A rich, historically grounded exploration of why theater and performance matter in the modern world
Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater:
the story of a romantic attachment to theater's potential to
produce surprising experiences of human community. It begins with
one of the first great plays of modern European theaterÑChekhov's
Uncle Vanya in Moscow and then crosses the 20th and 21st
centuries to look at how its story plays out in Weimar Republic
Berlin, in the Paris of the 1960s, and in a spectrum of
contemporary performance in Europe and the United States. This is a
work of historical materialist theater scholarship, which combines
a materialism grounded in a socialist tradition of cultural studies
with some of the insights developed in recent years by theorists of
affect, and addresses some fundamental questions about the social
function and political potential of theater within modern
capitalism.
Passionate Amateurs argues that theater in
modern capitalism can help us think afresh about notions of work,
time, and freedom. Its title concept is a theoretical and
historical figure, someone whose work in theater is undertaken
within capitalism, but motivated by a love that desires something
different. In addition to its theoretical originality, it offers a
significant new reading of a major Chekhov play, the most sustained
scholarly engagement to date with Benjamin's Program for a
Proletarian Children's Theatre, the first major consideration of
Godard's
La chinoise as a "theatrical" work, and the first
chapter-length discussion of the work of The Nature Theatre of
Oklahoma, an American company rapidly gaining a profile in the
European theater scene.
Passionate Amateurs contributes to the development of
theater and performance studies in a way that moves beyond debates
over the differences between theater and performance in order to
tell a powerful, historically grounded story about what theater and
performance are for in the modern world.
ÒReading a suggestively diverse set of modern performances, and setting those performances within a clear and well-defined theoretical/critical project, Ridout attempts to use the Ôpassionate amateurÕÑat once the spectator, the scholar, and to some extent the characters in the playsÑas a critical category disrupting the otherwise fully commodified communication of leisure products . . . Passionate Amateurs is wholly original, intellectually and critically stimulating, and certain to develop not only discussion but also to lead to a series of important questions in contemporary theatre and performance studies scholarship.Ó
ÑW. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
