Joseph Roach

The player's passion : studies in the science of acting

This reinterpretation of acting theories in light of the history of science examines acting styles from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century and measures them against prevailing conceptions of the human body and its inner workings.

Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editors Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.

The Great Hole of History: Liturgical Silence in Beckett, Osofisan, and Parks

A particular kind of silence characterizes three plays from different places and times that also dramatize separate but related actions. These actions share a memory of the Atlantic world that eludes conventional narrative. They must seek other languages for their retelling—languages of image, of gesture, of sound, and especially of silence. They seek the theater even as they resist surrendering their painful meanings to its reassuring but inhibiting conventions of time, place, and action. They seek the theater because they depend upon its fateful intersection of persons, times, and places astride the abyss of a history that disappears before it can be written and then reappears only as performance. They seek the theater because it is the last, best place, at least within the confines of Eurobourgeois culture, where the enormity of the consequences of certain historic maritime geographies can still be vividly enacted if not otherwise precisely mapped. They seek the theater, finally, because it is the place where deep silences can either follow significant revelations or create the emotional space into which revelation can enter. Commonly called liturgical silences, these moments

Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’

There is a certain quality, easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people. Call it ‘it’. For the sake of clarity, let ‘it’, as a pronoun aspiring to the condition of a noun, be capitalised hereafter, except where it appears in its ordinary pronominal role. Most of us immediately assume that ‘It’ has to do with sex, and we’re right, but mainly because everything has to do with sex. Most of us also think that ‘It’ necessarily entails glamour, and so it does, but not for long. Most of us think that ‘It’ is rare, and it is quite, even to the point of seeming magical, but ‘It’ is also everywhere to be seen. In fact, however elusive this quality may be in the flesh, some version of it will, at any given moment, fall within our direct view or easy reach as a mass-circulation image; and if not, a worthy substitute will quickly come to mind, even to the minds of those who, commendably, want to resist generalisations like these, along with the pervasive imposition of the icons they describe.

“Deep Play, Dark Play”: Framing the Limit(less)

She really did do it. Or did she really? And if she did, was she really serious? Whatever Aliza Shvarts (Yale College, ’08) did or did not do, she went from unheralded undergraduate to notorious provocateur in one news cycle. The tidal wave of e-traffic that hit the Yale server in mid-April, 2008 – protesting what she told a reporter from the student paper she was doing but hadn’t quite finished with yet – was unsurpassed in volume and rivaled in invective only by the 2006 response when the university offered special-student admission to Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, formerly deputy foreign secretary (that is, public-relations flack) for the Taliban. Before the Yale Daily News web site crashed, one critic compared Aliza Shvarts, valedictorian of her high-school class and college-senior art major, unfavorably to Adolph Eichmann, another favorably to Damien Hirst. Still another suggested that she might be “the first great conceptual artist of the internet age,” while someone purporting to be from Cal-Arts dismissed her as the perpetrator of a crass publicity stunt, which they had done there first (and better) anyway.1 Before she had done all of what she said she was going to do, however, her Art School Dean disavowed it to the press, “If I had known about this, I would not have approved it.” Her College Dean, previously on record as an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression, added, “I am appalled.”2 What did she do?

Flickless in Dublin

This is the part where Luke Skywalker, say, is discovered stuck on a random planet. He is doing quite useful but prosaic chores, but he is filled with inchoate longings. For long ago? For a galaxy far away? For lost relatives? What was left of mine left Ireland for good in  and never looked back: their nostalgia couldn’t survive the winter crossing. But right after New Year, , coincidentally just before the Theater of Irish Cinema Conference, I made it back to Ireland for one day to preside as External Examiner at a doctoral examination in the Samuel Beckett Centre for Drama and Film at Trinity University. I went knowing that I would soon be speaking at the conference back in New Haven, but also well aware that when it comes to Ireland and especially Irish film, I’m only a tourist, with nothing to declare but my genes.