Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics

Luckhurst, Mary

doi:10.1002/9780470690987.ch10

Cited by 15 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…In terms of implementation, the first phase of the project involved 21 “gifted and talented” students 6 from year 7 and 8 in verbatim theatre and physical theatre activities (Freshwater 2008; Luckhurst 2008; Paget 1987). 7 Verbatim theatre relies on the collection, by actors, of original research materials through methods that broadly coincide with qualitative research techniques.…”

Section: Dialogues Transformations and Translationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their purpose is to disrupt the primacy of the authorial voice and to produce a dramatic text which purports to represent the authentic voice of those whose testimonies have been gathered. Commentators on verbatim theatre accentuate the difficulties facing the tradition, including the apparent paradox of working in the imaginative space of the theatre to represent “real stories” and the inevitability of an editorial, interpretative voice (Luckhurst 2008). At the same time, they acknowledge the political purchase of this style, linking audiences’ current appetite for the genre to a distrust of the political classes and the mass media 8 .…”

Section: Dialogues Transformations and Translationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools, Research and Public Engagement

Gregson

Watkins

Broughton³

et al. 2011

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This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year-long research-based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision-making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value

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Section: Dialogues Transformations and Translationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Dialogues Transformations and Translationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools, Research and Public Engagement

Gregson

Watkins

Broughton³

et al. 2011

Antipode

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“…Recent investigations such as Derek Paget's 'Acting with Facts' project at the University of Reading (2007Reading ( -2010, and my own research with Tom Cantrell for Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People have demonstrated that many theatre and film actors approach the playing of a real person in ways that are distinct from playing a fictional character (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010). Analysis of documentary theatre, especially verbatim forms of theatre, has increased markedly in the last decade (Luckhurst 2008;Forsyth and Megson 2009;Hammond and Steward 2009;Martin 2010), though relatively little has appeared on the processes of performing real people in either theatre or film. Derek Paget investigated the first wave of verbatim techniques in Britain as early as 1987.…”

Section: The Ethics Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…This sense of responsibility can be significantly increased if the subject has/ had an iconic or celebrated status (for positive or negative reasons), and is still alive or only recently deceased, is/was politically powerful, or has undergone a trauma or ordeal that is made a feature of the play or film. It is heightened still further if the form of the drama makes strong claims for authenticity and exploits realist conventions (Luckhurst 2008). Actors frequently experience marked ethical dilemmas when preparing and performing for documentary forms, especially if verbatim techniques are used, and whether or not the figures they are representing are well known (Cantrell 2010).…”

Section: The Ethics Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical stress and performing real people

Luckhurst

2010

Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre &Amp; Performance

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This article argues that actors playing real people find themselves subject to specific forms of ethical stress that they do not suffer from when playing fictional characters. It investigates particular aspects of ethical stress and examines what individual actors might mean by their common claim to feel a greater ‘responsibility’ when playing a real person. Ethical quandaries and anxieties lead actors to modify their usual approaches and their experience is often one of imaginative and emotional containment. This article also exposes the difficulty actors face in articulating their ethical dilemmas because of assumptions about their subordinate role in the production hierarchy. Lastly, this article makes a plea for ethics to be incorporated into actor-training courses and for acting theory to be revisited in respect of ethics.

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“…This citat ional practice is also intended as a methodological gesture towards the genre itself. 29 On the other hand, some critics claim that headphones produce 'an authenticity that [even] other forms of verbatim cannot' reach. On the one hand, critics claim that the headphones are 'distracting: black wires snake across the stage, and occasion ally the headsets are audible to the audi ence'.…”

Section: Alienation Versus Authenticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Headphone Verbatim Theatre: Methods, Histories, Genres, Theories

Wake¹

2013

New Theatre Quarterly

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Created in an American rehearsal room, exported to an English workshop, and developed in Australia, among other places, ‘headphone verbatim theatre’ – also called ‘recorded delivery’ – is a truly global genre. In this article Caroline Wake focuses on the work of two pioneering practitioners, Briton Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades, in order to trace the form's history as well as its methods, genres, and theories. In doing so, she considers how audio technology has evolved over the past decade and how the display or disguise of headphones has affected both the production and reception of the form. She identifies three dominant genres of headphone verbatim theatre (the social crisis play, the social justice play, and the social portrait play, as well as three main performance modes – the epic, the naturalistic, and the mixed. The epic has been the most successful thus far, but the naturalistic and mixed modes are, in turn, begetting new ones. Finally, she suggests that in the same way that headphones have rejuvenated verbatim theatre, they might also reinvigorate the discourse on it by offering the opportunity to go beyond the politics of voice and visibility and to turn, instead, to listening. Caroline Wake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines cultural responses to and representations of refugees and asylum-seekers as well as the role of testimony in law, performance, and visual culture. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Text & Performance Quarterly, Modern Drama, and History & Memory. She is the co-editor, with Bryoni Trezise, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013).

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Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics

Cited by 15 publications

References 8 publications

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools, Research and Public Engagement

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools, Research and Public Engagement

Ethical stress and performing real people

Headphone Verbatim Theatre: Methods, Histories, Genres, Theories

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