Queer Theatre

This article examines instead how theatricality, as an aesthetic strategy, can challenge social conventions and may even invite viewers to take up positions on social issues. For such a filmic theatricality, I coined the concept of “committed theatricality.” The article considers the relevance of this concept in the filmic adaptations of Quebec plays Being at Home with Claude (Jean Beaudin, 1992), Cabaret neiges noires (Raymond Saint-Jean, 1997), Nô (Robert Lepage, 1998), Matroni et moi (Jean-Philippe Duval, 1999), and Les muses orphelines (Robert Favreau, 2000), all of whose elements of theatricality stress a political agenda. For example, lyrical speeches that highlight the power of words, when interpreted symbolically, may underline the importance of the French language for the Québécois people. In addition, tormented characters that double as other characters in order to liberate themselves from alienating social conventions may suggest the desire for emancipation of marginalized communities.

Since its beginnings, Luchino Visconti’s career was characterized by scandals, controversies, censures and even seizures, as a consequence of a particularly reactionary context but also of a transgressive intention which found its main expression in the representation of alternative sexualities and masculinities. Through a large amount of unpublished documents preserved in various archives and among Visconti’s papers, this book aims to study this largely overlooked aspect of Visconti’s work in relation to its cultural context, focusing on five case studies: the staging of Marcel Achard’s “Adamo” (1945) and Giovanni Testori’s “L’Arialda” (1961), and the films “Ossessione” (1943), “Senso” (1954) and “Rocco e i suoi fratelli” (1960).

La prima volta che indossai le mutandine di seta nera ebbi immediatamente un'erezione. Mi sentivo umiliato dalla cintura delle giarrettiere. Mi sentivo bene. Nelle scarpe coi tacchi alti diventai un prigioniero. Subivo lampi di freddo e di calore. Deliravo. Volevo inchinarmi e farmi calpestare. [...] Quando mi misi le mutandine mi sembrava una cosa reale, mi piaceva proprio. Come se mi fossi tolto la maschera invece di mettermela. [...] La natura della mia attrazione verso gli uomini, per il corpo maschile, a volte è masochistica, a volte pianista la accompagna e canta da soprano i ritornelli in lingua.

Der Autor stellt eine Re-Vision theatralischer Werke der französischen und amerikanischen Avantgarde der Moderne und Postmoderne zur Diskussion. Schon bei den frühen Avantgardisten des ausgehenden 19. Jh. zeichnet sich ein performativer Textbegriff ab, der das Verhältnis zwischen Körper und Sprache reflektiert. Am radikalsten manifestiert sich dieses dekonstruktive Textverständnis in einer Auflösung der Geschlechtergrenzen. Problematisch jedoch scheint die Tendenz, daß marginale Kunstwerke von der angeblich pluralistisch-postmodernen Gesellschaft absorbiert werden. Aber gerade das subversiv performative Spiel der gegenwärtigen künstlerischen Avantgarde mit dem gender-Begriff vermag Mechanismen autoritärer, hierarchisierender Festschreibungen aufzudecken.

is still the subject of a double mythologizing 1. First, he is the culturally idealized innovator of Modern Greek Theatre and on the other hand he is haunted, if not stigmatized, by a series of anecdotes regarding his personal life and his behavior during the rehearsals. These double myths have not only created an already complete meaning about Koun, a meaning that "postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, an comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions" (Barthes, 116), but also [this meaning] affects his legacy and cultural identity. I have divided my paper in four parts, in order to put Koun's ideology on acting into a cultural context outside the realm of myth and hagiographic valorizations. The descent of an Aesthetics Koun was an aesthete 2 director but in his own way. Although he did not diverge from the techniques of representation, and all its ethical-pictorial properties, he was attracted by formalists and symbolist tropes in an attempt to "fling representation to the winds" 3 , to use Virginia Woolf's words for Cézanne. The rejection of the "unnecessary truth" 4 of realism was of course an ideal which characterized the aims of theatre throughout the twentieth century, although the "canonical" practices of the realist tradition were never invalid for many directors (including Koun), given also that in Greece antirealism was strongly attacked by traditional critics, who saw theatre exclusively as a mimetic art 5 .

