The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000U of Minnesota Press, 2002. jan. 1. - 347 oldal Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory. Blau's struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style. If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau's struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau's previous books have come to expect. |
Részletek a könyvből
1 - 5 találat összesen 86 találatból.
... thing that's passing strange2 — from whatever there was before , whatever name we give it ( was it there be- fore ? ) that we think of as other than theater . Is it life ? is it the real ? or the relations of production ? or , in the ...
... things you are al- most ashamed of to bring out a surpassing performance , coaching and directing seem alike . What I had to say there , which led to a lively inter- change , is expanded here as the final piece in the volume , " Limits ...
... thing is sure : their " bloodlines are decidedly of the avant - garde , " which caused me to ob- serve that while hardly indifferent to politics , with transgressive cre- dentials too — they would probably wince at current notions of ...
... Thing , and the literary types in The Designated Mourner , the reviewer goes on to say that " all are challenging , and charming , audiences with the force of in- tellect . " 12 Welcome as this may be , it is not merely the IQ of ...
... thing to almost any kind of event or aspect of behavior , commonplace or hieratic , sexual or pornographic , political or fantastic , with attention in the process to remote and peculiar forms that have not only become increasingly ...
Tartalomjegyzék
Theater at the End of the Real | 9 |
2 The Impossible Takes a Little Time | 26 |
3 Spacing Out in the American Theater | 45 |
Rehearsing the Resistance | 61 |
5 A Dove in My Chimney | 70 |
An Analytic Scenario | 78 |
The Grail of the Voice | 126 |
Chills and Fever Mourning and the Vanities of the Sublime | 140 |
13 Readymade Desire | 207 |
From Tango Palace to Mud | 214 |
The Group Idea and Its Legacy | 223 |
New Music and Theater | 238 |
17 FlatOut Vision | 254 |
Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher | 273 |
Revising the Abyss | 289 |
The Insane Root | 315 |
9 The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity | 145 |
Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America | 165 |
Educating the American Theater | 189 |
12 The Pipe Dreams of ONeill in the Age of Deconstruction | 197 |
Notes | 329 |
343 | |
345 | |