This thesis examines the reinvention and resurgence of the monologue as a contemporary performance mode. It focuses on four pioneering practitioners: Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley and Anna Deavere Smith. The study reviews historical developments in monologue and analyses contemporary innovations made to the form. It also responds to debate on the use of postmodern aesthetic techniques in performance, as a means of critically engaging with and commentating on Western, specifically American, culture and politics. The hypothesis of this study is that monologue, as it is examined in this work, is a biopolitical form. It is biopolitical, as this analysis will show, in the sense that it is a linguistic, communicational and creative response to the conditions of global capitalism in the West. The study argues that the term monologue is increasingly inadequate to the discussion of these new forms of solo speech and performance and proffers the term “post-monologue” as a means of furthering consideration of the monologue beyond the terms of current understandings. It opens the way towards future manifestations of the form that offer critically effective, and affective, commentary on world events.

No description available.

The Meisner Technique emerged as a part of the realist, modern theatre of the early-Twentieth Century and extended its influence through the rest of that century, including the 1960s and 1970s when there was an explosion of various forms of postmodern performance. This work will demonstrate that while Meisner’s Technique is a part of the paradigm of modern, realist theatre, it simultaneously challenges this ideology with disruptive processes of the sort that postmodern performance instigates. It is the thesis of this work that the Meisner Technique operates according to a set of phenomenologically-aligned imperatives that create strong resonances with certain forms of postmodern performance. This establishes the dynamic wherein the Meisner Technique is able to enter into discourse with instances of the postmodern paradigm of performance. In the first three chapters I will conduct in-depth analyses of Meisner actors’ relationships with their environment, their fellow performers, and their actions from a range of phenomenological perspectives. In the fourth chapter I will apply the conclusions of these analyses to the operation of the Meisner Technique within the paradigm of modern, realist theatre. In the fifth chapter I will set a backdrop to the postmodern field and suggest the issues from this tradition with which the Meisner Technique might resonate. Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight each take one example of an artist from the postmodern field, Richard Foreman, Michael Kirby, and Robert Wilson respectively, establishes their own particular context, and suggests those processes relating to acting/performing technique that might provoke the most productive exchanges. This juxtaposition suggests the places between the practices where discourse might take root and suggests the beginnings of such dialogues.