Metatheatre and Dramaturgies of Reception in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present...
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Emma Willis
Abstract
If metatheatre is having a ‘moment’, it is one that reflects the character of the age – a time of endless parody and deconstruction. Distinct from the often light-hearted pop cultural ‘meta’, however, the current moment is also characterized by ceaseless and endemic violence, a fact inevitably covered over when the mirror otherwise turned towards the world outside is directed only inwards. This article asks what happens when these two aspects of the contemporary come together: how does the metatheatrical form ‘do’ violence and to what effect? To answer, one particular metadrama is examined, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Afrika, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915, as performed at the Soho Rep theatre in New York in 2012. The play depicts a company of actors attempting to devise a performance about the little-known colonial genocide of the Herero by German colonizers. As an explicit work of metatheatre, Drury’s play is a striking example of the affordances that the genre offers when it comes to representing (or non-representing) extreme violence on stage.
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Bionote
Emma Willis is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Recent publications include: Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), “A Thousand Hills: Responding to the Ethical Nightmare” (Australasian Drama Studies 66, 2015), and “Emancipated Spectatorship and Subjective Drift: Understanding the Work of the Spectator in Erik Ehn’s Soulographie” (Theatre Journal 66, 2014), which was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for 2015. She is also a director and dramaturge, most recently working in collaboration with choreographer Malia Johnston.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Conference Welcome
- Introduction: Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust
- Theatre in the “Forest of Things and Signs”
- Watching, Attending, Sense-making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres
- The Events: Immanence and the Audience
- Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion
- Challenging the Auditorium: Spectatorship(s) in ‘Off-site’ Performances
- Letting the Truth Get in the Way of a ‘Good’ Story: Spectating Solo and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke
- On the Border of Participation: Spectatorship and the ‘Interactive Rituals’ of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra
- The Erotic Voyeur: Sensorial Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man
- What do Audiences Do? Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Participatory Theatre
- It’s All about You: Immersive Theatre and Social Networking
- The Art of Spectatorship
- Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties
- Metatheatre and Dramaturgies of Reception in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present...
- “Who Is the Performer and Who Is the Spectator?”
- Performance, Experience, Transformation: What do Spectators Value in Theatre?
- Collaborating with Audiences
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Conference Welcome
- Introduction: Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust
- Theatre in the “Forest of Things and Signs”
- Watching, Attending, Sense-making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres
- The Events: Immanence and the Audience
- Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion
- Challenging the Auditorium: Spectatorship(s) in ‘Off-site’ Performances
- Letting the Truth Get in the Way of a ‘Good’ Story: Spectating Solo and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke
- On the Border of Participation: Spectatorship and the ‘Interactive Rituals’ of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra
- The Erotic Voyeur: Sensorial Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man
- What do Audiences Do? Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Participatory Theatre
- It’s All about You: Immersive Theatre and Social Networking
- The Art of Spectatorship
- Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties
- Metatheatre and Dramaturgies of Reception in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present...
- “Who Is the Performer and Who Is the Spectator?”
- Performance, Experience, Transformation: What do Spectators Value in Theatre?
- Collaborating with Audiences
