ABSTRACT
Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis is an international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice.
In exploring the tragic in the fields of history and theory of theatre, the book approaches crisis through an understanding of the existential and political aspect of the tragic condition. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, it showcases theatre texts and productions that enter the public sphere, manifesting notably participatory, immersive, and documentary modes of expression to form a theatre of modern tragedy. The coexistence of scholarly essays with manifesto-like provocations, interviews, original plays, and diaries by theatre artists provides a rich and multifocal lens that allows readers to approach twenty-first-century theatre through historical and critical study, text and performance analysis, and creative processes. Of special value is the global scope of the collection, embracing forms of crisis theatre in many geographically diverse regions of both the East and the West.
Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis will be of use and interest to academics and students of political theatre, applied theatre, theatre history, and theatre theory.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|67 pages
Crisis as Tragedy and Judgment
chapter 1|14 pages
Tragedy and the Crisis of History
chapter 2|16 pages
Beyond Suffering or Resolution
chapter 3|12 pages
Prophets Needed
chapter Testimony 1.1|11 pages
Avra Sidiropoulou in Conversation with Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll
part 2|60 pages
Texts and Contexts of Crisis
chapter 5|13 pages
Leaving the World Good or Leaving a Better World?
chapter 6|13 pages
Tragic and Post-Tragic Representations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama
part 3|67 pages
Stage Narratives of Failure or Visions of a Better World? Bankrupt States, Violent Cities, Global Resistance, Civic Consciousness, and the Poetics of Participation
chapter 8|13 pages
"Theatre Remains Traditionalist and Eurocentric"
chapter 9|16 pages
"How Many More Thousands of Years?"
part 4|39 pages
Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Anthropocene