- Department of Drama Studies
Samuel Beckett Centre
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland
Nicholas Johnson
Trinity College Dublin, Drama Studies, Faculty Member
- Samuel Beckett, Practice-Based Research, Actor Training and Working Practices, ROBERTO BOLAÑO, Documentary Theatre, Ernst Toller, and 16 moreTheatre and Drama Studies, Drama, Performance, Body in Performance, Acting, Directing, Irish Theatre, Performance Philosophy, Performance As Research, Theatre Studies, Theatre, Practice as Research, Performance Studies, Performing Arts, Actor Training, and Interdisciplinarityedit
- Nicholas Johnson is an Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he has worked full-time since 20... moreNicholas Johnson is an Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he has worked full-time since 2008. He co-founded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, within which he co-directs the Beckett Summer School and the Samuel Beckett Laboratory. With Jonathan Heron (Warwick), he co-authored the monograph "Experimental Beckett" (Cambridge UP, 2020) and co-edited the "Performance Issue" (23.1, 2014) and "Pedagogy Issue" (29.1, 2020) of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is a co-editor of two collections from the Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research: "Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing" (L'Harmattan, 2020) and "Beckett's Voices / Voicing Beckett" (Brill, 2021). He has published widely in journals and edited collections on adaptations and intermedial performances of Beckett, directing and acting Beckett, Beckett and censorship, and the use of performance as a tool for research. A secondary research interest, and the topic of a monograph now in progress, relates to how theatre laboratory work can generate new knowledge for more interdisciplinary contexts in a wide range of fields. Johnson has undertaken numerous practice-based research projects since 2008, including collaborations with literature scholars, art historians, educators, translators, sociologists, historians, computer scientists, and medical clinicians, in which performance has played a crucial role. As convener of the college-wide Creative Arts Practice research theme and as committee member of both the Neurohumanities and Medical and Health Humanities initiatives at TCD, Johnson's research is extending the role of theatre and performance in these alternative settings.
Johnson is a literary translator (from German), with current and past projects on Toller, Kafka, Frisch, Trakl, and Brecht, including the first translation and publication of Brecht's "David" Fragments from 1919-21 (Bloomsbury, 2020). These translation projects signal a further research interest in German Expressionism during the Weimar period, and more widely in modernism's legacy. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre.
Johnson continues to direct, perform, and work as a dramaturg in a variety of theatre contexts in Ireland, Germany, and the UK, and he gives talks and workshops worldwide (including Ireland, Germany, Bulgaria, UK, US, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, India, Poland, Mexico, Israel, and the West Bank). As a dramaturg, he is a regular collaborator with Pan Pan Theatre Company (2012–2021), and has worked with Dead Centre (2017–2019), Dublin Youth Theatre (2019), and OT Platform (2019–20). His directing has appeared at the Samuel Beckett Theatre and Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Lincoln Center (New York), and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz (Berlin). His 2017-19 project "Virtual Play" after Samuel Beckett, created in collaboration with V-SENSE, won 1st prize at the New European Media awards. He has held visiting research positions at Freie Universität Berlin and at Yale University.
Johnson is Director of the MPhil in Theatre and Performance (2016-present) and was Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning for the School of Creative Arts at TCD (2017-2020). He teaches courses related to theatre practice, modernism, postmodernism, and 20th century philosophy in theatre. In 2013 Johnson won the Provost's Award for Teaching Excellence (early-career award) and currently is active in researching higher education.
Johnson holds a BSc in theatre from Northwestern University and a PhD in drama from Trinity College Dublin. He was a 2004 DAAD Fellow in Berlin, a 2005 George J. Mitchell Scholar at Trinity, and received the inaugural Samuel Beckett Studentship in Dublin in 2006. His interdisciplinary work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, Enterprise Ireland, and Science Foundation Ireland, as well as internal grants from the Trinity Long Room Hub. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2021.edit
How do twenty-first-century theatre practitioners negotiate the dynamics of tradition and innovation across the works of Samuel Beckett? Beckett’s own tendencies towards fluidity of genre, iteration/ repetition, and collaboration – modes... more
How do twenty-first-century theatre practitioners negotiate the dynamics of tradition and innovation across the works of Samuel Beckett? Beckett’s own tendencies towards fluidity of genre, iteration/ repetition, and collaboration – modes that also define the ‘experimental’ – allow for greater openness than is often assumed. Reading recent performances for creative uses of embodiment, environment, and technology reveals the increasingly interdisciplinary, international, and intermedial character of contemporary Beckettian practice. The experimentation of current practitioners challenges a discourse based on historical controversies, exposing a still-expanding terrain for Beckett in performance.
