No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Playing sex : the exploration, creation and transmission of gender codes in puppetry through the exploration of Cleansed
Abstract
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek die verkenning, skepping en oordrag van geslagskodes in toneelpoppe. Die studie ondersoek die gebruik van geslagskodes in die skepping van manlike en vroulike identiteite. Die navorsing word baseer op Judith Butler (1999) se teorieë met betrekking tot geslagsgedrag waarvolgens geslag uit herhaalde gestyleerde aksies bestaan waaruit manlike en vroulike identiteite geskep word. Geslag word dus deur spesifieke geslagskodes weergegee wat in kleding, optrede en kommunikasie gevind word. In die studie word daar gekyk na die drie kenmerkende tekens van kommunikasie wat betrokke is by 'n toneelpop, naamlik ontwerp, beweging en spraak. Verder ondersoek die studie ook die kreatiewe prosesse soos gevind in die verhoogproduksie Cleansed (2009) wat as praktiese verkenning gedoen is om die oordrag van geslagskodes (ontwerp, beweging en spraak) by die toneelpop te illustreer. ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the exploration, creation and transmission of gender codes in puppetry. It investigates the gender codes used to construct masculine and feminine identities; this is done through the exploration of Judith Butler's (1999) theories on gender performativity. According to Butler (1999) gender consists of a stylized repetition of acts and through these socially constructed acts, a gendered self is constructed. Gender is thus communicated through gender codes and these codes are found in the way we dress, act and speak. This study also investigates the semiotics of the puppet, with specific reference to design, movement and speech as significant signs. This study also investigates the creative processes of Cleansed (2009). It is through this process that the gender codes (found in the design, movement and speech of the puppet) are explored, created and ultimately transmitted. Thesis (MDram (Drama))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.
The examination of violence and its association with masculinity is depicted in three distinct plays: Blasted, written by Sarah Kane in 1995; Curse of the Starving Class, authored by Sam Shepard in 1977 (it was made into a Hollywood film in 1994); and Matei Vişniec’ The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War (1996). Utilizing a qualitative approach, this study employs close textual analysis and an extensive review of relevant literature to examine the representation of violence and masculinity in theatrical framework while also exploring the wider societal implications of such portrayals. The chosen plays present a wide range of viewpoints regarding violence, encompassing both highly intense manifestations of violence and the repercussions of warfare on the individuals. This analysis utilizes Judith Butler's theory of gender construction and Antonio Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty in order to examine the ways in which these plays either challenge or uphold conventional gender. Furthermore, it investigates the intricate correlation between trauma and aggressive conduct as depicted in the plays. By going deeply into the text and exploring its underlying concepts, it reveals the crucial function of theater in tackling and evaluating complex social problems. The plays act as a mirror for society viewpoints, forcing readers and the audiences to face uncomfortable truths about aggression, masculinity, and emotional anguish. The impacts of trauma on individuals and communities are brought to light. These plays demonstrate how war trauma can induce rage and promote violent behavior. It also highlights the power of theater to challenge harmful social conventions and catalyze positive social change by challenging traditional gender roles and power dynamics. Improving the audiences understanding of cultural attitudes and potential paths for societal change, this study contributes significantly to the assessment of violence and masculinity as depicted in theatrical performances.
The modern self as puppet in Woyzeck on the Highveld
This article undertakes a semiotic investigation of identifications of the self in terms of a specifically South African modernism, via an exploration of an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”. William Kentridge’s production of “Woyzeck on the Highveld”(1992; 2009) marks at least three intersections of modernist and modernising discourses. Firstly, it uses as its principal source Georg Büchner’s protomodernist text, with its description of an individual alienated from his social context. Secondly, in making use of the puppets of the Handspring Puppet Company for its central characters, the play employs a style commensurate with modernist aesthetics, in terms of the objectification of subjectivity and the mechanisation of the subject. Thirdly, by re-contextualising Büchner’s German soldier as an African mineworker, the production deals with aspects of modernisation by examining the clash, confusion and concomitant syncretism of rural and urban cultures. The article concludes by identifying the all too human desire to be more than a puppet, more than machine, and the potential consequences of the fragmented modernist self on conceptions of identity and freedom.
