School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemBloody Roman narratives: gladiators, 'fatal charades' and Senecan Theatre( 2003)In an interview not long before his death in 1995, East German playwright Heiner Müller predicted that the theatrical medium would soon be faced with an important decision. Provoked by the fact that one of his plays, Mauser, in which a character is executed, had been performed in a penitentiary by murderers awaiting the death penalty, Müller asked what it would mean for theatre if some one were to be really killed in a performance? A borderline would have been crossed and the medium would face a crisis: There will be gladiator games again in the not too distant future. There will be performances where people will be actually killed. There is already an indication of this in television, everything is moving in that direction: reality TV. What will that mean for the theatre? Will the theatre become part of it, will it be integrated or will it find another route and remain symbolic? That is the essential question (in Weber, 2001: 228).This paper seeks to ask a question: if it is the case that the audience of mainstream entertainment are showing an overwhelming preference for ‘reality television’ over fiction as represented in film and theatre, then what can we learn from history when the line between staged actual pain and staged fictional pain became blurred?
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ItemNescio, sed sentio et excrucior: the many faces of art and pain( 2003)When Ann McCulloch, Ron Goodrich and I decided that the theme of the fifth Double Dialogues Conference was to be ‘Art and Pain’, I somewhat cynically remarked, "Oh good, that will bring them out" -- the ‘them’ in question being academics, artists and those who are both. My instinct was, not so much that many of us are closet melancholics (well, perhaps…), but that there was so much fertile ground to explore in this connection. The conference and this issue of the Double Dialogues Journal bears out my intuition, and it is my pleasure (and pain) to draw together a number of themes that are explored with such insight in this volume.In our Conference Brief we suggested that art is in some way a remodelling of lived experience into artificially constructed aesthetic forms (whether one sees art as representation, significant form, the expression of emotion, as institutionally defined and so on). Few people (and we are no exception) are nowadays brave (or foolish) enough to suggest a single definition for the word ‘art’, but we all know it is vitally important to who we are as human beings. We also feel, without always understanding how, that art has a strong connection to pain in human life, whether manifested as dysfunction, dislocation, tissue damage, political upheaval, community outrage, grief, depression and so forth. It is this connection between pain and art that we set out to explore in the conference and this volume.