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This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his... more
This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'.
The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.
The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.
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How many playwrights, novelists, philosophers, artists, composers, performers, filmmakers and critical thinkers influenced Samuel Beckett? And how profound has Beckett's impact been on creative artists worldwide, who have responded to the... more
How many playwrights, novelists, philosophers, artists, composers, performers, filmmakers and critical thinkers influenced Samuel Beckett? And how profound has Beckett's impact been on creative artists worldwide, who have responded to the stimulus of his work using every available medium, from theatre and television, through opera and contemporary art, and now to the internet and virtual reality?
This book approaches these two questions under two broad headings: first, "Influencing Beckett," or the ongoing traces of how Beckett constructed his own work by drawing on artists and thinkers near and far, ancient and current; second, "Beckett Influencing," or how his work has unfolded into the contemporary world across genre, across media, and as a source for others' artworks. The third section, "Practitioner Voices," concerns the implementation of such patterns of influence in theatrical practice.
With contributions from eight countries, this volume emerges from the first Beckett conference to be held in Hungary. It captures the international, experimental, and collaborative spirit of the Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
This book approaches these two questions under two broad headings: first, "Influencing Beckett," or the ongoing traces of how Beckett constructed his own work by drawing on artists and thinkers near and far, ancient and current; second, "Beckett Influencing," or how his work has unfolded into the contemporary world across genre, across media, and as a source for others' artworks. The third section, "Practitioner Voices," concerns the implementation of such patterns of influence in theatrical practice.
With contributions from eight countries, this volume emerges from the first Beckett conference to be held in Hungary. It captures the international, experimental, and collaborative spirit of the Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
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After first developing a taxonomy of intermedial prose performance based on distinctions in how an audience member or user experiences the work phenomenologically, this essay offers a performance history of some unusual translations,... more
After first developing a taxonomy of intermedial prose performance based on distinctions in how an audience member or user experiences the work phenomenologically, this essay offers a performance history of some unusual translations, adaptations and intermedial responses to Samuel Beckett's novel How It Is. Examples range widely across media, from the audio recordings of Patrick Magee to the experimental jazz records of Michael Mantler, and from the recent stage work of Gare St Lazare to the art installation of Mirosław Bałka. Such works reflect the experimental character of the novel itself, forcing a reconsideration of the discourse of the 'unperformable.'
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This essay discusses recent practice-as-research from Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Beckett Studies, where new media and new theatre technologies are being used to investigate how Samuel Beckett's work is altering, and being altered... more
This essay discusses recent practice-as-research from Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Beckett Studies, where new media and new theatre technologies are being used to investigate how Samuel Beckett's work is altering, and being altered by, digital culture. The three collaborators who created the 2017 project Intermedial Play, a version of Samuel Beckett's 1963 Play that used a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) robotic camera instead of the "interrogator" light of Beckett's script, write here about the directorial, scenographic/videographic, and sonic worlds of this performance, including how it led toward the later Virtual Play (about which more has been published to date). The electronic transmission of this performance, for surveillance by an audience in a different room, raises conceptual questions of simultaneity and "live risk" that are generally absent from digital and film adaptations. The possibility that technology itself can condition and influence performance emerges from this discourse as a key area for further exploration.
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Mixed reality (MR) technology is currently growing in popularity for applications in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, with the ability to be viewed with six degrees of freedom, volumetric video (VV) is presently being explored... more
Mixed reality (MR) technology is currently growing in popularity for applications in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, with the ability to be viewed with six degrees of freedom, volumetric video (VV) is presently being explored as a viable approach to content creation within this area. When combined, MR technology and VV present both practitioners and audiences with innovative approaches to the creation and consumption of both tangible and intangible representations of cultural significance. While there are some existing quantitative studies appraising these new technologies, the precise effects of MR in a cultural heritage context have yet to be fully explored. Here we show the results of a systematic evaluation of MR technology as applied in a cultural heritage context, where subject matter expert interviews were conducted to identify how virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are influencing the creative practices of domain experts and audience engagements with modern dramatic literature. Gathered from high-level stakeholders within the cultural heritage domain, our results highlighted the problems, concerns, and desires of users who must consider this technology in practice. We found that MR and VV content were considered by many to be disruptive technologies for the future of film, theater, and performance practice from the perspectives of both practitioners and audiences. We anticipate that these results will help future MR and VV projects to create meaningful content that is sympathetic to the needs and requirements of creators and audiences.
