Documentary theatre: beyond information
Walsh, Fintan (2010) Documentary theatre: beyond information. Irish Theatre Magazine ,
Abstract
Introduction: While documentary theatre is typically concerned with staging events that have actually happened, it usually seeks to mediate those events rather than to re-present them. In other words, the performance-as-document acts as a conduit through which a creative construction of reality is presented to an audience. Most likely, spectators will already know something of the material that the document indexes. Rather than just supply information, however, for documentary theatre to be meaningful it must establish a critical relationship between the event in the past and its reception in the present through a process of filtering and reorganization like any other artistic practice. Somewhere between the event and the audience there must still be a space of tension, uncertainty and unknowability, so that the performance can provoke inquiry rather than simply memorialize or disseminate information.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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School: | School of Arts > English, Theatre and Creative Writing |
Research Centres and Institutes: | Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR), Contemporary Theatre, Birkbeck Centre for |
Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
Date Deposited: | 25 Mar 2014 16:18 |
Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2016 11:59 |
URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9453 |
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