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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... politics , fashion , photography , and the other arts , as well as the more than residual mod- ernism in the postmodern condition . As there are other writings I might have included ( some from almost a quarter century before ) , this ...
... politics but for having broken when still in high school the four - minute mile , and a former coach at Stanford who when he was with the San Francisco Forty - Niners made himself eligible for the Hall of Fame by winning three Super ...
... political economy of music initiates an essay on new music and theater , in which I speak of collabo- rating with musicians who , with next to no money at all , were engaged in the " desperate enterprise of destroying music as a ...
... political theater and its relation to what in the introspection of Method acting was the privilege of the personal ... politics of theater . These are questions to which in other books I have returned as to a catechism : first of all ...
... politics , with transgressive cre- dentials too — they would probably wince at current notions of art as ( in the terms of a leveling discourse ) " social praxis " or " cultural produc- tion . " And I cannot imagine any of them ...
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 | |