Principal Module Aims
This module will introduce you to the practical craft of and the theoretical background to performance analysis and criticism. In the autumn term, the activity of the module is divided between seeing productions and writing reviews of them; workshopping these reviews in class; editing the reviews towards assessed submission; reading and discussing relevant academic and journalistic articles about criticism and particular critical principles/ methods/ approaches to analysing performance; and learning about alternative, digital, performative, and visual forms of criticism. In the spring term, the module will continue to provide you with a dynamic understanding of "performance" as a critical concept for the study of culture while at the time providing you with the opportunity to develop the basic strategies, methodologies and tools of analysis that you need to write scholarly essays from a performance and theatre studies perspective.
Principal Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this module, students should demonstrate an ability to:
• analyse various kinds of performance and introduce terminology suitable to the analysis of theatre and performance
• better understand, appreciate, and discern the different elements of theatre production (writing, directing, acting, design, the role of the audience)
• produce critical response to (live) performance via various forms of writing as well as visual and digital forms of communication, and have improved skills in written critical expression
• distinguish between various forms of performance criticism and critical theory and examine how they are shaped by social, political, and historical contexts
• analyse the role of theory and criticism in the processes of theatrical production and reception
• have a more nuanced understanding of contentious concepts such as taste, quality, and beauty
Aims of module:
The module explores the ‘inter-ness’ of performance – considering particularly how performance is inter-disciplinary, but also inter-active. How it intervenes, interrupts and inter-faces with contemporary social, cultural and technological issues and activities in the world. It will draw on specific expertise of different lecturers, thus offering different topics each year to demonstrate how we can explore these aspects of ‘inter-ness’ via case studies, with the following aims:
- to help students understand what is needed to work with ideas, theories, and methodologies from other disciplines in and through theatre and performance,
- to equip students with the ability to explore how artists, activists and general public are interfacing and interrogating issues in and through theatre and performance practices,
- to equip students with the 'how to do' this themselves in various modalities (scholarship, curation and creative practice).
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this module students should be able to:
· demonstrate that they understand what is needed to work across disciplines and modalities,
· interrogate how artists, activists, etc., are engaging in an interdisciplinary and interrogative way with theories and practices that address contemporary issues and concerns; and
· demonstrate these competencies in the ways they choose to engage specific theories, aesthetics and modes of performance in their written and practical work.
Overview:
Love remains an ever intriguing and complex emotion. Representations of love have been idealised, romanticised and formalised as part of theatre and performance tradition over centuries. In recent years love has also become visible (again) as a contested theoretical problem and political issue. The module addresses the “love question” as an open and exciting interdisciplinary field – one that traverses the arts, the humanities and the sciences. Studying closely a number of contemporary plays, performances and films from Europe and beyond we will ask questions such as: What is love? Why/how is love interesting now? Can we study love historically? What does it mean about love that its expressions tend to be so conventional, so bound up in institutions like marriage and family, property relations, and stock phrases and plots? How can we re-envision love so that it creates different kinds of intimately social (rather than intimate vs. social) bonds that embrace difference (vs. sameness) and are transformative of the self? Finally, what does love bring to the study of theatre and performance? How do performances of love in theatre or cinema deconstruct or confirm its social and political coding? How do theatre and performance recreate and subvert social scenarios of love? The topics to be covered will range from ethics and politics of love, gendered interests in love, to love as a force in radical transformations of society.
Aims:
The module aims to explore this new, wide-ranging interest in love by looking into the ways in which the twentieth and twenty-first century artists have dealt with the subject of love as material for their work (e.g. Strindberg, Cavani, Pinter, Haneke, Bausch), while investigating a wide range of theories that explore changing ideologies, representations and practices related to the subject (Freud, Butler, Halperin, Berlant, Carson, and others).
Learning outcomes:
By the end of the module students should be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of a broad constellation of contemporary plays, performances, and visual art references in the light of cultural, political, historical, and philosophical debates on the analysis, ethics and politics of love in the modern world. Furthermore, students should come away from this seminar with a new set of conceptual models and analytic tools to make use of in thinking about this complex and rich body of art. Students will achieve these learning outcomes through close reading of primary and secondary material, seminar discussions based around prescribed texts and seminar papers on specific topics. In addition to film screening, performance recordings will be used to illustrate the theatrical dimensions of the plays.
Module Description:
In 1968, the year of revolt, theorist Roland
Barthes famously proclaimed the ‘Death of the Author.’ He has put to rest the
notion of the author as originator/ God and placed the reader central stage.
This module takes Barthes’s provocation as a point of departure to explore
authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance from
its aesthetic aspects to its political dimensions. Text, as well as performance, consists
of multiple writings and potential embodiments, ‘issuing from several cultures and entering into a dialogues with one another, into parody, into
contestation; but there is only one place where this multiplicity is collected,
united, and in this place is not the author […], but the reader’(Barthes). The
aim of this module is to investigate how ‘the reader’ (as also the
spectator/participant) constructs ‘the author’? Why is the construction of an
‘author’ in the reception process, and even within some participatory forms,
important? How is the author constructed through imaginaries and re-imaginings,
over-writings and mutations, repetitions and archiving, fictionalisations and
theatricalisations? How is the authorial figure fashioned and constructed
through self-referentiality and dramatic irony? How does the figure of the author
appear as an intertextual and intertheatrical reference? How is the
author/predecessor ghosted within texts and various kinds of performance
practices?
The return to the question ‘Who is/was an author?’ is also to understand the multiple possibilities and limitations of the term along the lines of gender, ethnicity, class, and politics—not so much of authorship—but of the author as an accountable figure both self-fashioned and shaped through public imagination:
• How does the proclamation of the death of the author decentre those subjects that have historically never occupied the centre, who have historically been marginalised?
• What are the ethical implications of authorial presence/ absence?
• What/ where is authorial accountability if the subjectivity of the author is irrelevant?
• How do different kinds of authorial deaths destabilise the political dimensions of this concept (i.e. censorship, erasure)?
n order to grapple with these questions we will look at a range of works from Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of the Author and Tim Crouch’s controversial play The Author to postcolonial works such as Amie Cesare’s A Tempest that speak back to the canonical author; from Marina Carr’s biographical play about Chekhov 16 Possible Glimpses to Dead Centre’s deconstructive Chekhov’s First Play and Polly Teal’s feminist intervention in her play Bronte; from Marina Abramovic’s exploration of presence in the performance piece The Artist is Present to absence and censorship in the performances of artist/activists such as Wei Wei.
This module is aimed to support you to develop your critically creative voice and practice. Through a series of structured workshops, tasks, and artist-dialogues in the first term we will work together to explore why and how you can make the work you want to make. We will think about strategies for developing work, question what ‘practice-based research’ even is, and support one another to develop our creative voices. We will also look at a handful of previous examples and alumni work and together consider what works, what stumbles, and what we can learn from those who have gone before. The module is structured to move from more supported work to more independent work as the year progresses. From the second term you will collaborate with your supervisor more and conduct more work alone/in your project group. By the end of the module you will not only have created your own piece of critically creative work but you will have learned what it means to do research through practice and also have a set of tools to take forward into your future practice -whatever that may be. Good luck, everyone!