1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today’s writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?"
To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords:
- Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real)
- Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee)
- Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed)
- Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules)
- Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation)
- Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda)
- End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy)
- Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this).
These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre.
Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. A Dramaturgy of Cultural Activism
Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall
PART I: POST
2. Reflections Upon the ‘Post’: Towards a Cultural History and a Performance-Oriented Perspective
Andy Lavender
3. Post-Dictatorship Chilean Theatre and the Political Imperative: Ictus’ Esto (no) es un testamento
Jennifer Joan Thompson
4. After the Referendum: When the Theatre Tries to do ‘Something’
Marilena Zaroulia
5. Arab Political Theatre Post-Arab Spring
Marvin Carlson
6. Queer Politics/Nostalgia: Performing the UpStairs Lounge Fire of 1973
Sean F. Edgecomb
7. Contemporary Theatre, the Contemporary, and Historicity
C. J. W.-L. Wee
8. The vita perfumativa and Post-dramatic, Post-conceptual Personae
Jon McKenzie
9. Post-98 Indonesian Theatre and Performance: Politics Between a war of Loudness and the Dramaturgy of a Silencer
Ugoran Prasad
10. The Theatre of Posthuman Immunity
João Florêncio
11. Revolutionary Trends at the South African National Arts Festival
Anton Krueger
12. The Cultural and Political Impact of Post-migrant Theatre in Germany
Azadeh Sharifi
13. Staging Post-Democracy in State 1-4 by Rimini Protokoll
Imanuel Schipper
14. Parsing the Post: The Post-Political and its Utility (or not) for Performance
Janelle Reinelt
PART II: ASSEMBLY
15. Hosts of Angels: Climate Guardians and Quiet Activism
Denise Varney
16. Reflecting upon Freedom with Meiro Koizumi
Shintaro Fujii
17. An Assembly of Mourning: Documentary Theatre as a Mode Alternative Historiography
Kai Tuchmann
18. Assembly as Community: Politics and Performance in Late 20th- and Early 21st-Century Buenos Aires
Jean Graham-Jones
19. Advocacy, Allies, and ‘Allies of Convenience’ in Performance and Performative Protest
Bree Hadley
20. From Revolution to Figuration: A Genealogy of Philippine Protest Performances
Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco and Bryan Levina Viray.
21. The Politics of Care: Play, Stillness and Social Presence.
Michael Balfour
22. Assembling Non-Presence in The Aborigine is Present
Lara Stevens
23. 100% Tokyo (2013) by Rimini Protokoll as a Political Forum by Emancipated Performers and Audience Members
Ken Hagiwara
24. Lessons in Revolting: A Postdramatic Theatre in Egypt
Areeg Ibrahim
25. Obscene Public Speech
Tony Fisher
PART III: GAP
26. Dogwhistle Performance: Concealing White Supremacy in Right-wing Populism
Shannon Steen
27. Arkadas Kalabilir miyiz?/Can we remain friends? A Reflection on the Politics of Land, Performance and Friendship
Özgül Akinci
28. The Construction of Material Referentiality in Chilean Theatre: Los que van quedando en el camino (2010)
Milena Grass Kleiner
29. To Rest in the Gap: Possibilities for Another Politics through Theatre
Jazmin Badong Llana
30. ‘You are Bernarda’: Marginalised Roma Women Take on the Main Spanish Stages
Mara Valderrama
31. Dancing in the Gap
Rachael Swain
32. Touring San Francisco’s Chinatown: Collective Memories and Peripatetic Performance
Sean Metzger and Marike Splint
33. ‘It’s Just Not Right’: Performing Homelessness in Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s Mo'ui Tukuhausia
Emma Willis
34. ‘Resisting Production’: The Slow Politics of Theatre
Mark Fleishman
35. The Speculative Collectivity of the Global Transnational, or, Social Practice and the International Division of Labour
Verónica Tello
36. Acts of Collaboration and Disruption: Notes on the Asylum Ballet Uropa
Solveig Gade
PART IV: INSTITUTION
37. The Power of Abuse
Jen Harvie
38. Institutional Aesthetics and the Crisis of Leadership
Christopher Balme
39. The Politics of Teaching Theatre
Glenn D’Cruz
40. Going Feral: Queerly De-Domesticating the Institution (and Running Wild)
Alyson Campbell
41. Artists versus the City: The Curious Story of the Jakarta Arts Council 1968-2017
Helly Minarti
42. Festival Dramaturgy
Ong Keng Sen
43. ‘100-Days House’: Blackout as Political Action
Konstantina Georgelou
44. The Performative Institution
Edward Scheer
45. Punishment and Chaos
David Pledger
PART V: MACHINE
46. Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s Urban Action Clinic GARDEN: A Political Ecology with Diplomats of Dissensus and Composite Bodies Engaged in Intra-Action
