The concept of an authentic person who makes his/her ‘true inner’ visible on the body’s surface reappears as an ideal throughout history. What has undergone significant changes, however, is what exactly constitutes authentic bodily appearance. What ‘inner’ is represented and how exactly is it made visible on the body? My article focuses on two instances in which stagings of the authentic body represent an important issue: First in the French Enlightenment and subsequently in contemporary makeover culture (which originated in the Western world, but is no longer limited to it).

Images of bodies revealing their ‘true inner’ took on particular importance in the Enlightenment when writers such as Rousseau used them as counterpoints to what they rejected as the ancien regime ’s affected bodies. One might assume today –in the aftermath of late 20th century poststructuralism, postmodernism and feminism –that any notion of bodily ‘authenticity’ or for that matter ‘essential selfhood’ would be curtly dismissed. Yet, the image of an authentic body that reveals a ‘deserving’ inner self is exactly what is staged in most popular media today.

18th century acting theories suggested that ‘naturally expressive’ gestures could be conveyed –indeed reveal feelings –without any mediation. What has changed since then, I will argue, is that the ideal authentic body in makeover-culture has to be thoroughly and visibly worked for.

On Multiple Appearances: An Analysis of the Performing Body in Kitt Johnson's Drift In the article, I challenge the prevalent use of phenomenology in dance scholarship, which focusses on the dancer's experience of her body when dancing. This approach often implies the problematic assumption that the dancer's experience is immediately transferred to the spectators who, in turn, are universally 'moved' by her dancing body. Instead of acknowledging that dance is a product of historically and culturally specific circumstances, such an analytical perspective ultimately tends to mystify dance. In this article I propose a different use of analytical tools in dance scholarship: I employ phenomenological reduction and epoche to focus on how dancing bodies appear in a stage context. To test the ability of these tools to explore dancing bodies from a third-person perspective, I analyze Danish choreographer Kitt Johnson's solo performance Drift (2011), focussing on her variable physical appearance. While phenomenology helps me to describe the multiple and radically different guises Johnson assumes in her piece, my analysis does not, ultimately, aim to distil a truer, more real being from her appearances, as is often the case in phenomenological analyses. Instead, I complement my analytical approach with the Deleuzian notion of becoming animal, suggesting that Johnson stages what, in Judith Butler's terms, could be called a critical contingency of bodily appearance.

This master’s thesis discusses the term physical theatre from a discourse point of view. It also focuses on aspects of power from a field theory perspective. The main theory used is Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, and I try to apply this onto critical discourse analysis, mainly taken from Michel Foucault. The forms of physical theatre I focus on are mainly commedia dell’arte, theatre forms inspiredby Grotowski and Artaud, as well as mime, performance and contemporary circus. These are all theatre forms that focus especially on the body. My aim is to explore the status and discourse of physical theatre in Sweden today.

The thesis is divided into two main parts. First, I present research concerning empirical data, where I search for the term physical theatre, as well as other forms of describing these theatre forms, in magazines, theatre playlists, texts about theatre troups etc. The term physical theatre is not very common in these texts, it is often described as dance-theatre for example. It is also prominent that the view on what physical theatre is has changed, theatre forms which focus on the body and its expression have been incorporated into the major theatre field, and are no longer considered odd or different. Physical comedy, however, still stands out. Although it seems that it has become increasingly popular, it has somewhat moved away from the serious forms of physical theatre.

The second part of the thesis approaches the subject from a more theorising point of view, where the discussion itself is the main focus. I start off by discussing the term physical theatre and its aesthetics – how its meaning has changed from being something avant-garde to something that is considered “normal”. Thereafter I discuss the status of the physical theatre forms, and apply them onto Bourdieu’s field theory. Physical comedy has not yet acquired the status of ”high culture”, whereas the serious, more “arty” forms of physical theatre are on different positions in the theatre field, and even on the physical theatre field. I also discuss how this can be transferred to theories about popular culture, and the interesting things that happens when the once very popular, low-status theatre form commedia dell’arte is situated in a high culture theatre house, Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, in Sweden. I continue to discuss marginalised forms of theatre from a sub-culturalperspective, fighting both against and inside the dominant culture to gain status in the theatre field. After this, I discuss how the physical theatre’s new discourse has changed because of the newly found interest in contemporary circus, research projects in universities as well as higher education in physical art forms. The conclusion is that the term physical theatre still can be useful to describe different forms of theatre, although it is quite vague and has changed significally.

