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Why Theatre? - Bryan Reynolds
SEXY SHAKESPEARE: WHY WE CAN'T GET ENOUGH
Shakespeare lovers often explain their devotion through reference to grandly unifying, humanely edifying comforts: the plays’ faithfulness to human nature, their wisdom, their beauty. Such explanations are perhaps not untrue. Nonetheless, they are a sublimation of something no less humane or unifying, but rather more excessive and fugitive: perhaps the allure and mystery of sex, or, as I want to argue, something else, and something more, as well. Through a brief excursion into the fields of memetics, consciousness studies, neurochemistry, and cognitive neuroscience, I hope to unveil in new ways the incentives and causality behind aesthetic appreciation and audience experience. I hope to show how theater or performance, specifically embodied live art, can achieve a rare magnetism -- the magnetic energies they produce -- which is grounded in the somatic and cognitive perversity they inspire; and, perhaps more importantly, I want to explain how the media of live performance best serves this purpose. Liveness can reverberate with a power of immediacy, arousal, and titillation, but its “transversal aesthetics” can go much deeper, wider, and electric. It is this, acknowledged or not, that has seduced and pleasured generations of theatergoers, making writers like Shakespeare still our contemporary. This lecture will emphatically not be yet another excursion into the history of crossdressing or identity politics. It will be about Shakespeare’s “ineffable sexiness,” and the minds that can’t get enough of it.
Bryan Reynolds is a Visiting Professor at Utrecht University, during Autumn 2008. Reynolds (PhD Harvard University) is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in Theater and Performance at the University of California, Irvine. He is a founding member of the California-based Transversal Theater Company, which tours its productions nationally and internationally.
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INFORMATION
Date / time: October 2nd, 16 hrs
Location: Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht
Entrance is free.
Please make a reservation, by sending an e-mail to whytheatre@theatrestudies.nl |
Bryan Reynolds
www.bryanreynolds.com
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MAILING LIST
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