Jewish joke telling in Muttersprache Mameloschn: performing queer intervention on the German stage

This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer disidentification, I propose that the act of Jewish joke telling by a young lesbian plays out as a new queer project of intervention in this play that confronts both antisemitism and culturally positioned sexual hegemony.     

Republican China: Chaos,Process, and Revolution*

A pivotal figure in the birth of Chinese cinema, Zheng Zhengqiu (鄭正秋 1889–1935) established an art of dramatic film integral to the creation of early Chinese motion pictures. His style incorporated unique cross-media perspectives, producing theatrical works fundamentally grounded in his experiences in graphic arts (illustrated news) and theater. This article focuses on crucial links between Zheng's films and his work for various illustrated newspapers, as well as between his stage plays and his own experience of family life. The author offers new approaches to and interpretations of Zheng's art, analyzing his emotional modes of narrative and provocative forms of engagement. These artistic traits are rarely discussed in contemporary scholarship on his contributions to Chinese cinema. Emerging during the 1911 Revolution, Zheng's sensational style of drama aimed to foster broad social and cultural reforms. For Zheng, art was never for art's sake alone; instead, art was always in the service of society.     

仪式与剧场的互移：对现代中国大众政治行为的解读

本文运用政治仪式和剧场理论对现代中国大众政治行为进行了模式分析和意义解读。认为:以学生为主体的大众政治行为在仪式和剧场中展开并互移;失控的仪式和自发性的大众行为通常演化为政治剧场;政治剧场富含象征意义,根本诉求是政治参与、公开性和民主;官方对政治剧场的态度在鼓励与弹压之间摆动;作为公众表达途径的政治剧场是中国政治过程的一种动力因素。     

The presence of absence: Beyond the “great goddess” in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series

Ann Liv Young's The Bagwell in Me, which premiered at The Kitchen in NYC, 2008, continues this experimental dance-theater artist's characteristically brutal, anatomizing exposure of the performers’ bodies through both sexual and violent narratives. This analysis examines how Young's construction of a certain type of subject on the stage challenges the subjectivities of her audience members, provoking moments of potential eruption. By setting up the possibility of abjection through the ambivalent dynamic of attraction and repulsion, and bombarding the audience with tropes that engender a push toward Georges Bataille's concept of “radical formlessness,” I argue, Ann Liv Young's performance places notions of the stable subject – composed of a “whole” body that is coherently organized and intelligibly coded in terms of sex, gender, sexuality and race – into question. Not only will this analysis explore how viewing oral sex as choreography speaks to Bataille's discussion of radical formlessness through decontextualization and the maddening effects of staring at the sun, but it will also interrogate how the same strategy of radical formlessness could have entirely different performative effects regarding the threat of bodily coherence and taxonomy within the narrative of historical racial violence.     

Negotiating hybridity: Native women's performance as cultural persistence

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.     

Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.     

Renewal of Contacts: Problems and Benefits

The Liepāja theater in Latvia is headed by Lithuanian director Rolandas Atko?iūnas. Its artistic practice is a quite striking example of complementary and contrasting cultures, demonstrating common qualities as well as essential differences between neighboring theatrical traditions. The theater of action typical for Lithuania comes from the rituals of Catholicism, while the priority of the spoken word in Latvian theater is rooted in Lutheranism. These differences sometimes disturb the process of directing and acting. At the same time, they serve as a source for new inspiration and creativity.     

ACTING OUT REFORM: THEATER AND VILLAGE IN THE REPUBLICAN RURAL RECONSTRUCTION MOVEMENT

Abstract

Rural theater reform was a component of the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement from its mid-1920s beginnings in mass literacy efforts. Amid the economic and political upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s, reformers argued that national salvation depended on the unity and continued relevance of village communities, and they believed that rural theater could contribute to bringing village communities together. One important example, the Mass Education Movement project in Dingxian, illustrates how reformers used the theater to reinforce the village as the unit of reform and national reconstruction. Reformers hoped rural theater would transmit to villagers ideas about citizenship and the new responsibilities this political role entailed. However, it was equally important that the reform theater — a group activity performed for a village audience — enable and sustain a reconstitution of the village community. In this way, the Rural Reconstruction Movement demonstrates an alternative to the top-down rule that characterized most Guomindang state-making efforts.