Glenn D’Cruz - Böcker

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.

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 PsychosisHow 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 PsychosisHow 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).

This book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices.

This book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices.

David McComb, the driving force behind The Triffids, shaped one of Australia’s most revered albums, Born Sandy Devotional ( 1986). But after the band’s breakup, illness curtailed his solo career. He died in 1999, age 36. Truckload of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb Vol. 1 (2020) revives his final, unrecorded songs through the efforts of longtime collaborators, friends and admirers, including Graham Lee, Robert McComb, Phil Kakulas, Rob Snarski, JP Shilo, Romy Vager and Angie Hart.The book traces how McComb’s last songs extend his thematic preoccupations—love, loss, exile and the lingering pull of the past—through the framework of hauntology. Engaging with the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, it places his songwriting in a broader cultural and philosophical landscape before turning to his lost compositions, revealing an artist still in full command of his craft. Exploring connections between music, memory and artistic legacy, D’Cruz positions McComb as not only a singular songwriter, but a literary voice of lasting significance.