School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemHeiner Müller’s Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man: atrocity and pain in German history and theatre( 2003)Language that injures and causes pain is embodied in the work of Heiner Müller. In evaluating this type of language, Judith Butler’s enquiry into injurious speech and linguistic vulnerability, applied in a case study of so-called hate-speech, might be usefully applied to theatrical speech:'When we say that an insult strikes like a blow, we imply that our bodies are injured by such speech. And they surely are, but not in the same way as a purely physical injury takes place' (Butler, 1997: 159).Racist, class-based and sexist hate-speech is injurious speech that exposes the linguistic vulnerability of subjects and the power of language to wound like a sword. Applied to Müller’s dramatic texts, I argue that the speeches uttered by various figurations mimic the operations of hate-speech in the social sphere, with the addition that the effects of the speech may also be shown.The question I pose is: Can the discourse of the performance text bear witness to and embody pain as well as demonstrate the violence that is both enacted within and a consequence of speech? I ask with Susan Sontag, What do these imaginary accounts do to the real pain of the victims of war and political struggle and what is the point of their transformation into art given that "the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree" (Sontag, 2003: 40)?
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ItemGestus, Affect and the Post-Semiotic in Contemporary Theatre(Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd, 2007)With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the movement of its former member states towards democratic elections and capitalist economies, the Cold War was hastily and abruptly over. Triumphalist liberal and neo-conservative discourses proclaimed the end of communism and exhausted socialist populations welcomed the end of real existing socialism. Both politically and philosophically, the great modernist dualisms of communism and capitalism, East and West, Left and Right, had come to an end. This final act of deconstruction not only had profound effects on politics, culture and the everyday, but it also changed the terms and reference points for the processes of meaning-making, representation, interpretation and reception in the arts. Is there still a place for the arts of engagement in contemporary Europe? This paper proposes that these historic shifts in politics and the everyday find their artistic outlet in the shift from a gestic to an affective model of meaning and representation, or, from the semiotic to the post-semiotic. Whereas the Brechtian gestic model of social signification is based in the class war and the correlation of sign and referent, the affective domain, as theorised by Massumi drawing on Deleuze, is adaptable to a more fluid global realm. There is an associated movement from an emphasis on gesture to image. Gesture is indexic, it points to a relatively fixed social realm, whereas the image is everywhere in ‘the image- and information- based economies of late capitalism.’ Drawing on theatrical examples from Germany, the paper teases out the strengths and weaknesses of affect as a critical framework for new understandings of the arts of engagement.
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ItemGrotesque images and sardonic humour: pain and affect in German drama(Double Dialogues, 2005)In Art and Pain 1 2003 I discussed language that injures and causes pain. I looked in particular at ‘injurious speech’ and ‘linguistic vulnerability’ in German dramatist Heiner Müller’s play Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man. I suggested that in Germania 3 speeches uttered by dramatic personas mimicked the operations of hate-speech in the social sphere, with the addition that the effects of the speech are also shown. I suggested that Müller’s writing transforms a painful history into the discursive practices of the theatrical text and that the play’s impact and its importance reside in symbolic accounts of the pain and suffering of modern German history.This paper turns from language to images that evoke a painful history. In particular, it considers theatrical images whose effect is to call up or hail the real or metaphoric pain that circulates around historical events. These images belong to the symbolic or semiotic order but also, as I hope to show, the affective domain where feeling is provoked alongside cognition. Pursuing the theme once again through the work of Heiner Müller, the paper considers his direction of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which opened at the Berliner Ensemble on 3 June 1995. The Berliner Ensemble, as many know, was the theatre founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949 in East Berlin, and which became the flagship theatre company of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the lead role of Müller’s production was the talented and articulate Martin Wuttke, whose menacing and utterly compelling Arturo Ui prowled, pranced and preened across the stage for the duration of the performance. The production marked a return to form for the Berliner Ensemble, which had been beset with artistic, financial and leadership problems throughout the early years of reunification. Its critical and box office success stamped Müller’s artistic authority on the Ensemble for what would be the brief but dazzlin period of his leadership. The work lives on, as it should, with Arturo Ui remaining in the Ensemble’s repertoire today, with tours abroad including to France, Italy, Portugal, South America, the United States and India.
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ItemPolitical Lessons of the New Wave: Romeril's The Floating World(Double Dialogues, 2009)
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ItemRadical Disengagement and Liquid Lives: Criminology by Arena Theatre Company(Australasian Drama Studies Association, 2009)
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ItemHeiner Muller and Martin Wuttke: Staging new images in a time of change(Centre for Performance Research, 2005)
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ItemJoel Schechter ed., Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook(Australasian Drama Studies Association, 2004)
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ItemNo Preview Available"White out: theatre as an agent of border patrol"(Cambridge University Press, 2003)In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman's 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
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ItemNo Preview Available