Theatricality and the Arts
Film, Theatre, Art
Edited by Andrew Quick, Richard Rushton
This is the first book collection to consider the notion of theatricality across a range of fields (art, film, theatre, multimedia, photography, music). The collection engages with a wide range of case studies, examples of which include:
- theatre productions by Forced Entertainment, Daniel Kitson, She Pop, and Agnieszka Piotrowska
- art works by Rembrandt, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, and others
- internet works of art by Trecartin and Fitch, Hannah McPherson, as well as examples of ‘live’ networked art productions
- films by Peter Greenaway, Spike Lee and Pedro Almodóvar
- philosophical approaches to theatricality drawing on works by Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida
Theatricality and the Arts presents a series of investigations of the notion of ‘theatricality’. Primarily, theatricality concerns that which pertains to theatre, but the term has always carried with it the potentially pejorative associations of exaggeration and fakery. The essays here question and contest such associations.
The book is divided into four sections which together provide a comprehensive interrogation of theatricality. The four sections begin with multimedia, where theatricality is examined in relation to mixed modes of media (internet art, painting, performance and digital display). A second section takes a philosophical approach to questions of theatricality. A third section looks at art, broadly speaking, but also at the historical contexts of art, photography and other media (literature, film, music). A final section features reflections on theatre and cinema, often in conjunction.
Considered as a whole, the collection contributes to debates on theatricality in various fields, while also enabling a cross-examination of approaches to the topic.
Introduction - Andrew Quick and Richard Rushton
Part 1: Multimedia
Chapter 1. Staging Night Watch. Theatricality and Scenes of Crime in Peter Greenaway’s Screen Adaption of Rembrandt’s Painting’ - Kati Röttger
Chapter 2. Theatricalizing Absorption and Networked Hyper-Theatricality - Lisa Åkervall
Chapter 3. Theatricality and Dissonance: Frictions in Contemporary Networked Performance Practices - Jane Frances Dunlop
Chapter 4. Metatheatricality, Hypermediacy and Theatricality in the Making of Never Swim Alone - Lowell Gasoi
Part 2: Philosophy
Chapter 5. Display in Human Art and the Aesthetic Lives of Animals: A Rationalist Critique of Evolutionary Aesthetics - Mathew Abbott
Chapter 6. Against Experience: Theatre is Not Life (Or Theatre in the Age of Third Nature) - Simon Jones
Chapter 7. Theatre Against Itself: Performance, Politics and the Limits of Theatricality - Adrian Kear
Part 3: Art/Theatre/Photography/Sound
Chapter 8. Between Lies and Truth Lies the Truth: Staged Mythologies in Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable - Paula Blair
Chapter 9. Owning the (Female) Experience: Theatricality, Writing and Translation in Literature, Theatre and Cinema -Agneszkia Piotrowska
Chapter 10. Performance, Photography, Theatricality and Citationality: Theatricality as a Mode of Performing Citation in the Still Photographic Image - Allan S. Taylor
Chapter 11. Music, Miles Davis and Theatricality - Nicholas Gebhardt and Richard Rushton
Part 4: Theatre and Cinema
Chapter 12. Metaphoric Theatricality: Theatricality as a Weapon of Resistance: The Production of Our Grand Circus in 1973 Greece - Michaela Antoniou
Chapter 13. Theatricalising Sci-fi: Theatre and the Multiverse in Mouse: The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought (Daniel Kitson, 2016) and Constellations (Nick Payne, 2012) - Anna Wilson
Chapter 14. The Interconnectedness between Melodrama and Theatricality in Pedro Almódovar’s The Skin I live in (2011) and Nelson Rodrigues’ Woman without Sin (1941) - Isadora Grevan
Chapter 15. Popular Theatricality in Spike Lee - Angelos Koutsourakis
Bibliography
Index
In keeping with their previous work – both academic and artistic – Quick and Rushton have drawn together a timely and provocative collection on theatricality. One that with finesse, elegance and transparency draws attention both to the complexity of theatricality as its well to as its contemporary resonances in different media and genres. The collection signals a welcome shift back to the aesthetic, which, of course, is something that is rooted in the very construction of the social, as indeed all the diverse contributions in the collection are keen to stress. I highly recommend it to anyone working in the cultural field who is interested in how representation works and what it can do.
