Derek Jarman's Allegories of Spectacle: Inter-Artistic Embodiment

Relational Designs in Literature and The Arts: Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen. , 2012

William Shakespeare approaches visual experience in most of his plays, either to privilege the power of sight over any other sense (“I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine eyes [Hamlet, 1.1 55-57]), or to mistrust images for its fictitious simulation of true objects or people, (“I see thee still […] / There’s not such thing [Macbeth, 2.1, 45-47]). The boundaries between illusion and reality are blurred through Lear’s madness, Macbeth’s hallucinations, and the Spectre of Hamlet’s father, among other instances. Remarkably enough, Shakespeare’s reflection on visual stimuli is often related to artistic imagery. When looking at his wife’s sculpture, Leontes observes that “the fixture of her eye has motion in’t / As we are mock’d with art” [The Winter’s Tale, 5. 3, 66-67]. Moreover, when the avid reader/spectator sees Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, she is actually experiencing the incarnation of a memento mori, one of the most reproduced iconographies in European Art (mostly painting) since the 15th century. Turned into the most common among illustrations of Hamlet, including paintings and photographs, this memento mori has remerged throughout time, attracting artists of all periods. In the 20th century, Sergéi Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe portrayed themselves imitating Hamlet’s gesture. Likewise, Yorick’s skull has played a vital and ever-present role in the first decade of the 21st century. Just to mention an example, Damien Hirst not only designed a diamond skull to subvert the idea of vanitas but was also photographed holding it in his hand in the Hamlet-like style. In this context, this paper aims to examine the infinite circulation of energy from word to image and vice versa by focusing on the dialogic relations between Shakespeare’s plays and recent visual appropriations of Hamlet’s memento mori.

Art History, vol. 33, nr. 2, April 2010

2017

Theatre scholars and historians assume too easily that theoretical reflection on the performative qualities of the theatre began only in the eighteenth century. In mid-eighteenth century France, writers and philosophers such as Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond D'Alembert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antoine-François Riccoboni, or Jean-Georges Noverre (to name but a few) showed a passionate interest in the aesthetics and the morality of performance practices in dramatic theatre, music theatre, or dance. Compared to this rich diversity of ideas in the eighteenth century, seventeenth-century French writings on theatre and the performing arts seem, at first sight, far less interesting or daring. However, this is merely a modern perception. Our idea of le théâtre classique is still rather reductionist, and often limited to the theatrical canon of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière. It affords a view of the performing arts that is dominated by tragedy and comedy and that, firmly embedded within a neo-Aristotelian poetics, privileges dramatic concerns above performative interests.

El Palacio, Spring 2016 This exhibition examines the formal means artists employ to impart a sense of drama and setting in their compositions. In the performing arts, “stage, setting and mood” refer to the evocative and emotional experiences that can be created in the physical space of the theater with the use of backdrops, props, lighting, sound and the work of the performers. In the visual arts, artists employ theatrical pictorial means to appeal to the senses. Colors, bold forms, and compelling subjects can be called on to elicit an emotional connection between viewer and artwork. In this exhibition, artworks that feature high drama, theatrical presentation, and narrative storytelling, demonstrate the connection between sensation and spectacle. The townscapes and landscapes demonstrate a theatrical approach to non-performance subjects employing stage-like arrangements of landscape and architectural features, dramatic lighting to intensify mood, and narrative interaction. The exhibition comprises close to 50 artworks dating from the late 18th century to the present including paintings, drawings, photography, prints, book illustrations, ceramics, bronzes and glass. The diverse range of artists with work in the exhibition include Augustus Leopold Egg, Trude Fleischmann, Francisco de Goya, Gene Kloss, Eli Levin, Virgil Ortiz, Julius Rolshoven, Utagawa Kunisada, and Beatrice Wood. Feb 2016 – May 2016

Tekijä – teos, esitys ja yhteiskunta. Eds Annette Arlander, Laura Gröndahl, and Marja Silde

The article argues for a “textural” understanding of “theatricality,” across three fairly distinct models: the image – deep or shallow, as for Richard Wagner and Georg Fuchs; the platform – of skill or tension, as for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht; and the tightrope – this is Peter Brook’s metaphor for a kind of theatrical immediacy that navigates between the “holy” and “rough” aspirations of the above. Beyond such central authorities, authorship itself is seen as woven within the work; ‘texture,’ throughout, implies a dramaturgy of interweaving strands or processes, as opposed to the assemblage ofpre-existing parts or components. What marks each of the three models as specifically theatrical is how the very density or sparsity of their textures ostensibly deviates from some historically specific performative norm – be it operatic convention, stage naturalism, capitalist society, literary or “deadly” theatre.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2012

2005

Resumen en: The extensive use of symbolic images in Eduard II has often been ctitically addressed ; in this paper I would Iike to focus upon the use of emblems as a ...

Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2019

The article aims to reconstruct the eighteenth-century discussion about knowledge and its connection to a new kind of acting. Mise en sc e ne , that is, the collective and negotiable creation of meaning in theatre, will be at the core of the following pages. I will examine the eighteenth-century essayists who redefined the body as a readable text and senses as useful tools for understanding others, participants in the process. Metatexts, engendered by both the dramaturgic text and its staging, will demonstrate how these essayists orientated acting and theatrical reception. Key-words around which the main concepts have been developed will be considered as markers of the pervasiveness of the discourse on passions and sensibility in many literary and performative genres. As a case-study, the article focuses on Macbeth , affirming that essays written on the art of acting and related topics concurred in creating meaningful refractions in Garrick’s performances, whose manifold instances w...

Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 1994