Christel Stalpaert
47. Docile Subjects: From Theatres of Automata to the Machinery of Twenty-first-century Media
Evelyn Wan
48. The Human Object in Oriza Hirata’s I, Worker and Sayonara
Sarah Lucie
49. Clarke and Dawe’s Mock Interviews and the Politics of Duration
Yuji Sone
50. Exposing the Machinic Present: Rimini Protokoll’s Theatre of Operations
Timon Beyes
51. Performances of Exposure: Santiago Sierra’s Ethical Interruptions
Gabriella Calchi Novati
52. VOID
Kristof van Baarle
53. Performance in the Biosphere: or, a Theatre of Things
Eddie Paterson
PART VI: MESSAGE
54. How does the Riot Speak?
Sophie Nield
55. The Hopeless Courage of Confronting Contemporary Realities: Milo Rau’s ‘Globally Conceived Theatre of Humanity’
Peter M. Boenisch
56. Ibsen as Method: Critical Theatre for the Era of Post-Truth Politics
Andrew Goldberg
57. Facing Fear: the Radical Reversal of Narratives of Risk
Sigrid Merx
58. Form and Violence: Beyond Theatrical Content
Eero Laine
59. The Message is Maori: The Politics of Haka in Performance
Nicola Hyland
60. A Theatre of the Middle Way: Buddhism, Convictions, and Social Engagement in Burma/Myanmar
Matthew Yoxall
61. Contemporary Chilean Political Theatre between Opacity and Propaganda: the Case of Colectivo Zoologico’s Dark
Fabián Escalona
62. Flânerie of the Mind: Beyene Haile’s Asmara Play as a Dramaturgy of the Street
Christine Matzke
63. Acting on Behalf of Themselves: the Theatrical Politics of Child’s Play
Bryoni Trezise
PART VII: END
64. End and Interval
Joe Kelleher
65. ‘Stage Managing’ Ruins in Lebanon’s Borderlands
Ella Parry-Davies
66. Striving, Falling, Performing: Phenomenologies of Mood and Apocalypse
Peta Tait
67. Plastic Animals in Praxes of Metamorphosis
Eve Katsouraki
68. Against Staging Apocalyptic Disasters with Butoh Dance: Ohno Yoshito’s Flower and Bird/Inside and Outside
Hayato Kosuge
69. Theatre and Eschatological Politics
Felipe Cevera
70. Holstein’s hair: The Politics of Decadence in The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s Splat!
Adam Alston
71. Performance as Infrastructure and Institutional Unlearnings
Gigi Argyropoulou
72. Radically Dead Art in the Beautiful End Times
Peter Eckersall
PART VIII: RE
73. A Chinese Catastrophe? The Moving Target of Political Theatre
Paul Rae
74. Preserved by Permafrost: Reanimating and Reimagining Complexity in Canada’s Klondike Gold Rush
Phoebe Rumsey
75. The Situated Performative: Considering the Politics of the Pause in Performance
Alexa Taylor
76. Between Resistance and Consensus: The Mercurial Dramaturgy of The Necessary Stage
Melissa Wansin Wong
77. Open Platforms for Dialogue and Difference: Critical Leadership in Singapore Theatre
Charlene Rajendran
78. Geomnemonic Performance: Activating Political Ontology through Unsettled Remains
Daphna Ben-Shaul
79. Art, Politics and the Promise of Rupture: Reimagining the Manifesto in an Age of Overflow
Helena Grehan
80. Re-visit/ Re-Examine/ Re-Contextualise/ Re-Ignite: Protest and Activism as Performance
Sarah Ann Standing
81. Evidencing Slow Making in One-to-One Performance at the Proximity Festival
Renée Newman
82. Re-Inventing a Political Theatre in Burkina Faso
Heather Jeanne Denyer
Index
Biography
Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Centre, CUNY, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include New Media Dramaturgy (with Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan, 2017) and The Dumb Type Reader (with Edward Scheer and Fujii Shintaro, 2017).
Helena Grehan is Professor of Creative Arts at Murdoch University. She writes on performance and politics, spectatorship and ethics, and new media dramaturgy. Her most recent books are New Media Dramaturgy (with Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall, 2017) and William Yang: Stories of Love and Death (with Edward Scheer).
This impressive companion offers deep analysis and extensive international coverage of performances, contexts, theories and geographies. The eight terms that structure it creatively disrupt conventional perceptions of politics and standard ways of thinking about theatre’s impact. The length of each short essay belies both its complexity and its contribution to productive negotiations between theatre and politics.
Professor Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics provides crucially diverse and consistently inspiring clarion calls to action. A rich collection of interventions from across our contemporary world, The Companion offers vital examples of cultural activism that readers might engage, develop and deliver in their own acts of political performance.
Professor Susan Bennett, University of Calgary