theater theory Flashcards
How does A Strange Loop pull from Brechtian Theory?
Michael R. Jackson pulls from the theories of Bertolt Brecht through being explicit with intention, making connections to the epic theater, using the theater as instruction for critical analysis, resisting emotional identification, representing a picture of the world, looking at power dynamics, and employing the concept of “gestus” in the characters. The Brechtian goal would be to inspire the audience to go out and induce political and social change in the world.
How is “A Strange Loop” explicit with intention? (Three parts)
Jackson is explicit in his construction of Usher and his conflict shows how society shapes the self and what role internalization can play
Usher’s Goal: subvert expectations Black and white from the left and the right for the good of the culture)
Brecht → way to understand is to make strange (strange loop, haha)
How does “A Strange Loop” connect to the epic theater? (4 parts)
Hints at point of recognition
Human is point of inquiry
Accounts for jumps/curves that lets the spectator take each scene for itself
There’s some logical progression but it skips
Idea that social being determines thought
How does “A Strange Loop” act as instruction for critical analysis?
Both white and Black characters are used as the ground for critical analysis
Takes a cue from the epic theater and reflect “I’d never have thought it” or “that’s not the way” about topics ranging from the Black love of Tyler Perry to sexual power dynamics
How does “A Strange Loop” use gestus in character? (3 parts / Thought example / Usher example)
allows the actor to take on the physical embodiments of social commentaries.
This constant shifting creates an interesting visual perspective for the audience.
Conflicting images allow them to represent different social commentaries
EXAMPLE: Thought 6
Plays the Baldwin ancestor/ the white man Usher sleeps with/Mufasa
Usher → versions of himself in “Precious Dreams/AIDs is God’s Punishment”
“Real Housewives” / “mega-church pastor” / “Color Purple”
Embodiment of his different potential selves – ranging from internalized homophobia to a Celie-like self-acceptance – allow him to mimic the fluidity of the Thoughts and show physical embodiment in action.
How does “A Strange Loop” resist emotional identification? (2 parts)
Spectator should not be able to identify with characters but instead the play provokes rational self-reflection/critical view of what’s on stage
Directly calls out both Black and white audience members and severs some Black identification/reminds non-Black members of their inability
How does “A Strange Loop” do the picture of the world? What Brecht techniques are used?
show is a representation of reality and not reality itself
Shows how constructed it is
This is Brecht (direct audience address/songs to interrupt action)
How does “A Strange Loop” look at power dynamics in two ways? What does one allow Usher to do the other can’t?
explores power dynamics in the familial and sexual, dealing with both Blackness and white privilege
Familial → pushes back against the traditional power dynamics that would come from an authority figure like a parent
Pushback → admitting this to his father/calling out his mother for deflecting from her own failures
Sexual/white privilege → man on the train in Usher’s head/the older white man
Usher is silenced in sexual instances/can’t speak for himself like with his parents
Can only articulate self when talking with Black parents
Q: Commonalities between Artaud/Baraka and what they believe of the theater?
- Both challenge what the theater is capable of enacting/how it can act as a function.
- It can be used for social change through making the audience see the reality of their world while also critiquing the status quo to empower those included from the mainstream. 3. Should be change and force change.
How can Artaud’s theory connect to Baraka and The Dutchman? (4 parts)
- Artaud’s theater of cruelty
- Works to free the repressed/unconscious
- Disengages power/ liberate possibilities
- Shows what happens when men can see themselves as they are when the metaphorical “masks” fall to reveal lies and show the hypocrisy of the world.
Explain the relationship the spectator has with the theater in “Theater of Cruelty”
Spectator is exposed instead of protected.
A goal is to bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life through the removal of the aesthetic distance. First and foremost, it is difficult for the self. The spectator is centered and surrounded by the spectacle.
Does a deep dive into an area that the playwright sees as needing significant social change (Baraka’s desire to overthrow a white-dominated American social order)
Shows the unsuspecting audience the reality of their world through using the theater as a function that shows that social change is direly needed on an extreme level
How does “The Dutchman” use the theater of cruelty?
Instead of allowing the spectacle on one side and the public on the other, The Dutchman exposes its audience to things both revolutionary and violent.
