Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices

✍ Scribed by Nicholas E. Johnson, Jonathan Heron

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 86
• Series: Elements in Beckett Studies
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How do twenty-first century theatre practitioners negotiate the dynamics of tradition and innovation across the works of Samuel Beckett? Beckett's own tendencies toward fluidity of genre, iteration/repetition, and collaboration – modes that also define the 'experimental' – allow for greater openness than is often assumed. Reading recent performances for creative uses of embodiment, environment, and technology reveals the increasingly interdisciplinary, international, and intermedial character of contemporary Beckettian practice. The experimentation of current practitioners challenges a discourse based on historical controversies, exposing a still-expanding terrain for Beckett in performance.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Experimental Beckett
Contents
1 Positioning the ‘Experimental’ in Beckett
Introduction: A Living Legacy
‘Accursed progenitor’: An Evolutionary Model
Living Laboratories: An Experimental Model
Performance Cultures: An Emerging Model
2 Text and Embodiment (‘First the body’)
Introduction: The Biomechanical Body
Variations on Happy Days
Interventions with Not I
Translations in Return to Absence
3 Space and Environment (‘First the place’)
Introduction: Bodied Spaces
Bodies in Places: Moving the Audience
Places through Bodies: Site-Responsive Performance
Transforming Place: Intermedial Environments
4 Media and Technology (‘First both’)
Inside the Theatre: Light and Sound
Beyond the Theatre: Video and Internet
Towards the Virtual: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality,
and Artificial Intelligence
5 Beckett Beyond Boundaries: A Dialogue
References
Acknowledgements