2025-02-07
Mischa Twitchin
Addressing the cultural politics of what Mihaela Mihai calls “mnemonic care”, this paper considers three questions concerning Jewish identity and testimonial justice that are posed in a recent play (including in its very title) by the Estonian-Russian theatre maker Julia Aug, Mum, is our cat also a Jew? The contrasting claims of and for official and unofficial national histories – both during and after the Soviet period – are explored here in terms of Mihai’s invitation for us to consider how such memory politics “make space for the unassimilable”.
2025-02-07
Thomas Rosendal Nielsen
In their award-winning and still touring 2019 performance Dark Noon, the project theatre Fix&Foxy, led by Danish director Tue Biering, creates a theatrical space in which the audience are implicated in the hypercomplex relations between violent colonial oppression and the entertainment industry. What appears through the staging is the indirect complicity of the present White European in the long-distance and long-term atrocities of colonialism. Drawing on, amongst others, Michael Rothberg’s theory of The Implicated Subject, the present performance analysis will describe and discuss this unpleasant dramaturgy of implication in Dark Noon, and more specifically, how it works through a complex play on non/identity between the actors, the spectators, and the characters of the performance.
2025-02-07
Carmen Pellegrinelli, Laura Lucia Parolin
As known in theatrical literature, one way for communities to heal their traumas is through Applied Theatre (AT). Presenting a case of a theatre workshop promoted and attended by several healthcare professionals of the main hospital in Bergamo, this article shows AT as a resource and tool for professionals dealing with trauma, grief, and loss. Bergamo was the epicentre of the first outbreak of the pandemic in Europe. COVID-19 hit the entire community, dramatically putting the hospital and the ER at the centre of the crisis. Several doctors and nurses organized a theatre workshop a few years later to heal from the trauma and present their story in a theatre play Silent Days, Sleepless Nights, for the city. The article contributes to the literature on Applied Theatre in the post-pandemic era by showing the cathartic power of theatre and its potential for healing from COVID-19 trauma. Returning to tragedy in the classics, AT should be understood as a tool for communities when they experience a shared condition of fragility. The catharsis in the communal sharing of experiences through the staging of the scenes and the construction of a common narrative horizon were the elements through which the meaning and overcoming of painful memories were substantiated.
2025-02-07
Ann Werner, Isak Benyamine
What could create more displeasure in the performing arts than silence about power, sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination? Swedish performing arts has been described as a place where a code of silence rules, a code that has been challenged after the Swedish #MeToo movement of 2017 in film and performing arts. In this article, we aim to theoretically and empirically examine what silence around sexual harassment in the performing arts is, using feminist theory. And further, we discuss how it creates negative affect in the performing arts work environment. Silence or “theatre without action” as described by Rancière, has traditionally been regarded as a valuable creative tool in rehearsal work. However, the #MeToo movements have shone a light on how silence contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in film and the performing arts. Building on discourse analysis of qualitative individual interviews and recordings of rehearsals with employees of four performing arts institutions in Sweden, we examine the discursive and affective shape of silence in the performing arts today. Challenging the idea that great art comes out of suffering, we discuss how silence in the performing arts has consequences that risk being harmful, not only for the employees, but for art itself, as well as the audiences experiencing it.
2025-02-07
Tomaž Toporišič
The essay analyses the political tactics of two innovative European theatre directors, Romeo Castellucci and Oliver Frljić, and their use of displeasure as a theatrical tool. It shows how they decentre the spectator’s vision of the world and shape theatre as a specific producer of truth as defined by Alain Badiou in Handbook of Inaesthetics: thinking about art is not extrinsic; it is art itself. Exploring their work and audience reactions to the performances of On the Concept of Face in Paris and Vilnius, The Curse in Warsaw, Our Violence and Your Violence in Vienna and Sarajevo, this essay shows how they transform theatre into a weapon of political action using the displeasure and offence of the audience as artistic tools. The actors provoke the audience in order to generate a response and their involvement. Their performances thus generate discomfort and sometimes violent responses from the audience within various theatrical, cultural, and political contexts. To achieve their goal, Castellucci and Frljić use radical means: religiously motivated image-making inciting extreme reactions, insulting the audience in a specific version of parabasis, and resurrections producing defamiliarization. They deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, convinced that the performance is the result of interaction between the performers and the audience. Thus, they destabilize the social distribution of power reflected in the theatre.