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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
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Ethical stress and performing real people
More LessThis article argues that actors playing real people find themselves subject to specific forms of ethical stress that they do not suffer from when playing fictional characters. It investigates particular aspects of ethical stress and examines what individual actors might mean by their common claim to feel a greater ‘responsibility’ when playing a real person. Ethical quandaries and anxieties lead actors to modify their usual approaches and their experience is often one of imaginative and emotional containment. This article also exposes the difficulty actors face in articulating their ethical dilemmas because of assumptions about their subordinate role in the production hierarchy. Lastly, this article makes a plea for ethics to be incorporated into actor-training courses and for acting theory to be revisited in respect of ethics.
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Dys-appearance and compassion: The body, pain and ethical enactments in Mike Parr’s Close the Concentration Camps (2002)
By Rand HazouOn 15 June 2002, Australian performance artist Mike Parr staged a performance entitled Close the Concentration Camps at the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne. The work focused on the acts of self-harm that detained asylum seekers were engaging in while being segregated in detention centres in isolated parts of the country. For Parr the performance was an expression of solidarity and empathy with the detainees. In the resulting performance, he had his lips sewn shut and had the word ‘Alien’ branded into his thigh with a hot iron. This article draws on the phenomenology of pain as outlined by Drew Leder to discuss the deployment of pain in performance. Applying the notion of ‘dys-appearance’, the article discusses how the temporal characteristics of pain can lay the foundations for an ethical audience engagement by encouraging spectators to acknowledge that they share the same space and time as the bleeding and suffering body that they see before them. The article considers this ethical response in relation to the notion of ‘compassion’. Pointing to the etymological meaning of compassion as ‘suffering with’, I argue that the performance engages the painful body’s capacity to elicit an affective and visceral response in order to encourage audiences to feel with the suffering body they see before them. Moreover, this affective response can be seen as a prelude to political intervention on behalf of asylum seekers incarcerated in detention centres.
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A ‘Political Suspension of the Ethical’: To Be Straight With You (2007) and An Evening with Psychosis (2009)
By Liz TomlinThis article explores the tension between the ‘political’ and ‘ethical’ dimensions of contemporary verbatim practice, through an application of Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the universal symptom to two productions – DV8’s To Be Straight With You (2007) and Point Blank’s An Evening with Psychosis (2009). The article looks in particular at the treatment of transcripts from interviewees who offer testimonies in support of the institutional discourses that are the target of each production’s ideological critique. By drawing on Žižek’s understanding of ethical codes that are never ‘universal’, but always constituted in relations of power, the article argues that the satirical and Brechtian treatment of certain verbatim testimonies through their theatrical framing and style of presentation constitutes a justifiable ‘political suspension of the ethical’ in each instance.
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REVIEWS
Authors: Ben Poore, Emer O’Toole, Tom Maguire, Bryce Lease, Ben Poore and Lindsay JenkinsEMBODYING AMERICAN SLAVERY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, LISA WOOLFORK, (2009) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 248 pp., ISBN 978-0-252-03390-2, hbk, $40 SLAVERY AND SENTIMENT ON THE AMERICAN STAGE, 1787–1861: LIFTING THE VEIL OF BLACK, HEATHER S. NATHANS, (2009) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 275 pp., ISBN 978-0-521-87011-5, hbk, £50 REPRESENTATION AND CONTESTATION: CULTURAL POLITICS IN A POLITICAL CENTURY, CHING-YU LIN AND JOHN McSWEENEY (EDS), (2010) Vol. 73, Critical Issues Series, New York: Rodopi, 255 pp., ISBN 978-90-420-3149-4, pbk, £48 APPLIED THEATRE: INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDIES AND CHALLENGES FOR PRACTICE, MONICA PRENDERGAST AND JULIANA SAXTON, (2009) Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 224 pp., ISBN 978-1-84150-281-6, pbk, £19.95 CLOSER: PERFORMANCE, TECHNOLOGIES, PHENOMENOLOGY, SUSAN KOZEL, (2008) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 355 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-11310-6, hbk, £25.95 BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: THE CRISIS IN BRITAIN’S REGIONAL THEATRES, OLIVIA TURNBULL, (2008) Bristol: Intellect, 192 pp., ISBN 978-1-84150-208-3, pbk, £19.95, $40 RUSSIA, FREAKS AND FOREIGNERS: THREE PERFORMANCE TEXTS, JAMES MACDONALD, (2008) Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 219 pp., ISBN 978-1-84150-186-4, pbk, £14.95
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