{"id":793,"date":"2023-12-06T20:16:25","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T20:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?p=793"},"modified":"2026-05-27T19:47:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T19:47:49","slug":"next-page-on-stage-21st-century-dramaturgies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/next-page-on-stage-21st-century-dramaturgies\/","title":{"rendered":"Next Page on Stage: 21st Century Dramaturgies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria Ristani<\/strong><a href=\"#end\" name=\"back\">*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"abstract wp-block-paragraph\">This is a short thinking response to the 5<sup>th<\/sup> International Forest Festival organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG) in Thessaloniki (Greece), in late spring 2023. It attempts to echo back on and wire together important questions set by this three-week theatre feast on forms, tropes and modes of contemporary and future theatre stage.<br><br><strong>Keywords<\/strong>: NTNG International Forest Festival, 21<sup>st<\/sup> century theatre, new stages&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-background-color has-background has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The future stage is now. There can be no post-pandemic return to the old \u201cnormal,\u201d which was already broken; the time for courage, vision, and action is now. (from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americantheatre.org\/2021\/11\/05\/a-manifesto-for-the-future-stage-performance-is-a-human-right\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">futureStage Manifesto<\/a> by metaLAB at Harvard)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Festivals \u2013 as the word (with origins in the Latin <em>festum<\/em>) denotes \u2013 mark feast breaks in and away from social time. They offer opportunities to gather, and in gathering, to celebrate. Since their ritual beginnings in ancient Greece (and before), they\u2019ve signaled periodical pauses in \u201cnormal\u201d routine flow, suspending time alongside rules. Erika Fischer-Lichte writes on what she reads as the \u201cdouble dialectic\u201d fleshing festivals: though recurrent, she observes, \u201cthey forge their own temporality,\u201d and, though regulated and framed in rigid set-up, \u201cthe quintessence of a festive action [still] consists in the transgression of certain rules\u201d (235). Patterned in temporal repetition but framed in event singularity, festivals flesh and celebrate fissures in the flow of the ordinary, allowing pauses for shared observation, reflection, and celebration. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Such was the theatre feast offered by the 5<sup>th<\/sup> International Forest Festival in Thessaloniki, organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece and spanning a period of three weeks, from late spring to early summer 2023 (26 May &#8211; 15 June). Marking its fifth year of life, the festival offered a carefully-orchestrated pause to gather, in shared enthusiasm and curiosity, and celebrate theatre event-ness. Fleshing that unique festival temporality \u2013 within and despite day-to-day routine \u2013 it allowed delving into the present tense of theatre making, and, following the transgressive potential inherent in feasts, it made us return to the pressing question of what is \/ can be \/ will be theatre. Such question fleshed, as it were, the festival\u2019s refrain. The very title chosen for the event (\u201cNext Page on Stage\u201d) echoed this same query as an invite to imagine and explore \u201cnext-ness\u201d \u2013 the pregnant moment of page-turning for the future stage. How will\/do emerging theatre pages and stages look like? How will\/do they connect and where will\/do they materialize?&nbsp; &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"\u039a\u0398\u0392\u0395 2023: 5\u03bf \u0394\u03b9\u03b5\u03b8\u03bd\u03ad\u03c2 \u03a6\u03b5\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03b2\u03ac\u03bb \u0394\u03ac\u03c3\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2, \u03c4\u03c1\u03ad\u03b9\u03bb\u03b5\u03c1\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/e5ekHddS2hs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">5<sup>th<\/sup> International Forest Festival, official trailer, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Promising glimpses into a \u201cnext page on stage,\u201d the festival hosted a good range of twenty-first-century performances alongside a series of onsite and online discussions, workshops and parallel activities (such as the online screening of Luk\u00e1\u0161 Brutovsk\u00fd&#8217;s <em>Iokast\u00e9<\/em>, the performance <em>One Three Some, An Attempt for Devising A Democratic Assembly <\/em>by Danae Theodoridou, or the collaborative artistic project <em>Orlando Trip<\/em>). Sotterraneo\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=135&amp;fsid=48&amp;fid=3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>L\u2019Angelo della Storia<\/em><\/a> (Italy), Kim Noble\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=135&amp;fsid=47&amp;fid=3\"><em>Lullaby for Scavengers<\/em><\/a> (Great Britain), <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=135&amp;fsid=49&amp;fid=3\"><em>Be Arielle F<\/em><\/a> by Simon Senn (Switzerland), <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=135&amp;fsid=46&amp;fid=3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>We are Still Watching<\/em><\/a> by Ivana M\u00fcller (France) and <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=135&amp;fsid=50&amp;fid=3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Borderline