I have never succeeded in becoming completely used to existence, neither to that of the world, nor to that of others, nor above all to my own. I sometimes feel that forms are suddenly emptied of their content, reality is unreal, words are only noises stripped of all meaning. These houses, the sky, are only facades of nothingness; people seem to move automatically, without any reason; everything seems to evaporate, everything is threatened—including myself—by an imminent, silent sinking into I know not what abyss, beyond day and night. By what sorcery can all this still exist? And what does all this mean, this appearance of movement, this appearance of light, these kinds of things, this kind of world? And yet, I am here, surrounded by the halo of creation, unable to grasp the smoke, understanding nothing, disoriented, torn away from I know not what which makes me feel that I have nothing.

Enforced restriction of movement and social distancing regulations during the pandemic pushed a Nigerian-based church with global membership to innovate liveness without co-presence. The church purportedly transcended time-space limits in miracle performances during their Distance Is Not a Barrier digital sessions.

That's typical Pinter dialogue. The form is standard English, but the conversation doesn't get anywhere. Davies can see what Aston is doing, but Aston is careful not to tell Davies any more than what he can see. Sometimes, as in A Slight Ache or The Collection, the whole play is built around non-exchange of information. Pinter's goal in these plays is to mystify us. He does it through a special brand of dramatic irony in which both character and audience are unable to solve basic riddles. The game is called “put on,” and it is Pinter's favorite. Edward is put on by the Matchseller, James is put on by Stella and Bill. Davies is put on by Mick and Aston. Stanley is put on by McCann and Goldberg. None of these victims knows what the others intend for them; nor are they able to find out until it is too late.

In a concert of two sound worlds, one acoustic and the other electroacoustic, it is difficult to balance both sonically. When texts, lights, gestures, and movements from different artistic domains such as theatre, dance, or cinema combine with the music this coexistence creates, the result is a new language: the language of Constança Capdeville.

Winnie is buried up to her waist. Happy Days opens with the terrifying sound of a bell. A moment later the bell rings once again. Winnie wakes up, raises her head, opens her eyes. What does this bell mean? Winnie talks about it often, and throughout the entire first act she waits for it to ring. The bell rings when it is time to get up and when it is time to go to sleep. When I was in the hospital, there was no bell; the nurses woke us up and turned out the lights at night. But there was a bell when I stayed in a nursing home. The bell had a horrifying sound and woke us up every morning. The bell rang also at night, and when it had rung, we were not allowed to have the light on.

The so-called avant-garde theatre in the United States and England is generally a case of new wine in old bottles. The plays of most of the young Anglo-American playwrights do not break new ground. Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, to begin with one of the better known examples, is essentially a realistic psychological melodrama. His Sandbox and The American Dream utilize conventions of the traditional non-realistic theatre. Jack Gelber's The Connection explores a segment of society that has been previously unexplored in the theatre except in terms of melodrama, but the manner of presentation goes back to Pirandello. Jack Richardson brings to The Prodigal a unique intelligence and virtuosity but uses familiar techniques. In England as well, there is vitality within traditional forms. Although John Osborne's observations of the temper of postwar England are vividly realistic, he blazes no new paths of dramaturgy.

Like every other culture in this technologydominated world, Brazilian culture shows the influence of cinema. Film arbitrates life-styles, activates the imagination with its fantasies, and shapes moral life. Yet it is impossible to speak of the cinema in its Brazilian context without referring to North American film, whose influence and aggressiveness distributes North American culture throughout the world so that audiences now expect from all films only those images they are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cinema.

The Brazilian public, which is economically and culturally much closer to the United States than to Europe, has also based its images of life on North. American films. A vicious circle: when most Brazilians make films, they make them “a la Americana,” and it is primarily for this reason that Brazilian spectators try to make any Brazilian film they view into a Brazilian film “a la Americana.”

Many structuralist plays could be made quite directly into structuralist films. The time or durational structures of the live performances could simply be filmed, with or without the filter of changed camera angle and variation of frame size, to make a movie. Even the three-dimensional spatial structures important to most structuralist plays could be represented or “translated” in film. (For example, two alternating and interwoven stories separated spatially on stage could be distinguished in a film by using different color filters for each; spatial progressions could be translated into color progressions; etc.) Yet it would be impossible to make most structuralist films into live performances. Structuralist films tend to exploit the high degree of mechanical control inherent in the medium, a control that is not possible in live performance. Thus an analysis of selected films that may be called structuralist should tell us something about the media of film and theatre and about structuralism itself.

Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin’s musical reimagination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, sidelines the issue of white supremacy in its explorations of economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and collective action.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

Drawing on pre-Christian Assyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Sufi, Tibetan, and Persian elements at the time of the Russian Revolution, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff attempted to create a school of thought that would coordinate and expand Western man's anatomic and intellectual centers of energy Into newly dynamic forms. Certain physical and mental activities, Gurdjieff believed, could bring about a total alteration of consciousness. For over sixty years his philosophy has found adherents among the intelligentsia of the Russian, French, and English-speaking world. Directors, choreographers, musicians, designers, painters, writers, and psychologists like Nikolai Evreinov, Sergei Diaghilev, Thomas de Hartmann, Alexander and Jeanne Salzmann, Louis Jouvet, Felix Labisse, J.B. Priestley, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Peter Brook have all sought artistic inspiration in the esoteric teachings of the Russian-born mystic.

Nowhere but in France, it seems, do men of letters whose greatest talent clearly lies in other genres devote so much of their creative energy to the theatre. The Golden Age of Corneille and Racine, kept alive by an ever-growing number of French repertory companies, stands constantly before the writer, challenging him to try to rival its inaccessible perfection. An amazing number, from Balzac and Stendhal to Mauriac and Gide, have taken up the challenge. Even such transients in Paris as Turgenev and Henry James were affected by France's worship of the theatre as the supreme art and tried vainly to convince the public, and posterity, that they had mastered the dramatic form. Albert Camus’ passion for the theatre was lifelong, from his participation in the Algerian Workers’ Theatre in 1936 to his tragically short reign as director of a government sponsored avant-garde company in 1959.

In my attempts to arrive at a basic form for the musical theatre, I noticed several things which at first seemed to me to constitute entirely new insights but which after a closer look were revealed as but logical parts of the whole historical situation. While working on my own compositions, I constantly forced myself to answer the question: What occasions for music does the theatre offer? But as soon as I looked back at the operas written by myself and others, another question arose: What is the nature of music which is found in the theatre, and does such music have definite characteristics which label it music of the theatre? After all it has often been stated that a number of important composers have either never paid any attention to the stage or that they have tried in vain to conquer the stage.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview attempts to implicate white audience members in spectating Black life in order to make room for audiences of color to imagine a story built outside narratives of overcoming. Yet Fairview expects and operates under the assumption that there is a white audience to respond to the work, and leaves audience members of color exposed once more to the white gaze.