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From 1919 to 1921, Bertolt Brecht worked on a play about the biblical David. Notably, Brecht’s David appears to have little in common with the biblical figure, raising interesting questions about Brecht’s own inspirations, sources, and... more
From 1919 to 1921, Bertolt Brecht worked on a play about the biblical David. Notably, Brecht’s David appears to have little in common with the biblical figure, raising interesting questions about Brecht’s own inspirations, sources, and thinking in the early 1920s about the function of the theater as well as his use of the Bible. The first English translation and staging of the David texts, framed within an adaptation with the title The David Fragments, was undertaken at Trinity College Dublin between 2015 and 2017. This article explores the origins, methods, and results of this extended practice-as-research project—a project which shows that there can be significant value in exploring Brecht’s fragments through interdisciplinary practice-as-research, using the affordances of embodied ensemble praxis to comprehend and extend the implications of the source texts.
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Building on a poster presentation at Siggraph 2018[1], this article describes an investigation of interactive narrative in virtual reality (VR) through Samuel Beckett’s theatrical text Play. Actors are captured in a green screen... more
Building on a poster presentation at Siggraph 2018[1], this article describes an investigation of interactive narrative in virtual reality (VR) through Samuel Beckett’s theatrical text Play. Actors are captured in a green screen environment using free-viewpoint video (FVV). Built in a game engine, the scene is complete with binaural spatial audio and six degrees of freedom of movement. The project explores how ludic qualities in the original text elicit the conversational and interactive specificities of the digital medium. The work affirms potential for interactive narrative in VR, opens new experiences of the text, and highlights the reorganisation of the author–audience dynamic.
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This paper draws upon the primary research of an interdepartmental collaborative practice-as-research project that took place at Trinity College during 2017, in which a Samuel Beckett play, entitled Play, was reinterpreted for virtual... more
This paper draws upon the primary research of an interdepartmental collaborative practice-as-research project that took place at Trinity College during 2017, in which a Samuel Beckett play, entitled Play, was reinterpreted for virtual reality. It included contributions from the Departments of Computer Science, Drama and Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The goal of this article is to offer some expanded philosophical and aesthetic reflections on the practice, now that the major production processes are completed. The primary themes that are dealt with in this paper are the reorganised rules concerning: (1) making work in the VR medium and (2) the impact of the research on viewership and content engagement in digital culture. In doing so we draw on the technological philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, who extends the legacy of Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, to reflect on the psychic, sociopolitical and economic impacts of VR technology on cognition, subjectivity and identity in the contemporary digitalised world.
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This essay seeks to develop a new mode of attention in discussions of Samuel Beckett and trauma by focusing on the lived experiences of actors performing Beckett, especially in relation to contemporary psychophysical approaches to acting.... more
This essay seeks to develop a new mode of attention in discussions of Samuel Beckett and trauma by focusing on the lived experiences of actors performing Beckett, especially in relation to contemporary psychophysical approaches to acting. Many performers of Beckett’s work have reported traumatic symptoms, such as panic, fear, anxiety, and nightmare, but it can be difficult to disentangle the overdetermined origins of these feelings: are they ingrained in the source material, individual to the actor’s process, specific to the performance context, or simply authentic physiological responses to the physical demands? Working through these questions first in terms of contemporary acting theory, this essay introduces qualitative data from both experienced and early-career practitioners of Beckett. These interviews reveal a variety of strategies for managing and accepting the stresses and difficulties of performing that are intrinsic to the task, while also exposing some of the avenues and lenses that correspond to a discourse of trauma. The lenses engaged align with different theories of acting along the broad lines of the historical split between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ approaches to the task of acting. Though narratives constructed in the public perception might emphasize the difficulty of performing Beckett’s plays, especially those with heightened physical demands, the chapter concludes that trauma is not a necessary trope to ‘normalize’ in the discourse surrounding Beckettian performance. Alongside historical and theoretical explorations of acting, the chapter emphasizes the concept of the ‘void’ as one possible key to navigating the potentially traumatic terrain within Beckett, as well as naming it as one of the tools at the actors’ disposal. A focus on the materiality of these experiences extends a discussion beyond the fictive space of the texts and the biographical, currently the two most common approaches to Beckett and trauma.
