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. |
Fra bogen
Resultater 1-5 af 61
... once a music of the spheres , imparting harmony to the universe , it commanded nothing like the income of a rap musi- cian . The relation of noise and money in the political economy of music initiates an essay on new music and theater ...
... once ) in which our work occurred , as well as the cultural atmosphere of the watery twin - peaked city , lyricized by a local columnist as Baghdad by the Bay . In that regard , " From Red Hill to the Renaissance " is like an extended ...
... once we were into it , mostly by reflex — it seemed a far cry from attitudes about the arts circulating in critical theory , with its ideological take on the sta- tus of the aesthetic , to which I turned at one point in responding to ...
... once committed , " beyond exhaustion , " toward the consummation of what , however indeterminate , was already there in the impulse as if it were ordained . I am quoting from " Deep Throat : The Grail of the Voice , " which provides ...
... once taxed by tragedy for its funeral needs— passes too into the realm of commodification . Or so I suggest at the outset of this book's eponymous essay . " As for the scholarship that takes for granted that theater is the site of the ...
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 | |