1st Edition

Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor's Work Foreign Bodies of Knowledge

By Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento Copyright 2009
    194 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    194 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    A sophisticated analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance, Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. Alongside the perspectives of other prominent intercultural actors, this study draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret). By illuminating the hidden creative processes usually unavailable to outsiders--the actor’s apprenticeship, training, character development, and rehearsals--Nascimento both reveals how assumptions based on race or ethnicity are misguiding, trouble definitions of intra- and intercultural practices, and details how performance analyses and claims of appropriation fail to consider the permanent transformation of the actor’s identity that cultural transmission and embodiment represent.

    Acknowledgments.  1. The Cultural Temperature of the Twentieth Century.  2. Race, Culture, and the Myth of the Authentic.  3. Tenuous Boundaries: Intra- and Intercultural Embodiments.  4. Peep Show: The Hidden Lives of the Intercultural Actor.  5. Fictive Realities: Character and the Eye of the Beholder.  Afterword: A Theatre of Instabilities.  Appendix A: Forgotten Memories in Action: An Interview with Ang Gey Pin.  Appendix B: Playing the Invisible: An Interview with Roberta Carreri.  Notes.  Bibliography. Index.

    Biography

    Actor, director, and scholar Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, PhD, performs and conducts research internationally. Tatinge Nascimento is an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Wesleyan University, and her articles have appeared in Biblioteca Teatrale (Italy), Didaskalia (Poland), and Theatre Research International, among others.

    'Although dealing with a very complex topic, Claudia Tatinge Nascimento manages to make her point clear. Based on theoretical and practical data as well as on personal experience, the author presents a very coherent and readable book which may be of great interest both for experts and laypersons, for theatre scholars and scholars of cultural studies, literature and others.' - www.theaterforschung.de