Theatre Revue 1/2025

Description

The body is a support, a tool, a concept, a methodology or simply a challenge for its various thematization and reflection. By placing it in specific existential, cultural and socio-political contexts, it always serves us as a significant seismograph of identities, relationships and time. In contemporary discourse in the humanities, the body is seen as a central carrier of specific experience and becomes an important resource for research related to questions of history, memory and knowledge. At the same time, our body has always been confronted with the various mechanisms, constructs, precarizations and categorizations to which human civilization subjects it. This reciprocal relationship between the human and the body is also the connecting thread of all the diverse contributions to the issue.

As part of the analysis of aspects of the body and corporeality in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist drama Machinal, the issue also includes a new translation of the play, the first ever translation of the work into English. The author of the analysis and translation is student Terezie Šípová.

What makes the present issue exceptional is the fact that it resonates with the ideas of the emerging generation of experts in body-oriented performing arts research.

As part of the analysis of aspects of the body and physicality in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist drama Machinal, the issue also includes a translation of the play, which is the first ever translation of the work into Czech.
Iconographically, the book is phrased by drawings by Jana Preková, with whom we present an interview.

The scope of the issue and the breadth of research areas confirm the topicality and a certain inexhaustibility of the topic; in the context of the disappearing body due to the contemporary virtuality of the world, each page also reflects its unceasing urgency.