Ian Watson

Naming the Frame: the Role of the Pre-Interpretive in Theatrical Reception

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production of Death and the Maiden , Harold Pinters London production of Circe and Bravo , and an instance of Augusto Boals ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.

Catharsis and the Actor

‘Catharsis’ remains one of the several concepts employed by Aristotle in the Poetics whose precise meaning and implications have tantalized critics over the centuries. But all too often ‘catharsis’ has largely been discussed as a process which occurs to the audience of a tragedy: in this article, Ian Watson looks instead at the different forms it may take (and the differences in underlying intentions) so far as performers are concerned. He relates his ideas to forms of dramatic experience as discrete as psychodrama, and to schools of acting from Stanislavski to Grotowski.

Practical Aesthetics and the Formation of the Atlantic Theater Company

The Atlantic Theater Company has been one of Off-Broadways most successful theatre companies over the past twenty years, having won twelve Tony Awards, eight Lucille Lortel Awards, thirteen Obie Awards, and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. The company, originally founded in 1983 by the playwright David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy, has mounted over one hundred plays, many by new writers. Included among its successes are Martin McDonaghs The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Beauty Queen of Leenane , Woody Allens A Second Hand Memory and Writers Block , the revival of David Mamets American Buffalo, Celebration and The Room by Harold Pinter, Mojo and Night Heron by Jez Butterworth, and the new musical adaptation of Frank Wedekinds play Spring Awakening , which won the 2007 Tony for best new musical. But producing plays is only part of Atlantics mission: it also runs the Atlantic Acting School, which operates both as a private conservatoire and an undergraduate training studio in conjunction with New York University. Its curriculum focuses on Practical Aesthetics, the acting technique developed by Mamet and Macy. Mary McCann, in conversation here with NTQ Contributing Editor Ian Watson, is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company and Director of the Atlantic Acting School, where she also teaches. She continues to act, having appeared in many of the companys productions, on Broadway, on television, and in several independent films. The conversation took place over two meetings at the Atlantic Acting School in New York City, on 25 April and 5 June 2007.

Ways of Understanding the Culture: Re-examining the Performance Paradigm

The tendency for ‘performance studies’ to embrace and even supplant ‘theatre studies’ can usefully enlarge our perceptions of the relevance of theatricality to other disciplines and activities – but fully extended into the ‘performativities’ of everyday life can be counterproductive when definitions are so loose as to be redundant. Here, Ian Watson considers the boundary-crossing qualities of two variants on the ‘performance paradigm’ – Eugenio Barbas bridge-building concept of ‘Barter Theatre’ and Augusto Boals deliberately provocative ‘Invisible Theatre’. He proceeds to relate the characteristics identified to an event no less clearly staged, though less often discussed as such: the set-piece political speech, in this case President Clintons acceptance of his renomination as Democratic candidate at his partys Chicago convention in 1996. Ian Watson is an Advisory Editor of NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey. The last of his several contributions to the journal was his report on the Ninth International Gathering of Group Theatre in Ayacucho, Peru, in NTQ58 (May 1999).

Eugenio Barba: the Latin American Connection

The theoretical writings of Eugenio Barba on the nature and disciplines of acting have been a feature of NTQ since its first issue. These writings emerge, of course, from Barbas work with Odin Teatret, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary from its base in Holstebro, Denmark – and also from his formative association with ISTA. the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Accordingly, when a leading authority recently described Barba, along with Brecht and Grotowski, as one of the three major European influences on contemporary Latin American theatre, he was paying tribute to active participation and cross-fertilization, rather than to textbook discipleship. In the following article, Ian Watson, whose study of ‘Catharsis and the Actor’ appeared in NTQ 16 (1988), looks in detail at the nature and the consequences of Barbas ‘Latin American connection’.