Editorial
Maria Helena Serôdio
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire.
T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land (‘The Burial of the Dead’)
Upon renewing our presence on the website with a second issue of Critical Stages―and differently from Eliot―we can only be happy with the coming of April since it also brings with it the evidence that the International Association of Theatre Critics is able to pursue one of its main goals: to highlight the need (and the importance) of critics and criticism in the field of theatre. But this claim is not to be held as a vain conceit: it only means that we assume this as a challenge and a responsibility, so that we shall do our best not to disappoint artists, readers and theatre audiences alike.
In professing this idea in the second issue of our journal, we also try to show how varied is (or should be) the approach to theatre. That is one of the reasons why we engage in dialogue with both playwrights (Athol Fugard and Gianina Carbunariu) and theatre practitioners (set-designer Dragos Buhagia, and theatre directors: Jin-Chaek Sohn, David Zinder and Stan Lai / Sheng-Chuan). And either framing the dialogue in a more formatted way or using a specific moment of their careers to hear their opinions, it is always a way of assembling “views” and “voices” of those who create art for the stage and make them readable by all those who visit us at this site.
Other ways of approaching theatre allow for elaborating on theatre criticism as Yun-Cheol Kim, Don Rubin, Temple Hauptfleisch and Mark Brown do in the section dedicated to “critics on criticism,” thus recalling proposals the first two presented at a Colloquium held last January in Vallabh Vidyanagar (India) where that subject was discussed.
Three other critical perspectives can also be identified in our approaches to theatre. One is reviewing current performances (as well as of books recently released), and we can boast of having reviews of performances created by artists coming from Canada, Finland, Iran, South Africa, France, Latvia, Romania, Israel and Germany, among others. And among the reviewers, we are happy to count on former President of the IATC―Georges Banu―with two major articles, as well as a ‘lesson’ on performance analysis Patrice Pavis uses to approach a dance performance.
The second perspective is based on theatre research, looking for either artistic identities (be they Creole theatre, the condition of Immigrants in the Portuguese theatre, or Purcărete’s artistic output) or spotting painful memories in plays and performances.
The third perspective we adopt here has to do with examining theatrical legacies: both Jean Genet’s theatre (being revived in a festival held in Korea―in March and April of this year―to commemorate the centenary of his birth) and Brazilian director Augusto Boal. In this latter case, we are proud to include a file with articles by leading researchers and artists of Brazil who have known, studied and worked with Boal, together with a portfolio of photos that show some of the many riches of the newly formed “Augusto Boal Archive” at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO).
On the eve of granting the Thalia Prize to Richard Schechner in our forthcoming Congress in Yerevan (Armenia) to be held next June, we recall here the critic and essayist Jean-Pierre Sarrazac who received that same Prize in Sofia, two years ago, “for having influenced critical thinking about the art of theatre.” The speech he read in Sofia, as well as the “questionnaire” Randy Gener used to make his views more known to our readers form another section of this issue of Critical Stages. In the photos that are shown here we can see the emblem of the prize specially commissioned from the distinguished Romanian stage and artist-designer Dragos Buhagiar: a cane with a silver top, representing Thalia, the Greek muse of comedy.
My most sincere thanks go to all those who so generously contributed with their writings to this issue, thus sharing with us their knowledge and enthusiasm. And that is also extended to all the members of our Editorial Board who engaged with so many duties and concerns in order to have it all ready to release the issue in due time. It is, however, an immense joy to see how all those efforts come together in this issue, and how it proves that it is still possible―no matter how different we are in our ideas, sensibilities and ways of writing―to have a collective voice as theatre critics.
A last word of acknowledgement should be said in order to thank Yu-Jin Kim for Editorial Assistance, Myoung-Jae "Andrew" Yim for the Web design, and IATC President Yun-Cheol Kim who called into existence this journal and relied on me for its edition.
I could perhaps resume Eliot’s words of the epigraph quoted above not only to underline the singular metaphor of “lilacs” for the “pieces” that make up this issue (although not “out of the dead land,” rather the opposite living theatre …), but also for the “mixing of memory and desire” that is, to my mind, one of the main sources of our work as theatre critics.




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