Academic literature on the topic 'Postcolonial theater'

l presente artículo estudia dos piezas teatrales recientes sobre la independencia del Perú, Discurso de promoción (2017) del Grupo Yuyachkani, y Bicentenaria (2017) de Mariana Silva y Claudia Tangoa. Analiza estas obras como experiencia y acontecimiento, mientras revisa sus aspectos ideológicos, y cómo su estilo de representación influye en sus significaciones posibles. De esta manera, revisa cómo estas piezas critican algunas características de la república peruana, como el racismo y el machismo. Palabras clave: Teatro peruano, Teatro latinoamericano, Teatro histórico, Teatro posdramático, Teatro sobre la Independencia, estudios poscoloniales. Abstract The article studied two recent dramatic plays about the Peruvian independence, Discurso de promoción (2017) by Grupo Yuyachkani, and Bicentenaria (2017) by Mariana Silva and Claudia Tangoa. It analyzed these dramatic plays as experiences and happenings. Moreover, it reviewed its ideology. Thus, it studied how these ways of representation influences their possible meanings. This way, it reviews how these dramatic plays criticize some characteristics of the Peruvian Republic, such as racism and male chauvinism. Keywords: Peruvian Theater, Latin American Theater, Historical Theater, Postdramatic Theater, Independence Theater, Postcolonial Studies

Theatrical discourse in Indonesia is still dominated by Western theater discourses, both theoretically and practically. This domination ordains theater as an art that is distant from the audience, including Makyong. As an effort to bring theater closer to the community, the development of acting methods based on ethnic traditions can be an alternative. The research method that will be used in this study is the Research and Development method developed by Thiagarajan, et al. The stages of implementing the research are as follows: Defining, Designing, Developing. The theory used as a basis in this study is the theory of postcolonial acting put forward by Asrul Sani and concept of theater anthropology from Eugenio Barba. The results of this study are Malay acting training methods arranged in the order of spiritual knowledge based on Tunjuk Ajar Melayu, pantun skills and body training based on Malay dance techniques. The development of the acting training method, which the author calls Framing Malay, aims to collect things that can help actors in creating Malay behavior.

This article investigates representations of national belonging in British South Asian theater productions after the 2005 London bombings. It identifies a significant yet hitherto underresearched corpus of plays that show the formation of the UK “home front” in the war on terror from the perspective of postcolonial subjects who are deemed threatening rather than worthy of protection. After discussing the construction of British South Asian citizens as suspicious subjects, the article analyzes two plays that offer an extensive consideration of the contingencies of national belonging. It argues that True Brits by Vinay Patel and Harlesden High Street by Abhishek Majumdar dramatize strategies for building, making, or keeping a home in London in spite of the strictures of suspectification and securitization.

In the four decades that followed the April 1974 revolution, which ended the Estado Novo's dictatorship (1926–1974) and the Portuguese colonial empire, contemporary theater dance has witnessed an explosion in Portugal. After 1974, the African decolonization, the subsequent flow of immigrants, European Union accession (1986), and the opening to the contemporary Western world have substantially altered Portugal's political and demographic landscapes, social practices, and expressive cultures. Considering the current European crises, this article discusses how Portuguese contemporary dance is recently facing or reflecting the impact of Lusophone postcolonial cultural and demographic reconfigurations, and incorporating or dealing with its patrimonial expressive cultures.

This article offers a predominantly contextual introduction to my translation of a contemporary Welsh play by Sêra Moore Williams, Crash (2004), into Hungarian. Williams' three-person drama for young people was written originally in the author's native language, Welsh, and translated into English by the playwright herself. In my translation process of the play from English to Hungarian the intermediary role played by English raises ethical concerns from a postcolonial perspective, while in a pragmatic sense it is almost a necessity to rely on it when communicating Welsh-language cultural production to the broader international public, including to other minor languages. The article will place the drama in its generic context, introducing the play as a Theater in Education piece, as Williams' work has been inspirational in the development of tantermi színház [classroom theater] in Hungary since the early 2000s. As a specific case study within the case study, the additional discussion of the translation of Williams' polysemic title will provide an insight into the role such a significant paratext plays in uprooting a dramatic text from one culture to another.

