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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan
"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan
Publications and Research
This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
This essay draws upon a poetic and devotional texts from late medieval Spain to show how public displays of emotion (weeping, in particular) during penitential processions could be learned and prepared for in advance.
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
"Holy Wednesday" is a late sixteenth century adaptation of a Spanish auto sacramental (sacred play) written in alphabetized Nahuatl, the predominant pre-Columbian language spoken on the High Central Plateau of Mexico. The author remains unknown, however he was likely a Nahua amanuensis educated by Franciscans at Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Religious drama was one of the important evangelizing tools of the Catholic brotherhoods in colonial Mexico and although a record of performance of Holy Wednesday does not exist, this dramatic depiction of the final meeting of Christ and Mary prior to the crucifixion was almost certainly performed as …