Per Copi teatro e fumetto sono due possibilità, differenti e parallele, per rappresentare il mondo. Beninteso, il suo mondo. Che è al tempo stesso fantastico e iperrealista, fiabesco e grottesco, delicato e crudele, comico e tragico, basato su rigide sicurezze e sfrangiato in mille ambiguità. Sembra fin troppo facile descrivere il mondo di un autore per opposizioni, ma per Copi è davvero difficile fare altrimenti, anche se a dir la verità quello di Copi non è un mondo di semplici opposizioni, bensì un mondo mutevole e cangiante, dove qualunque elemento può essere il suo opposto ma anche tante altre cose ancora, e dove tutto si sfalda dal punto di vista semantico senza mai rinunciare alla logica cristallina della struttura formale. Del resto parliamo di un autore nato in Argentina, cresciuto in un ambiente cosmopolita e approdato nella Parigi degli anni 60 99 ; disegnatore, romanziere, autore di teatro e attore en travesti; linguisticamente trasversale tra francese, spagnolo e un pizzico d'italiano; omosessuale e anarchico. Come pensare che il mondo rispecchiato nelle sue opere possa essere chiaro e limpido?

This chapter is from a  collection of essays, 'Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities' edited by Dr Nina Kane and Jude Woods for Cambridge Scholars Publishing (June 2017). In this, Dr Kane explores the potential of Tennyson’s literary figure The Lady of Shalott and J.W. Waterhouse’s 1894 painting of the subject to act as a creative catalyst for exploration of the gender binary and gender crossings. Drawing specifically on her own life-model theatre practice (essentially dramaturgical and performative), on the gallery education and community projects of Cast-Off Drama and referencing the visual arts work of Phil Sayers, Margaret Harrison and Tony Bevan, Kane charts a progression of the life-model performer from one side of the binary (female) to the other (male). This Trans*tastic passing is enabled through shifting identification with both the Lady of the poem and Lancelot, the Knight, and is presented to the reader here in a rhizomatic and hairy weaving of textual and visual threads.
If citing this chapter, please do so as follows: N. Kane, 'Trans*tastic Morphologies: Life-Modelling Theatre and The Lady of Shalott.' In N. Kane and J. Woods (eds.), Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

If citing or quoting from this document please reference it as follows:
‘Nina Kane: Artist-in-Residence Daily Log, 29 January - 10 February 2018, Wakabacho Wharf, Yokohama, Japan. Japanese translation by Tomoco Kawaguchi’, Academia. Edu, 18 January 2019, https://www.academia.edu/38163823/Artist-in-Residence_Daily_Log_Japan-Britain_Exchange_on_Sarah_Kanes_Theatre, (access date).

From 28th January-9th February 2018, Nina Kane undertook a dramaturgical residency at Wakabacho Wharf, Yokohama, Japan at the kind invitation of directors Tomoco Kawaguchi and Satoh Makoto. The residency was funded by the Kanagawa Prefecture (many thanks to them). The aim of the trip was to further dramaturgical exchange on  staging Sarah Kane's plays in Japan and the UK - a research relationship that has existed between Tomoco Kawaguchi and Nina Kane since 2012. The daily log here was written and published on Wakabacho Wharf's facebook page as part of a public record of the visit for the Kanagawa funders' evaluation purposes. It also formed an artistic record for the wider research project. This particular trip focused on a staged, in-house reading of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, and initiated a two-year project between the partners on ths play.

This document can also be found online at https://www.tomococafe.com/posts/3698759.

This article develops the concept of "gay useful media" to explore a case study of gay entrepreneurship in Houston, Texas, of the 1970s. A father and son developed a gay media empire in the city, which spanned bars, bookstores, distribution, and vending. One of the pair's key establishments was Houston's legendary gay bar Mary's at 1022 Westheimer (also known as Mary's Lounge, Mary's, Naturally, and Mary's…Naturally).

What is lesbian theatre? Does this category even exist in Slovenia? How to conceptualise and perform it? This article investigates the reach of lesbian theatre in both the wider sociological view – as a phenomenon in the Slovenian society – as well as in the narrower theatre studies field. It reviews the conditions (the origin of the LGBTIQ rights movement) and continues with the spaces in which lesbian theatre hides. It presents the Monospolno gledališče (Monosexual Theatre) and other examples of theatre practices: comedy, institutional performances, international festivals and marginal cases of lesbian contents. It also proposes a model of how to research lesbianism in the Slovenian theatre and guidelines for the future of lesbian theatre.

In adapting Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America" for television, Mike Nichols accurately respected the political agenda of the author (democratic, hebrew and homosexual), who also wrote the screenplay. The choice of Hadrian’s Villa (instead of a San Francisco devastated by the earthquake of 1906) as a background for the scenes which take place in the Paradise can be understood as coherent with Kushner’s ideological perspective, as well as with his peculiar camp aesthetics.

