Cosmic theater: the moving state of theater

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34629/rcdmt.vol.1.n.1.pp144-157

Keywords:

Theater, Theater studies, Contemporary art, Aesthetics, Medium

Abstract

The term "theatre" has been losing some preponderance, with many artists and also the academia opting for designations like "performing arts" or "live arts". This search for a greater comprehensiveness with the alteration of nomenclature follows a trend with a tradition. But after the theatre of the beginning of the 20th century that was declaring itself as a place of confluence of different disciplines and arts, contemporary theatre provides objects that not only embrace that plurality, but also distance themselves from an essence that brought them together. Using vocabulary and philosophy extracted from the field of contemporary art, this essay seeks descriptions more capable of embracing the plurality of certain theatre and performing arts' performances, on the principle that if, on the one hand, categories are obsolete and conservative ways to talk about them, they are also what permits their social recognition.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

  • Jose Maria Vieira Mendes, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

    José Maria Vieira Mendes (b. 1976) is an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Humanities - University of Lisbon since 2021, Department of Germanic Studies, and a researcher at Theatre Studies Centre.

    He holds a BA from the University of Lisbon (German and Portuguese Language and Literature) and a PHD in Literary Theory from the same Faculty in collaboration with the Inter-Arts program at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He teaches seminars in Performing Arts, Cultural Studies and Contemporary Art among other subjects.
    He has published several articles on theatre and art, promotes workshops, and is invited to teach in seminars and conferences. He has written plays, librettos and writes occasionally for visual artists.
    He participated, as a playwright, in the International Theatre Academy Ruhr, in Bochum (1999), in the International Summer Residency 2000 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and at the Internationales Forum of the Theatertreffen Festival in Berlin in 2008. He was a guest writer at Berkeley University of California in 2009.
    He is a member of Teatro Praga, a Portuguese theater collective that has been regularly performing at the most prestigious contemporary cultural institutions in Portugal and in several festivals and venues in other countries (Italy, UK, Germany, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Denmark, Turkey, China, Brazil). He is also part of the artistic direction of Rua das Gaivotas 6, a multidisciplinary venue in Lisbon for young emerging performers. 

    His plays have been published in Portugal and translated into French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, etc. He has also translated plays by Beckett, Harold Pinter, Heiner Müller, R.W. Fassbinder, Bertolt Brecht, René Pollesch, etc. 

    He has published two volumes of his plays, a fictional diary and an essay, “One Thing Is Not the Other. On Theatre and Literature” (2016; 2nd revised edition 2022).

References

Auslander, Philip. 1997. From Acting to Performance. New York, London: Routledge.

Duplan, Anaïs. 2016. Take This Stallion. New York: Brooklyn Arts Press.

Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character. Perspectives on Theater After Modernism. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Higgins, Dick. 2007. Horizons. [n.p.]: ubu editions.

Krauss, Rosalind.1997. “‘… And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman”. October 81: 5-33. https://doi.org/10.2307/779016.

_________. 2000. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson.

_________. 2011. Under Blue Cup. Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 1997. “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy”, Performance Research 2 (1): 55-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1997.10871532.

_________. 2005. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren.

Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitsch Feminism: A Manifesto. London, New York: Verso Books.

Stein, Gertrude. 1988. Lectures in America. London: Virago Press.

Downloads

Published

2022-07-25

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2022 RHINOCERVS: Cinema, Dança, Música, Teatro

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Articles published or submitted to RHINOCERVS: Cinema, Dança, Música, Teatro are licensed according to Creative Commons Attribution License  (CC BY-NC 4.0). Authors agree that:

Copyrights of all articles published are retained by authors with first publication copyright granted to the journal.

All articles are under the Creative Commons Attribution License  recognizing the authorship of the publication and identifying that first publication took place in this journal.

Authors have the right to free distribute or make available in private or institutional pages the version published by  RHINOCERVS: Cinema, Dança, Música, Teatro provided the original proper citation.

The journal only accepts articles not published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. After published, the article cannot be published again partial or totally without the editorial board consent.

How to Cite

Cosmic theater: the moving state of theater. (2022). RHINOCERVS: Cinema, Dança, Música, Teatro, 1(1), 144-157. https://doi.org/10.34629/rcdmt.vol.1.n.1.pp144-157