Figurae Veneris Historiae (A Play for the Theatre)
- Submitting institution
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Canterbury Christ Church University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- U34.018
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Ljubljana 2014 and Macedonia 2015
- Brief description of type
- Play/Playscript
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- October
- Year
- 2014
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In developing the play of Figurae Veneris Historiae the key research question was how to articulate the moral insanity of the First World War dramatically. The script was written as a response to ideas from Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1931 book Sitten Geschichte des Weltkrieges (Leipzig: Schneider, 1930), published in English as The Sexual History of the World War. Hirschfeld, who established the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin in 1919, gives detailed examples and critical analysis of the psychological and sexual traumas of war. War is shown as human mass orgy, a bachannalia, a mass hypnosis.
The methodology applied in the play was practice-based dramatisation of these issues. It leads to a performance, a showing of these issues on the stage, where they are given affective urgency and immediacy. The play employs violent juxtapositions of methods: naturalist melodrama is poised against the expressionist theatre of Wedekind, Toller, Sternheim, (dreamlike and nightmarish atmosphere, disjointed and episodic structure, nameless designations of characters, febrile and rhapsodic dialogue). Brechtian settings of epic theatre – i.e. moments of rational understanding and comprehension – are juxtaposed with the shocks of the Artaudian theatre of cruelty and surrealist humour. The play points to the explosion and fracture of identity, the collusion of social chaos and moral disorder and merging of the tragic and the farcical.
The theories of affect generally point to visceral forces beneath, alongside, or outside conscious knowledge. The articulation of these forces through drama can serve to drive us toward informed thought and action, and create the possibility of social change. The play offers emotional meaning as a form of new knowledge. It integrates the emotional aspects of meaning with the meaning of emotion, and brings about new insights often neglected by official history or misconstrued by daily politics.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
