Theater and Revolution explores the dynamic and complex relationship between theatrical expression and revolutionary movements across diverse historical and cultural landscapes.
Theater and Revolution explores the dynamic and complex relationship between theatrical expression and revolutionary movements across diverse historical and cultural landscapes.
This illuminating volume examines the intricate connections between theater and revolution through a global lens, featuring scholarly essays that analyze performances during revolutionary periods and theater's role in preserving, transmitting, and reimagining revolutionary histories. Organized around three key paradigms—theater as an archive of past revolutions, revolutionary time, and revolutionary spaces—the collection offers rich insights into revolutionary and performance practices across China, Cuba, Egypt, France, Haiti, Iran, Mexico, Russia, the United States, Venezuela, and beyond. Through careful analysis of site-specific examples, the book reveals how theatrical expressions both document and actively participate in revolutionary processes, highlighting the uncanny parallels and stark differences in how revolution manifests through performance across different cultural contexts.
This book will appeal to the scholars and students in theater and performance studies, history, political science, and cultural studies who seek to understand how revolutionary movements are embodied, remembered, and reimagined through theatrical practice.
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Archives, Temporalities, and Spaces of Revolution
Logan J. Connors, Lillian Manzor, Emily Sahakian
I. Performance Archives, Repertoires, and Memories of Revolution
Chapter 1
Of Riots and Representations: The Case of Auguste Macoubas Play Eïa!
Man-maille là!
Andy Stafford
Chapter 2
Rocking the Canboulay: Trinidads Jamette Carnival Outside the Shadow of
Revolt
Stephen Cedars
Chapter 3
The National Discourse of a Revolution: Theatrical Censorship and Chavismo
Performativity
Neta Kanny
Chapter 4
Performing Tropicana: Cuban-American Theater Between Memory and Revolution
Lilianne Lugo Herrera
Chapter 5
Theater Adaptation as a Critical Reservoir of the Mexican Revolutions
Memories in Mendoza by Los Colochos Teatro
Maritza Beatriz García Rodríguez
II. Ruptures and Repetitions of Revolutionary Time
Chapter 6
Repeat Performances: Rehearsing the French Revolution in Late Qing Chinese
Theater
Cecilia Feilla
Chapter 7
Revolutionary Avant-Garde Puppetry from Germany, through Japan, to China
Siyuan Liu
Chapter 8
Heiner Müller, The Mission, and Revolutionary Time
Liam Johnston-McCondach
Chapter 9
Performing Revolution in the Age of Revolutions: Guillaume Tell across the
Revolutionary Chasm
Marc H. Lerner
Chapter 10
Revolutionary Time in Edouard Glissants Monsieur Toussaint and Maryse
Condés An tan révolisyon
Soraya Limare
III. Places and Spaces of Revolutionary Performance
Chapter 11
Three Stages of Iranian Theater in Revolution
Yassaman Khajehi
Chapter 12
Spatial Interventions and Material Re-appropriations: Resisting the
Aestheticization of Reality in the New York Young Lords Garbage
Offensive(s)
Briana Beeman
Chapter 13
Retaking Chile: Theater and Space in Authoritarian Times
Melissa González-Contreras
Chapter 14
Theatricality, Performativity, and the Fête révolutionnaire: The Paradoxes
of French Revolutionary Festivals as Performed Assembly
Alexis Stanley
Chapter 15
R for Rehearsal, R for Revolution: Stories from and About Tahrir Square
Dalia Basiouny
Index
Logan J. Connors is Professor and Chair of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami, USA.
Lillian Manzor is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies. She is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas at the University of Miami, USA and founding director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive (www.cubantheater.org).
Emily Sahakian is Associate Professor of Theater and French, jointly appointed in the Departments of Theatre & Film and Romance Languages, at the University of Georgia, USA.
