Maria Shevtsova

Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's champs and habitus for a sociology of stage productions

This article examines closely the concepts of champ and habitus and relevant aspects of Bourdieus theory in relation to theatre practice, specifically productions. The latter, although viewed in terms of historical cross‐reference and institutional status, are primarily identified as creative constructions that cannot be reduced to mere illustrations of objective social relations, notwithstanding their necessarily sociocultural character. The question of how directors and their work are creative and embody individual, subjective, artistic decisions is discussed in the context of issues to do with sociocultural signs (via Bakhtin), genre, imagination, performance and culture. Feter Steins Uncle Vanya and Lev Dodins The Queen of Spades provide the main examples for the argument as a whole.

On Directing: a Conversation with Katie Mitchell

One of Britains foremost directors, Katie Mitchells career embraces a formidable repertoire of play and opera productions. She has a taste for Greek tragedy – her Phoenician Women (1995) won the Evening Standard Best Director Award – and takes in Gorky, Chekhov, Genet, and Beckett, as well as such contemporaries as Kevin Elyot, whose Forty Winks she directed at the Royal Court in 2004. She has worked in Dublin, Milan, and Stockholm, and is an Associate Director at the National Theatre. This interview with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova shows Mitchells lucid and passionate engagement with her craft. It took place in London in several stages from December 2004 to July 2005, during a period of intense activity for Mitchell. Maria Shevtsova wishes to thank her for so generously giving her time.

Jean Genet : performance and politics

Jean Genet, Performance and Politics is the first book to explore the broad political significance of Genets performance practice by focusing on his radical experiments, polemical subjects and formal innovations in theatre, film and dance. Its new approach brings together the diverse aspects of Genets work through essays by international scholars and interviews with such key theatre directors as Richard Schechner, Terry Hands, Cornerstone Theatre and Jean-Baptiste Sastre. Where some of the contributors explore Genets relationship with political discourses and movements (performance theory, sociology, situationism, postmodernism, post-structuralism), others trace his influence on contemporary practice (Butoh, Body Art, avant-garde theatre, site-specific performance and queer cinema). This exciting and original volume situates Genet as a key political playwright and as a major figure in the history of twentieth-century performance practice, and will be of interest to students of Theatre, Performance, Dance, Film and French.

Sociocultural Analysis: National and Cross-cultural Performance

It is well known that theatre semiotics follows the metamorphoses of theories of semiotics in general and, like them, draws on Charles Peirce and American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics and the linguistics of the Prague Circle, Russian formalism and French structuralism. These currents converge in the theatre semiotics of the 70s, producing a methodology that is highly scientist, technical, self-reflexive and abstract. This type of theatre semiotics may no longer be an up-markettopic, nor is it stone-dead. Its fundamental principle of ‘abstract objectivism’, as Bakhtin/Voloshinov describe it, survives despite the greater flexibility provided by its attention to such areas as reception theory and theories of cultural systems. Its inclusion of reception theory acknowledged of the fact that spectators exist in the construction of semiosis. Ideas concerning cultural systems and, thus, primarily those concerning codes were used to indicate the importance of cultural contexts in the processes of signification.

An Interview with Richard Schechner

Richard Schechner is editor of TDR: The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of Arts, New York University. His publications include Performance Theory (1988), The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (1993) and Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002, 2nd edition, 2006). In addition to his academic work, Schechner has had a long career as a theatre director. In this interview, he talks about his environmental staging of The Balcony (1979/80), a production which marked the end of The Performance Group, a company he founded in New York in the late 1960s.

The Sociology of the Theatre, Part One: Problems and Perspectives

Although many disciplines have helpfully (and a few less helpfully) interacted with theatre studies over the past decade, progress has been notably slow in the discovery of a dialogue with sociology. Indeed, such progress as has been made has too often, argues Maria Shevtsova. resulted in perceptions and emphases which are not always sympathetic (or seemingly even relevant) to the interests of theatre workers. In this, the first of a three-part introduction to the sociology of theatre, Maria Shevtsova combines an objective analysis of progress to date with a study of the problems and misconceptions encountered along the way, and also proposes a possible methodology for correcting the present imbalance. In future instalments, she will look in particular at the ways in which theatre anthropology and theatre semiotics have helped and hindered this problematic relationship. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International , and Theatre Papers , as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.

Political Theatre in Europe: East to West, 2007–2014

What political theatre may be in contemporary times and in what sense it is ‘political’ are the core issues of this article. Examples are chosen from within a restricted period, 2007 to 2014, but from a considerably wide space that starts from Eastern Europe – Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland – and goes to Germany and France. These examples are principally productions by established ensemble theatre companies and they are framed by a brief discussion concerning independent theatres, ‘counter-cultural’ positions, and institutional and institutionalized theatres. The latter group is in focus to indicate how political theatre in the seven years specified has been far from alien to, or sidelined from, National Theatres, State Theatres, or other theatres of national status subsidized by governments. Two main profiles of recent political theatre emerge from this research, one that acknowledges political history, while the other critiques neoliberal capitalism; there is some unpronounced overlap between the two. Productions of Shakespeare feature significantly in the delineated theatrescape. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored) is The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

Social Practice, Interdisciplinary Perspective

The structuration and definition of disciplines – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century project – gave way, in the second half of the twentieth century in the European and American academies, to their destructuration, although certainly not everywhere, nor to unanimous approval. For all the resistance that it has encountered, however, this movement towards the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries has taken root. It can be traced back to the 1960s, a period whose economic growth and economic optimism freed up mental space, allowing energies to focus on political and sociocultural injustices and inequalities and thereby fermenting that ‘cultural revolution’ for which the 1960s are now most remembered in the affluent ‘western’ world. ‘Cultural’ here embraces, as it did at the time, the anthropological notion of culture as belief, knowledge, morals, customs and, among others, symbolic representation, thus also theatre and performance.

Stanislavsky to Grotowski: Actor to Performer/Doer

Stanislavskys ‘life of the human spirit’ is at the heart of his understanding of how the actor could become an organic actor rather than a player of borrowed actions and lines. In this article Maria Shevtsova explores the links between Stanislavskys aspirations for the actor and Grotowskis ‘holy’ actor, the latter providing the impetus for a theatre of presence rather than one of presentation – one that is concerned with the embodiment of fictional bodies and souls. The notion of actor ‘training’ is re-examined in the light of Stanislavskys practice concerning the actors mindful and probing work on himself/herself. Grotowskis work on presence-in-action, the basis first of the performer and then of of the doer, has been a catalyst for the singer-movers of Teatr ZAR and this groups goal of spiritual journeying, shared also by its spectators.

Teatr ZAR's Journeys of the Spirit

Teatr ZAR has been developing its Gospels of Childhood triptych since 2003, when the company was founded after several years of research in Armenia, Iran, and Georgia. It was in Georgia that ZAR learned polyphonic songs from the Svan oral tradition, which it developed in its unique song theatre. In this article Maria Shevtsova maps the first of a series of expeditions, the latter notably including Greece, Corsica, and Sardinia. She describes how the ancient hymns and chants gathered through direct oral transmission (ZARs choice of material reflects its interest in the songs of early Christianity) provide the subject matter and the spiritual dimension of the groups performance pieces. The idea of the ‘spiritual’ is here distinguished from the strictly religious/denominational as well as the ritualistic or cultic framings of the word. Details from the triptych show how breath, vibration and energy are the forces of ZARs sonic compositions in which singing, instrumental music, sound making, and movement are vehicles for experience other than immediate material sensation. Reference is made to ZARs link to the Grotowski legacy in the song theatre of Poland today.