Theatricality

The fundamental notions that we take for granted in drawing practice have been challenged and the acts of drawing may be extended through the interaction with media, new technologies and materials. At the same time the formative relationship between drawing and performance becomes critical in understanding the intermedial nature of the so-called performative artwork and its visual aspects (and scenography), as well as the ways media types are created and re-modelled in changing historical, cultural, social, aesthetic, and communicative contexts. Regardless of the fact, that they can possibly be perceived as pieces complete in themselves, certain drawings, but most importantly underdrawings, are often seen as work-in-progress products in connection to painting, while rehearsals are seen as work in progress, and as self-critical practices and methodologies, in relation to performance. This paper examines the ways that the theatricality of the preliminary drawings can be considered as a form of stage rehearsal by focusing on rehearsal as a temporal and theoretical topic and on Raymond Pettibon’s idiosyncratic performances and home videos from the 80s that draw exclusively from the theatricality of the rehearsal process. Rehearsals encourage the imperative to collaborate and Pettibon’s scripts are performed prima volta (first- timeness) - performed the first time but omitted at the repetition (rehearsal). They are performed during the rehearsal, but there is no repetition of this moment, and it is this “first-timeness” that is captured by the artist in his films. The artist renders the rehearsing process visible in his films to present an open-ended learning process in front of the recording camera. The nexus of the performative and fine arts is manifested in the visual artist’s documentation of improvised acting as it is in his vivacious drawings. Pettibon’s scripts oscillate between performance and rehearsal while they are not composed for but in performance.

In the opening lines of the Beach Boys 1964 hit, “In My Room,” Brian Wilson portrays the bedroom and domestic space in general as a place of retreat and security, a world that one can “tell their secrets to.”  Yet, as the narrator confesses to a growing feeling of fragility in this relation, the cavernous soundtrack comes to introduce an unnerving openness that belies this sense of safe enclosure.  This testimonial to isolation and its celebration of interiority is additionally compromised by a complex overlay of harmonies which render the individual voice strangely multiple.  In these dynamics, the song dramatizes the transformation of the home that would occur under Postmodernism as a once discrete and private space would be shot through with its exterior.  While the historical forces behind this transformation are multiple, the most prominent include: the increasing ubiquity and reach of media, the explosion of postwar advertising, the birth of suburbia and the “always on call” employment model of late capitalism.  As the convergence point for these forces, the home in the second half of the 20th century came to relinquish its enduring historical function which Gaston Bachelard describes as “shelter[ing] day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
This transformation of the home is at the center of the work of photographers John Divola, Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall.  While the specific strategies vary between artists, collectively their work visualizes these tensions by presenting the home as somehow uninhabitable, both literally and figuratively speaking.  In these images, the expectation of sanctuary that Wilson and Bachelard describe clash violently with the forces of late capitalism described above, fueling a self-reflexive dialogue in which the operation of the camera is rendered complicit in the larger processes of defamiliarization and alienation in which the home is enmeshed.  For example, John Divola surreptitiously enters abandoned seaside homes in Southern California.  Chronicling his presence through flares and light anomalies, the photographer introduces a tension between the constructedness of the image, the unwanted presence of the photographer and the decay and degradation of the spaces in which these acts take place.  Similarly, Gregory Crewdson creates elaborate, excessively theatrical images of the home which question the association of the domestic with the authenticity and interiority.  Finally, Jeff Wall’s portrayal of the home reveals an intrusion of the world of images into the domestic sphere by self-consciously fashioning the drama of the home according to overwrought types and conventions.  In these works, the image of the home emerges as a space of alienation, but also as the center point for the convergence of historical and technical forces which would shape subjectivity and the politics of the image.

The present study addresses one of the most recently debated areas in postmodern literature and art, the revival of interest in theatricality. The researcher aims to introduce a few strategies which are used to turn the intertextual elements and the pastiche into working tools for creating theatricality. In order to do so, Thomas Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) which was later made into a movie version as well, directed by Stoppard himself, is examined. The study tries to show how theatricality can affect the performance as well as the contribution of the spectators to the dramatic text and performance. The shared experience of the pastiche made based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare, can contribute to the understanding of how theatricality can work when intertextuality is a powerful and positive force. The sample scenes chosen here are concluded to be the examples of how the illusion of having a stable identity is what not only the characters, the players or the author just assume to exist, but also what the text deliberately and constantly recreates. The playful nature of theatricality highlights the way each of these contributors willingly dupe themselves for the show to go on.