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The past ten years have seen extensive experimentation with Beckett and new technological media at Trinity College Dublin. Research projects have included the stage adaptation and installation of a teleplay (Ghost Trio, 2007), the HD... more
The past ten years have seen extensive experimentation with Beckett and new technological media at Trinity College Dublin. Research projects have included the stage adaptation and installation of a teleplay (Ghost Trio, 2007), the HD digital video exploration of two teleplays (Abstract Machines, 2010, including new versions of …but the clouds… and Nacht und Träume), and numerous smaller projects involving audio and video within the remit of "fundamental research" at the Samuel Beckett Laboratory (2013–present). The most recent project, Virtual Play, explores Beckett's Play (1963) within FVV (free-viewpoint video), a form of user-centred VR (virtual reality). This project, reflecting interdisciplinary and cross-faculty collaboration between the V-SENSE project (within the School of Computer Science and Statistics) and the School of Creative Arts, has made high-impact contributions in both FVV research and Beckett Studies, and has now been recognised at European level, receiving first prize at the 2017 New European Media Awards. After introducing the idea behind the project in a short video, this intervention addresses the main outcomes of this research for both Beckett Studies and the study of VR. The researchers believe that the project revealed not only new ways to think about Beckett and Play, as might be expected from any new production of his text, but also insights that extend the existing field of research in Beckett and technology. The use of Beckett in this context also led to new thinking about VR acting and the VR audience, research which is ongoing for the computer scientists involved. Finally, Virtual Play has demonstrated some structural characteristics of the type of research ecosystem that might allow such interdisciplinary collaborations to flourish, visions which may have implications for the way that universities organise research between the separate but overlapping fields of "creative technologies" and "creative arts practice".
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As a central component of the 2014 BLAST at 100 Symposium at Trinity College Dublin, the organizers commissioned the first performance of Wyndham Lewis’s famously “unstageable” play Enemy of the Stars. This challenging text blends images,... more
As a central component of the 2014 BLAST at 100 Symposium at Trinity College Dublin, the organizers commissioned the first performance of Wyndham Lewis’s famously “unstageable” play Enemy of the Stars. This challenging text blends images, extended prose, and theatrically “impossible” stage directions with more conventional dialogue. Working with the 1914 published BLAST version as an exclusive source, directors Nicholas E. Johnson and Colm Summers collaborated with undergraduate actors, designers, and technicians to create a site-specific and semi-immersive experience of the play. Rather than a theatrical performance in the conventional sense, this was practice-based research, presenting the experimental outcomes that emerged from theatre artists grappling with Lewis’s 1914 text. This chapter sets out to explore the questions, methods, insights, and results that arose during the process of creating the performance, as well as providing documentation, critical analysis, and reflection from both directors. Methodologically, this writing will address the significant potential of performance as a strategy of literary investigation, including for texts that are not inherently dramatic. Finally, the pedagogical and political potential of this method within modernist literary studies and the contemporary university will be explored, given the intensive involvement of students at every level of the process.
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Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the performing arts have been party to an increasing number of digital media projects that bring renewed attention to questions about, on one hand, new working processes involving capture... more
Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the performing arts have been party to an increasing number of digital media projects that bring renewed attention to questions about, on one hand, new working processes involving capture and distribution techniques, and on the other hand, how particular works—with bespoke hard and software—can exert an efficacy over how work is created by the artist/producer or received by the audience. The evolution of author/audience criteria demand that digital arts practice modify aesthetic and storytelling strategies, to types that are more appropriate to communicating ideas over interactive digital networks, wherein AR/VR technologies are rapidly becoming the dominant interface. This project explores these redefined criteria through a reimagining of Samuel Beckett's "Play" (1963) for digital culture. This paper offers an account of the working processes, the aesthetic and technical considerations that guide artistic decisions and how we attempt to place the overall work in the state of the art.
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This dialogue contributes reflections on the ‘theatre laboratory’ to the scholarly debate surrounding methodologies of drama education and applied performance. The co-authors suggest that the experimental and ensemble-led approach of the... more
This dialogue contributes reflections on the ‘theatre laboratory’ to the scholarly debate surrounding methodologies of drama education and applied performance. The co-authors suggest that the experimental and ensemble-led approach of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, founded at Trinity College Dublin in 2013 as a space for research into Beckett in performance, may offer one response to a question that Kathleen Gallagher proposes in the twentieth Anniversary issue of RiDE (20.3), concerning ‘how drama educators might incorporate such practices of hope into their pedagogy’ [2015. “Beckoning Hope and Care.” RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Drama Education 20 (3): 423]. This work suggests that the hopeful practice of laboratory exploration de-hierarchises a scholarly endeavour and recasts the student as co-creator of knowledge, rather than consumer of cultural capital. The values and practices of such a laboratory may open one avenue of participatory pedagogy that scaffolds risk and re-values failure. In the dialogue that follows, we draw on Gallagher’s ‘practices of hope’ to develop our own interests in the subjunctivity of performance pedagogies in Beckettian contexts [cf. Heron, J., N. Johnson, B. Dinçel, G. Quinn, S. J. Scaife, and Á. Tyrrell, 2014. “The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013.” Journal of Beckett Studies 23 (1): 73–94].
