Magda Romanska

Ophelia's story in a way you've never heard it before, and seven more ways as well. Ophelia is trapped, stuck inside the machinery that has created her consciousness, fighting to be heard. Hamlet, overwhelmed by the ceaseless flood of media, mindlessly watches TV, consuming a mish-mash of beauty and horror; a daily soup of innocence and violence. The two of them hopelessly confined, and separated by the Atlantic Ocean. A polemic response to Heiner Mueller's Hamletmachine, Opheliamachine is a postmodern tale of love, sex and politics in a fragmented world of confused emotions and global, virtual sexuality. Since its premiere in 2013, Magda Romanska's celebrated experimental play has been performed and studied around the world, with each culture and language feeding into and responding to Opheliamachine's collage of modern existence. This edited collection brings together eight different translations of the play, offering English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Romanian and Polish language interpretations of Romanska's original text. Along with two introductory essays, these different versions of Opheliamachine provide academics, artists and teachers the opportunity to study a fascinating intersection of Shakespeare, translation, adaptation, feminism and avant-garde theatre.

Opheliamachine

Alan Ackerman

This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.

An Anthology of Theory and Criticism

Reader in Comedy

Dramaturgy, in its many forms, is a fundamental and indispensable element of contemporary theatre. In its earliest definition, the word itself means a comprehensive theory of "play making." Although it initially grew out of theatre, contemporary dramaturgy has made enormous advances in recent years, and it now permeates all kinds of narrative forms and structures: from opera to performance art; from dance and multimedia to filmmaking and robotics. In our global, mediated context of multinational group collaborations that dissolve traditional divisions of roles as well as unbend previously intransigent rules of time and space, the dramaturg is also the ultimate globalist: intercultural mediator, information and research manager, media content analyst, interdisciplinary negotiator, social media strategist. This collection focuses on contemporary dramaturgical practice, bringing together contributions not only from academics but also from prominent working dramaturgs. The inclusion of both means a strong level of engagement with current issues in dramaturgy, from the impact of social media to the ongoing centrality of interdisciplinary and intermedial processes. The contributions survey the field through eight main lenses: world dramaturgy and global perspective dramaturgy as function, verb and skill dramaturgical leadership and season planning production dramaturgy in translation adaptation and new play development interdisciplinary dramaturgy play analysis in postdramatic and new media dramaturgy social media and audience outreach. Magda Romanska is Visiting Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, Associate Professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy at Emerson College, and Dramaturg for Boston Lyric Opera. Her books include The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012), Boguslaw Schaeffer: An Anthology (2012), and Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2014).

The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside of their cultural and historical contexts.

History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class

The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor

Maria Pia Pagani

Giulia Randone

Tindaro Granata

Paolo Ottoboni

Benedetto Sicca

Gabriele Goria

Antonio Pizzo

Massimo Lenzi

Claudia D'Angelo

Vincenza Di Vita

Armando Petrini

Rivista semestrale di studi sulla vita e le forme del teatro. Articoli di A. Pizzo, M.P. Pagani, M. Romanska, T. Granata, P. Ottoboni, B. Sicca, G. Goria, M. Lenzi, C. D’Angelo, G. Randone, V. Di Vita, A. Petrini.

Scritture della performance

Mimesis Journal vol. 3, n. 1

Kathleen Cioffi

Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is an in-depth, multidisciplinary compendium of essays that examine Kantor’s work through the prism of postmemory and trauma theory and in relation to Polish literature, Jewish culture, and Yiddish theater as well as the Japanese, German, French, Polish, and American avant-garde. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theater and contemporary developments in critical theory—particularly Bill Brown’s thing theory, Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, and posthumanism—provide a previously unavailable vocabulary for discussion of Kantor’s theater.

Tadeusz Kantor in Context

Theatermachine

History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’

Magda Romanska

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