Playing Culture represents one of the corner stones in the model of the Theatrical Event, as developed by the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this volume, thirteen scholars contribute to illuminate the significance and possibilities of playing within the framework of theatrical events. Playing is understood as an essential part of theatrical communication, from acting on stage to events far from theatre buildings. The playfulness characterizing academic traditions sets the tone in the introduction, illustrating the four sections of the book: Theories, Expansions, Politics and Conventions. The theoretical chapters depart from the classical Homo Ludens and offer a number of new perspectives on what play and playing implies in today’s mediatized culture. The contributions to the second section on extensions, deal with playing in non-theatrical circumstances such as market places, passports and stock holders’ meetings. The third section on the politics of playing focuses on wood-chopping women, saints and youngsters in South African townships – all demonstrating their social and political ambitions and purposes. The last section returns to the stage on which performers intend to represent, respectively, themselves, Bunraku puppets or the audience. Playing appears in many forms and in many places and constitutes a basic principle of theatre and performance. This book touches upon important theoretical implications of playing and offers a wide range of historical and contemporary examples. Playing Culture – Conventions and Extensions of Performance is the third book of the IFTR Working Group on The Theatrical Event. The first volume, entitled Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames was published in 2004, followed by Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture in 2007. The present volume continues to expand the vision of the Theatrical Event as a theory and model for the study of playing, theatre, performance and mediated events.

Scholarly research on comical popular theatre is rare in the Swedish context even though the genre has attracted large audiences throughout the 20^th century. Nils Poppe is one of the greatest Swedish actors in the comical genre and he is famous for his playful acting style. With my Master’s dissertation I aim to shed some light on both the genre and this great actor. Another aim of this Master’s dissertation is to gain understanding of what causes the audience’s laughter experiencing Nils Poppe’s comical acting. To understand the audience response to the comical acting I need to study the communication between the actor and the beholders.  

In doing this I use Bert O. States phenomenological approach, in which he divides the communication into three modes in which the beholder experiences the action. In each of these modes I then use complementary concepts and theories to analyze the audience’s laughter.

My analysis starts with the Representational mode in which the focus is on the fiction of the play. Using semiotics, I discuss Poppe’s characters as a stock character related to the Commedia dell’arte character Harlequin and other clown characters, which are imbedded in the audience’s memory. With examples from a play I show why the audience laugh in different scenes. 

In the next chapter, I analyze the Self-expressive mode in which the artist at stage is in focus. While experiencing the fiction of the play the audience simultaneously experiences the reality on stage. The actor is present and Poppe’s real face, body and voice is affecting the audience’s response.

The final mode is the Collaborative mode in which the collaboration between the actor and beholder is analyzed. The direction of the play and how Poppe interacts with the audience is increasing the impression of presence among the audience. In his acting, Poppe breaks the theatrical conventions of the separation between fiction and reality, and in improvisations, he challenges both the audience and fellow actor’s notion of theatre.

The result of the study implies that some laughter can’t be explained just by studying each of these modes separately. When the character leaves the fictional play and acts within the audience reality, or when the actor on stage is understood as part of the fiction an incongruity is created that tends to make the audience laugh. 

This article investigates how Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer, as staged in Sweden in 1959, communicated sexual and racial anxieties. It aims to tease out the importance of fashion for the articulation of the closet and the expression of the simultaneous absence and presence of the queer subject in the play. Looking at the omnipresent use of whiteness of certain key costumes, the essay further proposes the concept of white Gothic fashion and argues that this assumed a whole new meaning when staged in a social and historical context that was not only characterized by institutionalized homophobia, but also promoted white hegemony and the control of women’s bodies. Placing particular emphasis on the socio-historical context of Sweden in the 1950s, the article demonstrates how performance studies and fashion theory can engage in a critical cultural analysis and help us understand national emotions, concerns and anxieties.

This article investigates how Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer, as staged in Sweden in 1959, communicated sexual and racial anxieties. It aims to tease out the importance of fashion for the articulation of the closet and the expression of the simultaneous absence and presence of the queer subject in the play. Looking at the omnipresent use of whiteness of certain key costumes, the essay further proposes the concept of white Gothic fashion and argues that this assumed a whole new meaning when staged in a social and historical context that was not only characterized by institutionalized homophobia, but also promoted white hegemony and the control of women’s bodies. Placing particular emphasis on the socio-historical context of Sweden in the 1950s, the article demonstrates how performance studies and fashion theory can engage in a critical cultural analysis and help us understand national emotions, concerns and anxieties.

