Suchergebnisse

'Relaxed performances' allow spectators to enjoy a non-judgmental environment in the theatre, where they can talk or move around, along with other adjustments to make them more accessible to a range of audiences including those on the autistic spectrum. Typical accommodations include reduced intensity of lighting and sound, provision of visual stories to familiarise spectators with the venue and production, and trained staff available to assist visitors. This paper will evaluate the Autism Arts Festival, an attempt to develop the idea of a relaxed performance further to create an entirely autism-friendly festival in Canterbury, UK. We developed a suite of features to make the festival more accessible, and whilst audience response indicates that no single one was used by all audience members, the suite as a whole was nevertheless effective at increasing the accessibility of the festival. Moreover, discussions with the performers indicate that the festival, as an 'autistic space', was conducive of both a sense of community solidarity and engagement with the politics of neurodiversity.

Charles Harpur (1813–68) is recognised in his native Australia as a pioneering Romantic poet, but his achievements are little recognised elsewhere. This essay considers his contribution to the development of Romantic tragedy. He wrote two tragedies, The Bushrangers (1853, orig. 1835), a gothic bandit drama in the tradition of Schiller's Die Räuber (1781), and King Saul (c. 1838), an incomplete Biblical drama apparently inspired by Byron's Cain: A Mystery (1821). Like many European playwrights of the period, Harpur was deeply influenced by the new kinds of melodrama that were sweeping the stage, but also sought to distinguish his literary productions from more popular fare. His alienation from the popular theatre was exacerbated by his colonial context, where strict censorship, rising snobbery and plentiful cultural imports from Britain stifled the early efforts of nationalist, convict-born writers like himself. These contexts help to explain three distinctive aspects of Harpur's Romantic tragedies: they were direct in an age when drama was often evasive, radical even in an age of revolution, and mystical in an age of increasing religious scepticism. Whatever his theatrical merits, Harpur was a bold playwright who worked through controversial political and aesthetic problems in a remarkably explicit way.

Through a process of 're-en-framing' events advocated by Žižek, S. (2014), this paper exposes 'rogue' representations of Chechen identity and lycanthropy. In first framing the 'official' narrative of the Boston Bombers, the paper proceeds from a critique of claims made in the Rolling Stone coverage of the event. The representations of Chechen identity that emerge from the magazine's article are then re-framed through fin de siècle 'Caucasaphobia' and mytho-medievalising of the Chechen subject. In then returning to the Boston Bombing event it is through a critique of counter-insurgency/radicalisation theory that the biopolitical consequences of the event are set alongside the 'werewolf trial' of the surviving perpetrator.