Theatre History Commons^™

Dreaming Of Light: On Edward Gordon Craig, Peter Sellars

Mime Journal

Sellars reflects on Craig’s legacy, emphasizing Craig’s focus on “making theatre out of light,” and casting Craig as “John the Baptist to Bob Wilson.” Sellars highlights the importance of Craig’s “keeping the dream space open,” but he also criticizes Craig for not traveling to experience the predominantly Asian cultures whose performance traditions he appropriated. Craig and Sellars have a shared interest in the functions of Baroque opera in socially cataclysmic times; Sellars speaks about the influence of Craig upon his stagings of Purcell and the St. Matthew Passion (first staged in 2010). Sellars celebrates Craig’s attempt to rescue the voice …

Picturing Robinson Crusoe: Edward Gordon Craig, Daniel Defoe And Image-Text Inquiry, Eric T. Haskell

Mime Journal

Haskell focuses on Craig’s work with art books in this essay. He offers a wealth of visual images to investigate influences upon Craig’s engraved illustrations for an edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a project planned for the Cranach Press, executed during the late 1930s, and published posthumously by the Basilisk Press in 1979. Haskell calls attention to the way that this fascinating edition—previously overshadowed by the Craig-Cranach Press Hamlet in the scholarly literature—adds to our understanding of Craig’s theories of print as performance. He also offers a nuanced reading of the way that Craig’s illustrations function as interpretation, providing …

A Note On Sanity In Stage Productions Of Shakespearean Plays, Patrick Le Boeuf

Mime Journal

A previously unpublished essay by Edward Gordon Craig which elucidates his ideas about the “right” way to produce Shakespeare. Edited, with notes, by Patrick Le Boeuf.

Hamlet's Last Act: Artist's Statement, Sam J. Gold

Mime Journal

Gold contextualizes his performance piece Hamlet’s Last Act (video will be available on the Action, Scene, and Voice website going live in Summer 2017). He reflects on his own journey and process in creating the show, and also offers some fascinating information about Craig’s relationship to Asian puppetry traditions. Gold’s innovative show turns Craig’s wood engravings for the Cranach Press Hamlet into Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppets; Gold later discovered that Craig actually knew of this genre and referenced it in certain works. Gold explains how in Hamlet’s Last Act, Craig’s published engravings literally become performers, breaking down the …

Edward Gordon Craig, Étienne Decroux, And The Rediscovery Of Mime, Harvey Grossman

Mime Journal

In this edited transcription of his remarks at the 2013 Pomona College (California) conference “Action, Scene and Voice,” Harvey Grossman elucidates the theory and practice of his two most important teachers: Edward Gordon Craig and Étienne Decroux. Grossman elucidates Craig’s much-debated comments on the “Art of the Theatre,” as well as Craig’s influence upon the French corporeal mime Étienne Decroux. He relates in detail Craig’s positive response to seeing Decroux and his students (among them Jean-Louis Barrault and Éliane Guyon) perform in 1945.

The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor

Mime Journal

Taylor considers the role that book arts may play in Craig’s theories of the new theatre, or the Art of the Future. He expands our understanding of Craig’s design work to include print culture, examining his engravings for the monumental editions of Hamlet published by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in 1929–30. Taylor explores the relationship of Craig’s designs for the 1912 Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet to his engravings for the German and English-language Cranach Press editions of the play. He suggests that it was only with this print publication that Craig finally achieved the absolute artistic control …

Our Puppets, Our Selves: Puppetry's Changing Paradigms, Claudia Orenstein

Mime Journal

Taking up the topic of puppetry, Orenstein forges connections between Craig’s vision of the übermarionette and the rise of “New Puppetry” today. She examines the use of puppets to explore similarities and differences between the technological anxieties of modernists versus contemporary artists. In addition, she calls for a more careful and contextualized attention to Craig’s puppet theory, with a close reading of the übermarionette passage in "On the Art of the Theatre." Orenstein returns to some of the most well-known and much-studied passages and theories from Craig’s early work, but considers them from the fresh vantage point of contemporary puppetry …

Contents - Edward Gordon Craig Special Issue 2017, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

Cover, front matter, and contents for Mime Journal Special Issue, "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig." Guest editors: Jennifer Buckley and Annie Holt.

Appendix: Program, Edward Gordon Craig Conference 2013, Pomona College, Mime Journal

Mime Journal

Conference program for "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig," at Pomona College, Claremont, California, March 2013.