I
t’s violent/bold/irrational/intimate
Examples of freeing the unconscious in the “Dutchman” (4 parts)
Clay smiles at Lula without self-consciousness at first even though she’s staring at him
Lula pushes him throughout the show until he snaps
Becomes violent/physical/talks about killing her
Sheds the persona of a book reading mild mannered son of a Republican
How does the Dutchman show liberated possibilities?
Theater was created to “drain abscesses” in society.
Through showing how Black/white cannot integrate or get along, he liberates the possibility of using theater to teach them their deaths
What is the abscess in the “Dutchman”? How is it shown?
Shows how Lula’s genocidal racism is an abscess to be drained
Showing that Black Americans have reason to hate the white man for hating
Lula’s actions are both scripted and unfounded/innate and natural
Nature of a white American to enact violence against a Black
Lula has a power dynamic over Clay from the beginning
“Free from their histories” line
Their histories become their presents that they cannot break free from
How does the Dutchman show falling masks?
theater can help the mind see the source of its conflicts (here: lack of freedom)
What does the Dutchman as theater teach us?
Clay sees through Lula, her lies and the society that has shaped him
Clay’s freedom → dark and aggressive (Artaud says true freedom is dark)
Theater should teach us things and Dutchman shows how Black life – Clay’s emotion – is unable to survive when faced with white oppression.
We see how Clay is shackled by white society even if he thinks he’s free
“Revolutionary Theater” → we must “isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality”
Q: Which of the theorists on your list would be most useful for analyzing Funnyhouse of a Negro? Why?
Munoz is the most helpful for analyzing Funnyhouse because Sarah uses a version of disidentification tactics.
What kind of survival strategies is disidentification?
Survival strategies that a minority subject may practice in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that eludes and punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.
How does Sarah/Negro disidentify? With who? Why?
Sarah identifies and disidentifies with the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regent and Patrice Lumumba to create spaces of productivity where her identity’s fragmentary nature can be accepted and negotiated for cultural, material and psychic survival.
To locate a point of departure for herself
Disidentification/historical violence with example
About managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence / acts as a response to state and global power apparatuses that employ systems of racial, sexual, and national subjugation
Sarah uses the disidentified selves to discuss / talk through her family trauma and historical trauma (like Lumumba’s assassination)
Interiorized passing/tactical misrecognitions of the self
Sarah’s monologue about needing white friends so she doesn’t reflect about being a Negro
Can’t recognize herself so she turns to fragmented embodiments
Grafts the embodiments with traits they did not possess (makes versions of them at odds with reality)
Subjects as constructed and contradictory
fictionalized beings that are part self and part historical figure
Blurring of fact and fiction
“Real self” who comes into being through fiction is not the self who produces fiction, but is instead produced by fiction as binaries falter and fiction becomes real.
Blurring of binaries in “Funnyhouse”
Binaries falter throughout the show (truth/fiction)
Sarah says “When I am the Duchess” but we also see the Duchess independently
The potential lie about her father
Time in “Funnyhouse of a Negro”
we witness a new formation within the present and the future
Sarah’s fragments exist outside of space-time
Duchess/Lumumba are deceased when the show starts
Investing objects with new life
recycles and reforms an object that already had its own powerful energy
(bust of Victoria/kinky hair)
Q: What’s the relationship between “disidentification” / “rep & rev” / “archive/repertoire” / “avatars”? (4 parts)
All 4 theorists remix/recycle/reuse/revive/reworks (r words) in various ways.
Disidentification engages with and recycles popular forms with a difference in a way similar to how rep & rev recycle with difference.
Performative re-citations then shape the subject and characters.
Rep &Rev, Avatars, Disidentification, and the Archive/Repertoire try to invest objects/ideas/words/performances with new life.
Difference between disidentification / rep & rev / avatars / archive & repertoire
survival strategy (Munoz/McMillan/Taylor) vs stylistic device (Parks)
How does Rep/Rev work?
Taking inspiration from jazz, it’s a stylistic device that relies on the repetition of words/ideas/plot devices where the character revises each time to give them new life as they change/evolve.
Art shouldn’t just tell you but instead challenge you to think differently.
When a character refigures their words through rep & rev, they show that they are experiencing a situation anew even when dealing with literal incorporations of the past.