Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces, in Chekhov's Drama and Stanislavski's Theatre

by Tait,Peta

• ISBN13: 9780754606383
• ISBN10: 0754606384
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on embodied social performances and create cultural spaces of emotions.Performing Emotions investigates how sexual difference impacts on the representations of emotions. The book develops an accumulative analysis of the meanings of emotions in twentieth century realist drama, theatre and acting.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introducing Emotions	1	(20)
The Politics of Emotions in Theatre	1	(10)
Discursive Approaches	11	(3)
Defining Emotions	14	(7)
Hope and Despair: Theatrical Emotions, Hysteria and Masculinity	21	(33)
Self-Dramatisation and Chekhov's Characters	21	(1)
The Seagull (1896)	22	(14)
Reverberating Fictions and Love	24	(7)
The Characterisation of Hysteria	31	(5)
Uncle Vanya (1897)	36	(14)
A Crisis of Masculine Identity	37	(9)
A Gendered Economy of Emotion	46	(4)
The Social Meaning of Theatrical Emotions	50	(4)
Loss, Nostalgia and Yearning: Representations of a Feminine Self	54	(35)
Literary Love	54	(2)
Three Sisters (1901)	56	(14)
Representations of Feminine Emotions	60	(7)
Emotional Spaces	67	(3)
The Cherry Orchard (1903)	70	(14)
Emotional Geographies	73	(8)
Embodied Emotions and Performative Acts	81	(3)
Femininity as Excess Emotion	84	(5)
Happy to Sad: Stanislavski's Theatrical Logic Embodied	89	(32)
Acting Emotions	89	(8)
Acting Being, Belief and Truth	97	(3)
Controversy Over the Director's Realist Logic	100	(8)
Social Bodies Act Inner Emotions?	108	(5)
Training Repetitions of Bodies	113	(8)
Laughter and Tears: Interiority as Bodily Control Over Emotions	121	(24)
Olga Knipper, Stanislavski and Acting Naturally	121	(13)
Theoretical Mastery Over Interiority	134	(4)
A Modern Theatre of Private Love	138	(2)
Staging Natural and Deep	140	(5)
Performing Emotional Bodies	145	(24)
Phenomenological Bodies Per/Form	145	(4)
Brecht's Separation of Emotion	149	(2)
The Social Performance of Emotion	151	(3)
Display Rules and Performative Identities	154	(5)
Emotions and Corporeal Subjectivity	159	(5)
Transgressive Emotional Performances	164	(5)
Conclusion	169	(3)
Bibliography	172	(24)
Index	196