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Introduction: Modern Drama, Aging, and the Life Course
... In spite of the acknowledged benefits for both fields, one of the evident challenges for this inter-and multidisciplinary alliance is to find "common ground" for fruitful research (Lipscomb 2012, 118) taking into account cultural, narrative, performative and material conceptualisations of age (Swinnen and Port 2012, 12). Some drama and performance scholars unanimously assert that these approaches "may be beneficial at one research cite: the theatre" (Lipscomb 2012, 118), and highlight its close and direct connection to ageing studies (Basting 1998;Bernard and Munro 2015;Fuchs 2014;Lipscomb 2012;Mangan 2013;Switzky 2016). Theatre's complicity with the construction of social and cultural ideologies is evident (Mangan 2013, 9). ...
... En efecto, a lo largo de las últimas décadas se han desarrollado interesantes experiencias relativas al uso de artes y humanidades como herramientas en iniciativas de acción social y cultural con la tercera edad. Ya no se trata de analizar cómo el arte y las humanidades han construido el concepto de envejecimiento y lo han recreado (GILLEARD, 2007;SWITZKY, 2016), sino de darles un valor de uso, para que danza, música, artes plásticas o literatura constituyan un referente en la vida de nuestros mayores (CASTORA-BINKLEY et al., 2010;MENTAL HEALTH FOUNDATION, 2011;BAKER, 2014). En el caso del teatro, y en el marco de una gerontología que cabría definir entonces como sociocultural (en tanto re-socializa y genera nuevas pautas culturales o las recupera), existen algunas interesantes panorámicas que muestran la variedad de experiencias realizadas, sea en países de lengua inglesa (RICKETT; BERNARD, 2014) sea en otras geografías y con otras lenguas (VENANCIO, 2008;KURZ, 2016). ...
El teatro, como práctica escénica, constituye una poderosa herramienta en procesos propios de la educación social, el trabajo social o la terapia ocupacional, y puede ser relevante con todos aquellos usuarios y colectivos que se sitúan en tiempos y espacios marcados por la ausencia de actividad profesional o productiva, especialmente en ese territorio vital que se conoce como tercera edad. Con este trabajo, realizado al amparo de una amplia revisión bibliográfica vinculada con los tiempos y espacios del teatro comunitario se analizan las posibilidades y las problemáticas derivadas del uso de la praxis teatral como herramienta para promover un envejecimiento activo asentado en la idea de un ocio autotélico, centrado en el desarrollo personal y en el de los grupos y comunidades de las que forma parte el sujeto. Como conclusión diremos que el teatro propone un marco en el que las historias de vida se convierten en patrimonio y capital de toda la comunidad, en espacio en el que encontrarse y reconocerse.
This chapter offers a hybrid approach to both aging and theater studies through a case of practice as research aimed at the creation of an anti-ageist dramaturgy. Departing from my own experience as a theater artist and an aging-studies scholar, while at the same time acknowledging my own limitations in the two fields as a middle-aged academic working intermittently for the theater, the practice as research presented is based on a small-scale study with 12 older professional actors, whose views on older age and the theater inform the dramaturgical sequence developed in the creative part of the project. Framing the small-scale study within the interdisciplinary field of theater and age studies, the chapter offers an opportunity to develop work on older actors as both critical sources of inquiry and exemplary figures in anti-ageist discussions and representations of older age. Through the examination of the process of writing the dramaturgical sequence derived from the small-scale study, the chapter underlines the capacity of the theater and, in particular, of dramatic writing, to generate transferable knowledge while simultaneously developing mechanisms of artistic inquiry through which the complexities of older age can be explored.
Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity’s aggressive interrogation of vision’s residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers-such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton-exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions-including Scribe’s The Glass of Water, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen’s A Doll House, Strindberg’s The Father, and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise-alongside analyses of artwork by major painters and photographers-such as Chardin, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann. In a radical challenge to existing criticism, Holzapfel argues that realism in theatre was never the attempt to reproduce an exact copy of the seen world but rather the struggle to make visible the act of seeing.
Telling Stories.” Doreen P. Townsend Centre for the Humanities Occasional Papers
- Kathleen Woodward
- Burke Kenneth