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This chapter proposes to narrate the history and explore the implications of key performances in Ireland and Northern Ireland since 2000 that do not easily fit within the generic category of drama, but are nonetheless significant in... more
This chapter proposes to narrate the history and explore the implications of key performances in Ireland and Northern Ireland since 2000 that do not easily fit within the generic category of drama, but are nonetheless significant in Beckett’s ongoing legacy. This period includes a notable spike in experimental work during the Beckett Centenary in 2006; the inclusion of trans-generic work (adapted film and adapted prose) in traditionally conservative programming at Dublin’s Gate Theatre; the foundation and international expansion of Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, which made its name through prose performances; the “festivalization” of Beckett in Dublin, Edinburgh, and Enniskillen; and the work of Pan Pan Theatre Company in the 2010s with Beckett’s radio, film, and dance on stage. This chapter will offer some historical context to trans-generic practice, of which there has long been a great deal, as well as material attention to the actual circumstances of making such artworks in the midst of economic challenges since 2008. In the process, the chapter will address an area that is not covered elsewhere in the “Staging Beckett” project (since these productions are not, by virtue of their non-play category, covered by the online database), and will demonstrate empirically the steadily expanding boundary for what "adaptation" means, and what the Estate allows, in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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A publication of the Creative Arts Practice Research Theme at Trinity College, co-edited with Philip Coleman of the School of English. The booklet focuses on interdisciplinary work involving creative arts practices in the 2013-15 period... more
A publication of the Creative Arts Practice Research Theme at Trinity College, co-edited with Philip Coleman of the School of English. The booklet focuses on interdisciplinary work involving creative arts practices in the 2013-15 period at TCD.
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"It's not certain" — Programme Note for Pan Pan's Endgame
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"Besieged by Nothing" — Programme note for Beckett's Room
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Samuel Beckett changed the theatre forever by using the new media of his time. Since his death in 1989, the analogue stage and screen technologies of the 20th century have given way to various forms of digital telepresence, and... more
Samuel Beckett changed the theatre forever by using the new media of his time. Since his death in 1989, the analogue stage and screen technologies of the 20th century have given way to various forms of digital telepresence, and experiments in translating Beckett across media abound. In partnership with the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Trinity Long Room Hub, the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies will curate a day of presentations, conversations, and lectures by leading experts and artists to discuss the impact of intermedial performance, contemporary art, and Beckett's legacy.
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The David Fragments continues a strand of contemporary theatre-making from the Samuel Beckett Centre that is substantially informed by ensemble practice, durational research, interdisciplinary connections, and innovation with challenging... more
The David Fragments continues a strand of contemporary theatre-making from the Samuel Beckett Centre that is substantially informed by ensemble practice, durational research, interdisciplinary connections, and innovation with challenging source texts. This tradition includes Love à la Mode (2017) and Enemy of the Stars (2014-15), as well as the work of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory (2013-present). While never seeking to sacrifice entertainment and accessibility, such work responds to the “laboratory” tradition of consciously intellectual and investigative theatre, a “textual event” of embodied research appropriate to a university. Hidden inside a question about the Bible and a playwright in Weimar culture, our ensemble has found more eternal questions about the creative process itself, survival in times of political upheaval, and the legacy of our oldest human stories.
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A contribution to the (Un)performable & (Un)translatable conference at Trinity College Dublin. This is the second public output of THE DAVID FRAGMENTS, a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice-as-research project based at Trinity... more
A contribution to the (Un)performable & (Un)translatable conference at Trinity College Dublin. This is the second public output of THE DAVID FRAGMENTS, a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice-as-research project based at Trinity College Dublin, developed by David Shepherd of the Centre for Biblical Studies and Nicholas Johnson of the School of Creative Arts. Its goal is to investigate the incomplete “David” material written by Bertolt Brecht in 1920-21 for a range of different research communities and potential outputs, including the first English translation and the first English performance of this material.