This introductory chapter outlines theatricality and performativity by way of their tensions and paradoxes – between seeing and doing, novelty and normativity – and argues for a more perspectival approach with notions of ‘texture,’ derived from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen Pepper. After a section on ‘metaphor,’ those of texture and weaving are further elaborated in three extensive segments, beginning from their prior usage in dramaturgy (Eugenio Barba) and philosophy (feminism, Pepper, ecology). The third and most important section introduces Ingold’s meshwork as a key figure of plural performative becoming: the interweaving of lines, as opposed to the network as a key figure of theatrical detachment or abstraction – the connecting of points or objects into which the meshwork is simplified when we optically ‘zoom out’ from its haptic engagement. In the end, the ensuing chapters are introduced, themselves addressed as specific ‘threads’ within the book’s overall texture.

The theatrical design process is rooted in a deep and careful examination of a "text", be it traditional script or a devised process.  This paper examines the importance of a dramaturgical analysis of that text, one which allows for an immersion into the material, and it's relationship to the designer's process which requires a designer to dwell within that text and be "baptized" by the process.

Among the XX century’s theatrical searches several new previously unreleased versions widely found an extension. First of all, these versions, which came as a result of the culturological approach, treated the human being as a game-inclining creature. In the book "Homo Ludens" by the famous culturologist and historian Johan Huizinga (1938), the essence of the games concept is examined from the point of view of its impact on human civilization. In the work, the idea has put forward that culture as a whole is a playful one.

Oshima Nagisa’s film Nihon no Yoru to Kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960, Japan), the last he would make with the Shochiku film studio, documents a pivotal moment in postwar Japanese history without the use of any actuality footage.1 In lieu of newsreel documentation, it takes the form of what Sato Tadao calls a “discussion drama” or “drama dialogue,” in which two generations of student protest movements are allegorized and rendered theatrical.2 Through its idiosyncratic use of mise-en-scène and cinematography, Oshima’s film stages the rift between two anti-imperialist factions of the Japanese left: the Stalinist generation of the 1950s, known as the Old Left, and what would become known as the New Left, the younger students protesting the Japan-US Security Treaty, called ANPO in Japanese (Nichibei Anzen Hoshou Jouyaku), in 1960.

The paper examines Hegel’s claim in the Outlines of the Philosophy of
Right that philosophy always comes too late to instruct us as to what
the world ought to be from a dual perspective. In the first move, Hegel’s
intervention in the field of political philosophy is compared to that of
Spinoza, who similarly criticized philosophers who describe men from
a moralist perspective and thus fail to write a political theory because
they “conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be”
(Political Treatise). Similarly, Marx writes that a proper historical enterprise sets out from “real, active men,” and demonstrates that “morality,
religion, metaphysics, and the rest of ideology” (The German Ideology)
depend on the material processes of those real, active men. In the second
move, the article discusses Hegel’s concept of history and philosophy’s
late arrival from the perspective of the metaphor consistently used not
only by Hegel and Marx, but also by critics such as Louis Althusser:
the metaphor of stage performance. The aim of this contribution is to
tackle the intricate relationship between thinking and acting by way of
a detour through the metaphor of theatricality.

El Palacio, Spring 2016
This exhibition examines the formal means artists employ to impart a sense of drama and setting in their compositions.

In the performing arts, “stage, setting and mood” refer to the evocative and emotional experiences that can be created in the physical space of the theater with the use of backdrops, props, lighting, sound and the work of the performers. In the visual arts, artists employ theatrical pictorial means to appeal to the senses. Colors, bold forms, and compelling subjects can be called on to elicit an emotional connection between viewer and artwork. In this exhibition, artworks that feature high drama, theatrical presentation, and narrative storytelling, demonstrate the connection between sensation and spectacle.

The townscapes and landscapes demonstrate a theatrical approach to non-performance subjects employing stage-like arrangements of landscape and architectural features, dramatic lighting to intensify mood, and narrative interaction.

