Land/Scape/Theater

by Elinor Fuchs (Editor), Elinor Fuchs (Editor)

Land/Scape/Theater proposes landscape as a necessary paradigm for understanding modern theater's increasingly spatialized aesthetic as well as its engagement with the cultural meanings of place and space.
Embracing subjects as diverse as the "landscape dramaturgy" of Suzan-Lori Parks, Artaud's trip to the Sierra Madre,Gertrude Stein's landscape theory and practice, Guillermo Gomez-Peña's "border subjects," and Bayreuth and Disneyland as cultic sites, Land/Scape/Theater draws on a broad range of theory, dramatic texts, and performance. All aspects of modern theater, these essays suggest, including the bedrock Aristotelian constituents of plot and character, have a landscape dimension that often goes unrecognized.
With its broad theoretical range and cross-disciplinary reach, Land/Scape/Theater will interest theater theorists and practitioners and cultural studies specialists, including historians of landscape. Theater students, scholars, teachers, directors, designers, and actors will find here a new framework and a new vocabulary for understanding both theater and the larger culture.

402 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 2002

Reviews

[Irma Mayorga · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As Carlson and others suggest, there are rarely strong arguments for excluding any particular definition of performance in order to propose a truer one. Instead, uses and definitions of the word tend to be additive. Any one of its many uses does not erase or negate other uses. But that is not so much conceptual richness as an accumulation or material abundance. Performance does not open itself to analysis as much as it generates log lists of particularities: things, events, objects, uses of language, social movements, identities, that are performative, which is to say they are actualized in action. But particulars gather no moss.” - Alice Rayner