Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The term 'theatre laboratory' appears across a series of interconnected practices, territories, pedagogies and ideologies. Bryan Brown seeks to properly address this contested phrase, and to position it within a wider history of laboratory studies.
A History of the Theatre Laboratory traces the organizational structures of creativity, finding two distinct archetypes present across theatre, the sciences, and visual art. These strands, rooted in Russian culture and history, are examined in a series of interviews with, and studies of, contemporary practitioners including Slava Polunin, Anatoli Vassiliev, Sergei Zhenovach and Dmitry Krymov.
Drawing upon texts and practitioners little known in the English language, as well as upon the wider field of laboratory studies, this volume presents a thoroughly historicized understanding of theatre laboratories and their use in contemporary practice.
Synopsis
The term 'theatre laboratory' has entered the regular lexicon of theatre artists, producers, scholars and critics alike, yet use of the term is far from unified, often operating as an catch-all for a web of intertwining practices, territories, pedagogies and ideologies. Russian theatre, however, has seen a clear emergence of laboratory practice that can be divided into two distinct organisational structures: the studio and the masterskaya (artisanal guild).
By assessing these structures, Bryan Brown offers two archetypes of group organisation that can be applied across the arts and sciences, and reveals a complex history of the laboratory's characteristics and functions that support the term's use in theatre.
This book's discursive, historical approach has been informed substantially by contemporary practice, through interviews with and examinations of practitioners including Slava Polunin, Anatoli Vassiliev, Sergei Zhenovach and Dmitry Krymov.