The exhibition comprises close to 50 artworks dating from the late 18th century to the present including paintings, drawings, photography, prints, book illustrations, ceramics, bronzes and glass. The diverse range of artists with work in the exhibition include Augustus Leopold Egg, Trude Fleischmann, Francisco de Goya, Gene Kloss, Eli Levin, Virgil Ortiz, Julius Rolshoven, Utagawa Kunisada, and Beatrice Wood.
Feb 2016 – May 2016

Theatricality is omnipresent in Turkey. You could speak of a true ‘theatrocracy’ instead of a ‘democracy’, after Plato’s The Republic (Politeia). However, there was still something called sovereignty of the audience, the people. The fact that theatre had the potential to be subversive and could disturb the established order with its traditional authority was paradoxically dangerous to the ancient philosopher in view of the ‘truth’, because it could be abused by the wrong people. Theatricality had split from the theatre - the ‘theatre’ as social and political site according to Samuel Weber (2004: 36) - and spread in all areas of society. Today we are seeing something similar in Turkey. It is the intellectuals, academics, critics, journalists, authors, activists and also the artists - those who dare to criticise the established order - who have to give into the theatricality of the regime and the media spectacle that keeps the average citizen captivated. This theatricality operates particularly as a form of symbolic politics in a climate of intimidation, fear and (self)censorship. In this chapter, I develop this argument regarding a larger concept of theatricality in Turkish society further through examples of recent media events and cultural policy. I focus particularly on the negative consequences for 'dissident' theatre practitioners who have been scapegoated in the public realm as well as the difficulties of the theatre trait itself in such a climate.

The primary aim of this thesis is to explore the use of theatricality in Andersonian cinema. Theatre’s considerable influence on Anderson’s cinema as well as the use of poetic and storybook aesthetics open up interpretations about the sociopolitical and ideological construction of the films. The in-depth analysis will focus on his two most recent, MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012) and THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014) both of which are relatively unresearched works by film theorists and critics. The films will be analysed by exploring the narrative techniques and stylistic elements, which consist of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound.

Hay que creer en el papel que uno representa en el Gran Teatro del Mundo. Por el simple hecho de aparecer en sociedad ya aparecemos caracterizados como tal o cual personaje, o como sujetos que desempeñan tal o cual papel en la sociedad. Esto se supone que ha de tomarse en serio por todos, empezando por el propio sujeto-actor: ha de creer en su propio papel. (Como ya señalaba Santayana, no se nos da mal eso). En este artículo presentamos la introducción a la teoría dramatística de la vida social tal y como se expone en el primer capítulo de 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' de Erving Goffman.

One must believe in the role one plays in the Great Theatre of the World. Merely by appearing in society we are characterized as such or such a character, or as subjects performing a given social role. There is an assumption that this is to be taken seriously by everyone, not least by social actor himself: he must believe in his own role. (As noted by Santayana, we are apt enough to do so). This paper provides an introduction to the dramatistic theory of social life as exposed in the first chapter of Erving Goffman's 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life'.

This paper examines the feminine perspective of London in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984). Lessing offers a feminist vision of the city representing London as a stage. Janna, the protagonist, strolls around the city, becoming a flâneuse as she gazes at the spectacle of urban life. Janna’s relationship to the old woman Maudie Fowler enables her to see the different layers of time and space of London and read the city as a palimpsest, a manuscript that shows traces of earlier texts. Lessing blends the theatrical view of city with the palimpsest. Furthermore, nature is not separated from the urban environment, but included as an essential part of the city. The femininity in Lessing’s view of London resides in the combination of theatre, palimpsest and nature.

In der Frühen Neuzeit finden sich idealisierte Denkfiguren, welche die Regeln der geometrischen Abstraktion durch praxeologische und inszenatorische Verankerung unterlaufen. Sie werden in diesem Beitrag als Modellszenarien aus der Per spek tive einer Wissensgeschichte des Theaters entwickelt. 1 Schematisiert betrachtet sind das Drama und das Theater bei Nicolaus Cusanus (Nikolaus von Kues) auf vier Ebenen als Wissensmodell anzutreffen: (a) Seine Schriften weisen stets typisiertes Personal auf; (b) die an den Dialogen Beteiligten lassen sich als Rol lenfiguren beschreiben, die durch variable Register individueller Merkma le ge kennzeichnet sind (wie in frühen Stegreifvarianten der Typenkomödie, i. e. Com me dia dell'arte/Commedia all'improvviso/Commedia a soggetto); (c) die Rede vollzieht sich nicht etwa im luftleeren, neutralen Raum logischer Argumentationsgänge, son dern wird inmitten von bedeutungsgeladenen Szenerien und architekto ni schen Wort ge stel len zu sam men ge reimt, welche zum integralen Bestandteil sei ner Ge sprächs theatralik geraten; 2 (d) vielgestaltig sind die Rückbezüge und Quer ver wei se in bi bel exe ge ti scher und allgemein philologischer Hinsicht; 3 aller dings

