Jennifer Parker-Starbuck

There is a whale in the room: Pina Bausch’s animals on stage

Abstract Throughout the Tanztheater Wuppertal/Pina Bausch’s ‘World Cities’ productions animals were on stage. Live animals, stuffed animals, imagined animals, evocations of animals, and anthropomorphized animals were all woven through the works creating an environment in which animals were a part of the world, in which they mattered. These environments, akin to the idea of Jacob von Uexküll’s ‘umwelt,’ produce a kind of travelogue, resonating both with ideas and images, stereotypes and icons of a given region, and also, in the company’s attempt to record their relationship with the city, encounters with the nonhuman animal. Bausch’s World Cities model possibilities for interspecies relations, and the essay looks at moments throughout these works that engage with these animals through their ‘umwelten,’ in inter- and intraspecies encounters, and in support of their human counterparts.

Karaoke Theatre: Channelling Mediated Lives

This essay began to take shape for me during January 2015 at several New York festivals. On every stage it seemed there were headphones, a visible technology on stage that reminded me of the sudden proliferation of screens on stage at the end of the twentieth century. Although headphones have been frequently used in, for example, verbatim theatre, the use in these festival shows moved out of that realm, engaging with digital culture’s shifting hybrid processes to produce a convergence of stories that were actual, fictitious, tragic, and mundane. At the same time it pointed to an exploration of the questions of reality of sources and stories emerging from the proliferation and deployment of technological channels (blogs, vlogs, YouTube, social media outlets, and so on) through which we, in a digital culture, experience other lives. The use of headphones through which we channel others signifies a way to harness stories and allow them to reverberate alongside bodies on stage, creating new modes of storytelling to complicate and understand this historical moment. It comes as no surprise that the theatre, society’s mirror, or increasingly, as Aneta Mancewicz has put it, society’s ‘intermedial mirror’, would take on the historical moment in which media preoccupy, entertain, and augment, reflecting back examples in which traces of histories and lives resonate beyond the performance itself. I am using the term ‘karaoke theatre’ as a way to respond to a growing trend of performances using modes of mediatised channelling techniques on stage. The term is intended to be evocative, loosely covering a range of performances in which I begin to identify a channelling that is reminiscent of musical karaoke. This essay is not attempting to define a new genre or lay claim to a coinage, but rather to find connections that might help think through the current state of digital performance. Inspired by the channel as a conduit or transmitter that can be either visible (as in a cable) or non-physical (as in a broadcast), I turn to the form of karaoke for its spirit of transmission, here transmitting ideas about the contemporary For material which complements this article please also see Jen Parker-Starbuck’s contribution to the journal’s Interventions website: Jen Parker-Starbuck, ‘Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE)’ <https://www. contemporarytheatrere view.org/2017/ROKE>.

Ecologies of the Festival. New York in 2012: COIL, Under the Radar and American Realness

In our era of market hegemony, when rapacious capitalism seems not merely triumphant but unchallenged, these artists are carving out a different measure of value, of human worth. We, as a culture, have yet to create an eco-system that adequately supports these artists or gives the vast majority of their potential audience access to them. Oskar Eustis (Programme, Under the Radar) Trying to frame the cross-section of three international festivals that took place in New York City in January 2012 – Under the Radar, American Realness and PS122’s COIL – through notions of ecology is a daunting task. Literally, the carbon footprint raised by bringing together companies from places as widespread as Italy, Japan, Argentina, Ireland, Poland, Reviews