Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2024
The goal of the previous part was to discuss the motif of the body in the theatrical works that mark the early stages of Johnson's and Zenkasi's performative oeuvre. What catches the attention in You’re Human Like the Rest of Them and Madam Eva, Ave Madam is the interest in the body as an instrument allowing for a personal experience of the world but also the authors’ preoccupation with the theme of contact and encounter. In Johnson's play, Haakon is painstakingly concerned with getting across the message to different audiences about the inevitable deterioration of the body. Communication difficulties seem to present him as mad and detached from his listeners. In Zenkasi's performance, in turn, the body with a disability is employed to revisit the biblical creation and approach the complexities of the human condition. The decision to introduce the actors in wheelchairs onto the stage provides challenges for the practitioners as well as exercises the communication between them and the audience, all with a view to making space for innovative interactions and connections.
This part will, in turn, focus on the authors’ approach to intertextuality and adaptation. The primary idea will be to analyse further performative works of Johnson and Zenkasi – One Sodding Thing After Another, Compressor and Finnegans Make – looking at the way the writers plan composition and refer to (or rather revise) other texts. Further, I will look at how they exercise the shape of the book to imagine a staging (the example of Johnson) or to convey the meanings that have been generated by a performance already presented (the case of Zenkasi's Finnegans Make). A consideration of this will provide an opportunity to see how the writers employ the book when working on dramas and scores as well as what they achieve by approaching them in a liberatic way. An accompanying issue concerns the position of the audience who become familiar with such texts. Since Fajfer's 1999 manifesto the reader of liberature has been treated as a writer's partner, encouraged to play a significant role in the process of meaning-making.
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