TDR (Cambridge, Mass.) articles from December 1999

TDR (Cambridge, Mass.) archives from December 1999

Announcements.
December 22, 1999... Enter TDR's Student Essay Contest, Win $500 1 June 2000 is the deadline for the 11th annual TDR Student Essay Contest. Essays may be on any subject concerning performance in the broadest sense of that term. Revise your term papers, adapt...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
December 22, 1999... In TDR volume 42, number 2 (T162), the caption for plate 3 on p. 126 of Frances Harding's "Presenting and Re-Presenting the Self: From Not-Acting to Acting in African Performance" was incorrect. The caption should have read: "A Chamba...

German Brecht, European Readings.(playwright Bertolt Brecht)
December 22, 1999... The writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret, because he is separated from it. However, his inability to read the work is not a purely negative phenomenon. It is,...

Brecht's Modernity: Notes on a Remote Author.
December 22, 1999... In Search of an Opponent The current pictorial biographies miss a photo that preserves a memorable moment: The young poet Brecht imagines himself as a future legend by standing in the empty alcove of the Schiller monument at the front of...

Newness and Pleasure: Mahagonny Songs(1).(Bertolt Brecht)
December 22, 1999... I Both the Mahagonny Songs of the Hauspostille (Manual of Piety) and the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny have continued to pose a problem to critics due to a certain inner contradiction: In inseparable fusion, they voice...

"... just an invented word".(Bertolt Brecht's works)
December 22, 1999... "Mahagonny--that is just an invented word" (BFA 2:331, emphasis added); this line ends the short epilogue which Bert Brecht wrote in 1927 for Kurt Weill's first musical rendition of his Mahagonny Songs. Within it, the whole history of the...

Editorial Principles in the Berlin and Frankfurt Edition of Bertolt Brecht's Works.
December 22, 1999... In the concluding sentence of a letter to Wieland Herzfelde, the publisher of his Gesammelte Werke [collected works] put out by Malik-Verlag, Brecht wrote in December 1937: "By the way, there is still a misprint in the catalogue: Kuratier...

Brecht [+ or -] Muller: German-German Brecht Images before and after 1989.(dramatists Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller)
December 22, 1999... I In 1982 Heiner Muller and Ginka Tsholakowa directed Muller's Macbeth at the Volksbuhne in East Berlin. In his review of the production Ernst Schumacher wrote: "All in all a realism of a surreal kind. The overall style: `Spiritual....

BRECHTBLOCK.
December 22, 1999... Wie komme ich, ein Mann aus Augsburg mit vielfachen Gaben, die Welt zu sehn und darzustellen, auf diese Markte, Cafes und Amusierbuden, und unter solche Menschen? Vierzig Jahre und mein Werk ist der Abgesang des Jahrtausends. Ich habe die...

The Performance of Translation: Benjamin and Brecht on the Loss of Small Details.
December 22, 1999... The question of translation, as reflected from different viewpoints by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, offers a methodological framework concerning the relation between text, performance, and gesture. Beginning with a short commentary on...

Brecht's Gestus: Brecht and C.P. Cavafy.(1) And Heiner Muller.
December 22, 1999... Among Bertolt Brecht's late poems there is one pertaining to the vicinity of the Buckow Elegies(2) and probably dating back to around 1953. This poem displays in a particular way Brecht's Gestus as a playwright and theatre director, which is...

Brecht in Hollywood: Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film.
December 22, 1999... Die beste Schule fur Dialektik ist die Emigration. Die scharfsten Dialektiker sind die Fluchtlinge. --Bertolt Brecht, Fluchtlingsgesprache (1967, 14:1462) [The best school for dialectics is emigration. The refugees are the sharpest...

Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theatre.(German author Bertolt Brecht)
December 22, 1999... Bertok Brecht's theatrical techniques are commonly cited as a useful means for feminist revisions of theatrical realism. Two articles in particular--one historical, the other theoretical--have connected Brechtian techniques to the sources of...

Einar wie Eva: Towards an Economy of the Feminine in Schleef's Puntila(1).
December 22, 1999... After the Zurich premiere of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti [Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti] (1948), Brecht felt it imperative to warn that "[t]he actor playing Puntila must be careful not to let his vitality or charm [...] so win over the...

Aleksandar Lukac: Theatre Offensives from Belgrade to Toronto.(Interview)
December 22, 1999... Toronto, Ontario, Canada 15 July 1997 RUDAKOFF: Tell me a little about your early introduction to theatre in Yugoslavia. LUKAC: I was born in Sarajevo in 1957 and lived there until I was 13, with a brief two-year stint in New York as...

The Lehrstuck As Performance.
December 22, 1999... I Reading Brecht's Lehrstucke as thesis pieces has become an established tenet of German studies even though there are disagreements over the status of the theses in Brecht's texts. Should they be understood in terms of content or form:...

The Making of a Document: An Approach to Brecht's Fatzer Fragment.
December 22, 1999... In the Fatzer fragment (1926-1930) Brecht develops his own concept of the document in response to the increasing popularity of documentary drama and literature in the 1920s. He plays with the conventional meaning of this term and especially...

Skin, Body, and Presence in Contemporary European Choreography.
December 22, 1999... reduction The contemporary European dance scene can be qualified by one term: "reduction"--of expansiveness, of the spectacular, of the unessential. Accompanying this reduction in dance is a stripping of the dancing body itself. Naked...

Representing "Awarishness": Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the 19th-Century Pin-up.
December 22, 1999... Faye E. Dudden's book, Women in the American Theatre, begins with an anecdote about the author's grandmother, who once told Dudden, "with an air of considerable importance, that she had seen Ellen Terry" (1994:1). Whether her grandmother had...

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. By Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; 311 pp.; illustrations. $50.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. A tour bus passes me, and someone leans over the...

Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. By Susan G. Davis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; 336 pp.; illustrations. $50.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. A tour bus passes me, and someone leans over the...

Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. By Andrea Stulman Dennett. New York: NYU Press, 1997; 208 pp.; illustrations. $45.00 cloth, $15.95 paper. A tour bus passes me, and someone leans over the rail to take my picture. I'm in...

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; 296 pp. $19.95 cloth, $50.00 paper. Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and...

Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. Edited by Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green. New York: New York University Press, 1998; 320 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper. Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship,...

Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre. Edited by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; 312 pp. $49.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. While a number of scholars working in the fields of...

Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. Edited by Jan Cohen-Cruz. London and New York: Routledge, 1998; 302 pp. $75.00 cloth, $22.99 paper. While a number of scholars working in the fields of performance studies and...