Can I read Adam Alston, and Martin Welton, eds. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, xv + 283 pp., £75.00 (hardback), £81.00 (PDF ebook). on EtoBox?

Adam Alston, and Martin Welton, eds. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, xv + 283 pp., £75.00 (hardback), £81.00 (PDF ebook). by Andrew Sofer is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Adam Alston, and Martin Welton, eds. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, xv + 283 pp., £75.00 (hardback), £81.00 (PDF ebook). about?

As the Dark/Noir strand of the 1993 Avignon Festival and the Battersea Arts Centre's 1998 Playing in the Dark season attest, much urgent contemporary theatre deliberately sets out to eliminate or obscure light. In this stimulating essay collection, editors Adam Alston and Martin Welton aim to document, historicize and theorize theatrical darkness. Further, they and their contributors adumbrate an ethics and a phenomenology of dark performance. Far from a mere absence of illumination, darkness emerges as a rich and complex medium that can enfold spectator and performer alike, with radical and potentially transformative effects. Indeed, theatre in the dark undermines the much-observed visual bias of theatre (theatron, 'seeing place') by foregrounding non-normative visual and non-visual experiences. As Welton has elegantly stated elsewhere, "[d]arkness is a threshold state for seeing, and when confronted with seeing nothing one is forced to consider not only what it is that one is seeing, but also how it is that one may be doing so at all" ("Dark Visions" 497). Alston and Welton's polemical introduction, "The Dark Draws In," makes the case for dark theatre as political activity, not j

Who reads Adam Alston, and Martin Welton, eds. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, xv + 283 pp., £75.00 (hardback), £81.00 (PDF ebook).?

Author

Andrew Sofer

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Published

2019

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)