In the early 1920s in a shattered Bavaria, before he became a famous innovator of the modern theatre, the young Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by the biblical story of David (and was in fierce competition with others working on the same material). Though Brecht's play about David was never finished, several scene fragments survive in German. Two of these fragments are the source materials for tonight’s work-in-progress showcase: “A 1” and “B 10.” Working with an ensemble of actors and designers, Shepherd and Johnson are developing the first English translation and performance of The David Fragments, a process that has also raised new research questions around literary translation, the reception of the Bible, the early career of Bertolt Brecht, and methods of practice-as-research.
In the early 1920s in a shattered Bavaria, before he became a famous innovator of the modern theatre, the young Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by the biblical story of David (and was in fierce competition with others working on the same material). Though Brecht's play about David was never finished, several scene fragments survive in German. Two of these fragments are the source materials for tonight’s work-in-progress showcase: “A 1” and “B 10.” Working with an ensemble of actors and designers, Shepherd and Johnson are developing the first English translation and performance of The David Fragments, a process that has also raised new research questions around literary translation, the reception of the Bible, the early career of Bertolt Brecht, and methods of practice-as-research.
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Research presentation of work-in-progress with Dead Centre for the Trinity Creative Challenge 2016-17. CREATIVE TEAM Ben Kidd (director) / Bush Moukarzel (director) / Nicholas Johnson (dramaturg) / Andrew Clancy (designer) / Eugenia... more
Research presentation of work-in-progress with Dead Centre for the Trinity Creative Challenge 2016-17.
CREATIVE TEAM Ben Kidd (director) / Bush Moukarzel (director) / Nicholas Johnson (dramaturg) / Andrew Clancy (designer) / Eugenia Genunchi (design assistant) / Grace O'Hara (props/effects) / Kevin Gleeson (sound) / Eoin Winning (lighting & production management) / Rachel Murray (producer)
ABOUT THE TRINITY CREATIVE CHALLENGE Trinity Creative is committed to making space for creative expression, collaboration, interdisciplinary experimentation and creating platforms to explore and stimulate new developments in creative arts practice. Trinity Creative Challenge is a key initiative of Trinity Creative. Sponsored by the Provost of the University, this funding award aims to foster the development of ambitious and innovative interdisciplinary projects and works, ideally involving a collaboration with, or within, Trinity College Dublin. The award is open to projects and ideas with a focus on interdisciplinary creative arts practices across a wide range of forms including performance, visual art, music, film, design, new media, animation, gaming and creative technologies.
CREATIVE TEAM Ben Kidd (director) / Bush Moukarzel (director) / Nicholas Johnson (dramaturg) / Andrew Clancy (designer) / Eugenia Genunchi (design assistant) / Grace O'Hara (props/effects) / Kevin Gleeson (sound) / Eoin Winning (lighting & production management) / Rachel Murray (producer)
ABOUT THE TRINITY CREATIVE CHALLENGE Trinity Creative is committed to making space for creative expression, collaboration, interdisciplinary experimentation and creating platforms to explore and stimulate new developments in creative arts practice. Trinity Creative Challenge is a key initiative of Trinity Creative. Sponsored by the Provost of the University, this funding award aims to foster the development of ambitious and innovative interdisciplinary projects and works, ideally involving a collaboration with, or within, Trinity College Dublin. The award is open to projects and ideas with a focus on interdisciplinary creative arts practices across a wide range of forms including performance, visual art, music, film, design, new media, animation, gaming and creative technologies.
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In the early 1920s in a shattered Bavaria, before he became a famous innovator of the modern theatre, the young Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by the biblical story of David (and was in fierce competition with others working on the same... more
In the early 1920s in a shattered Bavaria, before he became a famous innovator of the modern theatre, the young Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by the biblical story of David (and was in fierce competition with others working on the same material). Though Brecht's play about David was never finished, several scene fragments survive in German. These are the source material for a practice-as-research collaboration between Nicholas Johnson (translator/director) of the School of Drama, Film and Music, and David Shepherd (dramaturg) of the Loyola Institute. Working with an ensemble of actors and designers, Shepherd and Johnson are developing the first English translation and performance of The David Fragments, a process that has also raised new research questions around literary translation and drama.
This event presents the first public reading from this creative process, and will include actors performing Brecht's original German, Johnson's new literary translation, and — keeping Brecht's spirit of competition alive — assorted machine-translated versions of the same material. The discussion after the reading to explore these issues will include translator/director Nicholas Johnson, expert in translation studies James Hadley, expert in ancient translation traditions David Shepherd, and expert in computational linguistics Carl Vogel.