Abstract The Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant is not known for his work on theater; rather, he has been influential for a postcolonial reconceptualization of Caribbean spaces and the ways in which they are intertwined with a history of colonization. His theory of relation has been paramount for a rethinking of a concept of connection, theorizing the layered, complex, and often surprising relations between peoples and cultures that have shaped, questioned, imagined, and often also jumbled up the Caribbean as a world in transformation. Glissant views relation as a skein of networks and not as essentialist recovery of an authentic and true point of origin. This article addresses the theoretical transformative possibilities that this approach helps elucidate. I will mainly focus on the production of Simon Stephens’s 2012 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an inventive adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel that was staged in New York City between 2014 and 2016 to much critical acclaim. Finally, in a comparative approach, I would like to read this production with an eye towards Susanne Kennedy’s 2018 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993) for the Munich Kammerspiele and acclaimed Australian theater director Simon Stone’s 2016 rewrite of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901) for the theater in Basel as well as Ulrich Rasche’s inventive 2017 production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1917, when British Prime Minister Balfour declared Britain’s support for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the land of Palestine. The conflict has had many political, social, and artistic implications. On the political level, a struggle that has not been solved until this day has evolved. On a social level, many lives have been crushed: thousands of native citizens of the land became refugees, mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but also worldwide. Others, like the Arabs who stayed in what was in 1948 declared to be the state of Israel, have been suffering from an identity crisis; many of these Arabs face unlawful detention, demolition of houses, killing and racism. The Gaza strip has almost always been under siege by the Israeli military machine lately. Meanwhile, the Jewish society has never had a day of peace since the establishment of their state. On the artistic level, the conflict has always had implications for Arab/ Palestinian and Israeli writings., I seek to read the depiction of the conflict with its different violent confrontations from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives starting with the Palestinian Nakba to the violent Israeli oppression of any Palestinian resistance in the Intifada. I also read literary texts about Palestinian resistance, actual material resistance of the first Palestinian Intifada as represented by both sides in postcolonial terms. In fact, I believe that both Palestinian and Israeli literature could be read in the context of postcolonial discourse. On the one hand, for Palestinian and Arab writers, Palestinian writing is and should be read as resistance literature, or ‘Adab al-muqawamah’, a term coined by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Anna Ball’s study Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective examines Palestinian literature and film in the light of postcolonial feminism. Ball places the conflict in the context of colonial/ postcolonial discourse and breaks the taboo against using the word colonialism when speaking about Zionism. In fact, the research problem is based on the idea of the inadequacy of ignoring Palestinian and Israeli literature as part of postcolonial studies simply for fear of revealing the colonial status quo of the land. According to Anna Bernard, who seeks to draw attention to what she calls ‘blind spots in postcolonial studies’, mainly Israel/ Palestine: ‘by dismissing a ‘postcolonial’ approach to Israel-Palestine studies outright, [critics like] Massad and Shohat overlook the value of a literary study that seeks to demonstrate the collective and cross-cultural impact of the various modern forms of colonialism and imperialism on artistic production across the globe’. Massad’s argument that there is difficulty in describing space, time and body in Israel/ Palestine as postcolonial is based on his interrogations: ‘Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/ Israel without noting its ‘‘post-coloniality’’ for Ashkenazi Jews? Can one determine the post-coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahi Jews? (Although one could debate the colonized status of Mizrahi Jews) How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a post-colonial time?’ Ella Shohat, likewise, is against what she calls the ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and potentially [the] depoliticizing implications’ of the term ‘post-colonial,’ especially that, according to her, it is used instead of important terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism. In spite of the importance of paying attention to the correct description of states of imperialism and neo-colonialism, I still find it possible to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts in postcolonial perspective, agreeing with Bernard ‘that the tools that have been developed for reading these texts comparatively – including colonial discourse analysis, national allegory, minority discourse, and so on – can be usefully applied, tested, and revised in the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli literary and cultural production’. This view resonates with Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths’s in their study The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995), when they comment on this wide range of relevant fields that the term postcolonial suggests: ‘Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, [and] place’ . In fact, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not necessarily restricted to a real colonial period; it could be used, according to Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back: ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’. Between the view of the land of Palestine as a lawful possession of the Jews and that which sees Jewish presence as a settler or colonial one, a debate about reading the conflict and literary production tackling the conflict within theories of colonial and postcolonial studies arises. What makes reading the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its literature and literary production within the paradigm of postcolonialism problematic is worth some further investigation. First, the preference and focus on the discursive practices of colonialism over the material practices has resulted in excluding the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from the field of postcolonial studies by a number of critics like Ella Shohat and Joseph Massad, which is more elaborated on later. Second, the debate about the Zionist project as a settler colonial one could also problematize analysing the conflict within postcolonial theories. The first chapter explores the Israeli/ Palestinian and Arab writing of the conflict from a colonizer/colonized perspective. I mainly focus on the representation of violence as an essential element in a colonized society and the decolonization process, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory that violence is inevitable in any colonized community as the backbone of the analysis. For this purpose, I have chosen Syrian playwright Saad-Allah Wanous’s play Rape (1990), to compare with Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play Murder (1997), since both plays represent violence as a vicious circle that does not lead anywhere in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even though it is an everyday act that has become a way of life for both sides. Crucial terms in the field of postcolonial studies such as resistance/terrorism are examined. Some similarities between the ways the two playwrights write the conflict are also highlighted, which supports the idea that literature can always find shared ground between any two conflicting parties. In Chapters Two and Three I write about the history of the conflict as a chain of endless violent confrontations; violence in this case is on the national level when the two nations fight each other. Chapter Two addresses some of the landmark events in the history of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, mainly the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba as the same historical event seen from the two extremely different colonizer/colonized perspectives. The chapter also addresses what the Holocaust has to do with the two events and how the Holocaust was exploited by the Israeli state to silence any condemnation of the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine and later on to silence any international condemnation of the Israeli 1967 occupation of more Palestinian and Arab lands.

