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 63
... tion to the powers of imagination , dismissed in recent years as a swol- len conceit or transcendental signifier , with its pretentious claims to a privileged vision that is merely ideological . What can one say ? Here the imprinted ...
... tion , the same might be said of noise , through which , in the cybernetic feedback of its lucrative dominance , multitudinous meanings clamor for recognition . There is money in noise , as dot - com routers and disc jockeys know , and ...
... the substance of the myth , in the visual arts and poetry ( and there was a lot of poetic activity before the erup- tion of Howl ) , the view from Red Hill on theater was not what it should have been . Even now , " I wish Introduction XV.
... tion . " And I cannot imagine any of them announcing anything like a " subject position . " " A Valediction " is brief and maybe a little testy , but what came through the chills and fever is what , at the risk of elitism but out of the ...
... tion , sometimes virulently , critiquing the theater itself . What was strange , alienating , unsettling in those plays was also a productive ungrounding , thus energizing my own critique . If I avoided , for the most part , writing ...
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 | |