As well as having been stamped as the hallmark of queer drama in the literature of North America, Angels in America contributed in great extent to raise awareness for the queer and AIDS activism which was having its heyday at the beginning of the 1990s. Angels in America, published in 1991, conveys the story of the 1980s detached and isolated communities of HIV positive people, Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals as the AIDS epidemic striking at its most destructive period in North America. I will attempt to analyse the ways in which the AIDS crisis and queer awareness are intertwined into the long-lasting discussion of identity politics in Angels in America, and I will both argue the effects of the underrepresentation of different minority communities on different characters, and how the play criticizes the misconceptions about these minorities.

In this essay, I reflexively consider the role white privilege plays in programming and artistic scholarship in the dominant (read: white) Canadian queer theatre communities. It is clear that Toronto’s queer and LGBT communities have acquired general visibility and specific rights since the 1960’s. However, accepted homonormative activities are only viewed as acceptable when they conform to particular ideological expectations. In the context of performance and theatre communities, while white cisgender gay men’s works may have increased visibility and popularity on Canadian stages, the underrepresentation and lack of acknowledgement of marginalized queer artists in Canada complicates the vision of acceptance and inclusivity Canada purports to possess. Though the queer community is still a marginalized group whose works may also be underrepresented in mainstream programming, works by historically and currently minoritized groups and performers, particularly disabled artists, Indigenous artists and women and transgender people of colour, remain under-researched in queer theatre (Halferty 6). With this in mind, we must unpack how the false notion of a monolithic “queer theatre” community erases the privileges many queer artists possess due to their race, class, ability, gender, or settler identity.
Throughout this discussion, I hold myself and other white academics and practitioners accountable and consider how queer theatre is implicated in the erasure of multiple identities and experiences through the universalization and neutralization of patriarchy, whiteness, and settler colonialism.

My objective in this essay is three-fold: to interrogate how whiteness is strategically unnamed and positioned as neutral; to examine how the universal queer subject is often used as a means of both “diversifying” work and representing queer history, resulting in a lack of recognition and further erasure of more marginalized queer artists’ contributions in performance; and to recognize and confront the necessity for new forms of leadership in order to establish long-lasting systemic change.

(Forthcoming chapter in Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance, PCP)

Δημητριάδη ΧΑΡΤΗΣ 6 {ΙΟΥΝΙΟΣ 2019} {Θέατρο} Τέχνες του Γιώργου Σαμπατακάκη Η λογοτεχνία είναι ένας μη επιτρεπτός τρόπος αγάπης Δ. Δημητριάδης Οι σύγχρονες μεταγραφές της αρχαιοελληνικής τραγωδίας συχνότατα συνιστούν πράξεις λογοτεχνικής αντίφρασης (praeteritio), οι οποίες στοχεύουν αφενός στον μετασχηματισμό του μύθου (και τη χρήση του ως ανοικτού υλικού) και αφετέρου στη ριζική μεταποίηση του παραδοσιακά «ουμανιστικού» πυρήνα των έργων. Σε κάθε περίπτωση, πρόκειται για παραγωγική γενεσιουργό πράξη [1] που είναι απαραίτητη για την εξελικτική πορεία του δράματος, δεδομένου ότι μετακινεί τη γραφή στα «περιθώρια, τα διαστήματα και τα κενά» [2] των μύθων, υπονομεύοντας τις «οργανωτικές αρχές και τις ιδεολογικές βάσεις» [3] τους.

As theater is an art form that many times juxtaposes texts with the performing body, one of its main contributions to Jewish culture could be in its "corporeal reading" of Jewish textual heritage. Tony Kushner's celebrated play Angels in America proposes such a reading of Jewish texts-mainly the biblical Jacob cycle and the Jewish tradition regarding angels-as a queer re-performance that emphasizes bodily aspects such as desire, sexuality, and disease. Analyzing the play alongside Jewish classical texts from the midrashic and exegetic traditions, this paper suggests that the re-performance of Jewish texts as queer repertoire in Angels in America raises questions about the politics of the body in contemporary culture while at the same time opening up new horizons within textual tradition itself, exploring new meanings within these texts-as well as the efficacy of their performance.

The aim of this talk is not only to present a thematic analysis of the art of AIDS in Greece, but also to address two vital questions:
- Why was the art of HIV/AIDS in Greece condemned to invisibility?
- Is this invisibility a cultural and aesthetic strategy of undoing and unremembering, or is it just a symptom of queer evolution?

