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001 AAI3318314
005 20100216080441.5
008 100216s2008 ||||||||s|||||||| ||eng d
020 9780549675075
035 (UMI)AAI3318314
040 UMI|cUMI
100 1 Evans, Christine
245 10 Art, war, and objects: Reality effects in the contemporary
theatre|h[electronic resource]
300 265 p
500 Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-
06, Section: A, page: 2048
500 Adviser: Spencer Golub
502 Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008
520 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?
520 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
520 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
590 School code: 0024
650 4 Theater
690 0465
710 2 Brown University
773 0 |tDissertation Abstracts International|g69-06A
856 40 |uhttp://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/
advanced?query=3318314
912 PQDT