Visible<\/em> <em>(between Lausanne and Izmir)<\/em><\/a> by Ant Hampton (Great Britain\/Germany), all fleshed the main program on stage in what looked as an enticingly polyphonic dialogue between different (European) performance strands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All performances offered their singular take on what might form a \u201cnext page on stage,\u201d connected, nonetheless, through their shared laboratory approach, forming what theatre critic Jill Dolan would describe as cases when \u201c[t]heatre might become more of a workplace than a showplace\u201d (10). Their laboratory stages, we read in the <a href=\"https:\/\/on.ntng.gr\/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&amp;page=137&amp;fid=3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">information note<\/a> regarding the festival\u2019s character and scope, were \u201csmall and flexible in form, but contain[ing] big ideas.\u201d These were all \u201ccontemporary, restless, refreshing and interactive\u201d productions, designing, developing, testing and showing an emerging &nbsp;21<sup>st<\/sup> century theatre landscape in the making. &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Faithful to its promise, the festival showcased notable excerpts from the present page on stage and piercing glimpses into its future folds and turns. To begin with, as well-expected in the years of the post-dramatic rule, this \u201cnext page\u201d that the festival featured looked little like a typically-scripted drama page. The pieces staged featured no conventional dramaturgy and were clearly removed from the working logics of traditional play-texts; they were based, instead, on collaboratively devised scripts of historical anecdotes (as in the case of <em>L\u2019Angelo della Storia<\/em>), on inspiring literary-source texts (as with <em>Orlando Trip<\/em>), or on personal testimonies and private memoirs (as with <em>Lullaby for Scavengers<\/em>, <em>Be Arielle F<\/em> and <em>Borderline Visible<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Similarly, the stage forms hosting such pages looked little like what may have been expected; in place of traditional performance models, the festival showcased more compact, agile and flexible, \u201csmart-theatre\u201d forms, such as those of performance acts and lectures (<em>Be Arielle F<\/em>), collective and collaborative text readings (<em>We are Still Watching<\/em>), or private digital listening experiences (<em>Borderline Visible<\/em>). New stages were thus discovered emerging in and through text pages, headphone listening bubbles, or lecture-talk forms. Even the actual theatre stage, as such, looked transformed; in Ivana M\u00fcller\u2019s <em>We are Still Watching<\/em>, we experience the stage as a participatory playground of distributed logics, while in<em> Be Arielle F<\/em> we see the proscenium NTNG stage transforming into a digital streaming laboratory or growing entangled with other contemporary life stages such as that of a messenger video call.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image3-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-795\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image3-4.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image3-4-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image3-4-768x432.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Simon Senn\u2019s <em>Be Arielle F<\/em>. Photo: Courtesy of the NTNG<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On such \u201cstages,\u201d typical hierarchies and role allocations or divisions made little sense. What almost all festive pieces indexed was a new kind of de-hierarchized, horizontal performance-from-below that no longer fed from the age-old performer-audience binary, blurring the two, instead, in cross-fed encounters. A case in point was certainly Ivana M\u00fcller\u2019s <em>We are Still Watching<\/em>, which invited audiences to gather round for what looked like a \u201creading rehearsal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"532\" src=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image2-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-794\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image2-4.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image2-4-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image2-4-768x511.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Ivana M\u00fcller\u2019s <em>We are Still Watching<\/em>. Photo: Courtesy of the NTNG<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gathering round, as asked, spectators formed a circle referring back to and celebrating itself. The piece nourished on the notable absence of typical center-stage performers, their role initially usurped by a text-score inviting spectators to (collectively) read from, and soon growing and multiplying, as it spread across audience members who took turns in voicing\/acting out the piece. Though \u201cwe are still watching,\u201d we are also now writing, playing and (to some extent) directing\/shaping the flow of the piece. Such re-allocation of established roles inevitably affects stage temporalities; with audience members becoming themselves agents of action, the event also becomes further steeped in the present moment. As British playwright and performer Tim Crouch visualizes for 21<sup>st<\/sup> century theatre, \u201c[i]t grows more alert to the moment rather than alert to a process that has been carefully considered and developed and rehearsed\u201d (qtd. in LePage 18). Yielding in and capturing the precarious (but delicious) unpredictability of \u201cthe moment\u201d was default mode for almost all festival performances.