Articles
Mobilizing Workers Poetry: A Pedagogical Journal (TDR 2024)
The TDR: The Drama Review article talks about how students staged a performance based on poetry written by Chinese migrant workers while under lockdown in a boarding school in China. The poems guided an exploration of biotechnical interdependencies in and between local and global environments and the composition of the resistance script and movement score of laboring bodies embedded in the poems.
Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral (Performance Research 2023)
The article analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.
Lockdown Theatres of Sadness: Case Studies of Precarity in Artistic Work (Performance Research 2023)
I look at digital theatre made under the COVID-19 lockdown in Romania – specifically Exeunt, a collective creation directed by Bobi Pricop, POOL (no water), where Radu Nica, Andu Dumitrescu and Vlaicu Golcea repurpose Mark Ravenhill’s text, and finally Ștefan Peca’s one-man show mynewplay? – from the perspective of precarity and work-induced sadness. Through their alluring video art or funny rants against the theatre, the three projects stage anxieties about the future, labour grievances and commentaries on the art market. Theatre artists’ resilience during the time of lockdowns reflects both artistic ingenuity and the practiced survivalism of the cultural worker under neoliberalism.
Introduction to Opheliamachine by Magda Romanska (Methuen Drama 2024)
An excerpt from the intro: “Ophelia hardly ever spoke before. What was her opinion on the brotherly crimes, the neighbourly invasions, the Christian genocides? No one asked. When she did speak, it was because she was crazy. When she did speak, [Heiner] Müller made ‘her heart [into] a clock’, the poor object that she is. Ophelia was Europe, her body to be conquered. Ophelia was the body, ‘alone with […] breasts […] thighs […] womb’, Ophelia was the victim, ‘the woman dangling from the rope’, the item traded, bled, gassed. Opheliamachine gives subaltern Ophelia the chance to speak. It turns out she has an actual heart, one that ‘bleeds’, even though ‘her veins are made of wire’. Rebecoming a person is a tough journey; she will never fit the standards of the universal human. She misses the mark. She is cyborgian. She talks about irrelevant things. But she does have a mouth on top of breasts, and that mouth is not just another hole. She has thoughts she articulates into words. She is an intellectual. She is still mad, but this time angry-mad. She talks too much about other women, babies and marriage, sex and love, good-for-nothing, couch-potato Hamlet vacillating between TV channels, but what can you do, she thinks, ego sum femina. So are the other two characters besides Hamlet. Horatio appears feminized, ‘wearing a tux, fishnet stockings, and red heels. Her hair is pulled back’. Horatio is now Ophelia’s best friend, not Hamlet’s. Gertrude, looking like a Jersey immigrant matriarch in robe and hair rollers, plays the mother of the bride. How the tables have turned. There have never been so many good female roles in a Shakespearean play.”
To Image and Imagine: Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué, and the Counter-Archive (Theatre History Studies 2018)
In 2010, contemporary arts museum BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands, curated Rabih Mroue’s first solo exhibition, referencing the achievement of a theatre artist breaking into the fine art circuit with the exhibit’s playful title wavering between self-celebratory and self-effacing: I, the Undersigned. A few months into the exhibit, Mroue crossed out with a bold red line the big lettered title displayed on the pristine white gallery wall and graffitied in cursive Arab lettering underneath: “The People Are Demanding.” The slogan had just begun circulating among demonstrating crowds first in Tunisia and then in Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt, in a wave of protests that soon came to be named in the media as the Arab Spring. With a single gesture, Mroue drew a line underneath his previous work and hinted at beginning a new chapter. The move from the “I” to the “we” underscored an intent to recalibrate forms and temporalities in a shifted focus from past memories to future aspirations–from an obsession with parsing and (de)ciphering a long history of civil war in Lebanon and marking the present with the signs of trauma to a collective effort to move beyond ghosts and traces to imagine what can happen in an approaching future.
“Dramaturgies for the Digital Age,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska (2015)
The essay discusses principles of dramaturgy within the context of digital culture.
Europe in Movement: A Choreography from the Eastern Border (Journal of Poverty 2014)
This article centers on Letter to Heiner Müller by Croatian playwright Goran Ferčec to discuss methods of artistic intervention in the social sphere. Various forms of movement—as mass mobilizations, as ideology in flux, as national and international migration chasing work opportunities, and as the movement of the singular body in performance—form the layered textures of Ferčec’s piece trying to spell out possible directions of political action. The role of the artist and intellectual in oppositional movement appears to be the burning question of the day.
Virtual Theater for Beginners (Theater 2012)
The article details a first experience of Second Life theatre.
Ilinca Todoruț
Theatre maker, theatre teacher, theatre theoretician