Glenn D’Cruz – författare

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember Me’ – the command King Hamlet’s ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.

It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher''s and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.

This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember Me’ – the command King Hamlet’s ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.

It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher''s and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.

This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.

If the twentieth century has beendominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in thetwenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm andstart thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams—art,media and technology, and the intimate life—this volume offers up theintellectual and political significance of thinking through the plurality ofour publics. “Countering Neoliberal Publics: Screen and Space,” explores howdifferent artistic practices articulate the challenges and desires of multiplepublics. “Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology” showcases howmedia shape publics, and how new and emerging publics use these technologies toconstruct identities. “Commodifying Public Intimacies” examines what happens tothe notion of the private when intimacies structure publics, move into publicspaces, and develop value that can be exchanged and circulated.

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).