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Disassembling Performance

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Humanism, Drama, and Performance

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Abstract

Revealing the ideological constraints of dramatic and theatrical humanisms, “Disassembling Performance” turns to Anne Carson’s engagement with Sophocles’ Antigone (2012, 2015), Thomas Ostermeier’s with Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2012), and the Smeds Ensemble’s with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (2011). Decentering familiar modes and objects of theatre and culture (the book as a means of singularizing performance; a homogenized ensemble of experience inimical to politically defined assembly; the lamination of language, theatre, and nation through aesthetic pleasure), these performances resituate the canonical impulses of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms through the material instruments of performance, the figuration of the spectator as a participant in the spectacle, and the sociocultural—the aesthetic and political—cartography within which theatre takes place, remaking the place that theatre takes.

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  1. New York, NY, USA

    Hana Worthen

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Worthen, H. (2020). Disassembling Performance. In: Humanism, Drama, and Performance . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_7

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