Desde la fundación de los primeros institutos de ciencias teatrales en Alemania en el primer tercio del siglo XX y de la introducción de esta disciplina como carrera universitaria en Colonia en 1938 y en Berlín en 1943, así como desde la creación de un número considerable de institutos y cátedras de ciencias del teatro en los años 70 y la inauguración de un amplio y profundo debate teórico en este campo, no se logró establecer un lazo y un contexto de trabajo mutuo entre las ciencias teatrales y las literarias. Mientras la ciencia teatral – luego de una primera época empírica e historicista – fundamentó su análisis principalmente en el hecho escénico y, con el tiempo, fue incluyendo en forma más intensa diversos aspectos culturales, antropológicos, históricos y sociales1; la ciencia literaria y las diversas filologías, por el contrario, se concentraron especialmente en el análisis del texto dramático, analizando el teatro como un objeto literario. Así, ambas disciplinas permanecen hasta la fecha divididas y sin conexión mayor a pesar de tener un objeto en común y de basarse, desde los años 70, en teorías similares como el estructuralismo y la semiótica.

Desde la fundación de los primeros institutos de ciencias teatrales en Alemania en el primer tercio del siglo XX y de la introducción de esta disciplina como carrera universitaria en Colonia en 1938 y en Berlín en 1943, así como desde la creación de un número considerable de institutos y cátedras de ciencias del teatro en los años 70 y la inauguración de un amplio y profundo debate teórico en este campo, no se logró establecer un lazo y un contexto de trabajo mutuo entre las ciencias teatrales y las literarias. Mientras la ciencia teatral – luego de una primera época empírica e historicista – fundamentó su análisis principalmente en el hecho escénico y, con el tiempo, fue incluyendo en forma más intensa diversos aspectos culturales, antropológicos, históricos y sociales1; la ciencia literaria y las diversas filologías, por el contrario, se concentraron especialmente en el análisis del texto dramático, analizando el teatro como un objeto literario. Así, ambas disciplinas permanecen hasta la fecha divididas y sin conexión mayor a pesar de tener un objeto en común y de basarse, desde los años 70, en teorías similares como el estructuralismo y la semiótica.:Reflexiones preliminares. - Algunos conceptos fundamentales. - "Hibridización" y "medialidad". - "Teatro"/"Teatralidad"/"Texto teatral". - "Cuerpo" - "Deseo" - "Sexualidad" - "Poder"