This book addresses one of the most exciting and innovative developments within higher education: the rise in prominence of the creative arts and the accelerating recognition that creative practice is a form of research. The book considers how creative practice can lead to research insights through what is often known as practice-led research. But unlike other books on practice-led research, it balances this with discussion of how research can impact positively on creative practice through research-led practice. The editors posit an iterative and web-like relationship between practice and research. Essays within the book cover a wide range of disciplines including creative writing, dance, music, theatre, film and new media, and the contributors are from the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The subject is approached from numerous angles: the authors discuss methodologies of practice-led research and research-led practice, their own creative work as a form of research, research training for creative practitioners, and the politics and histories of practice-led research and research-led practice within the university. The book will be invaluable for creative practitioners, researchers, students in the creative arts and university leaders. Key Features. The first book to document, conceptualise and analyse practice-led research in the creative arts and to balance it with research-led practice. Written by highly qualified academics and practitioners across the creative arts and sciences. Brings together empirical, cultural and creative approaches. Presents illuminating case histories of creative work and practice-led research. © in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
What, at first glance, could be less close, less akin than drama and reflection? Drama demands a stage, actors, a heightened atmosphere, spectators, the smell of the crowd, the roar of the greasepaint. Reflection is at least one of the things one does with one's solitude. But to counter this opposition an anthropologist tends to think in terms not of solitary but of plural reflection, or, much better, plural reflexivity, the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray, understand, and then act on itself. Essentially, public reflexivity takes the form of a performance. The languages through which a group communicates itself to itself are not, of course, confined to talking codes: they include gestures, music, dancing, graphic representation, painting, sculpture, and the fashioning of symbolic objects. They aredramatic, that is literally "doing" codes. Public reflexivity is also concerned with what I have called "liminality." This term, literally "being-on-a-threshold," means a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, daytoday cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status. Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen. Another way of putting it would be to say that the liminal in socio-cultural process is similar to the subjunctive mood in verbs - just as mundane socioReproduced by permission of the author and of the publisher from Performance in postmodern culture (Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, Inc., 1977,. The section heads (except for the last) have been added by the editor.
Few have had quite as much impact in both the academy and in the world of theatre production as Richard Schechner. For more than four decades his work has challenged conventional definitions of theatre, ritual and performance. When this seminal collection first appeared, Schechner's approach was not only novel, it was revolutionary: drama is not just something that occurs on stage, but something that happens in everyday life, full of meaning, and on many different levels. Within these pages he examines the connections between Western and non-Western cultures, theatre and dance, anthropology, ritual, performance in everyday life, rites of passage, play, psychotherapy and shamanism.
Addresses one of the most exciting and innovative developments within higher education.
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen's Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.3 (2001) 36-46
--Sarah Kane
In the spring of 2001, London's Royal Court Theatre devoted an entire season to the plays of Sarah Kane, each one receiving either a production or a reading in the large Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. Kane, during her brief career, created a substantial body of work that altered the landscape of British theatre in the 1990s, and the season was a chance to reflect on this accomplishment.
Kane's first play Blasted, set in an expensive hotel room in Leeds, charts the violence that befalls the dying journalist Ian and his unwilling sexual partner Cate, a mentally-deficient young woman plagued by fits. Blasted's exploration of personal violence erupts into a far more bloody spectacle when the hotel room is transformed into ground zero for a war. The play was greeted with a maelstrom of abuse by critics when first produced by the Royal Court in 1995. Respected newspapers, TV programs, trashy tabloids, all relished describing their disgust at this play and speculating about the "sick" twenty-three-year-old female author who wrote "this disgusting feast of filth," as Daily Mail's Jack Tinker not-so-subtly put it.
Despite this rancorous reception at home, Kane was welcomed by European theatre. Blasted was quickly recognized as one of the most important British plays of the decade. Her plays were produced throughout the continent, two of which won awards for Best Foreign Language Play in Germany. What seemed the start of a lengthy career was cut painfully short when Kane committed suicide in February 1999 at the age of twenty-eight. Though admired abroad, Kane remained a little-understood playwright in her own country. The critical tide had finally begun to turn by 1998 with Crave, but with her sudden death, her plays again became prime targets for biographical speculation.
Recognizing Kane's status as the most-talked about, least-seen British playwright, the Court decided to consolidate her work and make it available to a much wider audience. The season included new productions of Blasted and Crave, a transfer of the Theatre Upstairs production of 4:48 Psychosis (posthumously staged in the summer of 2000), and readings of Phaedra's Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998). This would allow the curious an opportunity to see her plays, the critics a chance to revisit them, and her supporters a means to celebrate her talent.