Theatricality in sixteenth-century Venetian painting has long been understood as a characteristic of the paintings themselves. This article aims to give the concept a wider meaning by exploring its connection to the theatrical character of Venetian society and Venetian ritual. A portrait of the Venetian-born grand duchess of Tuscany, Bianca Capello (1548–87), painted by the Roman artist Scipione Pulzone (c. 1550–98) serves as an example. On the basis of a series of letters written by the owner, the Venetian nobleman Francesco Bembo, to Bianca Capello, the ways in which the Venetian audience approached this portrait can be reconstructed and the striking similarities between the manner in which people treated paintings and ritual behaviour in Venetian society are explored.

Tradução de Lucas Reis. Texto introdutório escrito por Lucas Reis e Iara Schiavinatto.
Partindo da análise de uma série de fotografias tiradas em expedições da Marinha britânica no Pacífico no final do século XIX, este texto interroga os aspectos teatrais e performativos da fotografia, propondo utilizá-la como um dispositivo heurístico na exploração historiográfica. Parte-se do pressuposto de que o quadro fotográfico possui um “efeito elevante” que força as imagens à visibilidade ao mesmo tempo em que cria pontos de fratura que concentram energia semiótica nas bordas da fotografia e tornam o espectador consciente do que está para além da imagem, permitindo, assim, confrontar narrativas históricas generalizantes. O enquadramento também intensifica tensões contidas no próprio ato do fazer fotográfico e permite, pela performance dos corpos dentro da imagem, uma confrontação da narrativa histórica imposta sobre eles (no caso das imagens analisadas, uma narrativa colonial). Publicado originalmente na revista Kronos em 2001.

A reading of Robert Morris' early minimalist sculptures with regard to Michael Fried's abhorrescence of theatricality; an interpretation of the temporality implied in Morris' "duration" as opposed to Fried's "presentness". Finally a confrontation of the still subject-centered embodied experience of phenomenology - on which Morris relies - with the heterogenesis of the human subject as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas.

La passione di un Burattino: teste di legno ribattezzate all'ombra della Commedia dell'Arte di Federico Pacchioni Il mondo meraviglioso delle marionette e dei burattini […] incomincia proprio […] al confine estremo dello spettacolo teatrale, dove fallisce l'ultimo sforzo di stilizzazione espressiva e d'astrazione logica del corpo umano 1 .

The Sydney Opera House is one of the world's most recognisable buildings. It serves as a symbol of Sydney and, often, Australia. Visited by over eight million people a year there is considerable interest in this icon of the built environment but an interest that does not readily flow into academic research outputs. For instance, the illumination remains an under investigated aspect of the edifice, compared to the construction or specific elements such as the glazing or acoustics. This paper will briefly discuss the interdisciplinary nature of the research into the illumination of the Sydney Opera House that is currently been undertaken to uncover the original design concepts and then relate these to the function of the building as a performing arts centre. Using the Sydney Opera House as a case study, the research examines the notion of theatricality in lighting design, drawing inferences from the aesthetic principles of stage lighting and applying these to the architectural lighting of this iconic structure. When completed, this research aims to demonstrate that, in relation to the world's most easily recognised performing arts complex, the efforts of the original lighting design team produced a scheme in which the illumination – incidentally or intentionally – is specifically theatrical.

Meu encontro com ONde Andará Dulce Veiga? de Caio Fernando Abreu e outros coisas dos anos 90 do século passado...Não há mais boa ou má literatura, bons ou maus filmes. Ou se há, não me importa mais. Há experiência e uma beleza impura. Há o protagonista. Há eu e você que me lê, que me ouve. Isto não basta, mas é um começo. Como a frase num calendário Seicho-No-Ie, os limites entre o sublime e o banal são frágeis: “Agora é o momento decisivo para renascer” (p. 17). Não há mais nomes. Nomes sempre lembram outros nomes, não traduzem identidades, são máscaras na internet, aparências no mercado, ficções na noite e no dia, heterônimos frenéticos, sem história e densidade. O protagonista canta seu nome no final, mas não o diz. O escritor não o diz. Dulce e Márcia e Pedro, tantos outros personagens saem de cena. Agora é a sua vez ou qual é a sua voz?

