Rachel Joseph
Writer, director, and performer. My monograph Screened Stages: On Theatre in Film is forthcoming from Routledge. My essays have been published in Performance Research, College Literature, Studies in Musical Theatre, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Word and Image, Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Journal of American Drama and Theatre. I have published book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series, Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs, The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, and Re-Focusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts.
My creative work includes directing plays ranging from my own The Screen Dreams of Buster Keaton, Blurred, The Message, and And This Before Leaving to Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, How I Learned to Drive, Mr. Burns: a post-electric play, Memorial, Blue Story, The Gas Heart (co-directed), Three Sisters, The Successful Life of 3, and devised works us and Between Worlds. My fiction, poetry, and plays have been published in journals ranging from Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Prime Number Magazine, Dime Show Review, Post Road Magazine, The Coachella Review, and After the Pause to The Brooklyn Review, Chiron Review, and Heavy Feather Review. Most recently I performed the roles of Antigone/Creon in my play Antigone in the City at the F.L.I.P.T. international theatre festival in Fara in Sabina, Italy. My play Stripped was a finalist for the 2017 Arts & Letters Drama Prize. My short story collection was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2017 Hudson Prize, 2018 Hidden River Arts Eludia Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Award. I was also a shortlisted finalist in 2017 William Faulkner-William Wisdom novella competition. I received my MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Arizona and PhD in Drama from Stanford University.
My creative work includes directing plays ranging from my own The Screen Dreams of Buster Keaton, Blurred, The Message, and And This Before Leaving to Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, How I Learned to Drive, Mr. Burns: a post-electric play, Memorial, Blue Story, The Gas Heart (co-directed), Three Sisters, The Successful Life of 3, and devised works us and Between Worlds. My fiction, poetry, and plays have been published in journals ranging from Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Prime Number Magazine, Dime Show Review, Post Road Magazine, The Coachella Review, and After the Pause to The Brooklyn Review, Chiron Review, and Heavy Feather Review. Most recently I performed the roles of Antigone/Creon in my play Antigone in the City at the F.L.I.P.T. international theatre festival in Fara in Sabina, Italy. My play Stripped was a finalist for the 2017 Arts & Letters Drama Prize. My short story collection was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2017 Hudson Prize, 2018 Hidden River Arts Eludia Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Award. I was also a shortlisted finalist in 2017 William Faulkner-William Wisdom novella competition. I received my MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Arizona and PhD in Drama from Stanford University.
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forward to narrate and “work through” family betrayals and traumas, and find their way to a space of eventual forgiveness and love.
the Dark (2000) uses the big musical theatre song and dance number as a place
where the unfathomability of traumatic emotion is expressed. Trauma’s unfathomability
comes from the inability of the person to process the traumatic event at the
moment of its occurrence. It tears apart carefully constructed fantasies that structure
reality and expose what usually hides from consciousness. Dancer in the Dark uses
the framing device of The Sound of Music, both the original 1959 stage version
and the 1965 film, and represents the absolute split between reality and fantasy
as traumatized Selma dreams herself into musical numbers. This space of tragedy
emerges framed by her dream of performing Maria in a community theatre production
of The Sound of Music. The affective promise of musical theatre during ‘real’
rehearsals of The Sound of Music contrasts sharply against the cinematic fantasies
rooted in the film The Sound of Music that serve to lift off the burden of traumatic
reality. This article will explore the revision to the film musical that von Trier offers
with Dancer in the Dark alongside the intertexts of theatre and film versions of
The Sound of Music in relationship to trauma, emotion and the psychoanalytic
concept of the ‘cure’.
I propose here looking at the dialectical nature of both films through Žižek’s
performances: one of them evincing presentness and one a terrifying void. I will argue that through this lack and through the dialectic between the two, ideologies of cinema and performance emerge. The dialectic of Žižek’s performances and Fiennes’ films reveals the relationship between materialism and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought as well as the relationship between performance and cinema. Performance and cinema are entangled and when encountered in the two documentaries they offer something new leading to, as Žižek would say when discussing The Matrix (1999), “A third pill!”
At first glance it may seem that Tedesco performs the film. Instead, the opposite is true—the film performs Tedesco, transforming her into something other than actor. She becomes a human stand-in: a medium channeling the film that is unmistakably (despite its invisibility) the central “actor” of the performance. Her subjective responses to the film become a feedback look that changes the infinite ability for the film to repeat in the same way that the film is changes Tedesco's perception of her own presence and encounter in front of an audience. This encounter between reproducibility and the corporeal presence of the human body crosses the boundary between performance and film and creates a new moment somewhere between screen and stage, reproducibility and subjectivity. This moment changes spectators’ relationship to past and present and offers a new version of the future in which theatre and film are embedded within the other and in a constant feedback loop in which the turbulence between forms becomes the performance.
onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event.
forward to narrate and “work through” family betrayals and traumas, and find their way to a space of eventual forgiveness and love.
the Dark (2000) uses the big musical theatre song and dance number as a place
where the unfathomability of traumatic emotion is expressed. Trauma’s unfathomability
comes from the inability of the person to process the traumatic event at the
moment of its occurrence. It tears apart carefully constructed fantasies that structure
reality and expose what usually hides from consciousness. Dancer in the Dark uses
the framing device of The Sound of Music, both the original 1959 stage version
and the 1965 film, and represents the absolute split between reality and fantasy
as traumatized Selma dreams herself into musical numbers. This space of tragedy
emerges framed by her dream of performing Maria in a community theatre production
of The Sound of Music. The affective promise of musical theatre during ‘real’
rehearsals of The Sound of Music contrasts sharply against the cinematic fantasies
rooted in the film The Sound of Music that serve to lift off the burden of traumatic
reality. This article will explore the revision to the film musical that von Trier offers
with Dancer in the Dark alongside the intertexts of theatre and film versions of
The Sound of Music in relationship to trauma, emotion and the psychoanalytic
concept of the ‘cure’.
I propose here looking at the dialectical nature of both films through Žižek’s
performances: one of them evincing presentness and one a terrifying void. I will argue that through this lack and through the dialectic between the two, ideologies of cinema and performance emerge. The dialectic of Žižek’s performances and Fiennes’ films reveals the relationship between materialism and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought as well as the relationship between performance and cinema. Performance and cinema are entangled and when encountered in the two documentaries they offer something new leading to, as Žižek would say when discussing The Matrix (1999), “A third pill!”
At first glance it may seem that Tedesco performs the film. Instead, the opposite is true—the film performs Tedesco, transforming her into something other than actor. She becomes a human stand-in: a medium channeling the film that is unmistakably (despite its invisibility) the central “actor” of the performance. Her subjective responses to the film become a feedback look that changes the infinite ability for the film to repeat in the same way that the film is changes Tedesco's perception of her own presence and encounter in front of an audience. This encounter between reproducibility and the corporeal presence of the human body crosses the boundary between performance and film and creates a new moment somewhere between screen and stage, reproducibility and subjectivity. This moment changes spectators’ relationship to past and present and offers a new version of the future in which theatre and film are embedded within the other and in a constant feedback loop in which the turbulence between forms becomes the performance.
onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event.