Yana Meerzon

Following Homi Bhabha's prompt on reading nationalism as a set of discursive and performative practices, this Element focuses on the cultural geography of today's Russia and examines a range of performative strategies used by the Russian state to uphold its nationalist project. Simultaneously, it maps artistic strategies of resistance to the ideology of nationalism as employed by both state-funded and independent theatre companies, via new dramaturgies, performance practices and strategies of storytelling.

In a Canadian general theatre studies or liberal arts program in which the majority of B.A. students are expected to simultaneously take classes in theatre practice and theory, including acting, directing, design, theatre history and dramaturgy, teaching and learning can be challenging. Often our students approach exercises in text and performance analysis as unnecessary or even as superfluous tasks which a practitioner can do without. The naiveté of this hostile attitude is not surprising, but what is interesting is how a system of structural text and performance analysis, specifically here regarding the category of space, can be used as a pedagogical strategy to wake up the student's imagination and eventually become a tool of the practitioner's creative work. In the following, I will describe how to use the analytical methodologies of drama and performance analysis as developed by Prague School theoreticians as a pedagogical strategy to harness creativity. My case study is a 4th year class

I propose a paradox: the novel experience of the COVID-19 induced digital spectatorship reenforced the fundamental laws of live theatre viewing, although it proved to be utterly anticathartic. This experience revealed that despite its digital mode of transmission, theatre can foster affectual (co)presence of its viewers, our sense of community and our need for ritual. At the same time, watching theatre on a computer screen created a series of false expectations and beliefs: such as feeling intimate with a streamed performance (being close to the action and to the actors), an illusion of control (being able to tune in and out) and a deceitful impression of an understanding of your subject-the personal, cultural, economic or political context, in which this work has been made. What this experience really proved is that theatre-live or digital-always operates within multiple binaries and pluralities. Watching theatre on screen-participatory or immersive-brings us into emotional immediacy with strangers. For a minute, we form an imagined community anew and share a ritual: together we cross the digital threshold, create the limen of a performance and exit back into the everyday. This homecoming is emotionally traumatic. It produces the ontological loss of self and re-enforces our sense of loneliness; and thus, it is anti-climactic and anti-cathartic. To illustrate my argument, I examine chekhovOS/an experimental theatre game produced by Boston's Arlekin Players Theatre and Zero Gravity Lab in 2021.

This dialogue between a Syrian theatre director, Ayham Majid Agha, who is currently residing in Berlin, and a theatre scholar, Yana Meerzon, focuses on the challenges and advantages of working in the multilingual performance context of a cosmopolitan metropolis such as Berlin. The artist discusses the notions of encounter and care as leading mechanisms of communication that such a multilingual and multicultural environment presuppose.   
Keywords: Exil Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theatre, Heiner Müller

In this hybrid (essay/interview) article, Yana Meerzon analyzes the production Mahmoud & Niny, directed by Henri Jules Julien and presented at the Avignon Festival, July 14-22, 2019. Developed through a series of conversations and workshops with its major participants, Mahmoud El Haddad and Virginie Gabriel, this performance provides an urgent commentary on abuse of cultural and linguistic stereotypes in the situations of everyday intercultural encounters. Together with Mahmoud El Haddad, Meerzon examines how this experimental work turns theatrical subtitles into a powerful political weapon.

The December 2019 issue of the journal Critical Stages continues a conversation on theatre, migration and multilingualism that Katharina Pewny, Gunther Martens and I started in 2016, in our research project on contemporary theatre and multilingualism sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University. “Migration and Multilingualism” (a special issue of the journal Modern Drama [N. 61.3; 2018]) presented the first part of the project, and the collection Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre (Routledge 2019) constitutes the second. The conversation is still at its beginnings; the seven articles and dialogues that make up the current section are the further proof of the importance and richness of this field, as we continue studying dramaturgical, political, artistic, ethical and economic challenges of doing experimental work in multilingual theatre today.

This article examines devices of comedy, laughter and dramatic humour as technologies of ethics when it comes to staging migration in contemporary theatre. Looking at a tragic farce Hunting Cockroaches (1985), written by the Polish theatre artist Janusz Głowacki during his American exile, and a domestic melodrama Kim's Convenience (2012), written by a Korean Canadian Ins Choi, this article examines comedy as a particular dramatic model that can challenge staging migrants as agentless and voiceless victims. It asks, what happens when theatre artists begin to use stereotype to stage the trauma of displacement? To what extent is comedy truly capable of rendering the complexity of migration? And how ethical can the comedic representation of a migrant be?

This article offers a dramaturgical report and a theoretical reflection on the challenges and pleasures of intercultural translation. It documents a four months journey I undertook in the Fall 2016, assisting a University of Ottawa, MFA student, Nicholas Leno in translating and adapting Nikolay Gogol’s comedy Marriage for his thesis production. First, it describes dramaturgical choices I and director made to bring the phantasmagoria of Gogol’s universe to its Canadian audiences. Then it examines the processes of creative discovery as a device of intercultural translation that relies on the melodies and rhythms of the target language to reconstruct anew the
stylistic patterns of the source text.

Today, there are numerous acting schools and teaching practices—from Russia to Brazil, from Canada to France, from Germany to Japan, from UK to Israel, from America to Taiwan—based on Chekhov’s method. Theatre scholars, practitioners, students and teachers not only practice his work, they also write extensively about it. The last two decades witnessed the upsurge of publications dedicated to reviving and promoting Chekhov’s method, including new translations of his Russian writings, contextualizing his work historically and theoretically, and interpreting it for today’s theatre students.

