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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
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The ethics of embodiment: actor training and habitual vulnerability
More LessStudents of acting and their teachers profoundly form each other and are formed by each other, through their embodied interactions, within the institutional processes of actor training. Yet this embodied formation requires appropriate and sustainable ethical training practices. Such practices are lacking as evidenced by both the potential for and actual accounts of misuse of power by teachers over students in a highly intimate and vulnerable context of learning, exploration and risk-taking. Ethical values of respect, merit and integrity; justice and beneficence need to be considered in discussions and policy development of teaching and learning practices in acting schools. Ethical and sustainable practices built in training will flow through to ethical and sustainable practices in actor employment.
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The sexy maid in Indonesian migrant workers' activist theatre: subalternity, performance and witnessing
By Ming-Yan LaiThe performances of Indonesian domestic workers in protests against the 2005 ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization included improvisatory dramas by an ad hoc theatre group of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union which countered the experiences of servitude and objectification that were common to those workers. This article explores our responsibility as intercultural critics in receiving and interpreting these theatrical performances in terms of witnessing. Drawing on the double meaning of witnessing eyewitness testimony and bearing witness it discusses our responsibility to simultaneously affirm the dramas as testimony to the enactment of an enabling subject position to refigure experiences of objectification, and bear witness to the subaltern silences underlying the articulation. The ethical issues of the intercultural critic as witness are examined in the latter parts of the article.
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A spectatorial dramaturgy, or the spectator enters the (ethical) frame
By John KeefeThis essay attempts to raise certain issues considered as an ethos of spectatorship seeking to place the knowing experience of the spectator in relation to the stage. Six sections characterizing an ethics of recognition, looking, materiality, complicity and empathy, participation and imagination, and attending show how these work together to construct a spectatorial dramaturgy. It is argued that such a dramaturgy is empirical, is an ethical economy of regard rooted in the material and social body in mutual and reciprocal concert; that it rests on the complicit, knowing empathetic imagination located and manifested in the engaged but distanced spect-actor as agent who witnesses the work of the actor in the arena we call theatre. Therefore, this relationship between a presented mise-en-scne and the always-present spectator makes the spectator always active in some way or other. An ethical spectatorial dramaturgy is the work of the actions of spectator(s) within the weave of the theatre event.
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Gender and homosexuality in Takarazuka theatre: Twelfth Night and Epiphany
By Yilin ChenSince it was founded in 1913, the all-female theatre, the Takarazuka Revue, has attracted a largely female audience. The Meiji modernization (18681912) occasioned the appearance of actresses on the Japanese stage, the emergence of a Japanese feminist movement and a disapproval of homosexual practices. These changes contributed to the founding of Takarazuka theatre, and influenced its policies on gender and sexuality. In two Takarazuka productions of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1999), the portrayals of female roles negotiated with the dichotomy of gender stereotypes and affected the display of homoerotic attractions on the stage. Furthermore, the androgynous charms in the performances became a medium to transform homosexual desires into acceptable homoeroticism in the Japanese shjo fashion. The homosexual implication on the stage, therefore, could be pardoned or interpreted as an expression of temporary adolescent confusion about sexuality.
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Close proximity
More LessThe possibility for artistic practice to effectively catalyse and support wellness is a question of some urgency as more than 42 million people are currently living as refugees or internally displaced persons. This article explores resilience, the power of symbolic meaning-making and the scale of influence at the nexus of beauty and home relative to community performance.
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Whose story is it anyway? Exploring ethical dilemmas in performed research
Authors: Vincent White and George BelliveauAs researchers in the field of education continue to expand the use of theatre as a device for inquiry-related purposes, increased attention is being paid to important methodological and ethical implications related to performatively representing and disseminating research findings. This article examines some of these issues within the context of a research project that used theatre to fictionalize the inner voices of educators in an attempt to reveal the multiple perspectives and loyalties that significantly characterize interpersonal dynamics within educational settings. The article begins with a scene from an ethnotheatre play that was designed by the researchers to serve as a site of inquiry that would enable researcher-participants, performers and audience members to performatively explore these inner voices. Who these inner voices belong to and the ethical implications involved in fictionalizing them are issues that are explored in some detail by the authors as these attempt to bring greater clarity to the process of theatricalizing and performing research.
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Reviews
Authors: Bryce Lease, Jennifer Cooke, Kelly Jones, Bryce Lease and Karian SchuitemaThe Applied Theatre Reader, Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston (eds), (2009) Abingdon: Routledge, 380 pp., ISBN 0415428874 (pbk), 19.99
Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence, Mark Pizzato, (2005) SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press, 265 pp., ISBN 9780791462591 (hbk), 64.00
British Pantomime Performance, Millie Taylor, (2007) Bristol: Intellect, 208 pp., ISBN 1841501743 (pbk), 19.95
Sex on Stage: Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Theatre, Andrew Wyllie, (2009) Bristol: Intellect, 160 pp., ISBN 9781841502038 (pbk), 14.95
Lovefuries: The Contracting Sea; The Hanging Judge; Bite or Suck, David Ian Rabey, (2009) Bristol: Intellect Books, 96 pp., ISBN 9781841501840 (pbk), 14.95
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