Art, war, and objects: Reality effects in the contemporary theatre [electronic resource]
說明
265 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-06, Section: A, page: 2048
Adviser: Spencer Golub
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008
Art, War and Objects: Reality Effects in the Contemporary Theatre focuses on contemporary theatre works that complicate the boundary between fiction and fact-based discourses and practices. I ask how the theatre produces its "reality effects" in a time when everyday Western culture has increasingly appropriated theatre's arsenal: simulation and mimesis. As fictional and fact-based discourses increasingly cite one another's techniques, how can we understand the relationship between the increasing theatricalization of public and fact-based discourses, and the importing of evidence, testimony and proof into the theatre?
I focus on several discrete areas of practice that incorporate extra-theatrical documents and objects into performance to very different intent and effect. These are firstly, the new wave of verbatim political theatre, which shapes its plays from documentary materials to represent "real" events without editorial addition, and secondly, the "facsimile-real" strand in the work of W. David Hancock and Forced Entertainment work that uses everyday lived spaces and practices---the city, the flea-market, the Airstream trailer, the guided tour---to frame fictive lives. Lastly, I consider certain plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, which despite their fictional premises bring the force of extra-theatrical events (war; mortality; historical catastrophe) onto the stage by means of formal ruptures in the plays' structure
I concur with Janelle Reinelt's view that the current desire for "real things" on stage reflects the need to reclaim the vanishing material ground of local and specific histories, at a time when reality, fiction, entertainment and war are profoundly intertwined as spectacle. However, I argue against the verbatim theatre's claim to provide transparent access to "real" events, on the basis that this claim is both disingenuous and politically ineffective. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's arguments for the autonomy of the work of art, I argue instead for the efficacy of formal considerations in theatre's dialogue with political and social questions. I conclude that formal strategies that foreground the constructed nature of theatrical representation and position the audience as active participants in the production of meaning from appearances would best serve the contemporary political theatre
