Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars
Taking the reader on an inward journey from façades to closets, from physical to psychic space, Architectural Involutions offers an alternative genealogy of theater by revealing how innovations in architectural writing and practice transformed an early modern sense of interiority. The book launches from a matrix of related “platforms”—a term that in early modern usage denoted scaffolds, stages, and draftsmen’s sketches—to situate Alberti, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others within a landscape of spatial and visual change.
As the English house underwent a process of inward folding, replacing a logic of central assembly with one of dissemination, the subject who negotiated this new scenography became a flashpoint of conflict in both domestic and theatrical arenas. Combining theory with archival findings, Mimi Yiu reveals an emergent desire to perform subjectivity, to unfold an interior face to an admiring public. Highly praised for its lucid writing, comprehensive supplementary material, and engaging tone, Architectural Involutions was the winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars.
"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin
"After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice
Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.
The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.
Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s.
Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.
"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin
"After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice
Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.
The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.
Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s.
Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.
In this broadly conceived study, Ralf Remshardt delineates the theatre’s deep connection with the grotesque and traces the historically extensive and theoretically intensive relationship between performance and its “other,” the grotesque. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance examines the aesthetic complicity shared by the two in both art and theatre and presents a general theory of the grotesque.
Performing the grotesque is both a challenge to a culture’s order and the affirmation of certain ethical principles that it recognizes as its own. Remshardt investigates the aesthetics and ideology of grotesque theatre from antiquity—in works such as The Bacchae and Thyestes—to modernity—in Ubu Roi and Hamletmachine—and opens up new critical possibilities for the analysis of both classical and avant-gardetheatre.
Divided into three sections, Staging the Savage God first interrogates the grotesque as primarily a visual artistic and theatrical mode and then inventories various critical approaches to the grotesque, establishing the outlines of a theory with regard to drama. In the most extensive part of the study, Remshardt shifts his emphasis to the theatre of the grotesque, from self-consuming tragedies and the modernist trope of the artificial human figure to the characterology of the grotesque. Remshardt’s conclusion takes bold steps toward unraveling the paradox inherent in the grotesque theatre.
Written in an engaging style and aided by nine illustrations, Staging the Savage God is a comprehensive and rigorous study that incorporates critical approaches from disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history, literature, and theatre to fully investigate the historical function of the grotesque in performance.
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