This paper will explore how intersecting identity theatre work can serve as a catalyst to begin a broader conversation about how multiple-minority individuals live and are perceived in the contemporary Canadian metropolis of Toronto. Through placing an interview with queer black Ghanaian-Canadian playwright and actor, Tawiah M’Carthy, alongside an interview with one of Canada’s leading institutional dramaturges, Mel Hague, a better understanding of the current state of affairs of intersecting identity theatre work can be seen. The insights gained from M’Carthy and Hague’s interviews will be situated alongside the theoretical work of cultural sociologist Jeffery C. Alexander, who has theorized, in his book Performance and Power, the way in which contemporary political personnel gain respect and authority (power) through a rather theatrical performance of honesty, knowledge, authenticity, and empathy. While Alexander’s work rigorously analyzes how cultural presence affects political strength, I will incorporate his theories through a reverse theoretical model that explores how political visibility can strengthen a theatre performer’s cultural significance and therefore artistic power—bringing individual performers, whose multiple-minority bodies are inherently political, a level of attention in the cultural sphere that they might not otherwise achieve.

Through a close analysis of the temporal shifts in Jess Dobkin's The Magic Hour, this article considers how a refusal to submit to a gendered expectation to rush, might offer not only a means of illuminating the disciplining logic of normative temporality, but also provide a performative space of healing and resistance. Grounded in theories on queer trauma and queer temporality, the article introduces a concept of the "lesbian rush," to consider how those with less support must multitask and rush to achieve economic stability and perceived success. Part of the work that naming this rush commits to is revealing how conceptualizations of "straight time" - a temporal logic invested in reproductive futurities and naturalized milestones - is both heterosexist and patriarchal; that is to say, straight time is not just straight, but also androcentric. Considering Dobkin's experiences in the theatre industry, alongside the production's focus on "trauma and transformation," this article discusses how expectations to keep pace may be combated through performance. Grappling with the systemic inequities which shape our experiences of time, alongside personal narratives of trauma, this article tells a story of one performance over and over again: The story of an artist; the story of slowing down; the story of the past and future melting into the present; and the story of repetition. Each story told refuses to rush the narrative, coming back to the beginning of the production and taking a new perspective on what it means to refuse the lesbian rush.

Au moyen The Magic Hour de Jess Dobkins, Laine Zisman Newman se demande comment un refus de se soumettre aux attentes genrées liées à l'empressement pourrait nous permettre non seulement de mieux comprendre la logique d'une temporalité normative qui impose sa discipline, mais aussi de créer un espace performatif dans lequel une guérison et une résistance peuvent avoir lieu. Zisman-Newman présente également l'« empressement lesbien », un concept qu'elle analyse à partir des théories du traumatisme et de la temporalité homosexuels pour voir comment ceux qui ont moins de ressources et de soutien sont contraints à mener plusieurs tâches de front et à se précipiter afin d'atteindre une stabilité économique et donner l'impression d'avoir réussi. Une partie du travail effectué en nommant l'empressement lesbien consiste à montrer que les moyens de conceptualiser le « temps hétéro »-cette logique temporelle investie dans les avenirs reproductifs et les jalons naturalisés-sont à la fois hétérosexistes et patriarcaux. Autrement dit, le temps hétéro n'est pas qu'hétéro, il est aussi androcentrique. En tenant compte des expériences vécues par Dobkin dans l'industrie théâtrale et de l'impor-tance accordée par la production au « traumatisme et [à] la transformation », cet article examine comment la performance peut nous aider à lutter contre nos attentes quant à l'obligation de suivre le rythme. Luttant contre les inégalités systémiques qui façonnent nos expériences du temps et présentant des récits personnels de traumatismes, Zisman-Newman raconte l'histoire d'une performance qui se répète sans cesse. C'est l'histoire d'une artiste; l'histoire d'un ralentissement; l'histoire du passé et de l'avenir qui se fondent dans le présent; et l'histoire d'une répétition, d'un refrain auquel

The Pera Palace Hotel has long been a site of transnational interest. Already its original intent when built in 1892 was to host passengers of the Orient Express and its nickname as the “oldest European hotel of Turkey” aptly reflects this heritage. It has been the setting of Anglophone world literature such as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snow of Kilimanjaro”, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, and perhaps most famously Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. But the hotel also reflects Turkey’s own turbulent history from Istanbul’s luxurious Belle Epoque to the oftentimes nostalgic luxury of a postmodern metropolis with Room 101 being converted into a memorial for Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, thus designating the space as museum-hotel. Pera Palas (1998), the play by Turkish-American playwright Sinan Ünel, is a complex spatiotemporal interlacing of the hotel’s/nation’s history with that of a Turkish family and their Anglo-American friends and lovers encompassing the 1920s via the 1950s to present time. Intermingling East and West, past and present, Islam and Christianity, traditionalists and feminists, hetero- and homosexuality, this play is at once a multifarious love story and a polyloguous diasporic tale.