"This thesis brings together discourses concerning indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language to bear upon the photographic image in an attempt to open the parameters of current photographic discourse and carve a place for nontraditional photographic practices. Each of these facets – indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language – links photography to the body and solicits an embodied response from the viewer by placing the viewer’s body at the center of the experience of beholding images. Mes vœux (My Wishes/My Vows, 1988-1991) is a photographic installation by multimedia French artist Annette Messager comprised of layers of black and white photographs depicting intimate close-ups of body parts, each framed under glass and hung from the wall by twine in a circular formation. Scraps of paper framed in the same manner overlay the photographs and contain handwritten, repeated words. The photographs and text exist as both images and elements of sculpture.

Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.

Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies."

PAR MENEZ CHAPLEAU JANVIER 2006 REMERCIEMENTS Je remercie Josette Féral, ma tutrice, qui s'est montrée à la fois critique, ouverte, patiente, encourageante et chaleureuse. Ensuite, je remercie Frédéric Maurin, Hélène Bacquet, Daniel Mroz, Vanya Rose, Sylvain Latendresse, et Melissa Rodier-Barcelo qui m'ont aidé dans les moments difficiles et avec qui j'ai eu des discussions stimulantes. Et enfin, je remercie Raphaëlle et Samuel Chapleau pour leur immense amour, leur dévouement, leur générosité et leur confiance indéfectible. Rose

Alienation [Verfremdung] is a concept that is inextricably linked with the name of Bertolt Brecht; with twentieth-century modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, alienation as a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la lettre surfaced already long before the twentieth century in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot. This comparative study destabilizes the dramaturgical definition of 'Verfremdung' we inherited from Brecht, by looking back at the dramaturgical and philosophical writings of Denis Diderot, in particular LE PARADOXE SUR LE COMEDIEN and LE NEVEU DE RAMEAU. It thereby seeks to open up new ways of understanding its aesthetic, political and sociological dimensions and potentialities. If for the Marxist Brecht, alienation constitutes a specific stage in history tied to capitalist socio-economy, it defines for Diderot an inescapable existential condition embedded in human sociality. Brecht uses the alienation-effect to disrupt and hollow out a form of naturalism thriving on subjectivity, identification and illusion; Diderot, by contrast, plunges the spectator into processes of identification and illusion, only to create an awareness of the subject's profound situation of self-delusion. Illusion, subjectivity and identification are thus exploited as aesthetic tools to confront alienated social relations and conditions into which the subject is inscribed. Whilst a Brechtian notion of theatricality purges the theatre of its absorptive capacity, Diderot's baroque theatricality celebrates and expands the theatre in all its dimensions and forces.

Publication details: 1st Edition, Oxford: Legenda, 2011. 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, 2017.

У статті на прикладі п’єси Л. Піранделло «Шестеро персонажів у пошуках автора» досліджено семантику прийому «театр у театрі», котрий не лише стирає відмінність між театром і життям, а й у процесі авторефлексивного семіозису експлікує семіотичну природу театральності та засвідчує театральну несумірність означника та означуваного.

