James Slowiak, Jairo Cuesta: Jerzy Grotowski (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, experimental theatre, paratheatre, participation, poland, poor theatre, spectatorship, theatre, theatre laboratory
Written by two theatre professionals who worked intimately with Grotowski over the last twenty-five years of his life, this book fills a gap in the published writings about this master director and teacher.
In this book, the writers demonstrate Grotowski’s significance and how his frank rhetoric, his revolutionary theories, his landmark productions, and pioneering cultural projects continue to cause controversy and provide fertile topics for discussion and further experimentation in theatre studios, classrooms, and on stages around the world.
The book introduces Grotowski to a new generation of theatre students, outlining his contributions to twentieth century performance and placing them in context and in perspective.
Publisher Routledge, 2007
Routledge Performance Practitioners series
ISBN 0203962745, 9780203962749
208 pages
Grotowski at Wikipedia
review (Kermit Dunkelberg, TDR: The Drama Review)
James H. Johnson: Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, audience, cultural history, france, listening, music, music history, paris, silence, sociology of music, spectatorship
Beginning with the simple question, “Why did audiences grow silent?” Listening in Paris gives a spectator’s-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today.
Drawing from a wide range of sources–novels, memoirs, police files, personal correspondence, newspaper reviews, architectural plans, and the like–Johnson brings the performances to life: the hubbub of eighteenth-century opera, the exuberance of Revolutionary audiences, Napoleon’s musical authoritarianism, the bourgeoisie’s polite consideration. He singles out the music of Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, and Beethoven as especially important in forging new ways of hearing. This book’s theoretical edge will appeal to cultural and intellectual historians in many fields and periods.
Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1996
Volume 21 of Studies on the History of Society and Culture series
ISBN 0520918231, 9780520918238
384 pages
Jacques Rancière: The Emancipated Spectator (2008/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, audience, life, philosophy, political art, spectatorship
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.
The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?
First published as Le spectateur emancipe, Editions La Fabrique, 2008
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso, 2009
ISBN 184467343X, 9781844673438
134 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)
PDF (no OCR; essay published in Artforum magazine, March 2007; updated on 2012-7-14)