Description
‘On Hell’ is an opportunity to update the scenographic maps of performance technology. At one time, to think of stage technology was to consider the vertical axis of the stage: the open heavens above and the closed underworld of the stage hidden from an audience. In the contemporary theatre space, the diversification of theatrical forms through the twentieth century has witnessed the machinery of the unseen under stage area of the nineteenth-century western theatre vanish along with our sense of what it evokes.
This issue seeks to rediscover that technologized space as a place of historical and scenographic significance in the theatre and to address the relationship between the visible playing space of the contemporary stage with the technological, now that it is no longer hidden in the historical underworld of the theatre. It examines what is now invoked when those technologies emerge and become part of the action, and ponders if once summoned, can what is underneath a stage ever be banished?
READ THE EDITORIAL AND ARTICLE ABSTRACTS online
CONTENTS
Editorial
GERAINT D’ARCY & RICHARD GOUGH
L’Enfer du Théatre
GERAINT D’ARCY
Hope at the Gates of Hell: Staging Dante’s Inferno
behind bars
RON JENKINS
Anthropocene Hells: Matter and myth in Philippe
Quesne’s Night of the Moles
JAN-TAGE KÜHLING
From Hell to Heterotopia: Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno
NATALIE KATSOU
Designed to Save: Scenography and ideology in Hell
House
MADELON HOEDT
Hell in the Cave: Falling down to find the light
SARA FONTANA
Seeing Alone Yet Together: Modern-day Tiresias in VR
theatre
HAKYUNG SIM
The Chamber of Banality: Hell on Earth
RINA ARYA
Secret Gardens, Ritualistic Renovations and Modernist
Failures: On the out loud building of scenographies by
Decoratelier
JASPER DELBECKE
Under the Pier: Staging Anne Imhof’s Sex
MARY L. COYNE
Words from a Pit
PEADER KIRK AND TOM CASSANI
Demonic Interventions: On robots as performing
subjects
ANIA MALINOWSKA
Conjuring Sonic Demons in Contemporary Australian
Gothic Theatre
MILES O’NEIL
Technologies of the Hungry Ghosts and Underworld
Gods
ALVIN ENG HUI LIM
The Ghost on the Machine: The Corsican trap and the
spirit of industrial capitalism
GAVIN WHITEHEAD
Looking Back with Orpheus
RICHARD GOUGH
REVIEWS
Performance Mediated by Technology: A review of
Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of
Performance by Pascale Aebischer
HAILEY BACHRACH
Technical Challenge: A review of Shakespeare,
Technicity, Theatre by William B. Worthen
MICHAEL JOEL BARTELLE
Making Sense of Life and Death: A Review of Andrew
Griffin’s Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama
AURÉLIE BLANC