Full version of the review of the Sarah Kane Season at Sheffield Theatres written for Litro Magazine including reviews of Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Blasted. See in the post below for the shortened and edited version that appeared in their online magazine, 19th April 2015. The full version here was published on the 21st July 2015. Please click on the link to download it. http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/07/breath-and-light-new-directions-in-the-staging-of-sarah-kane/

Co-Authors: Anoushka Ratnarajah, lee williams boudakian, Laine Zisman Newman

Co-sponsored by Simon Fraser University and the frank theatre company, Q2Q: A Symposium on Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada was held in Vancouver, BC, July 20-24, 2016. The symposium aimed to bring together performers, practitioners, scholars, and community members to discuss the current state of queer theatre in the country, its histories, and its future(s). The symposium included performances, panels, roundtables, and networking events. Performers and practitioners presented together on the same panels, and the lack of strict presentation guidelines resulted in dynamic and varied formats. In this piece, three participants reflect on the presentations, group dynamics, and discussions that took place at the symposium.

Reyes "We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous, get used to it!" fue el lema que representó la formidable toma de poder y la subsecuente emancipación de la comunidad gay al finalizar la década de los ochentas en los Estados Unidos. Al examinar el

The way as society deals, understands and treats gender diversity affects drastically the relationships for people who are identified as transgender, transsexual, as well as those
identified as gender fluid or non-binary gender. Our group from a university in southern Brazil develops several activities seeking dialogue with different social groups, bringing diversity as an issue for debates, actions and thoughts. Through interventions, artistic presentations and educational activities, we promote debates and reflection, and encourage
the understanding of and respect for diversity in society. The aim of this article is to describe a project about theatre playwriting addressing diversity as the central theme. Furthermore, we explain how these actions are guided in our proposals for a Border Pedagogy and Aesthetics of Ginga. Dealing with these issues in our local society, the playwritings were fundamental for unveiling these people and stimulating their self-esteem by showing their stories as nobody else had done before.

An audio recording of this paper can be downloaded at Chirbit by cutting and pasting the following link into your browser.
- http://chirb.it/LqfGyK

"The paper draws on dramaturgical enquiry into Sarah Kane's 1998 play Cleansed, carried out in a university studio space and a public gallery setting. The enquiry applied the philosophies of Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, positing Cleansed as a theatrical meditation on gender - one that requires actors to develop an ethics for the performing of sex, desire and violence. The research found that Irigaray's and Butler's ideas can be usefully applied to explore and contest binary constructions of gender, and provide vital philosophical frameworks for staging sexuate difference and transgender becoming in Kane's text. Cleansed centres its trajectory on an investigation of clothing and bodies which implicates and indicates the gender binary as a site of contestation, violence, desire, making, unmaking, resistance and mucosity. It encodes significant lesbian aesthetics of butch-femme play and languour in its performance structure. Its focus on sexuate difference, 'one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue of our age' (Irigaray), and its movement between genders is supported with dramatisations of touch and breath at key gestic moments. The paper discusses how actors chose to stage these moments, analysing the choices made with reference to The Forgetting of Air, Sexes and Genealogies, The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, and This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray). It discusses the nature of speech and desire - particularly female and lesbian desire - and the denial or erasure of this, with reference to Antigone's Claim (Butler). It reflects on the aesthetics of female and queer authorship at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, and the traces of this historical moment in Cleansed. Finally, it contextualises Kane's representations of gender violence with reference to Frames of War (Butler) and notes how philosophical discussions of time and irreducible difference can assist inter-generational dialogue in the rehearsal room."

The author examines the limitations and potential in the "Arabization" of the playwriting process through an exploration of the Lebanese Civil War and the inheritance (or erasure) of intergenerational memory.  Through a series of studio and written explorations, the author investigates conventional play-writing techniques and questions the capacity to de-center the locus of knowledge from a European lens.  The two-year exploration culminated in the play "The Green Line," which in and of itself is a discussion of transmigration and racial/ethnic building identity politics. The author interrogates the effectiveness of the "Arabization" endeavor and discusses findings that point to the potential ways the exploration failed and succeeded.