Theatre

Entgegen der Tendenz, Heiner Müller als Tragiker und seine Hamletmaschine als Tragödie zu deuten, will ich diese im Folgenden als eine spezifische Form von Komödie lesen – eine Komödie, die dabei gleichzeitig eine bestimmte Gegenwart der Tragödie in sich enthält.

A collection of new essays on the philosophy of theatre and the philosophy of drama, combining historical perspectives and new directions.

The relationship between philosophy and theatre is a central theme in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and of dramatists from Aristophanes to Stoppard. Where Plato argued that playwrights and actors should be banished from the ideal city for their suspect imitations of reality, Aristotle argued that theatre, particularly tragedy, was vital for stimulating our emotions and helping us to understanding ourselves. Despite this rich history the study of philosophy and theatre has been largely overlooked in contemporary philosophy. This is (...) the first book to introduce philosophy and theatre. It covers key topics and debates, presenting the contributions of major figures in the history of philosophy, including: what is theatre? How does theatre compare with other arts? theatre as imitation, including Plato on mimesis truth and illusion in the theatre, including Nietzsche on tragedy theatre as history theatre and morality, including Rousseau’s criticisms of theatre audience and emotion, including Aristotle on catharsis theatre and politics, including Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Including annotated further reading and summaries at the end of each chapter, Philosophy and Theatre is an ideal starting point for those studying philosophy, theatre studies and related subjects in the arts and humanities. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard’s oeuvre can be seen as a theater of ideas. This argument is developed in three steps. First, I will briefly introduce a theoretical framework for addressing the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s works. This framework is based on a distinction between“performative writing strategies” and “categories of performativity.” As a second step, I will focus on Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, one of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s innovative way of (...) doing philosophy. This strange and elusive book introduces the difficult and counter-intuitive notion of repetition. Repetition is a category of performativity that aims to activate the subjectivity of the reader. This performative effect is achieved by confronting the reader with an “unresolved”existential problem that is not yet drawn into clarity but is staged in all its confusions and contradictions. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantius relies here on a performative writing strategy that is animated by a dialectic of advance and withdrawal. In the last and third step, I will analyze Constantius’s own reflection on the performative dimension of his text. Constantius has left several clues behind, each of which suggests that he deliberately developed a performative writing strategy. (shrink)

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theatre in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions (...) of women this paper demonstrates that human-identity-related arts censorship not only harms but can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than suppress, artistic innovation. (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on improvisation in the arts as discussed in philosophical aesthetics, supplemented with accounts of improvisational practice by arts theorists and educators. It begins with an overview of the term improvisation, first as it is used in general and then as it is used to describe particular products and practices in the individual arts. From here, questions and challenges that improvisation raises for the traditional work-of-art concept, the type-token distinction, and the appreciation and evaluation of the arts (...) will be explored. This article concludes with the suggestion that further research and discussion on improvisation in the arts is needed, particularly in the areas of non-jazz improvisation. (shrink)

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theatre in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions (...) of women this paper demonstrates that human-identity-related arts censorship not only harms but can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than suppress, artistic innovation. (shrink)

Zeami (1363-1443), Japan's most celebrated actor and playwright, composed more than thirty of the finest plays of no drama. He also wrote a variety of texts on theater and performance that have, until now, been only partially available in English. Zeami: Performance Notes presents the full range of Zeami's critical thought on this subject, which focused on the aesthetic values of no and its antecedents, the techniques of playwriting, the place of allusion, the training of actors, the importance of patronage, (...) and the relationship between performance and broader intellectual and critical concerns. Spanning over four decades, the texts reflect the essence of Zeami's instruction under his famous father, the actor Kannami, and the value of his long and challenging career in medieval Japanese theater. Tom Hare, who has conducted extensive studies of no academically and on stage, begins with a comprehensive introduction that discusses Zeami's critical importance in Japanese culture. He then incorporates essays on the performance of no in medieval Japan and the remarkable story of the transmission and reproduction of Zeami's manuscripts over the past six centuries. His eloquent translation is fully annotated and includes Zeami's diverse and exquisite anthology of dramatic songs, Five Sorts of Singing, presented both in English and in the original Japanese. (shrink)

An introduction to the philosophical study of theatrical magic.