Editors' Note - Action, Scene, And Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues With Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

A roadmap to this Special Issue of Mime Journal. This issue emphasizes the tissue of influences that shaped Craig’s own work and continue to impact contemporary theater and performance. By focusing on the historical contexts in which his ideas were developed and those in which they have been received, the essays counter the widely held perception of Craig as the solitary genius of the “Art of the Theatre.” His claims of originality and singularity have too often obscured the connections between his work and that of other artists—especially the dancer Isadora Duncan, upon whom two of the pieces included here …

The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove

Mime Journal

Jennifer Buckley interviews dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lori Belilove on Isadora Duncan’s practice and legacy. Belilove argues for Duncan’s modernism, and emphasizes her impact upon Edward Gordon Craig’s developing aesthetic and his career. This edited transcription of their conversation takes its point of departure from Craig’s portfolio of six drawings of Duncan in action, Isadora Duncan: Sechs Bewegungsstudien, Insel Verlag, 1906. Belilove sees both Craig and Duncan as poised between late Victorianism and modernism, and she contends they shared a modernist impulse toward abstraction. Belilove also comments on her own practice as a performer and as a teacher passing …

The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou

Mime Journal

Olga Taxidou analyzes the ambiguous concept for which Edward Gordon Craig is best known—the “übermarionette”—alongside Isadora Duncan’s discussions of the liberated dancer. Highlighting the emphasis on futurity in Craig’s and Duncan’s manifestos and theories, she contends that this pairing works to undo the binaries between Hellenism and modernism, and between mechanistic and vitalistic aesthetics. Emphasizing the impact of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories upon Duncan’s theory and practice, Taxidou locates Duncan within an intellectual vanguard that includes Jane Harrison and her fellow Cambridge Ritualists as well as major modernist poets.

Nine Ways Of Opening Macbeth, Patrick Le Boeuf

Mime Journal

A previously unpublished essay by Edward Gordon Craig in which Craig considers various directorial and casting choices for Shakespeare's Macbeth. Edited, with notes, by Patrick Le Boeuf.

Edward Gordon Craig's Übermarionette And Étienne Decroux's "Actor Made Of Wood", Thomas Leabhart, Sally Leabhart

Mime Journal

Thomas Leabhart testifies to Edward Gordon Craig’s continuing influence on postmodern mime and movement. Leabhart discusses the influences that shaped Craig’s theory of acting. He then considers what the living actor and Craig’s “übermarionette” have to say to each other, putting pressure on the binary between human and non-human performers, especially in physical theater. Himself a student from 1968-72 of Étienne Decroux, the French corporeal mime and teacher whom the elderly Craig recognized as an “artist of the theatre,” Leabhart relates how he carries on Decroux’s pedagogy and legacy as a performer and teacher of corporeal mime.

Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt

Mime Journal

Holt focuses on Craig’s influential stage designs in relation to the performing body. Through costume design, Holt rethinks Craig’s relationship with the designs of the Ballets Russes, placing him in context with the experimentations of his contemporaries Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. Holt frames these designers’ historic opposition as a difference of opinion around the way that costumes can carry meaning. She argues that while all three designers used similar visual language and agreed that costumes should communicate with audiences, each artist used a different model for this communication – speech (Craig), music (Bakst) and writing (Picasso).

When The Rain Stops Falling

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University’s performance of When the Rain Stops Falling by Thornton Andrew Bovell.

Performed February 24-26, March 3-5, 2017.

It’s 2039. A fish falls from the sky and lands at Gabriel’s feet. Where did it come from? Gabriel’s estranged son decides to visit for dinner. What does he want? To know about his past? Gabriel barely knows his own past. From 1959 to 2039, from London to Australia, When the Rain Stops Falling follows the fragmented history and mystery of Gabriel’s family and the falling fish.

Top Girls, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2016-2017 Season

Top Girls is a 1982 play by Caryl Churchill. It is about a woman named Marlene, a career-driven woman who is only interested in women's success in business. In the famous opening scene, she hosts a dinner party for a group of famous women from history. As the play unfolds we find Marlene has left her 'poor' life, and illegitimate child with her sister Joyce, in order to tread the path to 'success'. The play is contemporary and examines the role of women in society and what being a successful woman means.

Introduction, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] An Excusion at Sea, The Thousand and Second Night, La Guimard ... For over a hundred and fifty years, these plays languished in Jules Verne's desk and then on the dusty shelves of the Nantes Municipal Library before Christian Robin was able to publish them in 2005, in honor of the centenary of Verne's death. That anniversary triggered a plethora of commemorations, new editions of Verne's works, events, and conferences, among many different activities and endeavors. Robin's remarkable collection included all of Verne's previously unpublished plays in a volume titled Theâtre inédit, issued by the …

Awakening Imagination: Glimpses Of Ignatian Spirituality In Seventeenth-Century French Hagiographic Theatre, Ana Fonseca Conboy

Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) propose an active method of exercising spirituality through meditation, prayer, and imaginative contemplation. Beyond mere spectators, Ignatian disciples are invited to become actors in the scene unfolding in their sensory imaginations, in what Barthes calls the “récit christique” (Barthes 1971, 10). In that sense, the Exercises possess a performative force. The implicit freedom inspired in the exercitant, the person who performs the Exercises, echoes the call to the imagination of the spectator of seventeenth-century French hagiographic drama. Exercises promulgated throughout the four weeks of the spiritual retreat are reflected in …

