Theatricality

"So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies"

by Kate Elswit

TDR 56.1 (2012), 133-142

La passione di un Burattino: teste di legno ribattezzate all'ombra della Commedia dell'Arte

by Federico Pacchioni

Intersezioni. Review of the History of Ideas 3 (2009): 339-356.

La théâtralité dans le cinéma classique hollywoodien: les mises en scène de George Cukor et de Joseph L. Mankiewicz

by Marguerite Chabrol

Thèse de doctorat, Paris X Nanterre, 2004. Dor Francis Vanoye

Mozart en mineur : les paradoxes de la théâtralité dans Amadeus

by Marguerite Chabrol

in Filmer le 18e siècle, dir. Laurence Schifano et Martial Poirson, Editions Desjonquères, 2009, pp. 134-145.

Ces histoires qui n'ont pas eu lieu : sur quelques effets de théâtralité dans Smoking No smoking

by Marguerite Chabrol

Revue Double jeu, n°7, "Alain Resnais et le théâtre", dir. Chantal Meyer-Plantureux et Jean-Louis Libois, Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2010, pp.133-141.

The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

by Simone Natale

Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (2011): 239-255

Free download in the Francis&Taylor site (only available for a limited time):
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/gqUsqrF3zfVir2srnGYS/full

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has... more While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity.

HAMLET'S Hysterical Form (1999)

by Dianne Hunter

published in LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, ed. F. Pereira (Lisbon 2001).

The design of HAMLET acts as a vehicle for the psychology of hysteria as histrionic mourning and theatricalized... more The design of HAMLET acts as a vehicle for the psychology of hysteria as histrionic mourning and theatricalized self-division. HAMLET can serve as a model for the splitting and theatricalization often noted in the clinical and cultural history of hysteria, demonstrating the relationship between a particular psychology and a particular dramatic form.

'Like this Insubstantial Pageant, Faded': Eschatology and Theatricality in The Tempest

by Judith Wolfe

Transmodality of Agota Kristof’s minimalist writing: from dramatic dialogue to novelistic narration

by Melasya Bilous

Relations between the novelistic and dramatic modalities of dictum lie within the scope of minimalist writing as the... more Relations between the novelistic and dramatic modalities of dictum lie within the scope of minimalist writing as the major tendency in the works of Agota Kristof, in particular, in respect of corresponding genre and narrative codes. Transmodality caused by the presence of theatrical discourse reflects in the texts of Agota Kristof the expression of split consciousness states and the fundamental impossibility of  monological truth.

Damien Hirst, Colley Cibber and the bathos of the commercialised sublime.

by Luke White

Unpublished paper presented at the conference Taste, Vision, Transcendence: Sublimity 1700-1900., 5th January 2007, University of Sussex.

The material in this was somewhat developed in my PhD, with a (I think) much more convincing discussion of Hirst and Cibber's negotiation of the sublime and bathos in terms of popular culture, camp and queer theory. Contact me if you want to know more about this!

The paper explores the way that the sublime is implicated in commercialised culture as well as high art through some... more The paper explores the way that the sublime is implicated in commercialised culture as well as high art through some strange parallels between the contemporary artist Damien Hirst and the eighteenth-century actor, dramatist and theatrical entrepreneur Colley Cibber. Cibber was a key butt of satire in Pope's writings, which set out to critique commercial culture in the inverted image of the sublime. I argue, however, that the poetics of the sublime was eagerly taken up by the commercialising culture of the day, and that the growth of this commodified culture was key to the development of discourses on the sublime. Both Hirst and Cibber, because of their investment in such discourses, and their positioning within the commercial field and as classed outsiders, remain suspended in an ironised position between the sublime and the bathetic.

Historionics: Neither Here Nor There with Historical Reality Television

by Michelle Liu Carriger

published in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, special issue "As Seen on TV" Spring 2010

‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality

by Theron Schmidt

Law Text Culture, 14.1 (2010), 55-78

When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the theatrical is usually made to stand for that which... more When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the theatrical is usually made to stand for that which is undesirable, inauthentic and empty about political life: we might describe a particular speech or gesture as ‘only theatre’, or use language such as ‘playing politics’ or ‘political drama’ to denounce the way self-referential questions about character or personal intrigue have obscured the ‘real’ issues of politics. In contrast to this dismissive usage, I would like to explore the ways that theatricality’s apparent failures or shortcomings might be themselves generative of political potential. My approach here is to consider certain problems of speech and gesture in the political realm as essentially theatrical problems — problems for theatre, but also ideas that theatricality makes problems of — such as problems of representation, authenticity and spectatorship. I will explore the theatricality at work in three examples of publicly performed discourse: Kevin Rudd’s official apology in 2008 to the Indigenous peoples of Australia; a gallery artwork by Carey Young which, in its entirety, is a legal disclaimer of its status as art; and a text and video work by Lebanese-born artist, Rabih Mroué, in which the artist offers an apology for the Lebanese civil war.