This collection of essays offers a panoramic plethora of responses to Shakespeare by both Western and Eastern critics, indicating that the Bard crosses all nationalities and deserves to be defined as a global writer, which is why he is easily appreciated, manipulated, translated, adapted, and interpreted by everyone everywhere. Divided into three parts, this volume deals with a wide range of issues on culture and multiculturalism, and hammers home the idea that the works of Shakespeare can be not only universally (...) understood, but also fully integrated into other cultures. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the different strategies the Bard uses in order to evoke sympathy in the reader for Macbeth who is so persistent in the path of evil. What strategy does Shakespeare use in order to provoke such a deep emotional response from his readers? By using paradoxes in the play, the Bard creates a world of illusion, fear and wild imagination. The paradoxical world in Macbeth startles us into marvel and fear, challenges our commonly held opinions, and (...) reshapes our thought in the process (Platt 8). As the text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous formation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, “reading reflects the process by which we gain experience. Once the reader is entangled, his own preconceptions are continually overtaken so that the text becomes his present while his own ideas fade into the past. As soon as it happens, he is open to the immediate experience of the text” (Iser, The Implied Reader 290). Mesmerised by Macbeth’s powerful imagination and poetic language, the reader engages in a dialogical interaction with the play and eventually finds light in the murky world of the text. Regardless of Macbeth’s diabolical world, the reader ventures into it, shares it with him and ultimately wakes up from its dizzying stupor. In reading Macbeth, the reader leaves behind the familiar world of his experience in order to participate in the adventure the text offers him. The edifying effect of the tragedy in the end is the reward the reader reaps after eventually waking up from the nightmarish dream of the text. (shrink)

Greek New Comedy, as we know it from references and fragmentary MSS., is the meeting-place of three confluent streams—comedy of manners, Aristophanic comedy, and tragedy. From Sicilian comedy, through Epicharmus at Syracuse and Crates and Pherecrates at Athens, it inherited certain stock stage figures, and a tradition of ‘invented’ plots and sententious speech. Old Comedy it resembled in its fun and informality and many stage conventions; and, indeed, the resemblance was so marked, in at least one of the later plays (...) of Aristophanes, that the writer of his life, mistaking effect for cause, claimed the lost Cocalus as the original model of New Comedy. Perhaps most important of all was the influence of tragedy; and this influence may be estimated by a direct comparison between Euripides and Menander, both in the spirit and form of their plays and in the social and philosophic theories underlying them. (shrink)

Book-review of the new critical edition of Benjamin Fondane's Théâtre complet and his philosophical writings, La Conscience malheureuse.

A comparative analysis of Fondane's and Artaud's conceptions of the theatre and of their engagement with the cinema during the 1920s and 1930s.

Lopes (2010) offers an account of computer art, which he argues is a new art form. Part of what makes computer art distinctive, according to Lopes, is its interactivity, a quality found in few non-computer artworks. Given the rise in prominence of such artworks, most notably videogames, they are surely worthy of philosophical inquiry. I believe their ontology and properties are particularly worthy of study, as an understanding of these will prove crucial to critical understanding and evaluation of the works (...) themselves. Lopes’ account of interactive art is novel and important, but flawed, and in this essay I will discuss its flaws and suggest a better account of the properties of interactive art that builds on his work, providing a partial account of the ontology of interactive art. In Section 1, I discuss Lopes’ definition and ontology of interactive art; in Section 2, I argue that he only accounts for the properties of displays, neglecting the properties of interactive artworks themselves. In Section 3, I discuss several possible solutions for Lopes and why they are inadequate before Section 4 presents my view, that interactive artworks possess all of the properties of their varying displays because each possible display is part of the artwork. This is compatible with Lopes’ definition of interactive art, and so much of his account can be preserved, but with a refined account of the properties of interactive artworks. What I present is by no means a complete ontological study of interactive art, but hopefully lays the groundwork for future work on this ontology. (shrink)

