Dr Nadine Holdsworth

Joan Littlewood’s Theatre
Cambridge University Press, 2011

Joan Littlewood was one of the most visionary and influential theatre directors of the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, detailed performance histories and close attention to wider political and cultural forces, this innovative study offers a fresh examination of Littlewood’s treatment of the politics of war; Renaissance plays; marginalised communities and popular culture in productions such as Oh What a Lovely War, A Taste of Honey and Richard II. It also breaks new ground with a sustained examination of Littlewood’s paratheatrical activity that centred on her ambitious plans for the Fun Palace, a multi-faceted cultural centre, and her numerous playground projects for young people. Alert to critical thinking on ethics, citizenship, cultural democracy, class and space, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre will deepen and extend knowledge and understanding of the innovative theatrical, cultural and community-based practices generated by Littlewood throughout her career.

Theatre & Nation
Palgrave, 2010

Throughout the history of the nation-state, theatre has contributed to the construction and reappraisal of the nation and national identities. This book argues that ideas of the nation are constantly in flux and explores how theatre has a vital role to play in questioning, critiquing and celebrating nations as they evolve in response to different political, economic, social and cultural climates

Art and the City

IB Tauris, 2011

Taking as its cue Henri Lefebvre’s rather cryptic prediction that the future of art would be urban, Art and the City portrays theoretically what may be at stake in the emerging triangulation of art, the city and human beings, concentrating particularly on the way these components have become integrated and mutually contingent. The book goes on to develop approaches to writing about artworks from the point of view of the spectator’s first-hand encounter with them in urban contexts. These instances of ‘relational writing’ attempt to extend the principle of the embodied viewer of artworks to that of the ‘experiencing writer’.

Artworks are seen here as presenting themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor. The examples discussed reveal a plethora of emergent forms, which are concentrated into three key modalities of urban arts practice in the twenty-first century: walking, play and cultural memory. Walking includes the ‘talked walks’ of artists such as Richard Wentworth, the generative street incursions of Francis Alÿs, and the walking spectator at a site-based event, including works by Gustav Metzger, Mark Wallinger and Pawel Althamer. Play embraces popular instances of mass public mobilisation in the form of flash mobs and mobile clubbing, as well as ‘creative interventions’ such as free running, graffiti-writing and video-sniffing, which reveal themselves to be engaged increasingly in a dialogue with the ‘high art’ of artists like Antony Gormley, Mark Quinn and Carsten Höller. Cultural memory is considered via the burgeoning cases of holocaust installations, interrogating two of the best-known – and controversial – European urban sites from the point of view of the physical encounters that they implicitly invite: Peter Eisenman’s memorial in Berlin and Rachel Whiteread’s in Vienna.

Performance and the Contemporary City: an Interdisciplinary Reader

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Marc Augé to Tim Etchells to Cark Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.

Dr Yvette Hutchison

African Theatre: Histories 1850 and 1950.

(Ed.) 2010. Published by James Currey/ Boydell & Brewer Inc.

This collection examines the complexities of documenting theatre in Africa insofar as it tends to focus on oral, embodied performance, as opposed to written text. It suggests that African performers, dramatists and directors have far out-paced chroniclers, critics and historians. Drawing on archived resources that are available, this volume seeks to critical read back the characterised a century of contact, conflict, compromise and creativity, exploring to what extent the archives themselves affect, even skew contemporary understanding of a theatrical period. The findings provide essential background to understanding contemporary developments in African theatre, and draw attention to the importance of documenting performance. It also includes an English translation of Ethiopian playwright Tekle Hawariat’s Comedy of Animals, arguably the first original play to be written and produced on the continent, long thought lost.

Making Theatre in Africa: Reflections and Documents, Contemporary Theatre Review (2011) 21:1.

Yvette Hutchison & Dennis Walder (eds.)

