Re-Activating the Repertoire, 1660-1830

从17世纪60年代到19世纪30年代的戏剧剧目提供了对种族，性别，性，能力，国家和资本的深刻历史的见解，这些历史塑造了并将继续塑造我们的文化和世界。这些戏剧知道我们需要知道的关于现代世界是如何以及为什么形成的东西。然而，这些剧目在很大程度上已被英国和北美的商业剧院公司所遗忘。这一时期只有少数戏剧定期上演，在观众和戏剧制作人中，流行的观点仍然是“复辟戏剧”是关于奢华的服装和诙谐的交流。此外，戏剧学校现在正在将这一时期的戏剧从课程中删除，部分原因是可以理解的担心，即它们存在意识形态问题。我们的国际研究网络“重新激活1660-1830年的剧目”认识到，这种情况只能通过学者和戏剧制作人之间真正和持续的合作来解决。这种合作将是相互变革的。研究人员将与导演和表演者分享他们对这些戏剧的政治和文化背景的知识，以及对理解他们复杂的舞台艺术至关重要的运动和姿态的历史。我们的项目将与从业者合作，在18世纪的戏剧中寻找深度和共鸣，就像他们习惯于在莎士比亚戏剧中做的那样，如《驯悍记》和《奥赛罗》。同时，这一过程将使研究人员能够向实践者学习。对这一剧目的学术研究在很大程度上继续孤立地阅读剧本。这是可以理解的：与研究莎士比亚或现代戏剧的学者不同，我们很少有机会看到我们研究和教授的戏剧的专业作品。与导演和演员合作将极大地丰富我们对这一时期戏剧的学术理解。保守的表演传统，将这些戏剧视为“礼仪喜剧”，在许多方面切断了我们与他们所拥有的重要社会文化知识的联系。我们强调运动、语言和意识形态的历史，目的是使专业戏剧制作人能够以更具实验性的方式参与这些戏剧，最重要的是，把它们作为一个具有概念和戏剧复杂性的戏剧体来认真对待，这必然涉及对我们今天的社会和文化景观的探索。反过来，这将使学者通过表现来学习；它将从根本上改变我们作为研究人员对这些戏剧的认识，以及我们如何与它们互动。我们的网络工作坊和演出将专注于过程；他们将测试多种场景布置和角色诠释方式，并认识到失败往往比成功更能说明问题。为了探索这些戏剧如何在具体的空间条件下发挥作用，研究人员将能够解决舞台上的关系和互动问题；关于戏剧如何使用手势和动作作为政治评论的模式；关于这些戏剧中的“角色”是什么；以及沉默如何像对话一样吸引观众的情感和智力反应。同样，也是最令人兴奋的是，排练和演出将产生关于这些戏剧的实际动态和更深层次思考的问题，这些问题是学者们还没有想到要问的。我们网络的最终目标是改变研究人员和从业者如何处理和思考1660-1830年的戏剧。

The theatrical repertoire from the 1660s to the 1830s provides insights into the deep histories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and capital that have shaped - and continue to shape - our culture and world. These plays know things that we need to know about how and why our modern world came into being. Yet this repertoire has largely been forgotten by commercial theatre companies in Britain and North America. Only a handful of plays from the period are regularly staged professionally, and among audiences and theatre makers the prevailing view remains that "Restoration drama" is about lavish costumes and witty exchanges. Moreover, drama schools are now dropping the period's drama from their curricula, partly due to understandable concerns that they are ideologically problematic.Our international research network - "Re-Activating the Repertoire, 1660-1830" - recognizes that this situation can only be addressed through genuine and sustained collaboration between scholars and theatre makers. This collaboration will be mutually transformative. Researchers will share with directors and performers their knowledge of both the political and cultutal contexts of these plays and also the histories of movement and gesture that are crucial to an understanding of their intricate stagecraft. Our project will work with practitioners to find depth and resonance in 18th-century plays just as they are accustomed to doing with Shakespearean plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Othello. At the same time, this process will enable researchers to learn from practitioners. Academic studies of this repertoire continue largely to read scripts in isolation from performance. This is understandable: unlike scholars working on Shakespearean or modern theatre, we rarely have an opportunity to see professional productions of the plays we research and teach. Working with directors and actors will immeasurably enrich our scholarly understanding of the period's theatre. The conservative performance tradition, which sees these plays as "comedies of manners", has in many ways cut us off from the vital socio-cultural knowledge they hold. Our emphasis on the histories of movement, language, and ideology is intended to enable professional theatre makers to engage with these plays in more experimental ways and, above all, to take them seriously as a body of drama that possesses conceptual and theatrical sophistication, and which necessarily involves exploration of our social and cultural landscape today. In turn, this will allow scholars to learn through performance; it will radically transform what we as researchers know about these plays - and how we engage with them. Our network's workshops and peformances will focus on process; they will test multiple ways of staging scenes and interpreting characters, and also recognize that failures often reveal more than successes. To explore how these plays work in embodied, spatial terms will enable researchers to address questions about relationships and interactions on stage; about how plays use gesture and movement as modes of political commentary; about what "character" is in these plays; and about how silence as much as dialogue invites audiences' emotional and intellectual responses. Equally, and most excitingly, the rehearsal and performance will generate questions about the practical dynamics and the deeper thinking of these plays that scholars haven't yet thought to ask. The aim of our network is ultimately to transform how both researchers and practitioners work with and think about plays from 1660-1830.