Cultural-political encounter between performance text and the audiences - Focused on the performance <Camino de Ansan>

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doi:10.15818/ihss.2018.19.3.265

Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness

Ben Jonson Journal ◽

10.3366/bjj.2019.0236 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

Carol Mejia Laperle

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Critical Field ◽

Political Authority ◽

Political Agenda ◽

Affective Experience ◽

Undue Influence ◽

Racial Identities ◽

Racial Impersonation ◽

Blackface Performance ◽

Performance Text

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.

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Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880–1895

10.1093/oso/9780198789260.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Clare L. E. Foster

Keyword(s):

Greek Drama ◽

Social Elite ◽

The Social ◽

New Ideas ◽

Made In ◽

Performance Text

This chapter examines Wilde’s championship of serious theatre and the authentic performance text by analysing his reviews of the first so-called ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek plays and Shakespeare. It offers a wider context in which to understand the rapidity of his disaffection with Greek plays, as practised among the social elite; and it suggests some ways in which his early enthusiasm for authentic Greek drama and Shakespeare is related to his own later classically informed playwriting, which combines old ideas of theatre as about and for its audiences with new ideas of drama as the appreciation of a literary object. Wilde’s own work as a dramatist straddled that change, prefigured by a comment he made in 1885: ‘An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.’ He combines both these directions of gaze in his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

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Text[ure]

APRIA Journal ◽

10.37198/apria.03.02.a15 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 136-142

Author(s):

Korsten ◽

De Jong

Keyword(s):

Middle Position ◽

Participatory Performance ◽

The Relationship ◽

Performance Text

In their 'Performance Paper Text[ure]' Korsten & De Jong build a wall-veil out of the audio of the 'Participatory Performance Text[ure]' and theoretical material (the 'text') from the 'Proposal Text[ure].' The wall-veil refers to Ruskin's famous example of the Matterhorn, which he uses to explain the wall-veil as symbolic of the relationship between massing and texture through interdependence. Korsten & De Jong's wall-veil is a mutable subject-object-complex with quotes from different theoretic fields, different eras and different theorists, in which positions shift continuously. Time is seen as a form of simultaneity in which layers fuse to form meaning. Korsten & De Jong regard this process of simultaneity as a middle position and seek it as an opportunity to question existing paradigms artistically.

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