Choisir le genre dramatique de la tragédie, emblématique de la culture occidentale, pour représenter et accompagner les luttes de décolonisations de l’empire français peut sembler paradoxal. Bien au contraire, nous montrons que cette association d’un genre canonique et d’un sujet politique contestataire est féconde. À partir d’un corpus varié d’une trentaine de pièces écrites en français par des auteurs d’Afrique, de la Caraïbe et de Madagascar dans la deuxième moitié du xxe siècle (1942-1992), notre thèse identifie un phénomène théâtral que nous nommons tragédies de la décolonisation. Le genre de la tragédie permet d’une part de créer des mythes, de célébrer la grandeur des sociétés précoloniales et de mettre en avant les luttes anticoloniales. D’autre part, en tant que genre qui montre des défaites, la tragédie permet de dénoncer l’hypocrisie de la prétendue mission civilisatrice de l’Europe et de révéler les violences et les oppressions du système colonial et esclavagiste, à travers le point de vue de celles et ceux qui les subissent. La spécificité du genre dramatique invite également à interroger ses effets sur le genre social. Enfin, discutant certains biais dans la réception des pièces, nous montrons que le genre dramatique lui-même est renouvelé, notamment dans l’affirmation d’une fatalité qui n’est plus transcendante mais historique, et de laquelle il est possible de s’émanciper
It may seem paradoxical to choose the dramatic genre of tragedy to represent and support the struggles around the decolonization process of the French empire, as it is a symbol of western culture. However, we demonstrate in this thesis the relevance of this combination of a canonical genre with a protest topic. From the study of a diverse corpus of about thirty plays written in French by African, Caribbean, and Malagasy authors in the second half of the 20th century (1942-1992), we identify a theatrical phenomenon that we call "decolonization tragedies". On the one hand, the genre of tragedy allows to create myths, to celebrate precolonial societies and to highlight anti-colonial struggles. On the other hand, this genre allows to display defeats, which enables the indictment of Europe's self-proclaimed civilizing mission, and reveals the violence of the colonial and slavery system from the standpoint of those who suffer it. Moreover, the specific nature of tragedy encourages to examine its impact on gender. Finally, discussing some distortions in the reception of the plays allows us to show that the dramatic genre is being renewed through the affirmation of a destiny that is no longer transcendental, but historical, and from which one can emancipate oneself

Throughout history theatrical performance has been used both as a disseminator of dominant ideology and as a place for revolt. This study will investigate how theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand may play a role in the decolonization of postcolonial peoples. At the core of the dissertation is an engagement with theories of postcolonial and intercultural performance which are tested in a theatre laboratory experiment to see how these theories translate in practical terms to the stage. The work will investigate, through a semiotic analysis, what occurs in the process of rehearsal and direction in transforming the meanings of a text to the stage. The text used for the theatre laboratory experiment is Mervyn Thompson's Songs to the Judges. One aim of the production will be to juxtapose Māori and Pākehā performance forms in a syncretic theatre performance. During the process I will focus on questions such as, "on what terms can a Pākehā woman direct a play with a bicultural cast?" and "what are the (im)possibilities of an equal exchange of knowledge/experience between the Maori and Pākehā participants?" Whilst the performance highlights polarities of them and us, black and white, the aim of the rehearsal process and group dynamic is to move beyond this polarity operating under the philosophy of Barba's concept of 'Third Theatre’, For members of the third theatre, content and form are often less important than a group's socio-cultural philosophy and how that philosophy is realized in its daily work and reflected in its productions (Watson 1993: 21).

