Staging Desire

Recovers the hidden history of theater professionals who transgressed the gendered expectations of their time

Theology in the modern era often assumes that the consummate form of theological discourse is objective prose—ignoring or condemning apophatic traditions and the spiritual eros that drives them. For too long, Kierkegaard has been read along these lines as a progenitor of twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy and a stern critic of the erotic in all its forms. In contrast, Hughes argues that Kierkegaard envisions faith fundamentally as a form of infinite, insatiable eros. He depicts the essential purpose of Kierkegaard’s writing as to elicit ever-greater spiritual desire, not to provide the satisfactions of doctrine or knowledge. Hughes’s argument revolves around close readings of provocative, disparate, and (in many cases) little-known Kierkegaardian texts. The thread connecting all of these texts is that they each conjure up some sort of performative “stage setting,” which they invite readers to enter. By analyzing the theological function of these texts, the book sheds new light on the role of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s authorship, his surprising affinity for liturgy and sacrament, and his overarching effort to conjoin eros for God with this-worldly love.

Scenography has been acting as a transformative force to reform the traditionalexhibitionary complex. This has led to an unprecedented intersection wherescenography meets contemporary curating, which further informs a radical ideologicalshift in the frontier of the exhibition scene. This book aims to exploit a new land ofdiscussion to look into this intersection between scenographic practice andcontemporary curating, its mergence and the subsequent revolution it has caused. Byseeing museums and exhibition spaces as metaphorical stages, it fundamentallyreconfigures the infrastructure of curating practices, in terms of a shift in authorship,architectural embodiment of ideas, field of experience, layered narrative, dramaturgy andthe hybrid expressions of new media. Three case studies will demonstrate scenography’swide-ranged methodologies in dealing with contemporary issues. Cases include: BMWMuseum (Reopened in 2008), Cultures of the World (Opened in 2010) and Leonardo’sLast Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway (2008, 2010). The discussion cuts throughmajor discourses, both responding to the rise of the experience economy and theexpanding notion of curating, in parallel.

Individuals who perpetrate murder sometimes pose or reposition victims, weapons, and evidence to make it look like events happened in a different way than what actually transpired. Until now, there has been scarce literature published on crime scene staging.Crime Scene Staging Dynamics in Homicide Cases is the first book to look at this practice, p

Classical drama on the modern stage as a cultural and political phenomenon is scholarly trailed since the 1950s and 60s and intensified in the last third of the twentieth century. The evidence is being extensively documented, pioneered by Walton (1987) and McDonald (1992) and subsequently developed by collaborative research projects which include published databases. It is clear from the work of these projects that performance of classical drama is a major feature in all types of theatre – avant-garde and experimental, student, international and fringe, epic and classical, commercial, popular and canonical. This means that it is closely intertwined with the politics of locale, environment and geography as well as of language, translation and culture. Each of the essays has a specialised contribution to make. However, the total impact of the whole section will be even greater than the sum of the parts because the authors not only intersect in their discussions of common concerns in modern performance of ancient drama but also provide case studies that will add to the knowledge base and critical acumen of everyone working in the field.

Bookending the chronology of this collection are two crucial moments in the histories of pain, trauma, and their staging in British theater: the establishment of secular and professional theater in London in the 1580s, and the growing dissatisfaction with theatrical modes of public punishment alongside the increasing efficacy of staging extravagant spectacles at the end of the eighteenth century. From the often brutal spectacle of late medieval mystery plays to early Romantic re-evaluations of eighteenth-century appropriations of spectacles of pain, the essays take up the significance of these watershed moments in British theater and expand on recent work treating bodies in pain: what and how pain means, how such meaning can be embodied, how such embodiment can be dramatized, and how such dramatizations can be put to use and made meaningful in a variety of contexts. Grouped thematically, the essays interrogate individual plays and important topics in terms of the volume's overriding concerns, among them Tamburlaine and The Maid's Tragedy, revenge tragedy, Joshua Reynolds on public executions, King Lear, Settle's Moroccan plays, spectacles of injury, torture, and suffering, and Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions. Collectively, these essays make an important contribution to the increasingly interrelated histories of pain, the body, and the theater.

Marguerite Duras is France's best-known and most controversial contemporary woman writer. Duras' influence extends from her early novels of the 1950's to her radically innovative experimental autobiographical text of the 1980's The Lover Leslie Hill's book throws new light on Duras' relationship to feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, literature, film, politics, and the media. Feted by Kristeva, and Laca who claimed her as almost his other self, Duras is revealed to be a profoundly transgressive thinker and artist. It will be a must for all concerned with contemporary writing, writing by women, recent European cinema, film and literature.

This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.