Yukarıdaki başlık  teatralliğin bir çöküş yaşadığını iddia etmektedir. Bu durumda, teatrallik hiç olmazsa post/geç-modernist bir bakış açısıyla yeniden ortaya çıkabilecektir.  Makalenin amacı durumun tam da böyle seyrettiğini gösterebilmektir.
1890 ile 1930 yılları arasında bir takım modernist tiyatro yönetmenleri de aynı iddiada bulunmuş, Rus tiyatrocu Nikolai Evreinov belli dönemlerin diğerlerine göre daha teatral olup olmadığı sorusunu ortaya atmıştı (1930). Evreinov’a göre; İngiltere ve İspanya rönesansı ile Fransız Rokoko dönemleri bariz biçimde teatral iken kendi dönemi tüm zamanlar içinde en çok gayri-teatralleştirilmiş (de-theatricalized) olandı; öyleki tiyatronun kendisi bile teatral değildi. Evreinov modern tiyatronun (Gerçekçilik) teatrallikten yoksun olduğu görüşünde yalnız değildi. Gerçekçilik’in tiyatroyu teatral-olmayan bir gerçeklik olarak yeniden yaratmasının ardından, tiyatronun yeniden-teatralleşmesini temsil eden ve aralarında Edward Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Antonin Artaud ile Bertolt Brecht’in de bulunduğu herkesin desteğini almıştı Evreinov.
İçinde yaşadığımız yüzyıl boyunca gerçekleşen yeniden-teatralleşme, burjuva gerçekçi tiyatrosunun kendini teatral-olmayan diye tanımlayışına bir cevaptı. Yeniden-teatralleşme dönemi boyunca teatrallik, her şeyden önce estetik biçimle ilgiliydi. Farklı tarz ve türler teatral ya da karşıtı olarak algılanmaktaydı. Ancak Evreinov’a göre, teatralliğin yokluğu bütün toplumu, tiyatroyu ve yaşamın kendisini ilgilendirmekteydi.

Nicht nur für das Theater geschriebene Musik verfügt über eine theatrale Schicht. Diese nicht als etwas der Musik Hinzugefügtes, sondern als etwas genuin Musikalisches zu begreifen, ist das Hauptanliegen dieses Buches. Der zweite Schlüsselbegriff neben dem Theatralen ist Latenz. Auf der Ebene von in der Musik latent angelegten Schichten geht es um autobiographische Verweise und Leerstellen in Werken von Alban Berg, Franz Schubert und György Kurtág. Allen diesen Werken ist nicht nur das Vorhandensein einer solchen latenten autobiographischen Schicht gemeinsam, sondern auch ein als modern zu bezeichnendes Verhältnis zur Form: das Fragmentarische. In diesem Spannungsfeld zwischen Abschluss und Öffnung der Form findet die latente Theatralität der Musik ihren Ort.

A Trinitarian theology in statu nascendi
The coming of a theatrical poetics of body and gesture according to the Gospel of John 
Our study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach emerging from both the living art of theater - with its implicit notion of theatricality - and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. This double approach allows for a phenomenological reading of the theatrical gesture found throughout the Johannine narrative. We can then proceed from there in our foundation of a poetical theology of the gesture. We begin by recognizing the Johannine narrative’s primary authority: there we discern the emergence of the logos of the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in connection with the disciples. This particular discernment takes place against the broader horizon of a poetics of the gesture. We then resituate the ‘poetic’ in its etymological sense as ‘the act of doing or making (poiein)’. This originating context highlights the ‘poetical’ as an expressive action of the body that is in process toward completion. This reading of the poetic as an action in the process of making [or doing] then allows us to recognize a logos underlying the bodily gesture that reveals itself and makes itself known in its nascent state. Such a poetics concerns the very theatricality of the body itself. Indeed, we do not limit ourselves to exploring the phenomenon of bodily theatricality underlying the Johannine narrative (i.e., an analysis of theatricality). Rather, we seek to uncover a poetical thought of the body manifesting itself in its nascent state – in statu nascendi – by means of Johannine theatricality. 
Keywords: body, expression, gesture, dramatic quality, movement, phenomenality, poetic, theatricality, theologality.

Ovid is today best known for his grand epic, Metamorphoses, and elegiac works like the Ars Amatoria and Heroides. Yet he also wrote a Medea, now unfortunately lost. This play kindled in him a lifelong interest in the genre of tragedy, which informed his later poetry and enabled him to continue his career as a tragedian – if only on the page instead of the stage. This book surveys tragic characters, motifs and modalities in the Heroides and the Metamorphoses. In writing love letters, Ovid's heroines and heroes display their suffering in an epistolary theater. In telling transformation stories, Ovid offers an exploded view of the traditional theater, although his characters never stray too far from their dramatic origins. Both works constitute an intratextual network of tragic stories that anticipate the theatrical excesses of Seneca and reflect the all-encompassing spirit of Roman imperium.

PRIX ZOGRAPHOS 2024 de l'Association des Études Grecques.

