Nordic Theatre Studies

Theatre and Materiality

2024-09-18T17:38:05+02:00

Unknown Stories

2024-09-18T17:40:53+02:00

Performance costumes have long been a distinctive way to visualize explicit and implicit cultural and social hierarchies, as well as to identify characters on stage. Stereotypical characters representing different ethnicities were familiar in Finland by the end of the nineteenth century, established with the help of instantly recognizable costumes and make-up, often premised by an internalized racism inherent to historical practices of costume design. This article focuses on the representation of ethnicity and especially racialized characters on the Finnish stage through the study of extant costumes and, in particular, a case study of two surviving “Lapp character” costumes in the artefact collection of the Theatre Museum in Finland in Helsinki, which houses objects considered worthy of preservation and representative of Finnish theatre history. By focusing on a previously unexplored type of costume, it is possible to propose new ways by which to enhance the visibility of marginalized perspectives in the museum collection.

The Enabling Materialities of the Charcoal Suit

2024-09-18T18:16:07+02:00

This article focuses on the artist Hanna Saarikoski’s performance C and the charcoal suit that becomes a co-performer in this work. The title of the performance, C, is a symbol for the chemical element carbon, which relates to 1) the main material of the suit, carbonized willow branches, and 2) the human ecological impact on the planet, often called the “carbon footprint”. In this performance, Saarikoski walked through the heart of the city of Turku wearing a bulky black suit, laden with more than one thousand charcoal sticks. I argue that performance C addresses the human-induced environmental emergency by sensually politicizing it and that the charcoal suit actively contributes to this politicizing process by generating sounds, interacting with the surroundings, and thus enabling surprising encounters. In this article, approaching the topic from the perspectives of new materialism, political performance art, and costume studies, I will analyze the ways in which the charcoal suit works as a co-performer and thus contributes to politicizing the human impact on the environment.

“Solos” with Sourdough and Drying, Cracking: Dramaturgy with Other-Than-Human Species

2024-09-18T18:24:53+02:00

The interest guiding this text is: how to articulate an ethics of dramaturgy with other-than-human species on the basis of current theoretical developments within post-humanist thinking and experiences of dramaturging with sourdough? This research is in dialogue with post-humanist theorist Karen Barad (2003, 2007), dehumanist theorist Julietta Singh (2018), and recent post-humanist perspectives on dramaturgy from Bleeker (2020), Woynarski (2020), and Žeželj (2022).
By understanding practical experiments, through reading post-humanist literature, ethical questions become condensed and articulated, not as a set of rules or points of evaluation/reflection, but as a “diffraction grating” to share with the research community. My practice research PhD, ”Dramaturgy with other-than-human species”, consists of live art projects that explore dramaturgy practice with sourdough, a microbiome of yeasts and bacteria which is commonly used in bread making. For the projects, I was guided by Robbrecht’s definition of dramaturgy as “the web of talks, thoughts, images and sensualities that brings us towards the conceptualization of what we are actually doing (‘the work’), and often resembles an ‘unidentifiable object’ during an artistic process”. Over two projects “Solos” with sourdough (“Solos”) and Drying, Cracking (Cracking) I attempted to do dramaturgical conversation with sourdough.

What Kind of Bodies Will Come Together in Passage 468?

2024-09-18T18:27:16+02:00

The aim of this article is to investigate the question, whether the performance of Passage 468 (2019), as interpreted through the theory of agential realism by Karen Barad and the concept of sensory field by Petri Tervo, could suggest a revised conception of the open body. First, the objective of the text is to review the literature concerning the conceptions of the open body by Bakhtin as part of the carnival culture, and the closed body by Elias as a result of the civilising process. Additionally, I make some remarks about how the open body is considered in theatre history. Secondly, I investigate the analysis of the performance by describing my experience as a spectator of being part of certain sensory fields that were opened up in Passage 468. I argue that the sensory field is akin to staggering away from the safety of identity which determines the way in which we perceive and categorize the different aspects of a performance as separate entities. Finally, I suggest that by translating the sensory field experience into written form as a part of performance analysis, it is possible to understand how different bodies are entangled in the phenomena of the body. As I propose, in this way it is possible to once again conceive of the body and approach it as open and collective.

Thinking Matter(s) in Theatre Practice

2024-09-18T18:29:09+02:00

This article discusses a materialist approach to dramaturgy framed as a dramaturgy of assemblage. It is inspired by posthuman thinking and draws on theory from new materialism (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Elaine Gan, and Anna Tsing). The dramaturgical approach is developed through artistic research, and the article refers to the performances Childism (2015) and Jeg vill høre havet (2017), which serve as examples of this practice. I articulate the movement from dramaturgy as a collective practice to exploring a collective which includes more-than-human collaborators. Rosi Bradotti’s work on the nomadic subject (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) has inspired the notion of the nomadic dramaturge. In her book Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti discusses what “we” are in the posthuman and post-anthropocentric condition, suggesting that the posthuman subject is (part of) a collective. Following Braidotti, I introduce the concept of dramaturgy of assemblages as a place for this collective subjectivity. A dramaturgy of assemblages responds in practice to the question of how a posthuman framework affects theatre and performance-making. What is presented in this article is all about shifting perspectives. When we think differently, we act differently, and different things are formed.

The Wet Pants - Becoming an Audience with the More than Human

2024-09-18T18:34:02+02:00

Inspired by new materialist theories, agential realism, and Karen Barad’s idea of entangled intra-action, this article explores how children, teachers, dancers, and researchers become an audience through their intra-actions with each other and with the more than human – such as a pair of wet leggings. I suggest that ways of becoming an audience are created, not just by following what humans do, but also by following non-humans, things, and how they are entangled with each other in becoming an audience. In this article, I show that knowledge production by following a pair of wet leggings also raises new ethical questions and considerations from a child-etic-perspective and in interactive performances. This leads to considerations around how teachers, dancers, children, research practices, and materiality are entangled.

Harriet Bosse’s Autobiography

2024-09-18T18:36:10+02:00

This article is a close reading of Swedish-Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse’s (1878–1961) unpublished autobiography. The theoretical points of departure are feminist historiographical theory and historical contextualization. The purpose is to offer a counter-story of Bosse in the history of theatre- and literature research that releases her from the role of Swedish author August Strindberg’s muse and puts her career in the context of the modern breakthrough.
The counter-story is about an actress who both resisted and embraced the transition of the modern breakthrough, who fought for her artistic ambitions to position herself as a diva, but in the end, was marginalized, primarily because of a combination of age, gender, and animosity. Bosse represents herself as modest, but we know that she regarded herself as an important actress in Swedish theatre history whose talent was God-given. Bosse’s specific acting style and some of her thoughts on the art of acting are also briefly discussed.

Pirkko Koski

2024-09-18T18:38:09+02:00