Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017

This article looks at two sequels to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot: Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives) (1991), originally written in Irish, and Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (2002), written in English. Although Curzon knew nothing about the earlier work of Titley, the article traces numerous stylistic and thematic similarities between the sequels and attempts to explain those similarities by drawing on the concept of carnivalized literature as elucidated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Both works are read as morality plays attacking a contemporary consumerist culture and the article concludes with an argument for Bakhtinian carnival as a particularly apt framework for analysing many other fictional critiques of modern consumerism.

Art historian and critic Claire Bishop and theatre/performance scholar Jen Harvie have each written about a relatively new form of socially engaged participatory performance art that Bishop calls ‘delegated performance’. Delegated performance differs from earlier forms of performance art in that the performance is delegated to other people (hired or volunteer), including (at times) spectators, who enact the piece, rather than the piece being carried out by the artist herself. This set of poetically informed microlectures examines delegated performance in the attempt to glean interdisciplinary understandings about how the delegation of performance happens in drama education and applied theatre. What might those who work and research in these fields consider as issues surrounding the delegating performance? Of what value is this notion in assisting in thinking about practice? Examples of delegated performance are drawn from Bishop and Harvie and additional sources and considered for the ethical questions and provocations they raise. In light of this investigation, drama educators and applied theatre facilitators are recommended to consider how much and in what ways they are delegating performance with students/participants, and to what effect.

Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre, Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte (eds) (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 216 pp., ISBN: 9781137297563, hbk, £66.99

Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others, Emma Willis (2014) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp., ISBN: 9781137322647, hbk, £53.00

Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew, Studies in International Performance Series, Maurya Wickstrom (2012) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp., ISBN: 9780230247215, hbk, £56

Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles (eds) (2013) London: Bloomsbury, 324 pp., ISBN: 9781408184868, pbk, £19.99

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance, Laura Cull (2012) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 302 pp., ISBN: 9780230319523, hbk, £55.00

Theatre & Violence, Lucy Nevitt (2013) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 96pp., ISBN: 9781137302274, pbk, £6:00

Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change, Dani Snyder-Young (2013) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 156 pp., ISBN: 9781137293022, hbk, £50.00

South African Performance and Archives of Memory, Yvette Hutchinson (2013) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 238 pp., ISBN: 9780719083730, hbk, £65.00