À partir d’une mise en perspective fondée d’une part sur les questionnements contemporains à propos de la valeur épistémologique de la vue et de l’ouïe, et d’autre part sur les modalités propres au spectacle théâtral, cet ouvrage propose une lecture de la dialectique dramatique de la vision et de l’audition dans cinq tragédies d’Euripide (Alceste, Hippolyte, Héraclès, Hélène et Bacchantes). Si les perceptions visuelles et auditives déterminent les divers degrés de conscience et de connaissance des événements de la part des personnages sur scène, ce double appel sensoriel permet également au dramaturge de caractériser ses personnages et d’orienter la réponse émotionnelle du public.

"Hellenistic oratory remains an elusive subject as not one Greek speech has survived from the end of the fourth century BC until the beginning of the first century AD. This collection of fourteen interdisciplinary essays offers a wide-ranging study of the different ways in which Hellenistic oratory can be approached.

Written by a team of leading scholars in the field, it examines the different kinds of evidence which shed light on the dynamic character of oratory during the Hellenistic period. All essays stress the pervasive influence of Hellenistic oratory and survey its different manifestations in diverse literary genres and socio-political contexts, especially the dialogue between the Greek oratorical tradition and the developing oratorical practices at Rome.

The volume opens with a detailed introduction, which sets the study of Hellenistic oratory within the context of current trends in Hellenistic history and rhetoric, and closes with an afterword which underlines the vibrancy and sophistication of oratory during this period. It will appeal to all students and scholars of Hellenistic history, society, and the history of rhetoric."

Arts are permeable. The current museographical approach seems to go towards a form of interdisciplinarity which leverages the encounter between arts. From the MAXXI
in Rome to the Louvre of Paris, to the National Gallery in London, this interaction between different art fields (dance, theatre, music, etc.), gives rise to new aesthetic proposals. Choreographed exposition and exhibited choreography are the rendition of this kind of negotiation between visual art, museum spaces, and performing arts, which sets up the spectatorship dialectic between temporal and spatial dynamics. Within a migration process, from the black box to the white cube, the theatrical body becomes a work of art, through a process of objectivation. Likewise, spectators participation is choreographed, as well as the very act of observation. The exhibition space loses its structural and statutory hierarchies, becoming a hybrid place, a meta-theatre and simultaneously a meta-museum. Points of view change; the frontal perspective of the theatrical or cinematographic architectures, and the Renaissance monocular gaze disappear. That is a contemporary dynamic of creolization for which, within an exhibition context, the spectator’s enjoyment meets with a theatrical approach, becoming a critical device of transcultural mediation.

Applied rigorously, philosophical conceptions of subversion call the very possibility of politically subversive Blockbuster cinema into question. For political theorist Johannes Agnoli, for example, subversion entails a critical reflection about oppressive social orders as much as an emancipatory political practice directed towards their transformation. While the commercial orientation and mass address of mainstream Hollywood film render the existence of politically subversive blockbusters in this narrow sense highly unlikely (as subversive films would not only need to tell stories about political subversion, but also actively participate in social conflicts), 2006’s V for Vendetta , which adapts Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1980s graphic novel of the same name, represents an interesting counterexample. Operating within the commercial framework of blockbuster cinema, the film relates the protagonist’s fight against the fascist government of a near-future Britain and, by doing so, promotes an (problematic) idea of theatrical performance as a model of subversive political activity. Beyond these thematic concerns, however, the film produced a lasting impact on the iconography of anti-authoritarian protest movements worldwide by disseminating and popularizing the image of the ‘Guy Fawkes mask’ as a symbol of political activism, which, in the years after the film’s release, came to be used by the ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous, activists of the Occupy movement, and street protesters at Istanbul’s Gezi Park (to name only a few). This paper explores  V for Vendetta’s function for the spread of the Guy Fawkes image and argues that the film’s depiction of subversive activity, along with the iconic staging of its masked protagonist, made the image available to activists and started a process of ‘viral’ serialization in which it was spread across different media over an extended period of time. This serialization followed and continued a series of earlier incarnations of the same image, and derived its power from the mask’s stylized and immediately recognizable character, i.e. from an iconicity that lends itself both to commercial logics of branding and to a use within the context of political activism.

