Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor's Work: Foreign Bodies of Knowledge

by Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento

Overview

A sophisticated analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance, this book redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. Alongside the perspectives of other prominent intercultural actors, this study draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret). By illuminating the hidden creative processes usually unavailable to outsiders—the actor’s apprenticeship, training, character development, and rehearsals—Nascimento both reveals how assumptions based on race or ethnicity are misguiding, trouble definitions of intra- and intercultural practices, and details how performance analyses and claims of appropriation fail to consider the permanent transformation of the actor’s identity that cultural transmission and embodiment represent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415988872
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/17/2008
Series:	Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento is an artist-scholar from Rio de Janeiro, with a particular interest in experimental performance. Her articles appear internationally in journals such as A[l]berto and Folhetim (Brazil), Biblioteca Teatrale (Italy), Didaskalia (Poland), Studia Dramatica (Romania), and TDR and Theatre Research International (United States). A professor and chair of the Theater and Dance Department at Macalester College, she is also the author of After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation (Routledge, 2019).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments. 1. The Cultural Temperature of the Twentieth Century. 2. Race, Culture, and the Myth of the Authentic. 3. Tenuous Boundaries: Intra- and Intercultural Embodiments. 4. Peep Show: The Hidden Lives of the Intercultural Actor. 5. Fictive Realities: Character and the Eye of the Beholder. Afterword: A Theatre of Instabilities. Appendix A: Forgotten Memories in Action: An Interview with Ang Gey Pin. Appendix B: Playing the Invisible: An Interview with Roberta Carreri. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Editorial Reviews

"…an excellent, concise contribution to the field…The book is a welcome addition to any cultural theatre curriculum or, for that matter, any advanced acting program." —Jim Williams, Winona State University, Theatre Journal

"Based on theoretical and practical data as well as on personal experience, the author presents a very coherent and readable book which may be of great interest both for experts and laypersons, for theatre scholars and scholars of cultural studies, literature and others." —Susan Mahmody, Theater Forschung

"This examination of intercultural performance is – in almost every respect – a very welcome addition to the field. It challenges its readers to rethink assumptions regarding artistic agency, collaboration, and theatrical border-crossing." — Kathleen M. Gough, University of Glasgow, New Theatre Quarterly

From the Publisher