The subject of this study is the experience of acting. The separation of artistic act and artwork results here not in a psychoanalytical analysis of the artwork via artist, but rather in a focus on the artistic act from the perspective of the actor. This dissertation is a theoretical work, not an empirical study. The research is drawn from a broad base of theoretical and practical texts on acting, a set of interviews with professional and student actors on the subject (...) of the experience of acting, and an investigation into relevant phenomenological theory, particularly that of Edmund Husserl. The crucial aspect of the writing involves applied phenomenological theory and the development of an extension to or a condition of that theory to cover the suprasensory experiences of the actor. ;The opening chapters establish the applicable phenomenological method as drawn from the writings of Edmond Husserl and translated into practical application to acting theory. In Chapter Two I discuss specifically Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to this analysis. By way of introductory application I then discuss the actor's perceptions of production and character early in rehearsals. Chapter Three proceeds with the actor into the performance period of production and will explore the actor's altered perceptions at this level. The next chapter discusses the actor's perceptions of self-as-character and of other characters during performance. This chapter offers some of the most specific actor impressions. Chapter Five represents a brief investigation into the aesthetic mode of perception described by so many actors. The closing chapter considers the questions raised by this study, particularly those concerning actor training and the future of stage acting. The bibliography includes phenomenological works and acting theory texts, as well as actor biographies and collected actor interviews. The appendices include edited selective interviews and the questionnaire on acting used in researching the acting process. ;The focus on the actor's mental state in performance and the actor's assessment of her perceptions in this state produce a kind of catalogue of perceptual modes experienced in performance and not experienced in mundane activity. These levels of experience fall generally into three categories: practical cognition of action and environment, a kind of heightened performance mode of perception, and an abstracted mode of perception, in which the actor seems to exist within a simultaneously perceived and created aesthetic object. The exploration of these modes of perception and the process responsible for the actor's altered mental behaviour become the key issues in this dissertation. (shrink)

«El naixement de la tragèdia» és el primer llibre de Friedrich Nietzsche i constitueix una de les contribucions més importants a l’estudi de l’art tràgica. L’admiració de l’autor per Schopenhauer i Wagner impregna la seva crítica a la concepció imperant sobre els grecs, considerats fins aleshores un poble alegre i serè. Segons el filòsof, però, els grecs necessitaven la tragèdia per a superar el pessimisme i el nihilisme en què estaven sumits. En aquestes pàgines, la tragèdia neix entre l’ebrietat primigènia (...) de Dionís i l’harmonia sublim d’Apol·lo, i mor amb Sòcrates i l’intel·lectualisme científic, en espera de renéixer amb la música de Wagner. -/- Cedres Vermells en presenta la versió de 1886, que inclou un «assaig d’autocrítica» amb el qual l’autor es retractà dels excessos de la primera edició de 1872, així com de la dedicatòria a Richard Wagner. Un pròleg de Mosè Cometta encapçala el volum i el situa en el context contemporani. El recull de correspondència amb Nietzsche, comentat per Joan Ferrarons i Llagostera, completa la publicació, bo i reflectint la recepció que tingué l’any 1872. (shrink)

I develop a paradox regarding the emotional experiences of theatrical actors, which I call the ‘paradox of onstage emotion’. Many actors tell us that they experience genuine emotions while performing fictional plays: they grow angry, sad, joyful, etc., as befits their characters’ circumstances. Yet, they are not their characters and are not actually in those characters’ circumstances. Intuitively, it would seem those actors cannot have emotions befitting their characters’ circumstances rather than their own. Thus, we face a paradox. After setting (...) up the paradox, I consider potential solutions to it. I consider four different available solutions, two of which I argue must be rejected. The two remaining solutions, I argue, are more promising, though which of these one accepts may be determined by one’s commitments regarding emotion theory in general. One stems from make-believe theory, the other from situationism. (shrink)

Feyerabend has recently argued that the best way to deal with philosophical problems is through drama rather than through intellectual debate. This paper criticises his view and corrects it.

A consideration of the differences between Shakespearean comedy and tragedy in light of the historically particular inflection of dramatic irony in the English Reformation. The essay compares classical and humanist understandings of literary response and then proposes that we consider that response as a function of knowledge with respect to (and hence feelings about) a protagonist and his plight. The essay compares the structures of suspense in Sophocles’ and Seneca’s Oedipus plays, and then goes on to examine the ways in (...) which two early modern versions of Seneca’s play demonstrate different manners of crafting an audience’s affective relation based on epistemological advantage. The author argues that the peculiarities of these repsonses, and their difference from Shakespeare’s handling of dramatic irony, can be illuminated by the English response to Calvin’s understanding of predestination as a matter of being known about. The analysis concludes with examples from Much Ado About Nothing and Othello that demonstrate the different affective charge of privileged information. (shrink)

