Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art

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Notes

¹ From a talk titled ‘Step off the Stage’ presented at the SPILL Symposium, Soho Theatre, Thursday 12 April 2007. Reprinted in the Live Art Almanac (2008).

² This series of exchanges spanned a wide array of media outlets and blog commentary. To begin to reconstruct the conversation, the following entries may prove useful: Michael Billington, ‘The National Theatre must stop neglecting the classics’, Guardian 25 April 2007; Ben Hoyle, ‘Dead White Men in the critic's chair scorning the work of women directors’, The Times 14 May 2007; Michael Billington, ‘I may be a white male, but I'm not dead yet, Mr. Hytner’, Guardian 14 May 2007; Lyn Gardner, ‘Nicholas Hytner is right: theatre criticism is too male-dominated’, Guardian 14 May 2007.

³ For examples of scholars whose work deconstructs the arrival of the Angry Young Men in 1956 and the apotheosis of the counterculture in 1968 as major periodizing events that garner their significance as a unified point of origin for a revolutionary ‘break’ in the field, see: Dan Rebellato (1999), Baz Kershaw (2004), and Melissa Dana Gibson (2006).

⁴ These facts were compiled from programme schedules and critical notes held in the National Review of Live Art archives, in addition to consultation of archival copies of Performance Magazine, accessed at the Live Art Archive, Department of Drama, University of Bristol, in March 2007. See <http://www.bristol.ac.uk/theatrecollection/liveart/liveart_archivesmain.html>.

⁵ This argument and the language used here to make it is greatly indebted to Shannon Jackson's Professing Performance (2004), in which she demonstrates within a largely American context how even the most so-called conservative, institutionalized forms of theatre could be seen to challenge as well as exemplify predominant notions of cultural forms and cultural value. She writes, for example, that across time and in various locations ‘[d] rama can be both low and high, contextual or de-contextualized, commercial or avantgarde, feminized or masculinized, literary or unliterary, cultured or cultural, a text or an event, practical or impractical, more fake or more real, depending upon the legitimating or delegitimating context’ (84).