This thesis, a collection of previously published materials, reflects a plural and
evolving engagement with theatre and performance over the past fifteen years
or so: as researcher, writer, editor, teacher, practitioner, spectator. These have
rarely been discreet categories for me, but rather different modalities of
exploration and enquiry, interrelated spaces encouraging dynamic
connectivities, flows and further questions.
Section 1 offers critical accounts of the practices of four contemporary theatre
directors: Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine.
Section 2 draws on elements of contemporary philosophy and critical thinking to
explore the mutable parameters of performance. lt proposes performative
mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events 'in proximity of
performance', to borrow Matthew Goulish's phrase: contact, fire, animals,
alterity, place. Section 3 contains examples of documentation of performance
practices, including a thick description of a mise en scene of a major
international theatre production, reflections on process, training and
dramaturgy, a performance text with a framing dramaturgical statement, and
personal perspectives on particular collaborations. The external Appendix
comprises a recently published collection of edited and translated materials
concerning five core collaborative projects realised by Ariane Mnouchkine and
the Theatre du Soleil at their base in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris.
The core concerns of this thesis include attempts to think through:
• the working regimes, poetics and pedagogies of certain directors,
usually in collaborative devising contexts within which the creative
agency of performers is privileged;
• the processes and micro-politics of collaboration, devising, and
dramaturgical composition; the dramaturgical implications of trainings,
narrative structures, spaces, mise en scene, and of images as multi-layered,
dynamic 'fields';
• the predicament and agency of spectators in diverse performance
contexts, and the ways in which spectatorial roles are posited or
constructed by dramaturgies;
• the imbrication of embodiment, movement and perception in
performance, and the plurality of modes of perception;
• the critical and political functions of theatre and theatre criticism as
cultural/social practice and 'art of memory' (de Certeau), of
dramaturgies as critical historiographies, and of theatre cultures (and
identities) as plural, dynamic, and contested;
• performance as concentrated space for inter-subjectivity and the flaring
into appearance of the 'face-to-face' (Levinas); the possibility of ethical,
'response-able' encounter and exchange with another; identity as
relational and in-process, alterity as productive event, the inter-personal
as political;
• the poetics and politics of what seems an unthinkable surplus (and
constitutive 'outside') to the cognitive reach of many conventional frames
and maps in theatre criticism and historiography; an exploration of acts of
writing as performative propositions and provocations ('critical fictions') to
think the event of meanings at/of the limits of knowledge and subjectivity.
This partial listing of recurrent and evolving concerns within the thesis traces a
trajectory in my evolution as a writer and thinker, a gradual displacement from
the relatively 'solid ground' of theatre studies and theatre history towards more
fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting 'lie of the land' in contemporary
performance and philosophy. This trajectory reflects a growing fascination with
present process, conditions, practices, perceptions 'in the middle', and ways of
writing (about) performance as interactive and ephemeral event.
| Date of Award | 2002 |
|---|
| Original language | English |
|---|
| Awarding Institution | |
|---|