The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000U of Minnesota Press, 1. jan. 2002 - 347 sider 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. |
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... figures , bearing on their breast the star of their fate .... " What Brecht disdained in those star - crossed , mesmerizing , vainglorious fig- ures was not the mere subjective burden of this too , too solid ( or squalid ? ) flesh but ...
... figures much or at all in the essay here , which focuses instead on The Hairy Ape . The essay was originally given as a talk at an international symposium on O'Neill in 1988 , the centennial year of his birth , at Hosei University ...
... figure of Walt , cryogenically preserved — informs " Fantasia and Simulacra : Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America . " If there is anything like a peda- gogy that goes along with the syllabus , it is derived most specifically ...
... figures , Raymond Williams , who foresaw against his disposition ( and before Baudrillard ) the dissolution of the social , in an unguardedly elegiac moment of an essay on the drama of a dramatized society : " Priva- cy , deprivation ...
... figure of authority as an armature for possi- bility ? As for socialism's die - hard prospect , the chiliastic ... figures of a national theater , but if the Comédie Franchise is , when not merely regressive , a mecca for tourists , like ...
Indhold
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 | |