Performance Research Volume 26 Issue 2

On Hell

Issue editors: Geraint D’Arcy & Richard Gough

ISSN: 1352-8165 (2021) 26:2

‘On Hell’ is an opportunity to update the scenographic maps of performance technology. At one time, to think of stage technology was to consider the vertical axis of the stage: the open heavens above and the closed underworld of the stage hidden from an audience. In the contemporary theatre space, the diversification of theatrical forms through the twentieth century has witnessed the machinery of the unseen under stage area of the nineteenth-century western theatre vanish along with our sense of what it evokes.

This issue seeks to rediscover that technologized space as a place of historical and scenographic significance in the theatre and to address the relationship between the visible playing space of the contemporary stage with the technological, now that it is no longer hidden in the historical underworld of the theatre. It examines what is now invoked when those technologies emerge and become part of the action, and ponders if once summoned, can what is underneath a stage ever be banished?

 

READ THE EDITORIAL AND ARTICLE ABSTRACTS online

 

CONTENTS

Editorial

GERAINT D’ARCY & RICHARD GOUGH

 

L’Enfer du Théatre

GERAINT D'ARCY

 

Hope at the Gates of Hell: Staging Dante’s Inferno

behind bars

RON JENKINS

 

Anthropocene Hells: Matter and myth in Philippe

Quesne’s Night of the Moles

JAN-TAGE KÜHLING

 

From Hell to Heterotopia: Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno

NATALIE KATSOU

 

Designed to Save: Scenography and ideology in Hell

House

MADELON HOEDT

 

Hell in the Cave: Falling down to find the light

SARA FONTANA

 

Seeing Alone Yet Together: Modern-day Tiresias in VR

theatre

HAKYUNG SIM

 

The Chamber of Banality: Hell on Earth

RINA ARYA

 

Secret Gardens, Ritualistic Renovations and Modernist

Failures: On the out loud building of scenographies by

Decoratelier

JASPER DELBECKE

 

Under the Pier: Staging Anne Imhof’s Sex

MARY L. COYNE

 

Words from a Pit

PEADER KIRK AND TOM CASSANI

 

Demonic Interventions: On robots as performing

subjects

ANIA MALINOWSKA

 

Conjuring Sonic Demons in Contemporary Australian

Gothic Theatre

MILES O'NEIL

 

Technologies of the Hungry Ghosts and Underworld

Gods

ALVIN ENG HUI LIM

 

The Ghost on the Machine: The Corsican trap and the

spirit of industrial capitalism

GAVIN WHITEHEAD

 

Looking Back with Orpheus

RICHARD GOUGH

 

REVIEWS

Performance Mediated by Technology: A review of

Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of

Performance by Pascale Aebischer

HAILEY BACHRACH

 

Technical Challenge: A review of Shakespeare,

Technicity, Theatre by William B. Worthen

MICHAEL JOEL BARTELLE

 

Making Sense of Life and Death: A Review of Andrew

Griffin’s Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama

AURÉLIE BLANC