Inspired by the Royal Court's season, this article aims to do something similar for an American audience. While Kane is becoming more well-known in this country, her plays have still not been staged in New York City, bar one unsuccessful production in Fall 2000 (the Axis Theater production of Crave featuring Deborah Harry), or in other theatre capitals across the U.S. Here, Kane is becoming a recognizable name, but her work remains misunderstood. This is due, in part, to the lack of under-standing regarding changes in contemporary British theatre.
The Kane season at the Royal Court made clear the formal innovations of the plays, which stray far from the "talking heads" theatre typical of the British stage. Yet, the season also highlighted their complex negotiation of ethics. Taking cues from the theories of playwright Howard Barker and philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a play such as Blasted dramatizes an "ethics of catastrophe." Rather than distinguishing right from wrong, the core of all moralistic enterprises, or conversely, flirting with a cynical amorality, where anything goes, Kane dramatizes the quest for ethics. Morality is made up of "constraining rules" which judge people according to "transcendent values," such as Good or Evil (Deleuze). Ethics, on the other hand, are subject to change, even optional, emerging from specific moments and certain modes of being. An ethics does not forsake the difference between good and bad, but views such distinctions as evaluations rooted in one's specific existence, not as judgments based on universal principles. (Recall Nietzsche's statement: "Beyond Good and Evil, at least that does not mean 'Beyond Good and...
This review considers the impact of recent performance theory, especially the theory of gender performativity, on anthropological efforts to theorize sex and gender. In brief, the theory of performativity defines gender as the effect of discourse, and sex as the effect of gender. The theory is characterized by a concern with the productive force rather than the meaning of discourse and by its privileging of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This review treats recent performance theory as the logical heir, but also the apotheosis, of two anthropological traditions. The first tradition is feminist anti-essentialism, which first distinguished between sex and gender in an effort to denaturalize asymmetry. The second tradition is practice theory, which emphasized habitual forms of embodiment in its effort to overcome the oppositions between individual and society. In concluding, questions are raised about the degree to which current versions of performance theory enact rather than critically engage the political ec...
This study aims to describe the puppet, mask and actor as icons or mediums in performance in Africa. The types of performances that will be discussed are religious performances, as well as liminal and hybrid performances. It is in the cases where the mask and puppet are used in religious performances, such as rituals, that the iconic characteristics or values are added to the mediumship of the object. In such cases, these objects do not represent concepts/thoughts/persons/spirits; they are these things in the space of the ritual. Matters pertaining to representation and acting are discussed, since iconic representation does not allow for acting from the performer. The actor can function with, or independently, as an icon, while all these performance elements can function as mediums in a performance using acting or role-play. These different concepts are then applied by discussing the term performance. The different elements of a performance and its characteristics – such as the use of time, space, objects, productivity and rule of a performance – are explained. The creation of a performance through the use of restored behaviour as well as the possible results of a performance in the sense of transportation and transformation as temporary or permanent changes in the performers or audience members is then addressed in the discussion. Different performance genres such as rituals and social drama will be used to describe the function of the mask, puppet and actor in liminal and liminoid performances, and to show how these different performance objects function as icons and/or mediums in these genres. Hybrid forms of performance that cannot be classified as purely liminal or liminoid performances are also studied, since these types of performances are often found in contemporary performances in Africa. The production Tall Horse is used to apply performance theory to see how the different performance objects function in changed context in a hybrid performance. Thesis (DPhil (Drama)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007.
Performance Analysis
- C Counsell
- L Wolf
Counsell, C. & Wolf, L. 2001. Performance Analysis: An Introductory Course Book.
Introduction: Performativity and Performance
- A Parker
- E K Sedgwick
Parker, A & Sedgwick, E.K. 1995. Introduction: Performativity and Performance. In
Performativity and Performance. London: Routledge. 1-17.
Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town
- J Taylor
Taylor, J. 1998. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape
Town Press (Pty) Ltd.
Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed
- R Schechner
Schechner, R. 1981. Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed. The
Kenyon Review, 3 (4): 83-113.
- S Kane
Kane, S. 1998. Cleansed. Great Britain: Methuen Publishing Ltd.
Orlan' s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity
- T Augsburg
Augsburg, T. 1998. Orlan' s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity. In Phelan, P.
Sarah Kane In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today
- A Sierz
Sierz, A. 2000. Sarah Kane. In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London:
Faber and Faber Limited: 90-121.