Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Sergi Belbel's Theatre Of Pain, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Dins la seva memoria ("Within his Memory"), a Catalan play written by Sergi Bel-bel in 1986, begins in total darkness, an imprecise empty void in which the spectator hears only the deep, rhythmic gasps and sighs of the anonymous protagonist. ' As the stage lights slowly rise during this "preliminary" scene, Ell (or, "He," as the protagonist is generically called) is depicted on his knees, masturbating with his back to the audience. At first glance, his violent, self-inflicted pleasure may be interpreted as an ultimate affirmation of life; yet, his autoerotic gestures are also imbued with memories that carry …

Post-Franco Theatre, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, …

Dins La Nostra Memòria, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

L'àmbit espacial de la cultura catalana configura un paisatge fluid i dinàmic, un espai simbòlic d'emoció, percepció i subjectivitat. De la mateixa manera, Barcelona ha sorgit i ressorgit al llarg d'aquest segle i del passat com un espai transcultural fluid de migracions. En una ciutat en què en l'actualitat almenys el 12% de la població prové de fora de les fronteres espanyoles, tot faria pensar que els dramaturgs catalans se senten ara especialmente inclinats a considerar l’espai del pluralisme cultural que és per a'ells «casa seva». Tanmateix, al teatre el procés d'autoreconeixement i el desig d'autoconscienciació es complex. Referintse al …

Tornar A Casa, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

A l'última escena de Suite, l'obra amb què Carles Batlle i Jordà (Barcelona, 1963) va guanyar el Premi SGAE 1999, hi ha un moment memorable i crucial en el qual l'espectador observa el collapse -«com un castell de cartes»- d'una casa de nines sobre el terra d'una típica sala d'estar. Es tracta d'una metàfora d'inestabilitat domèstica i també d'inestabilitat global, una imatge amb ressonàncies intertextuals que entrelliguen la dramatúrgia de Batlle amb la d'Ibsen -i fins i tot la de Benet i Jornet (penso en aquell teatret en flames a l'escena final d'E.R). Després d'aquest moment crucial, una de …

De Ausencias, Recuerdos Y Redescubrimiento: El Teatro De Agustín Gómez-Arcos, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

“El caso de este escritor español es en gran medida irreparable". Esta sombría afirmación, escrita por el eminente crítico de teatro español Moisés Peréz Coterillo, figuraba en su introducción a la edición de 1991 de la farsa en un acto Interview de Mrs. Muerta Smith por sus fantasmas de Agustín Gómez-Arcos. En efecto, el caso de Gómez-Arcos (Almería, 1933 - París, 1998) representa una paradoja extraordinaria para los observadores del flujo y reflujo de la historia literaria europea. En Francia, donde vivió un exilio voluntario desde 1968, llegó a ser una figura prominente como escritor prolífico y premiado. Fue autor …

Catalunya Invisible: Contemporary Drama In Barcelona, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

During the winter of 2000, Lluís Pasqual staged a Catalan version of Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard at Barcelona's Teatre Lliure, the historic home of Catalonia's most stable, accomplished, and distinguished repertory theatre company. In Chekov's play, Madame Lyobov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya, an emblem of the fading elegance and dwindling supremacy of the Russian aristocracy, is compelled by her situation of financial despair to sell her estate and cherry orchard to the nouveau-riche Lopakhin and then return to Paris on the eve of the Revolution. The orchard that was once admired for its beauty eventually will be destroyed in order to …

Faust In Barcelona: Catalonia's La Fura Dels Baus, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Total darkness. Garbled electronic sounds gradually build into a thundering roar, reminiscent of a plane veering down the runway. An orgasmic explosion fills the theatre with a big bang and a sudden flash of light. Following the chaos, what emerges in the darkness is the phantasmal image of two rotating human heads fixed at opposite ends of a single body. It is Faust, fastened to a revolving metallic "bed" evocative of Leonardo da Vinci's armillary sphere. The heads spin like two satellites in a never-ending cosmic orbit, creating a subtle allusion to the Faust/Mephistopheles duality that later in the performance …

"Un Agujero Sin Límites": La Mirada Fenomenológica De Josep M. Benet I Jornet, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Con un estilo libremente poético y, a veces, frenético, Richard Foreman, dramaturgo, director, y figura predilecta del mundo del teatro experimental neoyorquino, intentó en 1972 trazar del modo siguiente los puntales teóricos de su llamado "Teatro Ontológico - Histórico"

I want to be seized by the elusive, unexpected alivenesss of the moment.

Surprise at the center: not the surprise of the least-expected…because that (Least-expected) is a reaction that “places” it and makes it no longer elusive. But

surprised by

a freshness

of moment that eludes

constantly refreshes. You go toward it

and can’t seize it? You don’t go toward it….. …

Un Nen A L'Escala, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

El personatge principal d'El criptograma de David Mamet és John, un nen de deu anys hipercansat i d'ulls lleganyosos, intelligent i tafaner, a qui el seu permanent insomni ha deixat en un curiós estat de fantasia, en algun lloc entre el desvetllament i la vigília inconscient. El seu gest més compulsiu dins l'espai escènic consisteix en un constant viatge amunt i avall d'una escala amenaçadora que domina el camp de visió dels espectadors. L'escala és potser l'únic objecte estable sobre l'escenari i actua com un lloc de transició i un pont espaciotemporal entre el món innocent del nen (a dalt) …

