The rehearsal processes of theatre companies are an oft-neglected area of research in Drama and Performance Studies. This work on the Catalan devising collective Els Joglars and the Madrid producing venue Teatro de la Abad a seeks to redress the balance with a close analysis of methodologies employed in rehearsal. In effect, both companies have created distinctive rehearsal processes by applying ideas and techniques from a wider European context to a Spanish theatre scene which had been seen to follow rather than develop trends and techniques visible in theatre across France, Italy and Germany. Critically, their hybrid rehearsal processes generate heightened theatrical results for the audience. Thus the book shifts the focus of academic study away from product and towards process, demonstrating how an understanding of process assists in the reading of the theatrical product. Simon David Breden obtained a PhD in Drama & Hispanic Studies from Queen Mary, University of London. He has worked as a professional director and expert in Spanish theatre in London and Madrid.
This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.
This book examines troupes, plays, festivals, performative practices, and audiences active during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy. This period, spanning 1968 to 1982, is considered the historical moment that most directly shaped contemporary Spanish politics and society. The dominant narrative of the Transition has long portrayed it as a normalized, non-confrontational, and consensual process steered by political elites. But the world of Spanish theater tells a very different story - one in which ordinary Spaniards played a vital role in the transition to democracy. The chapters of this book draw on censorship files, photographs, audiovisual and textual material, and the author’s own interviews with more than a dozen audience and troupe members. Using these sources, David Rodriguez-Solas examines the notable experimentation during this period with theatrical performance and music; the establishment of performing spaces and festivals; the development of touring networks as a way to evade censorship; and the creation of networks of support that opposed diverse forms of violence and repression. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in theater and the cultural and political history of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s.
In this volume, we are particularly interested in approaching theatre and performance as a dynamic and evolving practice of continuous change, regeneration and cultural mobility. Neither the dramatic texts nor their stage versions should be viewed as finished products but as creative processes in the making. Their richness lies in their unfinished and never-ending potential energy and their openness to constant revision, rehearsal, revival, and collective enterprise. This edited collection aims to create a dialogue on the artistic processes implicated in the various ways of working with the play text, the staging practices, the way audiences and critical reception can impact a production, and the many lives of Iberian theatre beyond the page or the stage. That is, its cultural and social legacies.
In its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts. From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright Calderón de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment. The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift wherein belief systems were increasingly governed by reason—even though the discursive primacy of supernatural doxa and Christian wonder remained firmly entrenched. Thanks to their potential for motion, religious and profane puppets, automata, and mechanical stage props deployed a rationalized sense of wonder that illustrates the relationship between faith and reason, reevaluates the boundaries of fiction in art and entertainment cultures, acknowledges the rise of science and technology, and questions normative authority.
Lauded as one of the most important poets and playwrights of the twentieth century, Federico García Lorca was also an accomplished theatre director with a clear process and philosophy of how drama should be staged. Directing both his own work and that of others, Lorca was also closely involved in the rehearsals for productions of many of his plays, and from his own writings and those of his collaborators, a determined agenda to stimulate audiences and renovate theatre can be seen. This is the first book in English to fully consider Lorca as a director and his rehearsal methodology. The book combines: - A biographical account of Lorca’s work as a director and rehearsal leader, revealing his techniques and methods of approach texts; - An exploration of his key writings on and around theatre, drawing on his talks, play introductions, and some of the dramatic works themselves; - The first translation into English of his fragment Dragón; - A detailed discussion of Lorca’s key productions, Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (1933) for La Barraca, and his own Yerma (1934). - Specific focus on the practical applications that we can draw from Lorca’s methods, both from what survives of his own work and from the accounts of his close collaborators. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today’s student.
Electronic open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Covering from 1915 to the present, this book deals with the role that artists and intellectuals have played regarding projects of European integration. Consciously or not, they partake of a tradition of Euroskepticism. Because Euroskepticism is often associated with the discourse of political elites, its literary and artistic expressions have gone largely unnoticed. This book addresses that gap. Taking Spain as a case study, author Luis Martín-Estudillo analyzes its conflict over its own Europeanness or exceptionalism, as well as the European view of Spain. He ranges from canonical writers like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Zambrano to new media artists like Valeriano López, Carlos Spottorno, and Santiago Sierra. Martín-Estudillo provides a new context for the current refugee crisis, the North-South divide among EU countries, and the generalized disaffection toward the project of European integration. The eclipsed critical tradition he discusses contributes to a deeper understanding of the notion of Europe and its institutional embodiments. It gives resonance to the intellectual and cultural history of Europe's "peripheries" and re-evaluates Euroskeptic contributions as one of the few hopes left to imagine ways to renew the promise of a union of the European nations.
Este libro es el primero en examinar lo radicalmente nuevo y desafiante Teatro Pánico, un grupo de obras compuestas por Arrabal entre 1957 y 1966, en el apogeo del movimiento avant-garde. ENGLISH VERSION This book is the first to examine closely the radically new and challenging Panic Theatre, a group of plays composed by Arrabal between 1957 and 1966, at the zenith of the avant-garde movement. El presente libro estudia el Teatro Pánico de Fernando Arrabal, un conjunto de textos concebidos durante los primeros años del autor en París, entre 1957 y 1966. Escritas en el momento de mayor auge de la vanguardia, las obras vehiculan una teatralidad radicalmente innovadora cuya piedra angular la constituye el lenguaje ceremonial. La ceremonia pánica que subyace a toda esa dramaturgia es objeto de un profundo análisis a la luz de Le Panique, texto programático del propio Arrabal en que el autor identifica los tres conceptos que desencadenan la creación artística: memoria, azar y confusión. El estudio se detiene en los procesos por los que la memoria determina que las obras abandonen la mímesis, y el azar articula los materiales recuperados de la memoria en tramas y estructuras hilvanadas con gran precisión. Asimismo se incide en cómo los sujetos, objetos, marcos espacio-temporales y palabras se ven sometidos a un proceso de confusión que genera una forma teatral absolutamente innovadora. El concepto de lo pánico, situado en el epicentro de esta experimentación formal, dota de coherencia y unicidad teórica a este aparentementeheterogéneo grupo de obras. Diego Santos Sánchez es Alexander von Humboldt Fellow en la Humboldt-Universität en Berlin. ENGLISH VERSION The Panic Theatre is a set of plays conceived by Fernando Arrabal between1957 and 1966, the author's first years in Paris. Composed at the zenith of the avant-garde movement, they convey a radically new and challenging theatricality whose cornerstone is their ceremonial shape. The plays' underlying panic ceremony is thoroughly studied in light of Arrabal's programmatic text Le Panique, that singles out three key concepts responsible for artistic creation: memory, chance and confusion. This study shows how memory determines the plays' departure from mimesis and how chance articulates the materials recalled from memory into precisely arranged plots. Furthermore, subjects, objects, spatial-temporal frames and words are subject to confusion, inan attempt to create an utterly innovative form of theatre. This group of seemingly heterogeneous plays is given theoretical coherence and consistency by placing the idea of panic at the centre of a great formal experimentation. Diego Santos Sánchez is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.
