This event will be held online via Zoom. You can access the meeting using this link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/4855059036. The full Zoom invitation is copied below.
The meeting will be held from 7-8:30pm EST, with announcements from 7-7:15pm, the talk 7:15-8:00pm and Q&A from 8-8:30pm. We will also host a casual social/cocktail half hour after the meeting. Since there won't be a dinner and we have no space constraints, an RSVP is not required.
Professor Louise Geddes (Adelphi University)"The Thing Itself: Performance and the Celebrity Text."
Abstract:
Since the turn of the twentieth-century, the presumed invisibility of craft that defines dramatic theatre erases our capacity to usefully theorize the repeated use of a popular script in performance. This chapter suggests that the unrealistic expectation placed on dramatic theatre to represent events, thoughts, and feelings as if they were happening for the first time ignores the latent celebrity power of the oft-repeated play. This paper uses the Public Theatre's 2017 production of Hamlet to suggest that a Shakespeare play is a vibrant celebrity in its own right. Scripted performance is not a single event, but an entelechial process of materialization that continues to grow and evolve as its own affective archive. Acknowledging the archontic nature of the celebrity play recognizes how Hamlet's capacity to exist as its own archive affords it an affective, iterative power that navigates the production, marketing, and consumption of classical theatre without ever losing shape as “the play.”
