Production Complexity of the Iranian Performing Arts

Theater is referred to as a cultural product which plays a major part in the cultural paradigm of civilized societies. Public theater is a type of performing arts in which the production receives financial support from the government. Therefore, the public theater production follows a complex trend controlled by a particular socio-economic system. The aims of this study are to identify interactions among financial and economic factors in the Iranian public theater and to find the possible threats and suggest effective policies in order to improve the position of the Iranian theater. For this purpose, the authors use system dynamics methodology to build a model that can explain or mimic the system. They present their analysis in accordance with principles of microeconomics. The analysis is conducted in three acts, namely production, distribution, and consumption. Findings reveal that the position of the Iranian public theater is undesired due to accumulated workforce, lack of distribution networks, and underconsumption. Finally, policies are suggested to overcome the shortcomings.

“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: (Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy and Bess

This essay reexamines the legendary opera-musical Porgy and Bess by first tending to its origins in the dual phenomenon of early 1920s racialized sonic experimentation and the Southern literary conceits of DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925 novel Porgy on which the theater production was based. It traces the ways in which Heyward and George Gershwin's undertheorized fascination with “the vice of Black womanhood” effectively shaped the form and the content of a work often referred to as “America's most famous opera,” and it ultimately considers the ways that Black women artists navigated, complicated, and transformed the charged aesthetics of a Porgy and Bess. Their performance labor ultimately subverts an archetype whose novel roots threatened to circumscribe their representational and artistic possibility.

Beauvoir/Iribarren/Dodera

María Dodera’s theater production Simone, mujer partida (2017) builds on current movements against gender violence in Latin America. Actor Gabriela Iribarren’s portrayal of Dodera’s Beauvoir suggests we view her via a process of interaction between internal and external dialogic selves as she seeks subjectivity—a dynamic Iribarren makes evident through the juxtaposition of ephemeral live performance and the (re)presentation of Beauvoir’s life history. Her monologue is thus not univocal, but layered with multiple voices from the past and present.

Toward a Total Work of Art

Chapter 9 begins with the idea of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and considers examples of odors in theater from the Renaissance to the present, arguing that the inclusion of odors in some types of theater production is appropriate. In the case of film, the chapter discusses the difficulties faced by the first serious attempts in the 1950s and the handful of recent efforts, arguing that the combination of images with sound is able to suggests odors, whereas actual odors are likely to create more puzzles than they are worth, except in the case of highly experimental “art house” films. In the case of music, the chapter focuses on Green Aria: A Scent Opera, presented at the Guggenheim in 2009, a work that combined narrative, odors, and an electronic music score and marked a decisive step toward the successful integration of actual smells with music and narrative.

Zlatko Paković's Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience as an Embodied Text: The Impact of Different Types of Spaciality on Semioticity of a Performance

This paper deals with the corporeality of a performance and its place in the process of the emergence of meaning, following a case study of a Serbian theatrical piece Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience. Performance is constituted by bodies brought together by a certain purpose and temporal and spatial coordinates, and it is more and more often now decoded by the feedback loop performers and participants form in specific kinds of spatiality. Artistic corporeality defies objectivization, therefore the relational aesthetics is needed instead of an idealistic one to investigate the materiality of these performances. Using this theoretical framework, the analysis of the two different performances of the same dramatic text from the recent Serbian political theater production will tend to examine the nature of political potential of bodily co-presence in artistically and socially different environments and its implications for the semioticity of the given embodied text. Article received: April 5 2019; Article accepted: June 10, 2019; Published online: September 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Milovanović, Marija. "Zlatko Pakovicćs Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience as an Embodied Text: The Impact of Different Types of Spaciality on Semioticity of a Performance." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 19 (2019): 127-138. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i19.317

The Concept of NEO Theater Performances: Appreciation for Acting

This research investigates NEO Theatre (NT) by using historical approach. Ithas several significances; i.e. firstly, NT is one of modern theater groups thatinfluences modern theater development in Bandung; secondly, though it is stillrelatively new, the creativity of NT cannot be separated from the history ofFathul A. Husein’s creativity development as its director. By applying methodof history through several stages from heuristics, critics, interpretation, tohistoriography; NT’s creativity pattern can be constructed; it is in accordancewith the aim of this research, to achieve the historical illustration of NT’screativity pattern in realizing the prototype of theater performance entitledTritik Segaris Putih. Fathul A. Husein, as the NT leader, was one of the foundersof theater Actors Unlimited (AUL) established in mid 1990s. Having it ended,Fathul A. Husein, who acted more as a director, founded NT on 18 April 2012.Based on the works Fathul directed since his time in AUL, the creative processof NT shows similar creativity with the Studiklub Theater Bandung (STB). Animportant fact to support this statement is that as a modern theater observerand critic, Fathul had ever joined in some productions of STB during the timeof Suyatna Anirun (RIP) before he decided to join in the founding of AUL. Thus,it can be said that the model of STB theater creativity pattern is also reflectedon the creativity pattern of NT in each of its theater production.Keywords: theater history; theater production; NEO Theater

A challenge to American pragmatism: staging O’Neill’s Hughie by Alexa Visarion

“Hughie or the Tale of a Memory” is the working title of the first play that the experienced artist Alexa Visarion has directed for the independent theater (a production released in 2017). The purpose of my paper, which is an investigation of several drama reviews that discuss the play’s first night, is to prove that – despite difficulties with cultural reception and public taste (given a text by O’Neill that is 80 years old, as well as the director’s first time with an informal theater production) - this performance was a succesful attempt at communicating and debating the conflicted values of American pragmatism and equally a crowning of the Romanian director’s effort to stage O’Neill’s plays in our country. Relying on insights from the American doctrine of Pragmatism, I will try to show how O’Neill’s text challenges philosophical premises that are inbred in the American status-quo, thereby making his plays “anti-materialistic” by promoting a fatalistic approach to existence.

anecdotal

A poem based on an encounter with an audience member by the author following a prison theater production that the author was in as a mentor actor working alongside male inmates. The poem was presented as part of a panel on Applied Theater and Change—that is, how are we to know that change has occurred as a result of an applied theater experience or performance—at the triennial International Drama in Education Research Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand in July of 2018.

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.

This chapter explores Volcano Theatre Company’s radical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets through their award-winning physical theater production, L.O.V.E. (1992). Drawing on literary analysis and sociological readings, the chapter considers current and historical perspectives on what many consider to be Shakespeare’s most intimate work, and notably the implications of the poetry’s homoerotic focus. The chapter then explores Volcano’s adaptation of this nontheatrical work into narratively driven performance material, focusing on analysis of the company’s choreographic and aesthetic responses to the textual stimulus. The author’s decade-long experience of performing in L.O.V.E. is augmented through interviews with key members of the production’s original cast and creative collaborators. Finally, the chapter reflects on the critical impact of L.O.V.E. through analysis of its cultural and political reception both in the United Kingdom and internationally.