This article offers a critical analysis of the media discourse surrounding the Swedish diplomat Sverker Åström’s coming out as a gay man at the age of 87. Particular interest is devoted to his striking fashion choice of wearing a pair of oddly coloured socks, which highlighted his contradictory masculinity as well as the many inherent paradoxes of the closet. Åström’s red and green socks functioned as a means to express forbidden desires, to oppose normative expectations in a playful way and to grant the gay subject a presence in a world that is still very much structured by the logics of the closet. Moreover, his contradictory body language, coupled with his repeated affirmations that his coming out was a private issue, revealed a divided masculinity that was ideologically dependent on a pre-feminist understanding of gender and sexuality as private, that is to say non-political. The article argues that there was strong evidence to suggest that his coming out was in fact a tactical move in a political game, a move aimed to denounce and ridicule the Swedish Security Police (SÄPO), who, after decades of surveillance, refused to grant the diplomat access to its classified files on him.

This essay analyzes how Icelandic singer-songwriter and actress Björk uses dress as a creative medium to enhance her musical vision, visualize her patriotic politics as well as ally herself with performance art and further strengthen her position in the avant-garde. I devote specific attention to her joining forces with British designer Alexander McQueen and British photographer Nick Knight and unpack the implications of this creative collaboration, arguing that Björk strategically uses McQueen’s and Knight’s understanding of fashion as a performative process, that is, constantly in a state of becoming and transformation, in order to create her unique style that is characterized by the shifting and unstable identity of the Icelandic geographical body. In the last part of the essay, I take Björk’s involvement with SHOWstudio as a starting point to reflect on some of the consequences when these visual and performative collaborations move into the realm of the digital.

This essay outlines how the gossip surrounding Tennessee Williams’s visit to Vancouver in 1980 has influenced the narratives of gay communities and in so doing contributed to queer theatre history in Canada. Stories of Williams inviting young men to his hotel room and asking them to read from the Bible inspired Sky Gilbert and Daniel MacIvor to each write a play based on these events. The essay argues that Gilbert and MacIvor transcend the localized specificity of the initial rumours and deploy gossip as a tool to articulate a process of sexual and cultural marginalization, thereby fostering a dialogue with the past. This dialogue marks a crucial and pedagogical task in gay and queer theatre to address the on-going needs of an ever-changing community.

In this article Dirk Gindt discusses Ingmar Bergman’s 1951 production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in the small Swedish town of Norrköping, demonstrating how Bergman methodically ignored the tragicomic nature of the play in order to develop and exaggerate its comic and grotesque elements. After extensive cuts and alterations in the script, the character Serafina delle Rose became even more overpowering than in the original text and dominated the action from beginning to end. Karin Kavli, a leading lady in Swedish post-war theatre and a frequent collaborator with Bergman, played the character not as a mourning widow but as a possessed disciple of Dionysus in an unabashedly entertaining and sexualized production which, despite reservations from critics, became a success with audiences.

Contributing to an intercultural understanding of American and European theatre in the post-war era, this essay explores the significance of the Swedish publisher and producer Lars Schmidt for the introduction and spread of U.S. plays and musicals on his side of the Atlantic. Schmidt’s innovative publishing strategies and production methods in addition to his skills as a cultural translator made works like The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and My Fair Lady commercially viable and intelligible to audiences in various national contexts. In the process, he was largely responsible for the emergence of the individual producer in Europe, a position that was perceived as foreign and at times vehemently dismissed as too commercial and too American.

This essay proposes a case-study approach to examine how the initial European production of Cat was received and, by implication, how one of the defining American playwrights of the twentieth century was discussed in Sweden. It focuses on the process of cultural translation and, more precisely, the question of how Swedish ensembles interpreted a foreign playwright who was known for breaking sexual taboos. Unpacking the cross-cultural and transnational dialogue that was established when Cat made its first appearance on a European stage, the essay teases out the cultural tensions and the negotiation of national identity that took place when Williams’s play was transposed from the Mississippi Delta to a more northern latitude. I argue that the stage and the cultural sections of the newspapers offered a forum for Sweden to negotiate some of the country’s sexual anxieties by making use of American cultural products and firmly situating them in an exoticized American context whose values were deemed to conflict with European, and more specifically Swedish, cultural identity.

This essay analyzes the creative and economic relationship between and the intersections of theatre, performance and fashion by exploring the notion of collaboration through the work of Italian designer Giorgio Armani and American theatre director Robert Wilson. It addresses three case studies derived from different performance spaces: a performance art installation in a once derelict, purposefully redesigned train station; a modernist play staged in a traditional proscenium arched theatre; and a retrospective exhibition held in a fine art museum that invited the visitors to ‘walk the catwalk’. The objective of the essay is twofold. First, it focuses on the concrete results of the collaboration, that is, the actual events, the mutual artistic and economic benefits for both parties as well as the sometimes controversial critical reception and discourse surrounding them. Second, it queries the meaning and potency of the status of the auteur in a long-term creative collaboration between two equally influential artists from the related, yet distinct fields of theatre and fashion.