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The Contemporary French Theatre: Writing, Performing, Teaching

The Contemporary French Theatre: Writing, Performing, Teaching

Publié le par Angela Ryan

The Department of French, University College Cork, will host an international conference on the contemporary French theatre 2-4 September 2005. Keynote speakers will include Professor David Bradby, theatre historian Michel Corvin, playwrights Noëlle Renaude and Philippe Minyana (whose work will be performed at the Comédie Française in 2005-06) and theatre director Robert Cantarella (currently directing Michel Vinaver’s 11 septembre for production in Los Angeles and New York). The conference will feature a number of staged readings of contemporary French plays.

 

France is currently experiencing an extraordinarily rich period of dramatic expression, with the work of dozens of emerging and established playwrights being produced to national and international acclaim. If we can speak of a new departure in French writing for the stage, then we must consider the resistance that contemporary French plays present to conventional methods of reading, staging and spectating. The new theatre is interested in exploring the boundaries, points of intersection and collision of language and body, eye and ear, imagination and perceptual experience. To take part in these theatres of linguistic excess is to be reminded of what it is to speak and to listen, and to be returned to the fragile border where self and word fuse and separate.

What do university teachers have to say about this new work for the stage?

 

We intend the conference to provide a forum for an encounter between academics and theatre practitioners. Publication of a selection of papers is envisaged. The following list of possible areas of discussion is intended as a guideline, and is by no means exclusive:

 

  • Beckett once wrote of his search for ‘speech specifically dramatic’. What new critical approaches are emerging, particularly in French studies, to encompass a form of writing that actively engages writer, performer and spectator in an affair of muscle and breath?

  • contemporary French theatres of the auditory;

  • forms of address in contemporary French writing for the stage;

  • unmaking mimesis – the mimetic function in contemporary French theatre;

  • staging the voice of writing;

  • l’entre-deux: theatre on/of the margins; theatres of excess, theatres of instability/indeterminacy of boundaries, thresholds, points of traversal ;

  • the contemporary French theatre and the academic French department – how to teach plays that are resistant to private reading and to literary approaches to the dramatic text, that demand to be ‘performed’?

 Abstracts of proposed papers, of no more than 400 words, should be sent to Mary Noonan (mnoonan@french.ucc.ie) by 23 March 2005.

With generous support from the Ambassade de France en Irlande, Ireland Fund de France, Servier-Monde, together with the Arts Faculty Fund and the Department of French, University College Cork

  • Responsable :
    Dr Mary Noonan
  • Adresse :
    University College Cork, Irlande