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
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... talk — the only one about performance as we know it from the theater — that referred to high- pressure moments in practice or rehearsal when , doing things you are al- most ashamed of to bring out a surpassing performance , coaching and ...
... talking about here , off the animus of the essay , is an eruption of the aesthetic that validates it again . What still compels me in art is a logic of unsettled feeling , unsusceptible to any coding , at least for the historical moment ...
... talk at an international symposium on O'Neill in 1988 , the centennial year of his birth , at Hosei University ... talks at the AETA ( American Educational Theater Association ) and its current avatar , the ATHE ( xx Introduction.
... talk was subtitled " Educating the American Theater . " That text is here , the aesthetic fervor undiminished but with more sophistica- tion , in the scoring of long reflections on the vicissitudes of the Ameri- can theater and , beyond ...
... talk of collectivity during the thirties — nothing like it persisted into the forties , and cer- tainly not for the sake of theater , so that the Group felt isolated , vulner- able , unnourished by other groups . While the group idea ...
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 | |