A person in a shiny blue and beige outfit, white wig, and sunglasses sings into a microphone. A card with a face is on their forehead. The image is duplicated with a purple filter.

Prep School: War & Coolness

NYU Skirball is bringing you two international — and internationally renowned — theatre companies, with back-to-back adaptation-slash-translations of classic texts in entirely different contexts. Gob Squad takes on War and Peace and Teatro La Re-Sentida gives Molière’s The Misanthrope a contemporary spin with La Dictadura de lo Cool (The Dictatorship of Coolness).

Not familiar with these classics? No problem. The artists will get you up to speed when you see the shows — no prior knowledge necessary (although if you’re already an expert, there’s going to be plenty of new delights for you to discover). This study guide gives you some ways to think about translation, adaptation, the sanctity of “originals,” and the resonance of old stories in new contexts, plus some background on Tolstoy and Molière for good measure.

RELATED EVENTS
  • Fri Apr 6 – Sat Apr 7, 2018

Teatro La Re-Sentida: La Dictadura de lo Cool

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  • Thu Mar 29 – Sat Mar 31, 2018

Gob Squad: War and Peace

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  • Tue Apr 3, 2018

War & Coolness: A Between- Shows Skirball Salon

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Brandon Woolf on Gob Squad

War & Peace is back in town. With its immersive salon staging, its playful interaction between performers and audience members, and its free-flowing vodka and blinis. Indeed, there is still an abundance of music, there are wildly audacious costumes, and there is a very large cast of characters. But unlike Dave Malloy’s Great Comet over Broadway, Gob Squad’s War and Peace does not attempt to adapt a slice of Leo Tolstoy’s 1200-plus-page classic for the stage. No: they have taken on the whole epic book, copies of which are strewn about the theatre – with one shiny copy propped up on a pedestal. And yet Gob Squad is not all that interested in retelling Tolstoy’s story; they are not much interested in narrative at all. Instead, they have chosen to playfully refract some of the book’s central themes, ideas, and questions through our present moment: both our political realities and our contemporary aesthetic modes.

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Two actors perform on a brightly lit stage surrounded by artificial snow, smoke, and blue lighting. A structure resembling a house frame and a table with chairs are also part of the scene.
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Sebastián Calderón Bentin on Teatro La Re-Sentida

Among the many important contributions by the Situationist International (SI), the artist and activist collective working in Europe from 1957 to 1972, lies the concept of recuperation. Recuperation identifies the process under capitalism whereby radical ideas and actions are defused, absorbed and commodified into mainstream culture. An iconic example being the use of Che Guevara’s image as a mass market fashion trend or, more recently, Vanessa Beecroft’s quotation of a Rwandan refugee camp image as an inspiration for Kanye West’s 2016 fashion show in Madison Square Garden. For artists and activists committed to social change the process of recuperation poses both theoretical and practical problems since contemporary capitalism can appropriate radical gestures and sell them back to us in alluring yet antiseptic forms. As one of the Situationists’ main thinkers, Raoul Vaneigem, writes in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), under capitalism the function of “art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty.”

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A performer stands on a table during a vibrant stage show, while others sit or stand nearby. A large projected image of a man’s face with a cap is displayed in the background. Bright, colorful lighting fills the scene.

GET INTO IT

Gob Squad, Berlin’s notorious and challenging arts collective, make live video performances that unsettle the lines between the prepared and the improvised, performer and bystander, fiction and life. Gob Squad has been devising, directing and performing together since 1994, motivated by a desire to elevate the everyday and empower audience members to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators.

Teatro La Re-Sentida (The Resentful) is a collective of young activists and artists from the Chilean national theatrical scene who regard theater as a critical instrument with major political responsibility. Their work embodies the pulses, visions and ideas of their generation and assumes as duty, audacity, the desecration of taboos and reflection generated from provocation.

WAR & PEACE

The Guardian put this cheat sheet together in advance of a BBC adaptation: “War and Peace: The 10 Things to Know (If You Actually Haven’t Read It)”

“Why Read War and Peace?”: If you’ve never attempted it, let University of Chicago professor William Nickell tell you why it’s worth your time.

Virginia Woolf on Tolstoy:

There remains the greatest of all novelists — for what else can we call the author of War and Peace? Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien, difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of vision which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost our bearings, keeps us at arm’s length in suspicion and bewilderment? From his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate — here is a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards.

War and Peace is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time… but there’s always room for debate. What’s your pitch for Gob Squad’s next epic adaptation?

PLUS: Everything you ever wanted to know about Gob Squad in their FAQ Videos.

El Misántropo

Michael Billington, The Guardian‘s theatre critic, ranks The Misanthrope at #23 of the greatest plays of all time.

“Notes on The Misanthrope” by Pannill Camp, director of a 2015 production at Washington University in St. Louis

Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? Chapter 10: “Not!” Robert Goldsby (2012)

Adam Gopnik eulogizes Molière’s great translator Richard Wilbur while also using The Misanthrope to read contemporary French politics: “Thinking of Richard Wilbur and Molière While Listening to Emmanuel Macron”: The New Yorker, Oct 18, 2017

Can’t get enough Molière? Ariane Mnouchkine and Le Théâtre du Soleil made an epic film about him in 1978: Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête homme

On Translation (Or Not)


Let’s get classic: Walter Benjamin’s “La Tâche du Traducteur” (1923):

“The Politics of Translation,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993)

“Translation as Paradigm for Human Sciences,” Barbara Cassin (2016)

The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (2000)

And for the contrarians: read an excerpt from The Dictionary of Untranslateables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014)

On ADAPTATION

Adaptations can be seen as ways to uncover different meanings that may not be clearly revealed in the orginal stories. They can also be a way to explore the subjectivity of stories we have only been shown in one way.

Explore these readings to uncover more on the uses of adaptation in theatre.

“Telling the Tale: Adaptation as Interpretation” by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (2015)

“Adaptation, the Genre” by Thomas Leitch (2008)

“Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation” by Robert Stam (2000)

On MULTIMEDIA

Both companies use multimedia and immersive or participatory strategies in their works. Get up to speed on these styles:

“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” by Claire Bishop (2004)

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop (2012) [bonus: an article on the many languages of its translations]

“Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediated: A Story of Gob Squad” by Nina Tecklenburg and Benjamin Carter (2012)

“The Spectatorial Body in Multimedia Performance” by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (2011)

“Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre”  by David Z. Saltz (2001)

“In Media Res: Why Multimedia Performance?” with Eric Dyer, Brooke O’Harra, Alex Timbers in conversation with Steve Luber

EXTRA CREDIT

The Best Translated Book Award is an American literary award that recognizes the previous year’s best original translation into English, one book of poetry and one of fiction. It was inaugurated in 2008 and is conferred by Three Percent, the online literary magazine of Open Letter Books, which is the book translation press of the University of Rochester.