Description
From the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, to the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, to the images of the current refugee crisis and recent terrorist atrocities, the early twenty-first century has witnessed increased media interest in showing all kinds of wreckage to a global audience. While these particular examples are captured in images of the debris and detritus of a catastrophe, there has also been a significant turn, particularly in the UK, to the descriptions and linguistic performances of emotional and psychological wreckage, from the victims of various high-profile sexual grooming and abuse cases, to survivors and witnesses of other events. Wreckage is also increasingly made available through the rise of television dramas that deal with violence and representations of its aftermath.
Staging the Wreckage considers how theatre can call on ‘stagings of wreckage’ to show the labour of performance, the inevitable failure of representation and the disasters immanent in human relations. Beyond explorations of theatrical wrecks and wreckage, this issue brings together international scholars and artists who explore the performativity of wreckage, its sites, politics and ‘practices’, in essays, provocations and artists pages.
CONTENTS:
Staging the Wreckage : Editorial
Gianna Bouchard, Patrick Duggan
A Piece of Metal : Parts of Third Angel’s Parts for Machines that do Things
Alexander Kelly, Chris Thorpe
Bodily Wreckage, Economic Salvage and the Middle Passage : In Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on
Arabella Stanger
Staging the Wreck of the Unbelievable : Performing ideology: Imaginary surplus, alienation and anxiety
Gabriella Calchi-Novati
Salvaging a Sense of the Future : Towards a political aesthetics of wreckage
William Platt
Beyond the Sewol : Performing acts of activism in South Korea
Areum Jeong
Rethinking Tourism : On the politics and practices of ‘staging’ New Orleans
Patrick Duggan
Re: Staging the Trauma [artist’s pages]
Laurie Beth Clark
A Visitor Centre for the Next Nuclear Disaster
Sean Simon
Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room
Joseph Dunne-Howrie
THEATRE : POST : A photo essay
Ashley Marinaccio
Anthropocentric Wreckages : Diffracting bodies that haunt across time
Annouchka C. Bayley
Dismantling, Disappearing, Reconstituting? Reflections on the Mackintosh fire 2018
Viviana Checchia, Anika Marschall
Murder in Miniature
Gianna Bouchard
Treasuring Detritus : Reflections on the wreckage left behind by artistic research
Rhiannon Jones, Michael Pinchbeck
Postmodern wreckage in Kate McIntosh’s Worktable and Peter McMaster’s Gold Piece
Zelda Hannay
Body in Ruin : Outside the matter of representation
E. A. Stinson
Touch the Heart – Feel the Crash : Hands bridging bodies that beat the rhythm of loss
Sylvia Solakidi
Wreaking Havoc : The feeling of what happens in Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed
Nicola Shaughnessy
Wrecks Emotional and Unemotional : Mental Distress in Contemporary Performance Edinburgh 2018
Bridget Escolme
Theatre Mitu : Remnant [artist’s pages]
Theater Mitu