Routledge Theatre & Performance Studies
Christoph Schlingensief's Realist Theater
The monograph proposes a new understanding of realism in the theater, one that combines three interrelated dimensions of critique: political (critique of reality), aesthetic (critique of formal artistic means), and institutional (critique of theater as a cultural apparatus).
Ebook Available
The book is the first study of the prolific German filmmaker, performance artist, director, and TV host Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) that identifies him as a practitioner of realism in the theater and lays out how theatrical realism can offer an aesthetic frame sturdy enough to hold together his experiments across media and genres.
The monograph traces Schlingensief’s developing realism through his theater work in conventional theater venues, in less conventional venues, his opera work focusing on the production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, and his art installations on revolving platforms called Animatographs. The book may interest scholars of theater, film, and performance art and practitioners.
“Locked into its labor of negativity, realist theater can make occluded affirmations only on the sly. Schlingensief’s work exacerbated both realism’s intrusion into life and the borders between art and reality. This conflict played itself out through the twirling dances between myth and reality, surface and depth, seen and unseen, and occlusion and exposure that characterized theatrical realism from its nineteenth-century Wagnerian, Ibsenian, or Chekhovian infancy. Schlingensief’s work braved the quicksand of such contradictions, for example, in the realist manner in which language was used both a means of communication and discombobulation.”
- From Christoph Schlingensief's Realist Theater
Forthcoming
Feminist Dramaturgies
Routledge series “Focus on Dramaturgy” edited by Magda Romanska
Feminist Dramaturgies identifies and explains feminist principles of composition, techniques of devising, and methods of performance production. These principles, techniques, and methods actively question institutionalized ways of making theatre that bolster structural inequalities. They provide alternatives to ways of conceiving theatre that subscribe to authoritarian and violent ideologies, including the unreflective use of dramaturgical structures based on progress and growth, conflict, and heroism.
Translations
Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance
Co-translated with Cristina Modreanu into Romanian as Ghidul Routledge de Teatru și Performance, Nemira 2012.
Ilinca Todoruț
Theatre maker, theatre teacher, theatre theoretician