Plenarvortragende - Institut für Theater

Abstracts
Prof. Dr. Johan Callens (Brussel)
Johan Callens teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is the author of Double Binds: Existentialist
Inspiration and Generic Experimentation in the Early Work of Jack Richardson (1993), Acte(s) de Présence
(1996), and From Middleton and Rowley‘s „Changeling“ to Sam Shepard‘s „Bodyguard“: A Contemporary
Appropriation of a Renaissance Drama (1997). For the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association
he assembled the collections American Literature and the Arts (1991) and Re-Discoveries of America: The
Meeting of Cultures (1993). More recently he has edited two special issues on Sam Shepard for Contemporary
Theatre Review (1998) and one on intermediality for the journal Degrés (2000), besides a collection
of essays, The Wooster Group and Its Traditions (2004), based on a conference he organized in Brussels.
He also contributed an essay on Elias Merhige‘s remake of Nosferatu to the just released volume of the
IFTR‘s working group on intermediality, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and
Chiel Kattenbelt (2006).
Mediating Phèdre
The Wooster Group, the New York based performance company led by director Elizabeth LeCompte,
is well-known for its intermedial productions of canonical texts, productions that mediate between
different texts, languages, disciplines, genres, and cultures, the live arts and mechanically as well as
digitally reproduced arts, now marking now confounding the specifi city of each and all. To You, The
Birdie! (Phèdre) (2001) is an exemplary case in that it starts from Paul Schmidt‘s translation into Ame-
rican English of Racine‘s 1677 neo-classical play, reframes it by fragments from Euripides‘ Hippolytus,
and expands it with choreographical and visual intertexts, pertaining to the mythical material in which
Phèdre‘s story is embedded. Apart from briefl y sketching this story‘s pre-text for comprehension‘s sake,
summarizing Schmidt‘s performative view of translation, and giving an idea of the scenography‘s and
staging‘s operating principles and gender implications, my presentation will zoom in on one intertext in
particular, Luis Buñuel‘s Belle de Jour (1967), fragments of which were viewed on stage by the company
members to different effects. As I hope to demonstrate, these comprise, next to further extensions of
the intermedial web with the occasional painterly and iconographical reference, and the provision of a
gestural vocabulary, suggestions on how to subvert patriarchal power structures.
Kollegienhaus, Raum C / 13.10. / 12.00 – 12.30 Uhr
34 Theater & Medien