Joshua Abrams

Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

(p. 33). My feeling is that Bottoms has, in the spirit of what in Australia we call ‘stirring the possum’, over-egged the cake. Nonetheless, the editors immediately reframe the debate with an excellent, careful reading of Schechner’s 1976 Indian tour of his production of Mother Courage, seeking to demonstrate the unfinished and genuinely experimental nature of his work. The second section, ‘Performance Studies Genealogies’, puts further flesh on the historical narrative developed in Carlson’s essay. Contributions from Paul Rae, Henry Bial, Yu Jiancun and Peng Yongwen, and Peter Eckersall offer insightful and important takes on what might be understood, variously, as the parallel evolutions, appropriations, adoptions, or indigenisations of the originary Schechnerian moment across a range of contexts: Singapore, the United States, China, and Australia. Rae’s essay aims to redress the centre– periphery logics of the broad spectrum approach, understood here as the hegemony of a particular idea about performance extended as universal. In its place, Rae proposes not merely regional relativism, but the primacy of local knowledge: a genuine ethnography of performance rather than a totalising anthropology of performance. In the context of Singapore and archipelagic South-East Asia/ Melanesia, Rae floats the idea of ‘Wayang Studies’. This is an excellent essay, carried off with Rae’s familiar élan. Eckersall adopts the mantle of marginality to produce a considered narrative of the small, but dynamic and heterogeneous development of Performance Studies in Australia; Yu Jiancun and Peng Yongwen’s case study of what they identify as the ‘intercultural sensibility’ of performance studies focuses on Schechner’s own work at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Between this remarkable collection of essays, Henry Bial’s decidedly centrist ‘coming of age’ narrative is interestingly unsettled and problematised. Subsequent sections involve welcome first-person accounts of working with Schechner. Rebecca Schneider, Mariellen Sandford, John Emigh, and Phillip Zarrilli flesh out the conceptual/theoretical dynamics of their collaborations, while a series of interviews (with Joan McIntosh and Elizabeth LeCompte), letters (from Anna Deavere Smith), testimonials (Judith Malina), and an appropriately eccentric contribution from Guillermo GómezPeña offer artists’ perspectives. (Although, it should probably be acknowledged that, notwithstanding the editors’ choice here, we might want to think about the ways in which one of Schechner’s – perhaps problematic – legacies is to unsettle the rigour of the theory/practice divide; Zarrilli, in particular, mediates this relationship here.) Finally, the collection wraps up with a series of case studies in which the possibilities of performance studies are taken up in ‘applied’ contexts: in working with trauma (Diana Taylor), in medicine (Atay Citron), in thinking through restored political ritual in Japan (Takahashi Yuichiro), and concluding with something of a bang: Joseph Roach’s analysis of the transgressive performance of Yale senior Aliza Shvarts, whose abortion-art performance work caused a media scandal in 2008. For Roach, Schechner’s work is key because ‘his fecund, restlessly diverse, and prolific cogitation on performance returns again and again [...] to the core motives [Roach] perceived to be driving L’affaire Aliza Schvarts: frame, matrix, liminality, transgression, and play – particularly “deep play” and its boundary-transgressing intensifier, “dark play”’ (p. 278). This collection is an indispensable addition to the bookshelves of anyone with a stake in this contested, sprawling, messy ‘on-going thought-experiment (call it, “performance studies”)’ (p. 278). Let’s get on with it.

Der Weg der Verheissung (The Eternal Road), and: York Millennium Mystery Plays (review)

While fin-de-millénium anxiety led to concern about the impending end of the world, theatrical productions exploring the history and mythology of Judeo-Christian religion abounded. From the fully revamped decennial production of the Oberammergau Passion Play to a plethora of local adaptations of medieval cycle plays, many directors chose Western mythologies as source material to explore the role of religion in contemporary society. Although the medieval York cycle has been produced periodically since its twentiethcentury debut at the 1951 Festival of Britain, for the first time ever an adaptation was produced in York Minster. New York, meanwhile, witnessed the return of Kurt Weill’s massive 1937 biblical opera, Der Weg der Verheissung (The Eternal Road), produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a coproduction between the Chemnitz Oper and the New Israeli Opera. Both of these plays were produced with a conscious regard for historical traditions of iconographic representation; the York adaptation was clearly driven largely by Christian imagery and the Judaic production sought an iconography different from that accreted through two millennia of Christianity.