively over a three-month period by a group of performance-makers and performance scholars in response to the difficulties of writing and studying during the pandemic. Following a cancelled international conference, we wrote from five different continents in moments of crisis shaped by personal, political, and geographical particulari- ties. Meeting over Zoom, we shared our fears for our industries, our communities, and our personal griefs. We also sought to think together in response to Theatre Topics’ call for articles on “Theatre Essentials.” Prior to this work, many of us did not know one another, although some had worked together through other projects and academic gatherings. The call to consider the essentials of the- atre has opened possibilities for us to examine what remains of theatre and our own work, as well as how a discipline and field might coalesce when gathering in person is considered a dangerous act.