quotations about postmodern theatre
The poetics of unmaking in postmodernism is particularly meaningful, in that in the theatre, the world is seen as being unmade into a world in the making, in which the human subject unfolds as a process of subjectivity in the making as well.
A. ROBERT LEE
Old Worlds, New Worlds
The urge to disrupt the theatrical illusion has led to a variety of dramatic means such as a provocative audience addressing, or, even more radically, the attempt to establish physical contact with the audience ... It is precisely in the moment of the breakdown in a performance, that is, when the illusion of the stage as a closed world is denied, that the audience participation can take place and the spectator moves into the center of theatrical attention. In postmodern drama, forms of meaning are created by the gaze of the spectator ... the spectator becomes the "master of semiosis."
KERSTIN SCHMIDT
Postmodernism in American Drama
The postmodern theatre is introducing the removal of the boundary of language, and by that it is founding some new language whose source is art in itself.
STERIJINO POZORJE
Scena, 1990
The more successful the intellectual paradigm of postmodern performance becomes, the tighter is the circuit of exchange between the self-acknowledging and unmistakable energies of performance and the exemplary or demonstrative function that such free energies perform for the paradigm.
STEVEN CONNOR
Postmodernist Culture
Generally postmodern performance wants to provoke the viewer/ reader to be aware of, and to critique the very strategies of representation.
PHILLIP B. ZARRILLI
Theatre Histories: An Introduction
I always am in a role, lovely -- for you, for them -- even for myself. Yeah... Even when I'm alone, I am still in a role -- and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.
SIMONA PANOVA
Nightmarish Sacrifice
Previous concepts of plot and characterization, no matter whether they are in the Aristotelian or modernist sense, no longer exist in the postmodern theatre. Critical categories of the psychic, dream, distortion and plotlessness in modernist poetics are no longer the defining qualities of the postmodern theatre, which offers a new poetics of collage in playing with discontinuities and inconsistencies always in the making and unmaking.
A. ROBERT LEE
Old Worlds, New Worlds
In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other.
PHILIP AUSLANDER
From Acting to Performance
The postmodern theatre is a theatre of performance, rather than a theatre of the abstraction of idea, for performance itself is form, essence and idea.
A. ROBERT LEE
Old Worlds, New Worlds
New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
PATRICE PAVIS
Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
The postmodern theater is almost obsessed with citation, almost like pieces of a collage, into new combinations with little attempt to hide the fragmentary and 'quoted' nature of these pieces.
MARVIN A. CARLSON
The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine
Postmodern drama remains a theater of theory ... with vital interest in the transformative processes of perception, that is, on how drama and theater are created and presented on stage.
KERSTIN SCHMIDT
Postmodernism in American Drama
Under postmodern influence, theatre as it has so long and so widely been appreciated -- as holding "as 'twere the mirror up to nature" -- undergoes a catastrophic refiguring. The linearism and aesthetics of conventional theatre -- that comfortably familiar, enjoyably predictable swelling and subsiding of traditional, plot-focused drama -- falls away completely. What we are left with in its wake, is an uncomfortable vacuum and a pervasive, disorienting senselessness. The question is, are we convinced, or just a bit confused?
EMILY PARKER
"Savage melodies, clown-children, and pink plastic membranes: does postmodernist theatre go too far?", Oxford Student, November 1, 2014
Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.
PATRICE PAVIS
Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
Postmodern theatre makes a presentation, not a representation.
MICK WALLIS
Drama/Theatre/Performance
In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.
JEREMY BEGBIE
"Christ and the cultures: Christianity and the arts"
The task of postmodern theater is to ... continue to pursue the illusive foundation of an unfounded appearance. Rather than stand in opposition of life, theater is the most accurate mirror of life; the unfounded apparency of the actor caught within the dispersion of the text and the playing space mirrors the unfounded apparency of the social self caught within the dispersion of culture and social space.
FRED MCGLYNN
attributed, Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theater in the Post-Dictatorship Period
Underlying postmodern theater is the belief that life is simply an eclectic assemblage of disconnected and impermanent events and narratives.
R. KEVIN SEASOLTZ
A Virtuous Church: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Liturgy for the 21st Century
Far from participating in a collective experience that is human enough to be social, the postmodernist production is designed to distance the human and draw in the alien.
EMILY PARKER
"Savage melodies, clown-children, and pink plastic membranes: does postmodernist theatre go too far?", Oxford Student, November 1, 2014
Postmodern dramatists approach performance art as a valuable resource for their dramatic endeavors. Among others, the influence takes shape most vividly in the attempt to make the theatrical audience reconsider the traditional boundaries between performance and reality, art and life, fiction and autobiography.
KERSTIN SCHMIDT
Postmodernism in American Drama