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Speaking of \u201cthe moment,\u201d present-ness was, overall, what 5th International Forest Festival performances celebrated. In notable urgency, all performances interrogated, staged, (re)presented the moment, capturing twenty-first-century world tensions, dilemmas, questions and themes. The all-relevant debate on the Anthropocene crisis and its destructive human reign banged loud in Kim Noble\u2019s <em>Lullaby for Scavengers<\/em> as he set in dark, grotesque humor to tell us of what is insistently cleansed, cleaned up and cleaned away in a human-centered world. Our increasingly mediated lives, prosthetic bodies and worlds, in their dialectic of excitement and dread, and with all their bio-ethical dilemmas still pending unresolved, bled into Simon Senn\u2019s staging of <em>Be Arielle F<\/em>. The idea of History as structured and fleshed in interweaving layers of micro- and macro-stories, in interlocking strands of memory and amnesia, in public and private narratives, as well as in echoes, doublings and repetitions formed a common theme ground for both Ant Hampton\u2019s <em>Borderline Visible<\/em> and Sotterraneo\u2019s <em>L\u2019Angelo della Storia<\/em>. All performances drew from what matters now, harboring pauses to reflect on (and celebrate) the world as is in the present moment.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"600\" height=\"673\" src=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image4-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-796\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image4-3.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image4-3-267x300.jpg 267w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Kim Noble\u2019s <em>Lullaby for Scavengers<\/em>. Photo: Courtesy of the NTNG<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Afterword<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the aftermath of this theatre- and world now-ness feast, offered by the 5<sup>th<\/sup> International Forest Festival, what was explored as \u201cnext page on stage\u201d looks all the more minimally sketched. Seen in retrospect, what the festival, ultimately, seems to have indexed and celebrated across its events, is theatre letting go; relinquishing authorial or directorial control (<em>L\u2019Angelo della Storia<\/em>), letting go of central performers\u2019 presence (<em>We are Still Watching<\/em>), loosening its ties to traditional ideas of liveness (<em>Be Arielle F<\/em>), abandoning bulky stage forms (<em>Borderline Visible)<\/em>. Theatre growing and going lighter, embracing the new \u201clive\u201d, the agile, the playful, the unpredictable. Thankful for this feast on letting go, hosted by the Fifth International Forest Festival, we, as audiences, don\u2019t let go but remain fascinated to see how the page will indeed turn to make sense of and host our page-turning world. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Bibliography<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"hangingIndent wp-block-paragraph\">Dolan, Jill. \u201cGender Impersonation Onstage: Destroying or Maintaining the Mirror of Gender Roles?\u201d <em>Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts<\/em>, edited by Laurence Senelick. The UP of New England, pp. 3-13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"hangingIndent wp-block-paragraph\">Fischer-Lichte, Erika. \u201cPolicies of Spatial Appropriation.\u201d <em>Performance and the Politics of Space<\/em>, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Michael Breslin and Saskya Iris Jain. Routledge 2012, pp 219-39.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"hangingIndent wp-block-paragraph\">LePage, Louse. \u201cTim Crouch and Dan Rebellato in Conversation.\u201d <em>Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts<\/em>, \u201cRepresenting the Human,\u201d vol.6, no.2, Summer 2012, pp. 13-27.<a name=\"end\">&nbsp;<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/Maria-Ristani-150x150.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-797\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/Maria-Ristani-150x150.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/Maria-Ristani.jpeg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a name=\"end\" href=\"#back\">*<\/a><strong>Dr. Maria Ristani<\/strong>&nbsp;teaches British and Anglophone drama and performance theory at the School of English at Aristotle University, Greece. She has an active research and teaching interest in twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre and performance strands, with particular emphasis on the ways modern Anglophone theatre draws on and interacts with sound art and acoustics in fields such as audio-based theatre, podcast drama and sound walk performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Copyright <strong>\u00a9<\/strong> 2023 Maria Ristani<br><em>Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN:2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/88x31.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons Attribution International License\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">This work is licensed under the<br>Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-reflections"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2023\/12\/image2-4.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1280,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions\/1280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}