Towards an art of memory: Peter Brook, a foreigner in Paris

Williams, David (2002) Towards an art of memory: Peter Brook, a foreigner in Paris. In: Stock Image The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City's Stages. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, pp. 37-52. ISBN 0719061849

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Abstract / Summary

Emerging from a longstanding engagement in the work of Peter Brook, this commissioned chapter explores the evolving nature of Brook’s relations with Paris, from his earliest productions there in the late 1950s to his current work with the CICT. Locating Brook’s practices as contextual and rooted in a particular set of conditions operative within the French capital, it discusses: Brook’s conceptions of/attraction to Paris; the fluidity of structures and means of production he found there, and his collaborations with other artists based there; the effects of Paris’s cultural plurality and cultural policies with regard to subsidy for expatriate artists, and the state’s commitment to theatre as a ‘public service’; connections between the plural cultural identity of Paris and Brook’s own brand of ‘interculturalism’; Brook’s ambivalent relations to the political events of May 1968; Brook’s own displacement as both critical response to conditions in Britain and enabling strategy in the creation of conditions for research; Brook’s establishment of an international theatre research centre, and subsequently of the CICT after the discovery of the Bouffes du Nord in the mid-1970s, and the importance of this space in his work since that time. The chapter concludes with interviews about collaborating with Brook in Paris, and the city as meeting place/working base for foreigners, with three long-term collaborators: David Bennent (Germany), Bruce Myers (England), and Yoshi Oida (Japan), all of them displaced to new ‘homes’ and shifting cultural identities in Paris.

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: This outcome exemplifies one aspect of Williams’ research: critical analyses of contemporary performance practices. As such, it represents one major component within a group of related published outcomes, including chapters/articles/conference presentations on e.g. Goat Island, Forced Entertainment, Simon McBurney, Lone Twin, Simon Whitehead, Uninvited Guests, contemporary choreographies and performative writing practices.
ISBN: 0719061849
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Ex Falmouth Staff
Date Deposited: 07 Aug 2014 10:53
Last Modified: 13 Oct 2017 16:03
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/453

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