Unmaking Mimesis

In Unmaking Mimesis Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theatre and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist strategies with readings of selected plays by writers as diverse as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy Shaw. Through a series of provocative readings of theatre, theory and feminist performance she demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today. Unmaking Mimesis will interest theatre scholars and performance and cultural theorists, for all of whom issues of text, representation and embodiment are of compelling concern.

In Unmaking Mimesis Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theatre and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist strategies with readings of selected plays by writers as diverse as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy Shaw. Through a series of provocative readings of theatre, theory and feminist performance she demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today. Unmaking Mimesis will interest theatre scholars and performance and cultural theorists, for all of whom issues of text, representation and embodiment are of compelling concern.

This study investigates contestations over spatiality in one culturally composite nation, Australia, where contemporary theatre stages competing cultural and political agendas through space and place. Covering a wide range of plays it will have wide appeal for issues of space, spatiality and territory in all forms of theatre, in all nations.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is the first book to examine the plays of five fascinating and creative women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day. How these playwrights dramatize violence and its impacts in political, social, and personal life is a central concern of this book. Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning, and Teresa Deevy re-model theatrical form, re-structuring action and narrative, and exploring closure as a way of disrupting audience expectation. Their plays create stage spaces and images that expose relationships of power and authority, and invite the audience to see the performance not as illusion, but as framed by the conventions and limits of theatrical representation. Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is suitable for courses in Irish theatre, women in theatre, gender and performance, dramaturgy, and Irish drama in the twentieth century as well as for those interested in women's work in theatre and in Irish theatre in the twentieth century.

Quantum Theatre uses the science of quantum mechanics to construct a rigorous framework for examining performance practice and the theatrical event, and live performance as a means of exploring the implications of quantum mechanics. Key ideas from physics are used to develop an interdisciplinary approach to writing about the work of a number of British theatre practitioners in terms of identity, observation and play. What this type of analysis does is enable an examination of aspects of performance that can remain hidden and so cast new light on the performance event. This is the first study of its kind that develops such a framework for analysis of contemporary performance, and provides a coherent alternative to postmodernism as a theoretical framework for writing about performance. As such, this book develops a methodology that can be applied to a wide range of performance practices. Furthermore, it presents an analysis of the work of a number of contemporary performance makers, including Vincent Dance Theatre and Triangle Theatre.

This book is concerned with such questions as the following: What is the life of the past in the present? How might “the theatre of death” and “the uncanny in mimesis” allow us to conceive of the afterlife of a supposedly ephemeral art practice? How might a theatrical iconology engage with such fundamental social relations as those between the living and the dead? Distinct from the dominant expectation that actors should appear life-like onstage, why is it that some theatre artists – from Craig to Castellucci – have conceived of the actor in the image of the dead? Furthermore, how might an iconology of the actor allow us to imagine the afterlife of an apparently ephemeral art practice? This book explores such questions through the implications of the twofold analogy proposed in its very title: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny. Walter Benjamin once observed that: “The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. It concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living...” If the relation between the living and the dead can be thought of in terms of an analogy with ancient theatre, how might avant-garde theatre be thought of in terms of this same relation “today”?

The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of courtly desire, the uncanny Olympia, and the revolutionary Robots in post-WWI drama.