No description available.

Jerzy Grotowski's lifelong work can be divided into three stages. The first (1957-63) can be summarized as the theatre of collective introspection, which was to bring together people in Polish society by means of adapting ritual spectacle, Durkheim's view of the renewal of social solidarity and Jung's notion of collective unconscious. The second stage (1964-77) starts with the shift of Grotowski's focus from shaping collectivity in performance to achieving individual initiation - the liberation from social conditioning - during the theatre process, especially during actor training. In 1970 Grotowski stopped producing performances and innovated a series of events subsequently known as paratheatrical activities through which he hoped to achieve the liberation of participants more effectively without the burden of making productions. During the third stage of his work (1978-99), Grotowski separated the essential elements of certain traditional practices such as ritual songs and dances so as to establish gatherings in which a sense of collectivity could be experienced among the participants from different social and cultural backgrounds. He ultimately concentrated on work around selected traditional songs preserving the corporeal impulses of the singer m their vibratory quality. The work around these songs, which made the precise transformation of states of being possible was converted, by linking a sequence of songs, into a piece with a complete structure that could be taken as the potential central component of the proposed gathering Grotowski had been after. Grotowski' s work throughout can be summarized as the restless effort to revive ritual in modern society. He pursued the performance shaping Polish social solidarity, the process towards individual initiation as defined above, and the gathering of people together regardless of their social and cultural differences. Yet, what was achieved in his work is the transcendence of the self beyond its ontological, physical, psychological, social and cultural limitations.

No description available.

The (re)discovery of collage by the Cubists and futurists was one of the most significant artistic developments of the last century. Collage practice was embraced by artists and intellectuals as more than a formal process involving the combination of image fragments using glue. From Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, through the Dadaists, the surrealists, and on into the era of post-modernity, collage has become a metaphysical expression of a world in flux, characterised by relativity and uncertainty. Often working in close personal contact with the avant-garde artists, theatre director Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was intimately involved with the political, social and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century. This thesis argues that Meyerhold's work with the artists of the avant-garde has been under-investigated in English language scholarship, and that the influence of artistic developments on his aesthetic extends beyond the well-documented instances of causal cross-over (for example, in stage design). Seeing the lack of scholarship relating Meyerhold's work directly to the collage device as an oversight, this thesis constructs a collage-based model through which the director's theatre can be read. Collage in Meyerhold's theatre is initially identified in the construction of the mise-en- scene. By 1926, the device emerges as the organizational principle underlying the performance as a whole, shedding light on the form and function of the director's aesthetic. Particularly significantly, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre is seen to engage with the questions of subjectivity and objectivity in the audience experience, and, in line with anti-positivist developments in philosophy, radically deconstructs the objective as a category. In addition, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre finds vital points of contact with today's performance practice which often engages with the multiplication of spatial and temporal frameworks through the use of multi-media techniques.

This study reveals the complexity of relationships inherent in a system of theatre governance shaped by exclusive rights. Royal patents granted in 1662 entrusted sole guardianship of the ‘national’ or ‘regular’ drama to two ‘patent’ or ‘legitimate’ theatres (ultimately, established as The Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden). These held privileged access to the traditional canon of serious, literary drama, including Shakespeare. The monopoly regime’s power, re-affirmed in The Theatre Licensing Act 1737, prevented all other playhouses, labelled ‘minor’, from producing the national corpus of plays, and from employing ‘the spoken word’: continuous speech unaccompanied by music. ‘Minor’ theatres were restricted to exhibitions of movement, music, and rhyme, commonly termed ‘burletta’. By the early 1800s a consensus held the ‘patent’ regime responsible for degrading rather than preserving dramatic standards. Actor/manager Robert William Elliston purchased his first London ‘minor’ theatre in February 1809. From that moment he began a largely self-interested campaign to overthrow the monopoly. Seeking an equitable footing, Elliston made a series of formal challenges, but when they failed he abandoned official channels. Thereafter, while remaining within the law, he adopted subversive means to gain his goal of a free stage. The Times’s review of Elliston’s first circumvention of the law in August 1809, an innovative ‘burletta’-ized Macbeth, lauded his ‘irregular’ production, while recognizing this novel version as a landmark incursion into the ‘legitimate’ canon. Elliston’s pioneering role in the struggle for reform, recorded in 1926, has been little researched since. The thesis re-evaluates Elliston’s agency in the ‘patent’ cartel’s demise, so contributing to a re-assessment of the narrative of the monopoly regime, and the ideological and social significance of its abolition. Once free competition was achieved, the theatre became a space in which the ‘legitimate’ canon could be accessed by every class of theatre-goer.

This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Kraków may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is approached from Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian perspectives that read the work as a world-forming response to these contexts. Read in this way, key writings, art and performance works by Kantor are revealed to be explorations of existence and human being. Traditional ontological distinctions between process and product, painting and performance, are problematised through the critique of representation that these works and working practices propose. Kantor is revealed as a metaphysical artist whose work stands as a testament to a Heideggerian view of human being as a ‘positive negative’: a ‘placeholder of nothing’, but a ‘nothing’ that yet ‘is’ …