The "Confessing Animal" On Stage: Authenticity, Asceticism, And The Constant "Inconstancie" Of Elizabethan Character, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

For persons persuaded by the rhetoric of sixteenth-century religious reformers, authenticity was a complex matter of access to the reality of divinity. George Levin's paper on empiricist "habits of mind" seems a strange place to start elaborating on that observation, for such "habits" look to be worlds apart from what I study, the sixteenth-century Calvinist adaptations of patristic and medieval ascetic spirituality. Yet Levin maintains that he has identified empiricism's near-ascetic techniques. "To know nature," he claims, "one must make it alien ... and deny one's own desire." If he is correct about "the programmatically self-alienating" character of "the positivist …

Scenes From The Contemporary Barcelona Stage: La Fura Dels Baus's Aspiration To The Authentic, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

In October 1983, just south of Barcelona at the annual Sitges Theatre Festival, beneath the railroad tracks in the claustrophobic space of a subterranean pedestrian passageway, La Fura dels Baus erupted into public view with an embryonic version of their first major spectacle, entitled Accions ("Actions"). The performance was conceived along the same aesthetic lines that continue to shape even the most recent work of this Catalan company. Accions consisted of a series of transgressive and, at times, startling exercicis pràctics ("practical exercises") intended to elicit an impulsive, visceral response from audience members. In their program notes, La Fura defined …

Los Gatos: Gómez-Arcos's Spectacle Of Sacrifice, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Agustfn Gómez-Arcos's Los gatos is a powerful, chilling piece of theater, a sacrificial spectacle steeped in passion, violence, and death, which straddles the balustrade between the emotional intensity of a Lorcan tragedy and the grotesque hyperbolism and dark humor of Valle-lnclán's esperpentos. In 1965, a censored production of Los gatos, directed by Juan de Prat-Gay, premiered to a somewhat lukewarm reception at Madrid's Teatro Marquina. Then, in November 1992, nearly thirty years after its original première, director Carme Portaceli resuscitated and restaged this post-Civil-War allegory for a new generation of theatergoers. …

Sanctifying The Scatological And Debasing The Divine: Postmordernist Allegory And Gómez-Arcos's Interview De Mrs. Muerta Smith Por Sus Fantasmas, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

In February 1991, when Agustin Gómez-Arcos's Interview de Mrs. Muerta Smith por sus fantasmas premiered at Madrid's Sala Olimpia, the voice of one of Europe's most distinguished living writers triumphantly returned to the Spanish stage after an absence that had endured nearly twenty-six years. Born in Almería at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Gómez-Arcos began his career in Madrid as an award-winning playwright. Eventually his ongoing struggle against Francoist censorship prompted his voluntary exile from Spain in 1966, and following a two-year sojourn in London, he arrived in Paris amid the clamor of 1968. Since that time he …

Agustín Gómez-Arcos's Diálogos De La Herejía And The Deconstruction Of History, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

In 1962, Agustín Gómez-Arcos, a young dramatist, still new to the Madrid theater scene, won his first Premio Nacional Lope de Vega for the historical drama Diálogos de la herejía. Yet almost immediately, the prize was swept from his hands in a wave of controversy, annulled in a blatant gesture of censorship that signified the Franco Regime's official response to his unorthodox choice of thematic material, and consequently banned the play from the stages of Spain's state-supported teatros nacionales. Set amid the sacrificial flames of the Spanish Inquisition, Diálogos de la herejía portrays the turmoil and hysteria that rock a …

Ello Dispara De Fermín Cabal: Hacia Una Configuración Posmoderna Del Espacio Textual/Teatral, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Ya que estamos llegando al final (o, al desenlace) del siglo XX, casi se ha convertido en tópico la idea de señalar - semiologicamente hablando - la relación dinamica que existe en el teatro entre el texto y la representación de ese texto. Si vuelvo una vez más a esta dicotomía histórica, no es para establecer- como han hecho algunos semiólogos - un modelo comunicativo que plantee la posibilidad de una relación dialéctica entre los dos términos, sino para observar basta qué punto el teatro posmodernista plantea una ausencia y una imposibilidad de tal relación. Anne Ubersfeld propone la …

Ello Dispara De Fermín Cabal: Hacia Una Configuración Posmoderna Del Espacio Textual/Teatral, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Ya que estamos llegando al final (o, al desenlace) del siglo XX, casi se ha convertido en tópico la idea de señalar - semiológicamente hablando - la relación dinámica que existe en el teatro entre el texto y la representación de ese texto. Si vuelvo una vez más a esta dicotomía histórica, no es para establecer- como han hecho algunos semiólogos un modelo comunicativo que plantee la posibilidad de una relación dialéctica entre los dos términos, sino para observar hasta qué punto el teatro posmodernista plantea una ausencia y una imposibilidad de tal relación. Anne Ubersfeld propone la posibilidad de …

Perlimplín: Lorca's Drama About Theatre, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The contemplation of a theatrical work as a type of semiotizing machine which generates a network of signification systems, implies, a priori, the task of specifying the boundaries which define the object of analysis. Hence the dichotomy of text and performance has long been recognized as uniquely inherent in the theatre genre and, therefore, a logical preoccupation of the theatre semiotician. As indicated by contemporary theoretical work (such as that of Patrice Pavis and Anne Ubersfeld), it would appear that the role of the spectator in the reception of a performance is finally coming into view as an essential aspect …