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12 results

  • Chapter 3 - Drama before Standardization

  • Edited by Clare Finburgh Delijani, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • With Christian Biet, Université Paris Nanterre
  • Book:
    A New History of Theatre in France
    Published online:
    22 October 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024, pp 72-87

  • Summary

    Christian Biet explains that ahead of the restrictions on theatrical representation imposed in the seventeenth century, sixteenth-century theatre was free to stage macabre spectacles of cruelty and bloody horror, convulsive emotions and transgressive acts. Like Bouteille and Karsenti in their chapter in the same book, Biet is careful to locate the theatre he examines during the catastrophically destructive Wars of Religion. While overt depictions of the war were banned in an attempt to avoid sectarianism, playwrights presented schism, chaos, politics of state and abuse perpetrated by the monarchy via the detours of allegory, classical myth or foreign context. In Nicolas Chrétien des Croix’s Les Portugais infortunés (The Unfortunate Portuguese, 1608), for example, the encounter between the Portuguese and the inhabitants of the land they colonize indirectly critiques France’s own colonial politics of expansion and the use of religion to justify terror and abuse overseas. Biet argues that, far from being primitive or archaic, theatre from this period has much to teach us today about the representation in the arts and media of violence and atrocity.

A New History of Theatre in France
  • Edited by Clare Finburgh Delijani
  • With Christian Biet
  • Published online:
    22 October 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Theatre in France was the first in Europe to be written in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. It has provided the English language with the medieval word farce, the early-modern word role, and the modern term mise en scène. Molière is single-handedly responsible for launching European-style playwriting in North Africa. Today, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that it's harder to get tickets for the Festival d'Avignon, one of the world's largest theatre festivals, than for the Rolling Stones' farewell tour. Containing chapters by globally eminent theatre experts, many of whom will be read in English for the first time, this collaborative history testifies to the central part theatre has played for over a thousand years in both French culture and world culture. Crucially, too, it places centre-stage the genders, ethnicities and classes that have had to wait in the wings of theatres, and of theatre criticism.

  • From ritual to performance: Ta'zieh in Iran today

  • Yassaman Khajehi, Christian Biet
  • Journal:
    Iranian Studies / Volume 56 / Issue 4 / October 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    24 August 2023, pp. 671-684
    Print publication:
    October 2023

  • As a practice and experience, ta'zieh lies at the crossroads between ritual and performance, collective lament and recollection, literature, and folklore. Focusing on the experience of the spectator, this paper discusses ta'zieh's liminal status and diverse functions in Iran today. This study is based on observations gathered during fieldwork in the fall of 2017 in Tehran (Grand Bazaar), Isfahan (Falāvarjān), and Kashan (Nushābād). By way of comparison, we further reflect on a video installation by Abbas Kiarostami presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2003, which challenges common assumptions about the aesthetic and religious effectiveness of ta'zieh. The contrast allows us to elucidate how, by renovating ancient narrative forms, contemporary Iranian performing arts partake in the shaping of individual affects as well as communal emotions.