CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Lucaciu, Mihai |
|---|---|
| Title | The Return of the Flesh: Poetics of Male Hysteria for the Stage |
| Summary | ”The Return of the Flesh” explores the conceptualization of the body on stage in the context of expressions of male hysteria and the deconstruction of sexual difference in canonical texts of Western theatre practice – ie those theories belonging to the modernist avant-garde. I argue that by re-reading the cases of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Artaud through the Freudian psychoanalytical discourse I can identify forms of a particular hysteria – male hysteria – which lies at the heart of these radical texts – allowing the chance for subversion, possibilities to question gender norms and to rethink the performing body when bringing theory into praxis on the stage. My thesis uses multidisciplinary methodological approaches - performance analysis, psychoanalysis, postmodern and feminist epistemology – in its attempt to further the existing discourses on theatre, body, masculinity and male hysteria. The radical modernist theatre practice introduced changes at the level of approaching the body of the actor and the modern function of the director. Starting with the first modernist director, Konstantin Stanislavsky the body on stage is thought in hysterical terms in a spiraling identification actor-director. The linkage between theatricality and male hysteria can become a method of positively claiming the hysterical masculinity as a form of resistance to dominant forms of masculinity and a reevaluation of hysteria today. Male directors speak the language of theatrical hysterics in the sense of developing imaginary a unsteady body that resists representation while the rigorous demands of the symbolic and excitability are not synthesized and the consequence is to compromise through somatic symptoms, affective states and impossible fantasies. The point is to read through hysteria the performing bodies as they are conceptualized in directors’ canonical writing on theatre by exploring the symbolic coding of the body in avant-garde Western theatre practice. A re-reading of these male directors' texts has the potential to undermine the disciplinary forces that are inherent to any canon, to reveal the avoidance of commodification of new forms of radicalism, the undiscovered inherent transgressiveness of those texts and their radical potential invoked in reaching beyond the existing systems of formalized power by creating unimaginable forms of association and action. The hysterical male was perceived historically in negative terms, as unmanly or feminine, as a dangerous denial of masculinity. The link between performance and male hysteria functions as an essential questioning of the body/mind and feminine/masculine dichotomies through a troubling sexual difference which I can relate to a confusion of masculinity and femininity in hysteria. How do we understand acting and theatricality in contemporary Western theatre? A possible answer has to take into consideration the modern rhetoric and practice of rehearsal and training. By introducing the male hysteria element and the feminist psychoanalytical template, I attempt to connect theory to practice in an effort to locate the hysteric in modernist theorized practices of acting nowadays. By identifying the tensions generated by hysterical manifestations, I locate the theoretical points that generated change in the practice and conceptualization of theatrical performance and claim their radical instability in the present. |
| Supervisor | Lukic, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/lucaciu_mihai.pdf |
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