This book is about watching theatre; and how to utilise a corporeal semiotics to read genres of contemporary theatre. It suggests that three key concepts interact: genre, the formal term that structures theatricality, including the textual grammar of a dramatic work, its performance style, theatrical frame, and mode of rhetorical address; corporeality, an assemblage of the troubling physical work of the actors, the figurative forms in the text, and the ambivalent bodies of the spectators; and performance, the presenting of theatre as symbolic action in the social world. In order to develop new models of embodied spectatorship, these essays examine canonical productions of Medea, King Lear, Miss Julie, Genesi: The Museum of Sleep directed by Deborah Warner, Barrie Kosky, Anne Bogart, and Romeo Castellucci. With close attention to bodies and texts in performance, the book argues that to watch theatre is an intimate, yet political, atunement to processes of human transfiguration. It concludes by offering a reinvigorated perspective on tragedy and tragic experience in the theatre.

Autorentext

The Author: Rachel Fensham is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the University of Surrey and Visiting Research Fellow at Monash University. Her research interests lie in the terrain between cultural aesthetics and politics, particularly in relation to creative processes and their reception. Her publications include works on performance theory, feminist and postcolonial theatre, as well as studies of cultural history and policy. Current research projects include mapping transnational and crosscultural choreographies in Australia and archival research on women as modern dance pioneers in the UK.

Inhalt

Contents: On Genre and Corporeality - The Body Double and Female Tragedy: Medea - Smell-bodies: Tragic Masculinity in a Postcolonial King Lear - Performativity and Desire in the Romance Plot: Miss Julie - The Rhetoric of Organs without Bodies: Genesi: The Museum of Sleep - On Watching Tragedy.