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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
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Actualizing a Spectator Like You: The Ethics of the Intrusive-Hypothetical
By James FriezeAbstractA stream of performance pieces over the last five years – including The Author (Tim Crouch), Tough time nice time (Ridiculusmus), Beachy Head (Analogue) and Make Better Please (Uninvited Guests) – have addressed the ethics of dramatic narrative via narratives that are presented as possible rather than actual. Mooted, proposed, quoted, imagined, these real yet hypothetical narratives court and assault their audience. Mocking our wish to make a difference while offering no genuine invitation to do so, these works script our failure to intervene. Drawing on Ganaele Langlois’s discussion of online participatory media platforms, and on Zygmunt Bauman’s ethical-existential view of ‘the liquid, modern world’ of digital, cognitive capitalism, I read these works as a distinct mode that I call intrusive-hypothetical performance. It is a mode that poses important ethical questions about the reification of the self in a digital-capitalist economy in which personality must, above all, be readable.
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Precarious Subjects: Ethics of Witnessing and Responsibility in the Plays of debbie tucker green
More LessAbstractThis article considers the complex ethics articulated in the work of black British playwright debbie tucker green. Drawing on Judith Butler, Hans-Thies Lehmann and Kelly Oliver as its key theoretical lenses, the article examines the interface of witnessing, precariousness and responsibility in dirty butterfly (2003), born bad (2003), stoning mary (2005) and random (2008) by paying close attention to the plays’ affective registers. The piece proposes that tucker green’s interrogation of the address-response frame through a double negation of ‘the human’, exposes the limitations of witnessing and responsibility and promotes a politics of affect. The article also makes a case that the positioning of the audience as witnesses to dehumanization and grief operates as an ethical and political trope that opens up the space for mobilizing a collective response-ability vis-à-vis the value of human life.
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Towards an Ethics of Intimate Audience
By Helen IballAbstractAs so-called ‘intimate theatre’ (Gardner 2009) becomes a feature of UK festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe and the focus of the BAC (Battersea Arts Centre, London) One-on-One Festival (2010 and 2011), so relations between audience and performer alter. This shift has raised concerns about the ethics of theatre audience participation. Taking Adrian Howells’s one-to-one performance Footwashing for the Sole (premiered Glasgow 2009, international touring since 2009) as its case study, the article undertakes an ethical review that identifies key benefits and risks of the activity for Howells and his participants. The evidence is drawn from a three-day interdisciplinary research workshop conducted with Howells and student theatre-makers, witnessed by psychologists and applied ethicists (Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds 2010). Using video clips of the two workshop performances of Footwashing for the Sole, which are available to readers via an online archive, the article proposes an ethics of intimate audience that draws upon a key concept from Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) read through Nel Noddings’s care theory (1984). It concludes that, in a dynamic heightened by the ‘particular intimacy’ (Sedgwick 2003) between physical touch and emotion, Howells and his audience-participant bring their ‘ethical selves’ (Noddings 1984 and 2007) to this ‘accelerated friendship/relationship between two initial strangers’ (Howells 2009).
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Reviews
AbstractPlaying with theory in Theatre Practice, Megan Alrutz, Julia Listengarten, M. Van Duyn Wood (eds) (2012) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 303 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-57780-0, pbk, $30.00
A Life of Ethics and Performance, John Matthews and David Torevell (eds) (2011) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 159 pp., ISBN 978-1-4438-2871-0, hbk, £34.99
A Pathognomy of Performance, Simon Bayly (2011) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 246 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-27169-2, hbk, £55.00.
Performing Mixed Reality, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi (2011) Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 296 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-01576-9, hbk, £24.95
Community Theatre and Aids, Ola Johansson (2009) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 179 pp., ISBN 0-2302-0515-1, hbk, £50.00
Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance, Stephanie Leigh Batiste London: Duke University Press, 2011, 326 pp., ISBN 978-0-822-34923-5, pbk, £17.99
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