Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article explores the notions of performance and performativity through the activities of the male fan base of the Canadian football team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders (CFL /Regina Saskatchewan). It considers the carnivalization of fandom through the lens of the theatrical event and examines how normative gender identities are simultaneously constructed and reconstructed on the field and in the stands. Saskatchewan's football team, The Roughriders, has the biggest fan base within the Canadian Football League. Male fans practice orthodox masculinity by cheering the team with cultish fervor fuelled by alcohol, chants and, paradoxically, by costuming their bodies in forms of high camp drag. This action transforms the traditional football field into a spectacle in which inverted forms of gender display and voyeurism form no small part. Green body make-up, wigs, masks, watermelon helmets and fake breasts queer fans' bodies through performative gestures that temporarily reconstruct genders. Finally, the article considers these actions in relation to the celebration of the hyper-masculinized body of the athletes positioning the football stadium as a highly theatricalized third space in which two representations of masculinity are performed simultaneously.

This essay proposes that humorists Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker cast the middlebrow professional as a modern performer in their drama reviews and fiction. Under the sign of sophistication, their work champions individual identity and social status based on professionalism, public performance, and wit. The article traces sophistication as an ideal on the Broadway stage of the 1920s and 1930s, analyzes the skeptical personae that Benchley and Barker create in their drama reviews for middlebrow magazines, and follows the trope of performance (monologue, song, stage) in fiction by Benchley and Parker. In their drama reviews, Benchley and Parker reclaim the tonal extremes of modernist drama for the alienated middle-class professional, and they insist that even artistic avant-gardes derive their techniques from low-cultural spectacle and mass media people-pleasing. In so doing, they encouraged their readers to view themselves as consumers and producers of modern performances. In their fiction, Benchley and Parker use the roles of the beleaguered businessman and the world-weary divorcée to advocate social mobility, professional independence, and hedonistic choice over self-abnegating duty.

This project explores Renaissance revenge tragedy's conspicuous theatricality in light of the genre's primary concerns of personal transformation and the place of the self within an increasingly prescriptive society and cosmology. Specifically, its goal is to assert the essential dramaturgical role of theatricality in the early modern revenge play. Focusing primarily on the Kydian tradition of revenge begun with The Spanish Tragedy and continued in the work of William Shakespeare, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton, this study investigates the genre's treatment of subjectivity and how the characters' attempts at self-fashioning are mitigated—and at times, utterly thwarted—by the preexisting interpretive systems within which these characters move. This project argues that the revenger's turn to theatricality affords him a means of destabilizing those associations by interfering with the court's ability to identify, interpret, and classify effectively. In so doing, the revenger facilitates a transformation of self that will combat his original state of impotence and vulnerability, and ultimately, creates a fleeting opportunity in which he might appropriate those tools of political domination that had previously victimized him. The liberatory potential of such theatricalized agency is compromised, however, by its conspicuous exclusion of female subjects, who are either appropriated as spectacles to motivate masculine reprisal, or cast as monstrous agents whose grasp at revenge effectively robs them of their femininity. More generally, Playing With Lives explores how the genre's theatricality undermines essentialist notions of subjectivity, and through its metadramatic conventions, essentially stages spectatorship to foreground issues of signification and voyeuristic reception to speak to the broader issues of how the individual semiotically constructs meaning and how those interpretations are situated within a political framework.

Abstract This article provides a critical examination of the cultural sociology developed by Jeffrey C. Alexander, focusing on his view of the theatricality of social life. The argument is that, while Alexander's perspective do engage in a highly significant valuation of the performative dimension of social and political life that matches his strong program in cultural sociology to add a reflexive turn to cultural production in general, his views on theatre and politics remain somehow limited in their efforts at reaching the symbolic structures that are constitutive of these domains. In using a structural hermeneutics to define the analytical core of his methodology, Alexander loses sight of a more dialectical hermeneutics able to tackle the significant transformations affecting those symbolic structures, and exhibited by both avant-garde theatre and media infused mass democratic politics.

