REAL POWER
Marina Abramovic likes to say that in the theatre the knife is fake and the blood is fake, but in THIS the knife is real and the blood is real.
performance art
The setting of this play remains static across each act, representing the playwright's home country and showing the effects of events and regimes unfolding through history on the lives of ordinary people
The Teahouse by Lao She
This famous manifesto written in 1913 includes hatred for and control of women as part of a techno-fascist vision of the future
The Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti
Artistically, the Mexican-American playwright Sophie Treadwell was part of modernist and expressionist art movements. Politically, she participated in this movement across North America
The woman's suffrage movement (half points: feminism)
"Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control”
Hamilton
Settler colonists found this Lakota practice so powerful and threatening that the US government committed this massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890
The Ghost Dance
Rolling Macbeth, Lear, Punch and Judy, mad kings, and the psychopathic stock characters of Grand Guignol all into one, this titular protagonist is often used to represent modern dictators
Ubu Roi
Georg Büchner's political manifesto
"The Hessian Courier," arguing for a peasant-lead society and urging "Peace to the huts! War on the palaces!" is one of the earliest examples of this political movement emerging in central Europe
This mode of representation, used before the birth of modern psychology, aims to reveal the intense internal states of characters and the “mood” of society
Expressionism
“The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”
The Indian Independence movement began with a series of uprisings in 1859, partially sparked by this play
Nil Darpan / The Indigo Planting Mirror
Sidi, the village belle, represents a decision between serving one's own desires and serving one's cultural traditions. Throughout Soyinka's play, and in its title, she is referred to as THIS
a jewel
Aime Cesaire states us the aim of his play Une Tempete through this concise phrase, to do this
to reveal the barbarity of Western Civilization
The plays of the Harlem Renaissance focused on the real lives of Black Americans, sharing this mode of representation with other socialist and communist movements of the 1920’s
social realism/realism
“Just as the poppy and the dandelion are scythed down in the flower of their youth by the pitiless scythe of the pitiless scyther who pitilessly scythes their pitiful pans, so poor Renski has played the pretty poppy’s pitiful part.”
Ubu Roi
The real person on which this play was based was publicly executed in the main square of Leipzig on August 27, 1824
Woyzeck
This overarching metaphor of "all the world's a stage / and the men and women merely players" defines the cosmology of the Western colonial-modern world in metaphorical relation with the traditional dramaturgy of the theatre. In Latin, it is called THIS
Theatrum Mundi
This Russian playwright's plays were developed within an acting company as part of a holistic artistic methodology theorized by this director, actor, and producer
Stanislavski
The playwright Dinabandhu Mitra is one of the most famous founders of this important cultural movement in Kolkata
The Bengali Renaissance
“How can that be? A great sin – a mortal sin – for which I must die and go to hell – but it made me free! One moment I was free! How is that, Father? [...] And that other sin – that other sin – that sin of love – That’s all I ever knew of Heaven – heaven on earth! How can that be – a sin – a mortal sin – all I know of heaven?”
Machinal
Brecht’s used this denaturalizing theatrical convention to keep "pushing away" his audience, so they could maintain a critical attitude
The alienation effect, or "verfremdunkseffekt"
Demonstrating care, maternal love, and responsibility for the vulnerable, this character is not just a victim of suffering, this protagonist of the play Plumes can also be seen as a metaphor for Black feminism (or womanism)
Charity Brown (in Plumes)
Alfred Jarry’s theatrical satire of science, which he called "pataphysics," claims to do this
provide imaginary solutions that change the problem
Butoh is a crucial part of this post-WW2 epic movement across dance, music, visual art, and theatre, a movement which is just now transforming as colonial-modern worldviews lose their hold
Postmodernism
“There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!”
The Three Sisters