The journal Critical Stages has kindly offered space to host this new project. The special section consists of six articles documenting six different pedagogical approaches in actor training, highlighting the wide geographical scope and interdisciplinary application of Chekhov’s thought. The section opens with David Zinder’s summary of his pedagogy “ImageWork Training and the Chekhov Technique” and is followed by Lisa Dalton’s introduction, analysis and demonstration of practical applications of teaching acting using Chekhov’s Chart of Inspired Acting. Designed by Chekhov and developed through the work of National Michael Chekhov Association (NMCA), the chart presents a carefully crafted pedagogical sequence of actor training, which includes Five Guiding Principles found in his final lectures. In the following piece, Ulrich Meyer-Horsch, from Michael Chekhov Europe Society in Germany, discusses the importance of listening in actor training and practice. He specifically focuses on the concept of gesture as the act of listening on stage, as proposed by Chekhov and developed in his own work.

James Haffner comes to Chekhov’s work from the field of music and opera. In his article “Musical Synthesis of the Michael Chekhov Technique: Integrated Training for the Singer-Actor,” he demonstrates the benefits of working with Chekhov’s system for opera singers. Lenka Pichlíková proposes a historical detour: she discusses the importance of Chekhov’s work on character for teaching corporeal pantomime and Commedia dell’Arte techniques to contemporary actors. She emphasizes special points of encounter between Chekhov’s work on character—physical and psychological traits—and her own methods of teaching the Commedia, to which she arrived via her personal encounter with the training of Marcel Marceau.

The section closes with the article by Sol Garre, who discusses the importance of introducing Chekhov’s notions of presence, radiation and atmosphere as part of regular conservatory curriculum in actor training in Spain. Most importantly, this publication allows the contributors to share their work and teaching methodologies not only in words, in the form of the short “know-how” interventions, but also through video and sound excerpts. Although there is a number of video and audio materials illustrating Chekhov’s work and available internationally, this special issue is particular in this sense: it invites its readers to become students and practitioners of Chekhov’s method while watching and listening to the international experts.

This article addresses concerns about the relationships between practice and
theory in today’s theatre and examines the discipline’s analytical methodology.
This contribution re-introduces Yuri Lotman’s concept of semiosphere as an
anthropological and social space of communication, in which every participant
maintains their existence concurrently across temporal, linguistic, and
cultural zones. Finally, by launching the notion of a theatrical semiosphere
that embraces the dynamics of cognitive impulse in the tripartite proximity of
the space of the stage, the space of the audience, and the space of the “in between,”
this study seeks to demonstrate how the transitory nature of theatrical
communication directed at the multiple audio-visual, cognitive, and cultural
sensors of actors and spectators can still be considered and studied from the
perspective of semiotic exchange as the primary device of human cognition.

This essay examines the forms of history and memory representation in
Incendies, the 2004 play by Wajdi Mouawad, and its 2010 film version,
directed by Denis Villeneuve. Incendies tells the story of a twin brother and
sister on the quest to uncover the mystery of their mother’s past and the
silence of her last years. A contemporary re-telling of the Oedipus myth,
the play examines what kind of cultural, collective, and individual memories
inform the journeys of its characters, who are exilic children. The play
serves Mouawad as a public platform to stage the testimony of his childhood
trauma: the trauma of war, the trauma of exilic adaptation, and the
challenges of return. As this essay argues, when moved from one medium
to another, Mouawad’s work forces the directors to seek its historical and
geographical contextualization. If in its original staging, Incendies allows
Mouawad to elevate the story of his personal suffering to the universals of
abandoned childhood, to reach in its language the realms of poetic expression,
and to make memory a separate, almost tangible entity on stage, then
the 2010 film version by Villeneuve turns this play into an archaeological
site to excavate the recent history of a single war-torn Middle East country
(supposedly Lebanon), an objective at odds with Mouawad’s own view of
theatre as a venue where poetry meets politics. Naturally the transposition
from a play to a film presupposes a significant mutation of the original and
raises questions of textual fidelity. This essay, however, does not propose a
simple comparative analysis of two works, but aims to discuss: 1) how and
to what effect the palimpsest history of Mouawad’s play is transferred onto
the screen; and 2) how and to what effect its testimonial chronotope is actualized
in Villeneuve’s film. As its theoretical lens, this paper uses Lubomir
Doležel’s distinction between fictional worlds created in the work of literature
based on a particular historical event and historical worlds evoked in
the historical narrative documenting and analyzing this event.

In his critique of intercultural ideology and practice in theatre,
Rustom Bharucha proposes an alternative concept, intraculturalism,
which describes the dynamics of the interaction between various
cultural contexts within a single nation or a theatre production.
When applied to the discussion of exilic identity, the dynamic
of the intracultural takes on a different meaning: it identifies the
exilic self as a territory of multiple, unmarked discourses, the
discourses that are still waiting to be recognized, acknowledged,
and brought into coherent dialogue with each other. Secondly,
Bharucha extends his notion of the intracultural to describe the art
of the theatrical mise en scène as the process of creating a multivocal
performance discourse that still must be acknowledged as a
homogeneous utterance. In theatre, this homogeneity of multiple
discourses originates within three spheres: the stage,between stage
and audience, and within the audience itself. In the theatre of exilic
artists, this intricatemise en scène is also defined by the dynamic of
the intracultural encounters that simultaneously appear at the
levels of the creator’s exilic identity and that of his/her exilic art.
The dramatic texts and productions of Lebanese-Québécois artist
WajdiMouawad are examples of personal,dramatic, and theatrical
intraculturalismthat formthe basis for this phenomenon, and thus
are the focus points chosen for this study.