Gender and Sexuality:Watching as Praxis

How to represent the Holocaust, a historical experience that largely exceeds our imagination, on stage? In its seminal performance Kamp, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern addresses this question by literally restaging the experience of Auschwitz on a miniature scale. Kamp is not just a simple attempt to commemorate a particularly painful episode in our recent Western history, the performance makes the spectator think about what we experience as ‘real’ in this recollection and, at the same time, how this memory is determined by various cultural conventions. This self-reflexive perspective, I will argue, is a truly baroque strategy. In this article I will therefore return to the religious wars at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. There, too, concrete violent historical circumstances led to a fundamentally violent theatrical imagination, to a spectacular ‘theatre of the real’. At the same time, this theatre simultaneously put itself, or rather the idea of theatrical representation itself, at stake. It is this meta-perspective that makes it possible not only to show the unbearable, but also to understand the constructed nature of historical memory.

This dissertation examines the ways in which tragedy produces, and challenges, human subjectivity in three distinct periods of western theatrical production. It also tells a story of their ahistorical continuity based on tragic repetition. Readings of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae ground this argument in the Greek original. Specific constructions of fate, agency and justice provide sites for understanding the evolution of a tragic consciousness. Charting a meta-narrative of tragic inheritance through Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragic drama, and the modern drama, I establish an alternative view of western theatre's past—one that embodies its own consciously adopted tragic form. Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction. Finally, I retheorize Szondi's “crisis of the drama” reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.

2015

According to 20th century death-of-tragedy theorists like George Steiner, Northrop Frye and Friedrich Durrenmatt, tragedies are unfit for today's world. Does this mean that terror and tragic events such as depictions of war have completely disappeared from the modern stage? No. This paper shows that mass as well as individual tragedy is very much present on the stages of contemporary theatres, but in genres different than the traditional tragedy. The paper looks at various examples of genres like documentary or verbatim theatre, tragic comedy and poetic theatre, showing some of the ways that 20th ct. playwrights deal with issues of terror(ism) and violence. E.g. Peter Weiss' The Investigation, which will be discussed as a representative of the documentary theatre, uses original transcripts from the Auschwitz process after the 2nd World War in the form of an „Oratorio in 11 Cantos“ to show its terrible events. Furthermore, Henry Adam's play The People Next Door was, on th...

SubStance, 2002

Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 2020

This article is on performing tragedy. It looks at three aspects of tragic stage production: tragic curtains; tragic walks; and speaking in a tragic tone. In exploring how tragedy could be conveyed materially and physically, beyond, beside or without words, it shows how crucial staging was to a play’s categorisation and hence meaning.

2021

Written soon before and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when theatre ground to a halt and spectatorship was suspended, this book takes stock of spectatorship as theatre's living archive and affirms its value in the midst of the present crisis. Drawing from a manifold affective archive of performances and installations (by Marina Abramović, Ron Athey, Forced Entertainment, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Blast Theory, LIGNA, Doris Salcedo, Graeme Miller, Lenz Rifrazioni, Cristina Rizzo, etc.), and expanding on the work of many theorists and scholars, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout and Alan Read, among others, the book focusses on the spectator as the subject, rather than the object, of investigation. This is the right time to remember their secret power and theorise their collective time in the theatre. This book is an archive of their adventure and a manifesto rooted in their potentiality. It boldly posits the spectator as the inaugurator of theatre, the surplus that survives it. The book will be of great interest to spectators all and sundry, to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, of spectatorship and politics.

This article attempts to achievean aesthetic definition of the concept of culture through a comparative study of Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud's ideas. What we call “Tragic Culture”in this article is the result of Nietzsche and Artaud's approaches in finding the aesthetic patterns of ancient Greek tragedies and “theater of cruelty”. From the perspective of the authors of this article what drives Artaudand Nietzsche to theater is the approach that theater evokes in justifying the nature of “suffering”through the tragic and the concept of cruelty. On this basis it can be said for Nietzsche and Artaud, theater acts as a model to justify the existence aesthetically. The model, with an aesthetic justification of suffering, transforms it to a source of tragic pleasure and consequently undermines it inside an organic unity. More than anything else this research tries to answer the question as to why does an aesthetic justification of life presents itself in seemingly pessimistic concepts such as pain, suffering, conflict and the tragic? But the ultimate goal of this appear is to explore a culture that is on the basis of such a perspective, i.e. the aesthetic justification of life and stands against the culture that tries to reduce life to a partial of ideological and subjective elements. So in the end, in addition to a comparative study, we will see that the unity that exists in the modern cultureis a false unity imposed by an external element on life and that the true meaning of culture deems an internal unity like the generic unity of the work of art linked to the aesthetic justification of existence. This research is based on library resources and particularly focusing on the booksThe Birth of Tragedy and The theatre and its doubletries to explain the quality of this culture in the pattern of a form of “Action”, “Pluralism” and “Yes Saying”to life and to the “New”.

TDR/The Drama Review, 2003

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2014

Performance Philosophy, 2015

The form of tragedy has been central to philosophical projects since classical antiquity, and it gained special critical import as a result of the so-called 'tragic turning within philosophy' during the Romantic period of German Idealism (see Beistegui 2000). The aim of this short paper is to address the notion of aesthetic appearance (semblance, Schein) within aesthetic theory (Theodor W. Adorno) and in contemporary tragic theatre (Howard Barker) and to show that the problem of semblance re-appears as a productive critical category in the current discourse of performance philosophy.

2012

My thesis aims to partake in the controversial and theoretical debates surrounding sight which can be traced as far back as Plato. It seeks to provide an overview of the cultural history of the gaze in order to set up a triangulated and indepth schema or triadic relationship between theatre, text and trauma through the lens of psychoanalytical, phenomenological and socio-theoretical frameworks. More specifically, it attempts to explore the various interactions, along the axis of representation, between theatrical metaphors and those of traumatic vision, as well as traumatic representations on stage of viewing and the multi-layered and sociopolitical implications of various ways of looking (or non-looking), which often trigger traumatic responses. By examining two canonical plays – Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth – as well as the modern performances of artists such as Orlan and Franko B, I hope to show how visual trauma can transcend time and space and how the stage,...

Performance Philosophy Journal, 2016

Following the inaugural symposium entitled Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy - Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre hosted by the Performance Philosophy Working Group “Genres of Dramatic Thought” which took place at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin in December 2014, this contribution is a series of attempts to both recapture the debates of the symposium and stake out the field of inquiry for our Working Group’s engagement within Performance Philosophy. By tracing philosophy’s dramatic heritage within the history of genre theory and pointing to its current and future developments, this piece suggests how attention to genre can work to deepen and expand the emerging landscape of Performance Philosophy.