Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship PDF Download

Author: E. Willis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137322659
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Works of theatre that depict grievous histories derive their force from making audible voices of the past. Such performances, theatrical or tourist, require the attentive belief of spectators. This engaging new study explores how theatricality works in each instance and how 'playing the part' of the listener can be understood in ethical terms.

Author: Emma C. R. Willis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
"To call the twentieth century a catastrophic one, is to acknowledge the collapse of humanist values. Events such as the Holocaust, genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, and numerous other atrocities demonstrated the utter failure of social and political frameworks. The incomprehensible scope of such suffering also profoundly challenged representational practices; as widely cited, Adorno stated that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz (34). Yet, we cannot turn away from such disasters. This thesis is concerned with how theatricality allows us to face such grievous history, and seeks to engage a theatrical analysis to help clarify what is at stake in such spectatorship. In order to examine theatricality as a mode of ethical responsiveness, I offer two contrasting sets of examples: tourist sites and theatrical performances. The sites I consider are examples of 'dark tourism, ' destinations that depict death and disaster. I explore how theatricality arises in response to the key challenge that underlies these places, which is how to make past suffering available to the spectator at the same time as acknowledging that such representation is never completely possible. In discussing a series of sites including Rwanda, European concentration camps, museums and memorials in South East Asia and a New Zealand example, it is this tension, and the difficulty of locating and sustaining an ethical performativity that I explore. In contrast with the tourist sites discussed, I consider theatrical examples that have sought to represent the same history. I discuss works such Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis, Catherine Filloux's play, made in response to the Tuol Sleng Genocidal Museum in Cambodia, Photographs from S21, and Erik Ehn's Maria Kizito, which deals with the first trial of Rwandan genocidaires. Through this interdisciplinary analysis, I ask how theatricality's ability to make available something of the experience of the other might be thought of in ethical terms. I draw on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his image of the 'face of the other, ' in order to consider the relationship between spectator and absent other. I intend to demonstrate that a theatrical analysis helps us to understand such encounters, touristic and theatrical, more clearly"--Abstract.

Author: E. Willis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137322659
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Works of theatre that depict grievous histories derive their force from making audible voices of the past. Such performances, theatrical or tourist, require the attentive belief of spectators. This engaging new study explores how theatricality works in each instance and how 'playing the part' of the listener can be understood in ethical terms.

Author: Kathryn N. McDaniel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319746871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This book takes the concept of “dark tourism”—journeys to sites of death, suffering, and calamity—in an innovative yet essential direction by applying it to the virtual realms of literature, film and television, the Internet, and gaming. Essays focus both on the creative construction of imaginary journeys and the historiographic and civic consequences of such memorializations. From World War II time-travel novels to Game of Thrones, and from Internet reproductions of Rwandan genocide locations to invented tragedies in futuristic domains, authors from various fields examine the purpose and influence of simulated travels to morbid sites. Designed for a wide audience of scholars and travelers virtual and real, this volume raises awareness about the many pathways through which we encounter death experiences in contemporary society. What we know about the past—or, what we think we know about it—is shaped daily by such imagined journeys as these.

Author: Jennifer Dawes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030211908
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This edited collection expands scholarly and popular conversations about dark tourism in the American West. The phenomenon of dark tourism—traveling to sites of death, suffering, and disaster for entertainment or educational purposes—has been described and, on occasion, criticized for transforming misfortune and catastrophe into commodity. The impulse, however, continues, particularly in the American West: a liminal and contested space that resonates with stories of tragedy, violent conflict, and disaster. Contributions here specifically examine the mediation and shaping of these spaces into touristic destinations. The essays examine Western sites of massacre and battle (such as Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and the “Waco Siege”), sites of imprisonment (such as Japanese-American internment camps and Alcatraz Island), areas devastated by ecological disaster (such as Martin’s Cove and the Salton Sea), and unmediated sites (those sites left to the touristic imagination, with no interpretation of what occurred there, such as the Bennet-Arcane camp).

Author: Korstanje, Maximiliano
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522527516
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Mankind has been fascinated with and drawn to the macabre for many years. This is particularly evident in the growing popularity of dark tourism, which centers on locations known for death and suffering. Virtual Traumascapes and Exploring the Roots of Dark Tourism is a pivotal reference source featuring the latest scholarly research in which the rise of new technology platforms is not only changing tourism worldwide, but also facilitating the access to areas of war, mourning, and disaster. Including coverage on a number of topics such as sexual tourism, disaster recovery, and capitalism, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on concepts and methodologies of the dark tourism industry.

Author: Philip R. Stone
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137475668
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 782

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Book Description
This handbook is the definitive reference text for the study of ‘dark tourism’, the contemporary commodification of death within international visitor economies. Shining a light on dark tourism and visitor sites of death or disaster allows us to better understand issues of global tourism mobilities, tourist experiences, the co-creation of touristic meaning, and ‘difficult heritage’ processes and practices. Adopting multidisciplinary perspectives from authors representing every continent, the book combines ‘real-world’ viewpoints from both industry and the media with conceptual underpinning, and offers comprehensive and grounded perspectives of ‘heritage that hurts’. The handbook adopts a progressive and thematic approach, including critical accounts of dark tourism history, dark tourism philosophy and theory, dark tourism in society and culture, dark tourism and heritage landscapes, the ‘dark tourist’ experience, and the business of dark tourism. The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in aspects of memorialisation and morality in sociology, death studies, history, geography, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, business management, museology and heritage tourism studies, politics, religious studies, and anthropology.

Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683846X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

Author: Natalie Alvarez
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472123548
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In a time of intensifying xenophobia and anti-immigration measures, this book examines the impulse to acquire a deeper understanding of cultural others. Immersions in Cultural Difference takes readers into the heart of immersive simulations, including a simulated terrorist training camp in Utah; mock Afghan villages at military bases in Canada and the UK; a fictional Mexico-US border run in Hidalgo, Mexico; and an immersive tour for settlers at a First Nations reserve in Manitoba, Canada. Natalie Alvarez positions the phenomenon of immersive simulations within intersecting cultural formations: a neoliberal capitalist interest in the so-called “experience economy” that operates alongside histories of colonization and a heightened state of xenophobia produced by War on Terror discourse. The author queries the ethical stakes of these encounters, including her own in relation to the field research she undertakes. As the book moves from site to site, the reader discovers how these immersions function as intercultural rehearsal theaters that serve a diverse set of strategies and pedagogical purposes: they become a “force multiplier” within military strategy, a transgressive form of dark tourism, an activist strategy, and a global, profit-generating practice for a neoliberal capitalist marketplace.

Author: Emma Willis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030851028
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.