This special issue of CTR explores the significance and potential of contemporary theatre on the African continent. It reflects theatre’s continuing involvement with intercultural activity, and its engagement with new ways of making theatre while exploring issues of memory, identity, the place of women, and the role of new generations of practitioners in challenging issues of the past in relation to the present. The articles also demonstrate that often the theatre-makers are also the critics. This is enriching for new theatre-making because, while encouraging a critical engagement with practice, it creates a very real awareness of the practical aspects that impact on theoretical formulations. These articles open a small window onto some of the ways in which theatre in the African context is alive and adapting to new contexts and challenges, including those of globalisation.

Article:

2010. The “Dark Continent” goes North: an exploration of intercultural theatre practice through Handspring and Sogolon Puppet companies’ The Tall Horse. Theatre Journal (2010) 62, 57–73.

This article explores various issues involved with intercultural theatre collaboration by exploring theory in relation to Tall Horse (2004/5), created by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Malian Sogolon Puppet Company. It traces narrative engagement with cross cultural gaze and representation of an ‘other’ alongside performance aesthetics, process of creating the work and issues of reception

Dr Susan Haedicke

Books

Contemporary European Street Arts: Aesthetics and Politics. Palgrave/Macmillan. Forthcoming 2012.

This book investigates the symbiotic relationship between aesthetics and politics in a range of contemporary street interventions. It looks at performance practices, variously called intervention, infiltration, invisible theatre, social practice, “new genre public art,” or community performance, that insert art into daily life in actual public spaces. It interrogates what interventionist performance does rather than what it is, and it focuses on the public’s aesthetico-political embodied responses that act as a form of social critique.

Chapters in Books

“Beyond Site-Specificity: Ecological Heterocosms on the Street.” Performing Site-Specific Theatre. Edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins. Palgrave/Macmillan. Forthcoming, 2012.

This essay argues that three contemporary street performances—Metis Arts’s, Third Ring Out: Rehearsing the Future; Opéra Pagaï’s, Entreprise de Détournement: Chantier #5: L’Ile de Carhaix-Bretagne; and Motionhouse’s, Cascade—play with extended concepts of site-specificity as they use recognizable public locations associated with everyday activities, not art events, as a way to comment on the proximity of the environmental crisis both spatially and temporally. Thus, the site is simultaneously a geographic location and a more abstract space of environmental discourse.

“Opéra Pagaï’s Entreprise de Détournement: Collages of Geographic, Imaginary and Discursive Spaces.” Theatre and the Politics of Space. Eds. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz. Forthcoming with Routledge New York in “Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance” series. 2012.

This essay argues that the durational street interventions in Opéra Pagaï’s, Entreprise de Détournement work like collages of geographic, imaginary and discursive spaces juxtaposing incongruous images, ideas or logics to construct new interpretations and to insert socio-political issues into the daily life of the local inhabitants.

“Breaking Down the Walls: Interventionist Performance Strategies in French Street Theatre.” Theatre and Performance in Contemporary France. Ed. Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh. Palgrave/Macmillan. 2011.

This essay argues that three performance installations, Jeanne Simone, Le Goudron n’est pas meuble; Le Phun, La Vengeance des Semis; and Ilotopie, Confins, create ‘symbolic sites’ (de Certeau’s term) in which the public experiences familiar locations and daily activities differently. The productions thus offer an alternative social experience based in performativity.

Practice-as-Research Project

Hope is a Wooded Time. Practice-as-research applied performance-gardening project, 2011-14.

This multi-stage international practice-as-research project explores the intersections of the performing arts and biodiversity in neglected woodlands and investigates its use of applied theatre to engage local inhabitants in their preservation. Working with collaborator Sarah Harper, Artistic Director of Friches Théâtre Urbain in Paris, I develop and interrogate pedagogical and artistic practices to educate residents living near wasteland sites about their biodiversity and the low maintenance conservation techniques needed to protect them. For the first stage of the project, Harper has been granted artistic management of a small ‘wooded wasteland’ plot as part of an environmental urban-agriculture initiative launched by the city of Montreuil, France. Early research will evaluate the viability of the Montreuil project as a transferable model for arts projects that collaborate with local inhabitants on conservation of wasteland areas. The project starts in France, but it will expand to abandoned urban wooded sites in the UK, Italy, and Bulgaria.