En este artículo comento los aspectos más prominentes de la teoría de la interaccionalidad presencial desarrollada por Erving Goffman, y apunto algunos correlatos teóricos de la misma para una definición de la realidad y una teoría de la subjetividad, así como algunas maneras en que esta teoría interaccional es aplicable, con los ajustes pertinentes, a otros tipos de interacción humana no presencial, como en la comunicación mediada por ordenador, en la ficción narrativa o en la hermenéutica de la interpretación. No es sorprendente el poder explicativo de la teoría de Goffman en estas áreas, pues toda interacción comunicativa humana deriva en última instancia, genéticamente, y se asienta estructuralmente, sobre unas estructuras centrales de naturaleza presencial y holística, en las que la información corporal y periférica, y las formas de su uso y reapropiación, son un elemento crucial. Para el análisis de toda interacción comunicativa humana, por tanto, son relevantes las reflexiones de Goffman sobre la dramaturgia de la acción y la teatralidad de la presentación en sociedad, pues somos teatreros en todo lo que hacemos, de principio a fin—that's no jest.

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We Playact: The Subject, Dialectic Interaction and the Strategy of Representation According to Goffman (Somos teatreros: el sujeto, la interacción dialéctica y la estrategia de la representación según Goffman).

This paper comments the most prominent aspects of Erving Goffman's theory of face-to-face interaction, suggesting its theoretical relevance for theories of reality and of the subject. It also notes the theory's applicability, with the relevant adjustments, to other types of human non-presential interaction, such as computer-mediated communication, narrative fiction, and the hermeneutics of interpretation. The explanatory power of Goffman's theory in these areas is not surprising, given that all human communicative interaction is ultimately derived, genetically and structurally speaking, from the basic and holistic structures of presential interaction, in which peripheral information and body language, and the modes of their use and reappropriation are crucial elements. Therefore, due to the inherent theatricality of human social interaction, Goffman's reflections on the dramaturgy of action and the theatricality of social presentation are highly relevant for the analysis of any mode of human communicational interaction.

This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality (1980)—by constellating Fried’s work alongside Péter Szondi’s writings on modern drama and Paul de Man’s theories of allegory. This theoretical juxtaposition reveals, first, that the phenomenon Fried describes as “absorption” parallels a form of mimetic, bourgeois drama hegemonic in European theatre from the time of Diderot to Ibsen, and second, that Fried’s concept of “theatricality” corresponds significantly to the notion of 􏰀allegory􏰁 developed in de Man’s work. Fried’s writings thus advance a theory of modernity organized around the rise and fall of mimesis in performance, one in which mimetic drama comes programmatically to eclipse allegory and theatricality during the Enlightenment, only to then fall into crisis around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of modernism, understood as a moment marked by the reemergence of allegory and theatricality in the arts. In this way, Fried’s views of theatricality overlap considerably with the origins of postdramatic theatre demonstrated influentially in theatre studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and these overlaps require our field to rethink now well-established positions on Fried and Lehmann alike. A new view of theatre history is required, one that accounts both for the emergence of supposedly postdramatic forms and for this general reappearance of theatricality and allegory in modern times.

Статья посвящена первому советскому изданию «Парадокса об актере», подготовленному Н.Е. Эфросом и увидевшему свет сначала в Москве и Петрограде, а затем в Ярославле, в 1922-м и 1923 годах соответственно. В обеих брошюрах тексту Дидро было предпослано восторженное и в то же время чрезвычайно проницательное предисловие А.В. Луначарского: «маленьким шедевром» Дидро театральный отдел Наркомпроса предполагал открыть «серию отзывов величайших людей Европы о театре». Этому замыс­лу не суждено было реализоваться, но появление в печати «Парадокса» стало заметным событием  театральной жизни начала 1920-х годов. Литературные и театральные критики, а также актеры, откликнувшиеся на выход книги, писали о произведении полуторавековой давности так, как будто оно было создано их современником: спорили, восхищались, опровергали. Одной из наиболее значимых (хотя и опосредованных) реакций на первую публикацию «Парадокса» стала анкета, подготовленная театральной секцией ГАХН и предложенная ведущим актерам московских театров в сезон 1922/23 года. Анкета, почти семьдесят вопросов которой так или иначе касались «чувствительной» и «рациональной» составляющей актерской игры, была составлена Л.Я. Гуревич и Н. Е. Эфросом, верными соратниками К.С. Станиславского.

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity.