Janelle Reinelt

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights

Notes on contributors Chronology 1. A century in view: from suffrage to the 1990s Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt 2. Women playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s Maggie B. Gale 3. New plays and womens voices in the 1950s Susan Bennett 4. Women playwrights and the challenge of feminism in the 1970s Michelene Wandor 5. The politics of location Susan Bassnett 6. Contemporary Welsh women playwrights Anna-Marie Taylor 7. Contemporary Scottish women playwrights Adrienne Scullion 8. Women playwrights in Northern Ireland Mary Trotter 9. Language and identity in Timberlake Wertenbakers plays Susan Carlson 10. Pam Gems: body politics and biography Elaine Aston 11. Caryl Churchill and the politics of style Janelle Reinelt 12. Violence, abuse and gender relations in the plays by Sarah Daniels Gabriele Griffin 13. Small island people: black British women playwrights Meenakshi Ponnuswami 14. Writing outside the mainstream Claire MacDonald 15. Lesbian performance Sue-Ellen Case.

Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama

Bertolt Brechts theory and practice have had a strong influence on the British theatre, dating from the first visit of the Berliner Ensemble in 1956 and the English publication in 1964 of John Willetts compilation of the theoretical writings, Brecht On Theatre. Political theatre practice in England had benefited from the socialist movement as well as the impact of the Beveridge Report on the arts. Following Beveridges mandated university grants, educated working-class men and women had found their theatrical voices in playwrights such as Shelagh Delaney, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker. The continuing search for a political form and technique led to Brecht who, in shaping a dramaturgy specifically suited to social critique, provided a path beyond social realism to the epic theatre. Brechtian techniques provided a methodology for embedding a materialist critique within the theatrical medium. Political theatre requires the ability to isolate and manifest certain ideas and relationships that make ideology visible, in contrast with the styles of realism and naturalism, wherein ideology is hidden or covert. Brechts theorization of the social gest, epic structure, and alienation effect provides the means to reveal material relations as the basis of social reality, to foreground and examine ideologically-determined beliefs and unconscious habitual perceptions, and to make visible those signs inscribed on the body which distinguish social behavior in relation to class, gender, and history. For feminists, Brechtian techniques offer a way to examine the material conditions of gender behavior (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class.

Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2

Comment Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2 Janelle Reinelt As Jon McKenzie’s TDR Comment, “Is Performance Studies Imperialist?” [50:4 (192) Winter 2006], went to press, I was preparing a keynote on a similar topic for “Performance Studies and Beyond,” a symposium held at the Grotowski Center in Wroclaw (December 2006) on the occasion of the translation into Polish of Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002). The original title of my piece is “Toward International Performance Literacies.” [Ed. note: Richard Schechner’s response, along with reactions from Eugenio Barba, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Kusuhara Tomoko, William Huizhu Sun, Takahashi Yuichiro, and Diana Taylor will appear in the next issue.] What is needed educationally is not to learn that we are citizens of the world, but that we occupy particular niches in an unequal world. —Immanuel Wallerstein (1996:124) Asked to envision a future for performance studies in the new millennium, I respond that both theatre and performance studies must ultimately find a way to truly internationalize our research and our postgraduate education, tasks that I predict will not be easy, and some aspects of which will require a certain form of sacrifice. I’ll ask three questions: What would it take to develop international performance literacies? What does performance studies, as it is currently constituted, bring to the table as both assets and liabilities? What might constitute some concrete strategies for immediate uptake? The concept of “international performance literacies,” which I am arguing should be our goal, requires some unpacking. Literacy has been traditionally understood as the ability to read and write, in other words, to communicate through print culture. A larger view might see literacy as the ability to use language—to read, to write, to listen, and to speak. I intend something larger yet, building on what Patrice Pavis in 1982 called “Languages of the Stage” recognizing that visual images and embodied practices, cultural memories and momentary localized fads all constitute the languages of sociality, the communicative pathways of contact and comprehension in the theatre itself and in all of cultural production. In Performance Studies: An Introduction, Richard Schechner calls attention to “an explosion of multiple literacies. People are increasingly ‘body literate,’ ‘aurally literate,’ ‘visually literate,’ and so on. [. . .] These multiple literacies are ‘performatives’” (2002:4). I’ve deliberately chosen the word “international” when I might have chosen “global” or “transnational” instead. There are several ways to negotiate this terminological terrain, but I propose here a certain politics for performance scholars in which “globalization” connotes the economic advance of transnational capital as an integrative mechanism that constitutes a Comment Janelle Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Formerly, she was Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and President of the International Federation for Theatre Research from 2003 through 2007. She is a former Editor of Theatre Journal, and serves on the advisory board of theatre journals in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. With Brian Singleton of Trinity College, Dublin, she edits a book series for Palgrave/Macmillan entitled “Studies in International Performance.” She has published widely on contemporary British theatre, feminist theatre, and the politics of performance. Her current project is a book with Gerald Hewitt on the politics and dramaturgy of David Edgar. TDR: The Drama Review 51:3 (T195) Fall 2007. ©2007 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 8 Comment significant problematic, something to be understood and often struggled against; while “transnational” indicates movements across national borders and bears traces of those scholars who think the nation state is an anachronism. Believing that the nation continues to play a central role in both globalization and movements of transnational capital, goods, and information, I prefer the older, even old-fashioned term “international,” understanding international to mean pursuing interconnections and cooperation across cultural and national lines, fostering comparativist research, developing cosmopolitan methodologies and perspectives with regard to our national and local scholarship, and seeking to understand and critique the complex and ever-shifting global context within which we live and work. This word, “international,” poses its own difficulties, as I am well aware. Not only is the meaning of...

Toward a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events: In the Case of Stephen Lawrence

Looking at the murder case of Stephen Lawrence, and then at the art object made out of the eventthe documentary play, The Colour of Justicethe interpenetration of performance codes and practices with real life demonstrates the explanatory power of performance to shape ideas, question truth claims, sway public opinion, and construct an aesthetics that might functions as an epistemology.

Approaching the Sixties: Between Nostalgia and Critique

This essay addresses theatre scholars who self-identify as baby boomers or, more precisely, those who link the years of their youth to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, those who, in the vernacular of that time, were participants in or influenced by “the Movement.” Of course, the singular “Movement” was really a number of different movements or forms of activism, public performance, and revolutionary effort. The unselfconscious use of singular terms like “Movement” was one of the defining conundrums of the period itself, but I do not want to begin with a never-ending series of qualifications indicating I have passed beyond the thinking of those years. I prefer, rather, to start with a basic affirmation of participation in the rhetoric as well as the struggles of that time. Although my discussion addresses a limited age cohort within the field of theatre and performance studies, I am ultimately suggesting that scholarly, pedagogical, or even performative projects based upon a period that one has lived through need, at some level, to incorporate openly and consciously a critical self-reflection based on that experience.

Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age

Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 6 ( 2 ) , p p . 1 6 2 7

The Limits of Censorship

The rhetoric of censorship is increasingly invoked in the West in response to the curtailment of civil liberties, often as a result of new repressive legislation arising from efforts to fight terrorism. However, while agreeing that serious issues concerning censorship are arising for artists with more frequency, this essay argues that caution needs to be exercised concerning the charge of ‘censorship’, and that theatre artists and scholars need sustained and nuanced analyses of what constitutes censorship and what extenuating circumstances may accompany events that at first glance bear the marks of the censor.

The Performance of Political Correctness

This article is about the power of cultural performances to shape and sometimes coerce public opinion and public behaviours. In the process, I intend to defend a concept which has few supporters these days: ‘political correctness’. So prevalent is this concept in our public discourse that its meanings have become habitual, thus ideologically invisible. Beginning with an examination of the term and its history, I situate it in relation to the arts through its relation to censorship, and frame it within the broad field of cultural performances to which it belongs. Concluding with a specific case study taken from theatre, I hope to perform a ‘correction’ of sorts – to reintroduce the term as a positive value and practice in an artistic milieu which has largely rejected its utility.

Dossier: History, Memory, Event: A Working Archive

This dossier documents a research collaboration between members of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and members of the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom, between 2008 and 2010. This collaboration was dedicated to a cross-cultural inquiry into methods and topics of performance research that might serve to produce a robust international dialogue capable of approaching performance through multinational lines of inquiry. Participants chose a common topic (History, Memory, Event, and the Politics of Performance 1970–1990), and composed an archive of materials drawn from six nations which was analysed and interrogated by the group. The dossier offers examples from the archive and an account of the way the group processed these artefacts.

The political theatre of David Edgar : negotiation and retrieval

David Edgars writings address the most basic questions of how humans organize and govern themselves in modern societies. This study brings together the disciplines of political philosophy and theatre studies to approach the leading British playwright as a political writer and a public social critic. Edgar uses theatre as a powerful tool of public discourse, an aesthetic modality for engaging with and thinking/feeling through the most pressing social issues of the day. In this he is a supreme rationalist: he deploys character, plot and language to explore ideas, to make certain kinds of discursive cases and model hypothetical alternatives. Reinelt and Hewitt analyze twelve of Edgars most important plays, including Maydays and Pentecost and also provide detailed discussions of key performances and critical reception to illustrate the playwrights artistic achievement in relation to his contributions as a public figure in British cultural life.