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The Alchemical Actor offers an imagination for new and future theatre inspired by the manifesto of Antonin Artaud. The alchemical four elements – earth, water, air and fire and the four alchemical stages – nigredo, albedo, citrino and rubedo serve as initiatory steps towards the performance of transmutational consciousness. The depth psychological work of Carl G. Jung, the theatre techniques of Michael Chekhov and Rudolf Steiner infuse ‘this’ Great Work. Jane Gilmer leads the reader through alchemical imaginations beyond material cognition towards gold-making heart-thinking -
key to new and future theatre.
The Alchemical Actor offers an imagination for new and future theatre inspired by the manifesto of Antonin Artaud. The alchemical four elements – earth, water, air and fire and the four alchemical stages – nigredo, albedo, citrino and rubedo serve as initiatory steps towards the performance of transmutational consciousness. The depth psychological work of Carl G. Jung, the theatre techniques of Michael Chekhov and Rudolf Steiner infuse ‘this’ Great Work. Jane Gilmer leads the reader through alchemical imaginations beyond material cognition towards gold-making heart-thinking -
key to new and future theatre.
Abstract
The chapter presents the history of Theatre 21 (T21), the first professional Polish theatre company of actors with intellectual disability. It examines the way in which T21’s artistic director Justyna Sobczyk has been creating a truly dissensual, political theatre by empowering her actors to speak about their problems in their own voice. Wiktoria Siedlecka-Dorosz focuses in particular on Tisza be-Aw [Tisha B`Aw] (2015). Alluding to the extermination of patients of mental institutions, the performance highlights the remains of eugenic thinking and the mechanisms of social exclusion that are still operative in the contemporary societies. The chapter also discusses T21’s 2018 performance entitled Rewolucja, której nie było [Revolution that Never Took Place], which was devised as a response to the first major sit-in at the Polish parliament staged by people with disabilities, their parents, and carers.
Abstract
Recent critical advances in the field of Word and Music Studies have drawn attention to the role of the reader in the process of “activating” the “Musical Novel”. The score-like qualities of Finnegans Wake are not designed for mere sight-reading, and instead require a literary equivalent of what is referred to as “audiation” in musicology. I suggest here that the Wake demands to be read in a fashion analogous to the way a musician audiates a polyphonic musical score. Performing the Wake’s musical score fragment “silently” within our mind, is a gateway to the manner in which we might read the entirety of the book. This practice can be called “literary audiation”, and it paves an exciting avenue to approach Joyce’s complex text. Here we come at odds with Joyce’s own claim that to understand his texts, we should read them aloud. In fact, reading them aloud requires a sequence of choices, closing down the democratic and multifaceted aspect of Joyce’s texts. Alternatively, the silent world of “inner hearing” does not demand such choices and so is, in fact, the ideal site for the performance of these words. This sort of audiated reading should not be restricted to overtly musical sections; it is a way of experiencing the text in general.
Abstract
The first Chinese college graduate in America, Yung Wing (1828-1912) founded the Chinese Educational Mission (1872-1881) and wrote My Life in China and America (1909), the first Asian American autobiography and narrative of return. Linking Asian American writing to missionary travel narratives and slave narratives, Yung’s autobiography presented him as a global subject, albeit one critical of Western imperialism, the coolie trade in Peru, and the Qing dynasty’s oppression of ordinary Chinese. Yung’s text manages many contradictions, yet is tacitly suffused with racial melancholia, for by his text’s end, he has attained full acceptance in neither China nor America.
Abstract
The chapter focuses on the artistic work of several Polish theatre companies which consist of adults who were clinically diagnosed with low-functioning intellectual disabilities and which created an informal association IM+. It examines selected fragments of interviews with the disabled actors as well as non-disabled therapists and theatre practitioners who collaborate with these ensembles. Placing their analyses in the context of Homi Bhabha’s third space and Mikhail Bakhtin’s borderline, the authors show how the members of the companies venture beyond the narrow medical context of occupational therapy, which is symptomatic of a slow but persistent change that has been taking place in Polish disability culture over the last few decades. The chapter discusses the work of IM+ as a way to establish a third, dissensual space, a borderline in which disability art and disability itself can be renegotiated, and new meanings, identities, and cultural narratives emerge, thus helping reconfigure the Rancierian inegalitarian distribution of the sensible. In this way, it helps destigmatize intellectual disability and conceptualize it as a productive source of creativity rather than a form of deficit.