Staging 21st Century Tragedies

Avra Sidiropoulou is Associate Professor at the M.A. in Theatre Studies Programme at the Open University of Cyprus and Artistic Director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. She is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). She was Visiting Researcher at MIT and the Graduate Centre at CUNY, the Freie University, the Universities of Surrey, Leeds, and Tokyo (Japan Foundation Fellow). Avra has lectured, directed, and conducted theatre workshops in many parts of the globe. Recent directing works include Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (Cyprus Theatre Organization 2022), Bryony Lavery’s Frozen (Skala Theatre 2020), Phaedra I— (text: Sidiropoulou—Tristan Bates Theatre, London 2019), and A Doll’s House (Technochoros Ethal 2019). She was nominated for the League of Professional Theatre Women Gilder/Goigney International Award 2020. https://persona.gr/en/people/avra-sidiropoulou/.

Part 1: Crisis as Tragedy and Judgment

1. Tragedy and Crisis: Staging Forced Displacement and Its Reluctant Hero

Yana Meerzon

2. Beyond Suffering or Resolution: Tragedy and the Twenty-First Century Collective Experience

Avra Sidiropoulou

3. Prophets Needed: Five Easy Pieces and La Reprise: Histoire(s) du théâtre (I) by Milo Rau

Carol Martin

Τestimony 1.1. Avra Sidiropoulou in Conversation with Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll

Τestimony 1.2. Cards of Identities (Poetic luxury)

Hanane Hajj Ali

Τestimony 1.3. Chorus and Crisis in the Contemporary United States

Peter Campbell

Part 2: Texts and Contexts of Crisis: Power/lessness, Precarity and Identity Politics

4. Caesar Must (Not) Die. Italian Political ‘Caesars’ in the New Millennium

Silvia Bigliazzi

5. Leaving the world good or leaving a better world? Theatre and crisis through the lenses of Bertolt Brecht

Aldo Milohnic

6. Tragic and Post-tragic Representations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Fractured Togetherness in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Annie Baker’s The Flick

Ana Fernandez Caparrós

7. Modern African Drama in Crisis? Two African Authors in Search of Identity

Taiwo Afolabi, Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah and Ogah Mark Onwe

Part 3: Stage Narratives of Failure or Visions of a Better World? Bankrupt States, Violent Cities, Global Resistance Civic Consciousness and the Poetics of Participation

8. "Theatre remains traditionalist and Eurocentric." About Milo Rau’s "theatre of crisis"

Freddy Decreus

9. "How Many More Thousands of Years?": Dystopia, Otherness, and the Greek Crisis in the Work of Three Contemporary Greek Dramatists

Constantina Ziropoulou

10. Theatre as Assembly: ‘Theatre Commons’ Radical Dramaturgy

Tadashi Uchino

11. Marca España. Making Theatre from Precarity, State Violence and Fiesta

Ana Contreras Elvira

Τestimony 3.1. Aoidoi of a Country’s Living History

Lupe Gehrenbech

Part 4: Reflections on the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Anthropocene

12. For the theatre of the Anthropocene

Frank Raddatz

Testimony 4.1. Theatre in Covid Τimes: A Report from Greece

Anestis Azas

Testimony 4.2. All is related to Me

Su Xiaogang

Testimony 4.3. Plays (we never staged) to survive

Miguel Rojo and Javier Hernando (Los Barbaros)

Testimony 4.4. Troy Too [Original playscript]

Karen Malpede (Theatre Three Collaborative)