James Reynolds - Böcker

Howard Barker and The Wrestling School have been seen as marginal to the major concerns of British theatre, problematic in their staging and challenging in the ideas they explore. Yet Barker's writing career spans six decades, he is the only living writer to have been accorded an entire season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and The Wrestling School produces theatre of such a striking quality that it earned continuous Arts Council funding for nearly 20 years.Wrestling with Catastrophe challenges existing ways of reading Barker’s theatre practice and plays and provides new ways into his work. It brings together conversations with theatre makers from in and outside The Wrestling School, with first-hand accounts of the company’s practice, and a selection of critical readings. The book’s combining of testimony from key Wrestling School practitioners with alternative practical perspectives, and with analysis by both established and emerging scholars, ensures that a spectrum of understanding emerges that is rich in both breadth and depth.In its consideration of the full range of Barker's aesthetic concerns - including text, direction, design, acting, narrative form, poetry, appropriation, painting, photography, electronic media, technology, puppetry, and theatre space - the volume makes a radical re-evaluation of Barker's theatre possible.

Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s theatricality is inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural, and, inevitably, characterised by intense hybridity. These complex features – while the source of an internationally celebrated theatrical innovation, and considerable pleasure for audiences – have nevertheless also prompted notable criticism. Robert Lepage / Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space reads against the grain of criticism, providing readers with a fresh, practice-based and critical perspective by arguing that these innovative aesthetic practices operate simultaneously as positive cultural principles. Drawing directly on case studies of process and a wide range of productions, and building from in-depth interviews, this book intertwines theoretical and practical concerns, weighing them in balance, and, in doing so, produces for the reader a new critical perspective on Robert Lepage and Ex Machina.Through the course of his analysis, James Reynolds illustrates that underpinning the inter-disciplinary eclecticism of Ex Machina's practice is a profound engagement with social, cultural and political difference. Running through the work is a drive to create performances built around a principle of contradiction, through which audiences can apprehend difference in its myriad, infinite forms. Consequently, Robert Lepage / Ex Machina explores this embracing of difference in all its depth and complexity, opening a key way for readers to develop both their practical and theoretical appreciation of this practice. At the same time, the discourse around this vital, forward-looking practice is rebooted, not only by re-thinking its contribution to the vocabulary of drama and theatre, but also through revealing and assessing the critical discourse it initiates through performance.

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space provides an ideal introduction to one of our most innovative companies – and a much-needed and timely reappraisal of Lepage’s oeuvre. International, interdisciplinary and intercultural to the core, Ex Machina have negotiated some of the most complex creative and cultural challenges of our time. This book maps the story of that journey by analysing the full spectrum of their richly varied work. Through a comprehensive historiography of productions since 1994, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina offers a detailed picture of the relationship between director and company, while connecting Ex Machina to culturally specific features of Québec, and its theatre. This book reveals for the first time how overlooked aspects of creativity and culture shaped the company’s early work, while installing a dynamic interplay between director and company that would spark a unique and ongoing evolution of praxis. Central to this re-evaluation of practice is the book’s identification of an architectural aesthetic at the heart of Ex Machina’s work, an aesthetic which provides its artistic and political centres of gravity. Moreover, this architectural aesthetic powers the emergence of concrete narrative as a new and distinctive mode of theatrical storytelling – uniting story and space, body and technology, content and form – and demanding that we discover the politics of these performances in the energetic gestures of theatre design, and space itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lepage, Ex Machina personnel and collaborative partners, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina calls upon us to revise both our creative and critical perceptions of this vital and distinctive practice.