Part of Probe: Research Uncovered at Trinity College Dublin. This European Researchers' Night project is funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions.
This event presents the first public reading from this creative process, and will include actors performing Brecht's original German, Johnson's new literary translation, and — keeping Brecht's spirit of competition alive — assorted machine-translated versions of the same material. The discussion after the reading to explore these issues will include translator/director Nicholas Johnson, expert in translation studies James Hadley, expert in ancient translation traditions David Shepherd, and expert in computational linguistics Carl Vogel.
Part of Probe: Research Uncovered at Trinity College Dublin. This European Researchers' Night project is funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions.
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Dramaturgy for the world premiere of Pan Pan Theatre Company's new production of "Cascando" by Samuel Beckett, performed in the Samuel Beckett Theatre in April 2016, with support from the Trinity Creative Challenge, the Arts Council, and... more
Dramaturgy for the world premiere of Pan Pan Theatre Company's new production of "Cascando" by Samuel Beckett, performed in the Samuel Beckett Theatre in April 2016, with support from the Trinity Creative Challenge, the Arts Council, and Dublin City Council.
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A world premiere at the White Light Festival 2015, Lincoln Center, New York. A new adaptation of Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing," co-created with Lisa Dwan and designed by Katherine Graham.
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A presentation at European Research Night 2015 of work-in-progress from the late prose piece by Samuel Beckett, newly adapted by Scott Hamilton and directed by Matthew Causey.
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Originally published in the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST in London in 1914 and never performed for 100 years, Wyndham Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars is an avant-garde text composed of images, prose, and very little conventional... more
Originally published in the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST in London in 1914 and never performed for 100 years, Wyndham Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars is an avant-garde text composed of images, prose, and very little conventional dialogue. Originally commissioned as practice-based research for the BLAST at 100 symposium at Trinity College and first performed in July 2014 at the Trinity Long Room Hub, this adaptation has been further developed and devised in 2015 in collaboration with our entire creative team, for production in Dublin and in Fez, Morocco as part of the tenth Fez International Festival of University Theatres. We have attempted to discover and distill the essence of this work — its thought, its politics, its soul — and to find a contemporary theatrical vocabulary that expresses this branch of Modernist thought for audiences in two countries. Our experimental approach draws on images from early modernism, techniques of dance and mime, and inspirations from both 20th and 21st century theatre practices to create a dense theatrical experience for audiences that communicates the life within Lewis’s thought. We have also sought to contextualize the play in its time by incorporating the movement’s manifesto, and to place ourselves in relation to it today by using textual fragments from our dramaturgical research within the performance. Our methods heavily emphasize both an element of performance research — the unity of practice and theory within the theatre — and the fundamental values of “ensemble” in which we work with one another in a unified and non-hierarchical manner.
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The Howl Ensemble is an experimental performance installation that responds to Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl. It is an open system based on movement, music, and improvisation that lives continuously over four hours on a single day (26... more
The Howl Ensemble is an experimental performance installation that responds to Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl. It is an open system based on movement, music, and improvisation that lives continuously over four hours on a single day (26 September 2014). It is not an adaptation of the poem, but rather an embodied ensemble response to it. Conceived by Dr Nicholas Johnson (Assistant Professor in the School of Drama, Film, and Music) and maintained by an ensemble of professional actors including Trinity College alumni, this experiment explores modes of textual adaptation across genre, as well as contributing to the the study of embodiment, empathy, and ensemble practices. Audience members are invited to go and come at will throughout the four-hour period, which will be broken down as follows:
18:00 – 19:00 Part I (“Who”)
19:00 – 20:00 Part II (“Moloch”)
20:00 – 21:00 Part III (“Rockland”)
21:00 – 22:00 Footnote to Howl (“Holy!”)
18:00 – 19:00 Part I (“Who”)
19:00 – 20:00 Part II (“Moloch”)
20:00 – 21:00 Part III (“Rockland”)
21:00 – 22:00 Footnote to Howl (“Holy!”)
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With prescience and power, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama renews and extends two long-existing strands of Beckett scholarship: those that focus particularly on his drama and those that focus on the body. Crucially, the... more
With prescience and power, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama renews and extends two long-existing strands of Beckett scholarship: those that focus particularly on his drama and those that focus on the body. Crucially, the book engages both 'drama' and 'body' not as stable categories or essences, but rather as evolving processes with ambiguous and unsettled intensities. Using a diverse range of methodological tools, the book advances the potential of performance within Beckett Studies, particularly as a means of bridging without conflict between archival, psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches. While suggesting a line of flight that reaches back to McMullan's equally incisive but more narrow study of the late drama in Theatre on Trial (1993) and through many of her projects since, this work launches the discourse forward in surprising ways, generating a programme – almost a hidden manifesto, but without the aggressive ethos that word implies – for the future 'embodied' life of Beckett's work.