Cette thèse de doctorat, s’inscrivant dans le champ des études postcoloniales, s’intéresse à l’émergence du théâtre de l’immigration durant la décennie 1970 dans la continuité de luttes qui marquent l’apparition d’un discours critique sur la colonisation et ses effets. Le théâtre est y utilisé comme une arme de combat, une poursuite de l’activité politique et militante, permettant de démanteler les mécanismes d’aliénation et d’exploitation auxquels sont soumis les immigrés en contexte contemporain. Il est en effet désormais impossible de penser l’immigration sans penser les résultats d’une histoire qui a débuté avec la colonisation. Les indépendances, loin de consacrer une rupture dans les modes de domination établis pendant la colonisation, semblent au contraire en perpétuer certaines pensées et pratiques dans une expression renouvelée : c’est notamment à travers la figure de l’immigré algérien, excroissance à rebours de la colonie française qu’était l’Algérie, que des modes de traitement, d’encadrement et de surveillance de l’immigration, hérités en partie de la période coloniale, perdurent dans la période postcoloniale. Ces mécanismes de domination et d’exploitation des travailleurs immigrés seront violemment dénoncés durant la décennie, qui voit l’apparition à la fois d’une nouvelle subjectivité politique et l’émergence d’un théâtre immigré dont la pratique illustre les théories anglo-saxonnes sur la colonisation et ses conséquences dans le jaillissement de nouvelles formes discursives et esthétiques. Le poids de l’héritage colonial, en particulier celui lié à l’Algérie, permet ainsi de mobiliser les travailleurs autour d’une identité contextuelle et de développer un théâtre qui repose idéologiquement et esthétiquement sur l’examen panoramique d’une réalité qui s’inscrit dans une temporalité et une territorialité complexes, liées au mouvement
This doctoral dissertation, falling in the field of postcolonial studies, investigates the emergence of an immigration theatre during the decade 1970 in the continuation of fights that characterise the development of a critical discourse regarding colonisation and its effects. In this context, theatre is used as a weapon, a prolongation of the political and militant activism, permitting to dismantle the mechanisms of alienation and exploitation to which immigrants are subject in contemporary environment. Indeed, it is now impossible to consider immigration without considering outcomes of a history initiated with colonisation. Independences, far from consecrating a rupture in the modes of domination established during colonisation, instead seem to perpetuate some beliefs and practises in a renewed expression: it is in particular through the Algerian immigrant figure, backward excrescence of the French colony Algeria was, that methods for processing, supervising and monitoring immigration, in part inherited from the colonial era, persist during postcolonial times. These domination and exploitation mechanisms directed toward immigrant workers will be fiercely denounced during the decade, which sees apparition at the same time of a new political subjectivity and the emergence of an immigrant theatre, whose practise illustrates Anglo-Saxon theories on colonisation and its consequences in the burst of new discursive and aesthetical forms. The weight of colonial legacy, particularly the one related to Algeria, therefore allows to mobilise workers around a contextual identity and to develop a theatre ideologically and aesthetically based on the panoramic examination of a reality inscribed in complex temporality and territoriality linked to motion

Thu Hoài Tran untersucht Interventionsformen in die hegemonialen Strukturen und eurozentrische Wissensproduktion von deutschen Stadt- und Staatstheatern. Anhand eines performativ-theatralen Szenarios wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie das Theater zu einem Ort der Desintegration werden kann. Welche Widersprüche werden in diesem Prozess und der Neuordnung des Begehrens sichtbar? Theoretische Ansätze der Affirmativen Sabotage nach Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak und der Desintegration nach Max Czollek werden hierbei herangezogen. Ganz nach Spivak verfolgt Thu Hoài Tran das Anliegen, mit ästhetischen Denk- und Suchbewegungen das Vorstellungsvermögen für eine ethische Intervention zu schulen. Aufgebaut ist der Beitrag wie ein Theaterstück in fünf Akten.

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der Bedeutung von Unterbrechungen im Theater. Unter welchen Bedingungen werden Unterbrechungen politisch? Und was genau verleiht solchen Unterbrechungsgesten eine performative Qualität? Mittels einer Auseinandersetzung mit einer Lecture-Performance des belgischen Performers Chokri Ben Chikha aus dem Jahr 2018, in der er mit einer Geste der Selbstverbrennung die Protokolle der Performance unterbricht, setzt sich der Beitrag mit den politischen Dimensionen der theatralen Unterbrechung auseinander. Louis Althussers Konzept der ideologischen Interpellation ermöglicht es, Unterbrechungen als Mittel von Subjektivierungsprozessen zu interpretieren. Der Beitrag schlägt vor, das Politische im Double Bind ihrer Inszenierung zu suchen.

Das hier abgedruckte Gespräch zwischen Joy Kristin Kalu (als Leiterin des Festivals "Save your Soul" in den Sophiensælen) und Anja Quickert (als Autorin für das Fachmagazin "Theater heute") setzt ein Interview fort, das im Rahmen der Berichterstattung über das Festival begonnen wurde. Kurz zuvor hatte Kalu die Performance der US-amerikanischen Künstlerin Ann Liv Young aufgrund eines Rassismus-Vorfalls abgebrochen. Der Vorgang bot Anlass, das Spannungsfeld zwischen der Autonomie künstlerischer Prozesse im experimentellen Gegenwartstheater einerseits und dessen soziale Relevanz und Verantwortung andererseits auszuloten und zu diskutieren.