The United States at the infancy of the twenty first century is in the midst of an era of unprecedented military performance seeming to intentionally blur and collapse the boundaries between training and actual combat by means of an increasing spectacularity in the theorization and execution of military strategy. Combining the lenses of theater and performance with theories of military history and warfare, trauma, and the workings of power, this dissertation seeks to lay bare the ways in which performance, as both a system of power and knowledge and an expressive twice-behaved behavior, structures and drives warfare and weaves throughout contemporary US infantry theory. Infantry training, in an effort to contextualize the experience of warfare beforehand in training, attempts to identify, define, and prepare for the traumatic. But the extremity of warfare remains trauma, which by its very definition lies beyond the limits of existential reality, leaving training a doomed and fruitless attempt to voice the unspeakable that collapses the real into the virtual. Locating the roots of the government's use of "Shock and Awe" via a genealogical approach, I situate current infantry practices within a history of military theory aimed at preventing cathartic responses to the spectacle of combat in soldiers. I then examine how the Army and Marine Corps uses training to craft flexible and adaptive warriors in training through a process of mimetically theatrical simulations and perpetual rehearsal driven by a systematic dedication to performative power. The remaining chapters approach the effect of military training from the perspective of theories of trauma, arguing that infantry training-as- combat--rehearsal staged as performance--forecloses the possibilities of grasping the full impact of what is seen and done; such a process leaves an experiential gap that magnifies the probability of repeated impossible confrontation with the originary missed event. I conclude by offering theater as a possibility for testimony, for fully recounting the victim-witness's narrative and thereby overcoming trauma. This project thus levels a critical indictment of theatre, performance theory, and the military as structurally akin, experientially unimaginable, and existentially terrifying.

Abstract
The essay provides a brief review of how certain approaches to theatricality evolved in response to particular theatrical archives or repertoires in non-Chinese contexts. It then considers a number of recent studies of Chinese drama and theater in light of the following issues: the nature of theatrical language, the emergence and uses of fictionality, and the reconstruction of performance aesthetics. In focusing on these particular areas, the essay seeks to show how such research can contribute toward countering entrenched characterizations of xiqu as "non-drama," "spectacle," or "pure heritage." The final section of the article proposes some future avenues of inquiry in order to deepen the dialogue between Sinology and theater studies while providing tools for sustaining the practice of xiqu and fostering broader appreciation of traditional Chinese theater in Anglophone, Chinese-speaking, and other contexts.

Abstract
Contemporary anthropological research requires innovation in method that can take the measure of consequential reflection by many subjects on knowledge production within their own domains and anticipate how a research project might connect productively with various discursive communities and networks given the increasing complexity of ethnographic scale and context. One such innovation, the para-site, addresses these challenges by enlisting reflexive subjects as epistemic partners in orchestrated interactions situated alongside ongoing fieldwork activities. Our experiment set the para-site in the “Green Room” of the World Trade Organization and employed linguistic anthropology to facilitate exchanges at the level of our ethnography′s guiding concepts.

Thesis deals with political rituals in public city spaces extra focus lying on their theatrical and performative elements. First chapter of the thesis presents definition of political rituals. Political rituals are defined as secular, designed to gain or reconstruct power relations. Political rituals are also described as organized, taking part in specific environment on specific time, creating symbolical value for used objects and participants, not producing material value, repeated, purposeful activity. Separately are describes theatricality and performativity of public political rituals. After presenting theory examples are analyzed. Second part of thesis deals with state holidays. After showing that they can be regarded as political ritual, theatricality and performativity of February 16th, March 11th and July 6th are analyzed. Third part of the thesis goes on to analyze processions. Procession can be described as a genre. Using form of procession almost automatically makes an event ritualized. Further are analyzed processions that represent different political views and relations to official state politics: patriotic procession "For Homeland", Christian procession "For Life" and procession for Tax freedom day organized by Liberal and centre union. In order to have broader perspective on how aesthetics, performativity and politics interact, fourth part of the thesis deals with political performance art, which uses elements of ritual or is ritualized by repeating it. Chosen examples are "Sadam goes to heaven", "FLUXUS four weeks", "Pro-test laboratory". Thesis not only deals with term performativity, not too often used in Lithuanian theatre studies, but also analyses relations of politics and aesthetics. Theoretical tool, forms in first pat of the thesis can be further used to analyze theatricality and performativity of other public political rituals.