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This is a review of the first two Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festivals, from 24-27 August 2012 and 22-26 August 2013, respectively. It is also an attempt to innovate the review format, first by drawing on the festival’s... more
This is a review of the first two Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festivals, from 24-27 August 2012 and 22-26 August 2013, respectively. It is also an attempt to innovate the review format, first by drawing on the festival’s own irreverent and whimsical approach to Beckettian cross-references and parodies, but more importantly by revisiting the dialogic format as a mode of academic criticism. These dialogues have been developed collaboratively and equally by Nicholas Johnson and Brenda O’Connell, who both attended both years of the festival. As Nicholas Johnson was also a programmed artist in the second year of the festival and therefore considered himself less objective, his focus of this review is from the 2012 festival, while O’Connell predominantly represents 2013. As with Duthuit and Beckett, the dialogues evolved from epistolary correspondence as well as verbal encounter, and should be consider a single work of dual authorship.
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This new dramatic translation of Max Frisch's play "Andorra" was produced in Dublin in 2010. The translation was created with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag. It has not yet been published and is thus not being made available on this site.... more
This new dramatic translation of Max Frisch's play "Andorra" was produced in Dublin in 2010. The translation was created with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag. It has not yet been published and is thus not being made available on this site. For production rights or research interest, please contact johnson@tcd.ie.
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Produced in Dublin and in Berlin's Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz in 2008, this script is the rehearsal text (not a final publication) and is made freely available for research purposes here. Toller is now out of copyright, but I... more
Produced in Dublin and in Berlin's Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz in 2008, this script is the rehearsal text (not a final publication) and is made freely available for research purposes here. Toller is now out of copyright, but I assert copyright over the translation; please contact johnson@tcd.ie for performance rights.
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Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy can pose challenges for first-time readers. This short guide, developed in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Mannion, has been provided with the novel to students of my advanced Samuel Beckett seminar in... more
Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy can pose challenges for first-time readers. This short guide, developed in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Mannion, has been provided with the novel to students of my advanced Samuel Beckett seminar in recent years, and has shown some success in opening several of the book's key ideas, underlying structures, and more obscure references. It is being made available here for use by the academic community as a free teaching aid; please do just acknowledge us if you do use it, and let us know if you have found it useful.
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A contribution to the Youth Theatre Ireland magazine, reflecting on the development process of 2019's "The Sleepwalkers" with Pan Pan and Dublin Youth Theatre.
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Writer and dramaturg Nicholas Johnson writes for Culture about The Sleepwalkers, the new collaboration between Dublin Youth Theatre and Pan Pan, which runs at The Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin from July 22–27.
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What would a " perfect " performance even mean in the context of Beckett, that poet of failure?
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The author's adventures in radio speak to an oral tradition renewed in the digital era.
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The European Constitution would have set in stone the first steps Europe has taken toward abolishing its own borders, while maintaining its different cultures amicably. It would have taken only the first steps toward abolishing its own... more
The European Constitution would have set in stone the first steps Europe has taken toward abolishing its own borders, while maintaining its different cultures amicably. It would have taken only the first steps toward abolishing its own outer borders, enabling citizens of the "different" nations to partake of the same umbrella of trade, law, and human rights... The U.S. border regions with Mexico and Canada offer proof that societies can be multiple and can be the stronger for it.
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Security walls are tragically useful, in Belfast as in Israel, when two communities are in a state of war. It is easily observed, however, that the United States and Mexico are not in such a state. The philosophical danger of the proposed... more
Security walls are tragically useful, in Belfast as in Israel, when two communities are in a state of war. It is easily observed, however, that the United States and Mexico are not in such a state. The philosophical danger of the proposed border fence is that its enforced separation creates a mentality of difference, an essentially violent act which can lead to real violence.
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It may seem absurd to claim that a nation that watches an average of 7 hours and 40 minutes of TV a day, the highest in the world by most surveys, is not paying much attention to the subject. But is mass media, and the regulatory body... more
It may seem absurd to claim that a nation that watches an average of 7 hours and 40 minutes of TV a day, the highest in the world by most surveys, is not paying much attention to the subject. But is mass media, and the regulatory body which theoretically guides it, still serving the public interest?