Willmar Sauter

Proceedings of the XIth FIRT/IFTR Congress (selection)

New Directions in Theatre Research

Vicki Ann Cremona

Gay Morris

Rikard Hoogland

Playing Culture represents one of the corner stones in the model of the Theatrical Event, as developed by the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this volume, thirteen scholars contribute to illuminate the significance and possibilities of playing within the framework of theatrical events. Playing is understood as an essential part of theatrical communication, from acting on stage to events far from theatre buildings. The playfulness characterizing academic traditions sets the tone in the introduction, illustrating the four sections of the book: Theories, Expansions, Politics and Conventions. The theoretical chapters depart from the classical Homo Ludens and offer a number of new perspectives on what play and playing implies in today’s mediatized culture. The contributions to the second section on extensions, deal with playing in non-theatrical circumstances such as market places, passports and stock holders’ meetings. The third section on the politics of playing focuses on wood-chopping women, saints and youngsters in South African townships – all demonstrating their social and political ambitions and purposes. The last section returns to the stage on which performers intend to represent, respectively, themselves, Bunraku puppets or the audience. Playing appears in many forms and in many places and constitutes a basic principle of theatre and performance. This book touches upon important theoretical implications of playing and offers a wide range of historical and contemporary examples. Playing Culture – Conventions and Extensions of Performance is the third book of the IFTR Working Group on The Theatrical Event. The first volume, entitled Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames was published in 2004, followed by Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture in 2007. The present volume continues to expand the vision of the Theatrical Event as a theory and model for the study of playing, theatre, performance and mediated events.

Conventions and Extensions of Performance

Playing Culture

John Tulloch

Peter Eversmann

Hans van Maanen

Theatrical Events. Borders, Dynamics and Frames is written to develop the concept of 'Eventness' in Theatre Studies. The book as a whole stresses the importance of understanding theatre performances as aesthetic-communicative encounters of a wide range of agents and aspects. The Theatrical Event concept means not only that performers and spectators meet, but also that the specific mental sets, backgrounds and cultural contexts they bring in, strongly contribute to the character of a particular event. Moreover, this concept gives space to the study of the role societal developments - such as technological, political, economical or educational ones - play in theatrical events.

Borders, Dynamics, Frames

Theatrical Events

Erika Fischer-Lichte

Jacqueline Martin

Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice

Understanding Theatre

In the field of aesthetic experiences, presence must be seen as mental activities such as attention, curiosity, and participation. The mere physical ‘being-there’ guarantees no aesthetic responses to artistic or natural appearances. When aesthetics became part of the discourse in eighteenth-century Enlightenments philosophy, the beholder was the centre of interest: how observations turned into aesthetic experiences. In this book, the spectator, reader, listener and viewer have again become the focus of scholarly attention, replacing the century-long dominance of the artwork as exclusive object of aesthetics. In the light of such historical observations, the book develops central aspects of an aesthetics of presence, and introduces, interfoliated with cases of aesthetic experiences in arts and theatre, cities and nature, new parameters of presence. Perceiving, playing, placing and performing are explored and systematised here as theoretical cornerstones of a renewed ‘Aesthetics of Presence’.

Philosophical and Practical Reconsiderations

Aesthetics of Presence

Willmar Sauter

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