Plays, symphonies and other works in the performing arts are generally regarded, ontologically speaking, as being types, with individual performances of those works being regarded as tokens of those types. But I show that there is a logical feature of type theory which makes it impossible for such a theory to satisfactorily explain a 'double performance' case that I present: one in which a single play performance is actually a performance of two different plays. Hence type theories fail, both for (...) plays and for the related performing art of music as well. (shrink)

The Kleinian psychoanalyst Hanna Segal argues for the reparative nature of art, and especially of the genre of classical tragedy. According to Kleinian theory, healthy psychological development requires that early infantile aggressive and destructive emotions are worked through; such “working through” is necessary for the development of conscience, for feelings of empathy, as well as for cognitive development. It is also a necessary condition for creative activity. Segal examines the roots of the impulse to create by looking specifically at the (...) genre of classical tragedy; she argues that the pleasure we derive from tragedy is non-contingently related to the distressing elements of the drama. Thus not only are the formal and aesthetic elements important for the containment of powerfully distressing emotions, but the distressing emotions themselves are a necessary ingredient of the aesthetic pleasure This paper will examine Segal’s discussion of tragedy in the light of her commitments to Kleinian theory, and it will attempt to explore more fully the contributions of difficult or painful emotions towards aesthetic pleasure. (shrink)

One feature that classical apocalyptic writings commonly share is their eschatological dimension, their "sense of an ending"1—the end of the world, of time, of humanity. But whereas traditional apocalyptic texts were for the most part utopian, their tales of destruction followed by narratives of redemption, modern secular apocalyptic literature is largely dystopian, ending in pure devastation. According to some scholars, the very arrival of modernity, beginning with Cartesian philosophy and its inherent doubt, was apocalyptic in nature. In the twentieth century, (...) as Thomas Altizer has argued, no central literary work—from Rilke to Kafka and from Joyce to Beckett—managed to eschew the apocalyptic.2 Today, at the .. (shrink)

Theatre translation is usually seen as a more elaborate dimension of literary translation because the text being translated is considered to be just one of the elements of theatre discourse. When translating a play, the translator should always adapt for performance the text he or she is recreating and be aware that a performer will deliver the lines. The translator, then, must take into account both the pragmatic and the semantic expressiveness of the word and remember that they are always (...) at work simultaneously. I will take examples both from my personal experience and from remarkable cases in point of how a good translation may affect an audience reception of a foreign play and I will show that it is primarily through a pragmatic approach that it is possible to obtain an awareness of what is the most appropriate way of rendering the original text. (shrink)

This paper argues against the conception of sport as theatre. Theatre and sport share the characteristic that play is set in a conventionally-defined hypothetical reality, but they differ fundamentally in the relative importance of audience and the narrative point of view. Both present potential for participants for development of selfhood through play and its personal possibilities. But sport is not essentially tied to audience as is theatre. Moreover, conceptualising sport as a form of theatre valorises the spectator’s narrative as normative (...) for sport experience over that of the participant athlete or player, eliding player experience. Imposition of external narratives over experience risks fossilising interpretation and inhibits the beneficial effects of play for self-realisation, especially as a form of self-examination and creation through internal self-narrative. (shrink)

The category of works of fiction is a very broad and heterogeneous one. I do have a general thesis in mind about such works, namely, that they themselves are fictional, in much the same way as are the fictional events or entities that they are about. But a defense of such a broad thesis would provide an intractably complex topic for an introductory essay, so I shall here confine myself to a presentation of a similar thesis for narrative theatrical works (...) or plays, performances of which are naturally regarded as involving, or evoking, a “fictional world” whose fictional characters and events are what the work in question is about. Another reason for initially focusing on such narrative plays is because performances of them provide a rich source of epistemic issues about evidence for artistic authenticity or correctness of artworks, which will turn out to be of integral importance to my fictionalist account of plays. (shrink)

In the performing arts, including music, theater, dance and so on, theoretical issues both about artworks and about performances of them must be dealt with, so that their theoretical analysis is inherently more complex and troublesome than that of nonperforming arts such as painting or film, in which primarily only artworks need to be discussed. Thus it is especially desirable in the case of the performing arts to look for defensible broad theoretical simplifications or generalizations that could serve to unify (...) and potentially comprehensively explain these difficult cases. (shrink)