On Chinese Acting

Brecht, Bertolt; Bentley, Eric

doi:10.2307/1125011

Cited by 48 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Superficially at least this form of noisiness resembles Brecht's alienation effect (Brecht 1961), and as such might encourage us to align Broomfield's direct cinema with Western theatre's long tradition of disrupting the fourth wall of naturalistic illusion in order to 'reach out' to the spectator. Rancière, however, has alerted us to a danger in this strategy for reading of the noise in Ghosts when he points out that the idea of the need to disrupt the fourth wall is modelled on an idea of the spectator as a passive consumer of a spectacle produced on his or her behalf (Rancière 2009a).…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 96%

Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

Martin

2019

Crossings: Journal of Migration &Amp; Culture

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This article explores the various ways in which noise acts as an aesthetic marker of precarity in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a documentary account of the death of 23 undocumented Chinese nationals in the United Kingdom in 2004. Taking its cue from recent work on aesthetics and the temporalities of precarity, it considers the ways in which the different forms of noise ‐ medial and informational ‐ index the ways in which the figure of the undocumented migrant labourer disturbs dominant western accounts of the aesthetic predicated on a division between production and consumption. Noise, in the form of Michel Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite, it argues, registers the ways in which precarious labour has revealed the dependence of aesthetic categories on models of production rendered incoherent by the representation of undocumented migrant labour.

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Section: IImentioning

confidence: 96%

Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

Martin

2019

Crossings: Journal of Migration &Amp; Culture

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“…Stages that reveal their social production alienate the relationships between actors and audiences. To achieve this, Brecht (1957Brecht ( , 1961 famously removed traditional spatial divisions between audiences and actors such as the curtain at the back of a stage and the fourth wall at the front. He would expose support staff and infrastructures to the audience to reveal the social practices needed to produce a performance.…”

Section: Staging and Performancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So, inspired by new-materialism, the article develops a materialist organizational dramaturgy through the thinking of Bertolt Brecht (1948Brecht ( , 1950aBrecht ( , 1950bBrecht ( , 1957Brecht ( , 1961. He emphasized that a stage can harness the acting capacity of humans and non-humans to produce improvizational performances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ethnographic study of organizational performances in business services: Space, staging and materiality

Cluley

2022

Human Relations

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It is said that all the world is a stage. But how do organizations physically stage performances, such as pitching for new business, presenting reports and entertaining clients? Drawing on a 14 month-long ethnographic study at a Fortune 500 strategic research company, this paper explains how. Emphasizing the active role of human and non-human actors, it uncovers three staging practices that an organization can use to transform a space into a stage. Organizations theme stages by populating them with certain objects. They produce a style of performance by arranging relationships between performers and audiences. Finally, they order movements from one stage to others so that plots emerge. Theorizing these staging practices through a materialist dramaturgy, the paper challenges existing organizational theory. It tends to focus on the ways organizations control and script performances. The paper shows that organizational performances in service and knowledge organizations can be improvisational. They are not preordained but they are organized.

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“…The tracing of Littlewood's and Mnouchkine's training processes draws on scripts and archival material, notes from rehearsal, interviews, relevant scholarship, and actors' testimonies. The methodology capitalises on how Bertolt Brecht's observations of the Chinese opera actor (Brecht and Bentley 1961) mobilised training processes for creating gestus, which are described as 'actions that are both themselves and emblematic of larger social practices' (Martin and Bial 2000, 5). As actor training for devised theatre in the West draws heavily on commedia dell' arte and clowning (Evans 2006, 117) and contemporary clown practice has adopted character and narrative building devices from commedia, this article illuminates how clown-driven devising can decolonise and decentre actor training.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine against the canon: developing the actors’ social representations through clowning

Stamatiou¹

2022

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training

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The investigation of how Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine used clowning to develop actors with social purposes responds to the current interest in the neglected counterhegemonic training processes of women. It also contributes to current efforts to decolonise and decentre actor training. Using Theatre Workshop's Oh What A Lovely War (1963) and Théâtre du Soleil's Les Clowns (1969) as exemplars, this article traces how Littlewood and Mnouchkine trained actors on clowning to theatricalise social struggles and develop their social representations. Through ensemble improvisations that exploited clown devices such as the master-servant, clown logic, object misuse, misfitness, and the flop the actors tackled their biases in two stages: the serious/comedic dissonance alienated the actor to critically explore social gests, and the process of finding the appropriate social representations during group improvisations. Contemporary actor training that wishes to invite students to explore how their body, voice and imagination in performance can resist dominant ideologies and historical stereotypes might proliferate from the use of clowning to create social representations. The tracing of Mnouchkine's and Littlewood's clown training processes through the deconstruction of their key works, can inspire and offer insights to pedagogues who wish to decolonise and decentre their processes.

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On Chinese Acting

Cited by 48 publications

References 0 publications

Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

An ethnographic study of organizational performances in business services: Space, staging and materiality

Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine against the canon: developing the actors’ social representations through clowning

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