Theatre Of The Oppressed. Time, Body, Text in Theory and Contemporary Performance

The present issue of Maska offers a broad range of articles; however, a good half of them – despite different scripts, different approaches to thinking and analysing and despite the diversity of the phenomena under consideration – touches upon the questions of emancipatory and even political potentials of contemporary performing arts, their conditions and, last but not least, reflection itself. Using the closing down of the Dutch Theatre Institute as a case in point, Alja Predan lays bare the brutality and malevolence of neoliberal policies as regards the cultural sector as such; a survey of the Theatre of the Oppressed explores the reasons for the global popularity of August Boal’s theatrical techniques and methods; Danae Theodoridou’s contribution communicates with the issue on projected temporality, published last autumn, and at the same time is a follow up to the deliberations on creative gestures of resistance we engaged in in the next, winter issue 2012 – namely, Theodoridou writes about the understanding and practices of (artists’) creative resistance to the demands of the present times and about the possibilities of “creating time”. Referring to selected works by Dani Ploeger, Via Negativa and Janez Janša, Tomaž Krpič considers the relations between texts, bodies and feelings/senses in contemporary theatre and performance art.

Urška Brodar, Mojca Puncer, André Schallenberg, Jasen Boko and Mark Brown use different approaches in their analyses of three festivals. And finally, the issue is rounded off by our regular column, Criticism without adjectives, in which we examine the new translation of Pavis’s La mise en scène contemporaine published by Knjižnica Mestnega gledališča ljubljanskega