Before Crenshaw: A Historiographical Look At Intersectional Identity In Three Twentieth-Century American Plays By Eaton, Grimké, And Treadwell, Emily Goodell

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This thesis anachronistically applies Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term intersectionality to three dramatic texts using Thomas Postlewait’s model of theatre historiography. These plays were authored by twentieth century female playwrights who had similar intersectional lives as the leads discussed. Yuki, from the 1901 novel turned 1903 Broadway play A Japanese Nightingale, was crafted by Winnifred Eaton. Yuki’s identity will be the subject of the first chapter. The second chapter examines the identity of Rachel from Angelina Weld Grimke’s anti-lynching play Rachel. For the third chapter, the identities of both female leads fromHope for a Harvest by Sophie Treadwell are analyzed. …

News - Oconee County Library, Athens Regional Library System, Rebecca Ballard

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Show Me The Money: A Study Of Interrelationships Between A Regional Theatre's Revenue And Location, Rebecca Snedeker-Meier

Senior Independent Study Theses

Regional theatres are non-profit organizations that survive off earned and contributed income. In particular, contributed, or donated, income can change depending on the community a theatre is located in. However, there is no consensus whether there is a relationship between the two. This study compares Arena Stage, Guthrie Theater, Cleveland Play House and Alley Theatre to answer the question; how does geographic location relate to the ratios of revenue sources? The income ratios were based off numbers derived from 990 tax forms and the theatres’ operating budgets. Those numbers were then analyzed and compared to the other theatres’ income ratios. …

A Dull Soldier And A Keen Guest: Stumbling Through The Falstaffiad One Drink At A Time, Emma Givens

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre history has long interwoven with the production, consumption, and peddling of alcohol. While the seedier aspects of our past generally go unremembered, we can find traces of them in the culture of the times. If we read Shakespeare through the lens of drinking culture, what can we discover about the play and what can that tell us about how to produce his works today? By looking at the rules and customs surrounding alehouses during the English Renaissance I have analyzed the three plays contained within the Falstaffiad (1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Merry Wives …

Theatrical Texts And Contexts: Poe And Hawthorne’S Fictional Women, Savannah M. Singletary

Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are arguably two of the most highly read and heavily debated nineteenth-century antebellum authors in America. Their writings fascinate readers, while their character depictions, particularly their characterizations of fictional women, prompt intense academic debate. This thesis examines the previously less-studied historical developments surrounding Poe and Hawthorne in the antebellum era that shaped their approach to writing fiction. In particular, this study scrutinizes the effects of the development of a newly popular art form, ballet, the ascendency of female authorship, and the impact of American theatrical reform upon antebellum authors’ authorial faculties, especially Hawthorne and …

The Writers, Artists, Singers, And Musicians Of The National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (Omike), 1939–1944, Frederick Bondy

Purdue University Press Book Previews

In May 1938, Hungary passed anti-Semitic laws causing hundreds of Jewish artists to lose their jobs. In response, Budapest’s Jewish community leaders organized an Artistic Enterprise under the aegis of OMIKE Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (Hungarian Jewish Education Association) to provide employment and livelihood for actors, singers, musicians, conductors, composers, writers, playwrights, painters, graphic artists, and sculptors.

Between 1939 and 1944, activities were centered in Goldmark Hall beside the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. Hundreds of artists from all over Hungary took part in about one thousand performances, including plays, concerts, cabaret, ballet, operas, and operettas. These performances appealed …

The Launch: A Senior Cabaret, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2016-2017 Season

A showcase of performances by seniors with special guest Lindsay Nicole Chanbers '02

Dance Usm! Program [2016], University Of Southern Maine Department Of Theatre

Programs 2016-2017 Season

Directed by Maria Tzianabos

Dance 2016: The Goddess, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2016-2017 Season

No abstract provided.

Literary And Theatrical Circulations In The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Rwanda And Burundi, From The Belgian Colonial Empire To The Africa Of The Great Lakes., Maëline Le Lay

Artl@s Bulletin

This article on literary and theatrical circulations in Africa’s Great Lakes region begins by retracing the history of these practices, taking several examples from the colonial period. It then analyzes contemporary modalities of the circulation of texts (via procedures such as reprising narrative patterns and adaptation), and cultural actors, in the different transnational arts networks that are more or less closely tied to the humanitarian sector, or to international cooperation. Finally, it proposes a critical questioning of the concept of artistic circulation.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University’s performance of Oklahoma!. Books and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rogers.

Performed on November 11-13, 18-20, 2016 at the Mitchell Theatre.

The high-spirited rivalry between the farmers and cowmen of the Western Indian Territory provides the colorful, turn-of-the-century backdrop for Curley and Laurey’s love story. But with these headstrong romantics holding the reins, the road to love is as bumpy as a surrey ride down a dusty road. Despite many hardships, their rocky romance leads to a new life beginning in a brand new state. Rodgers & Hammerstein's first collaboration remains, …