Blockchain Papers

Aleksandr Anatol'evich Boldirihin

The subject of the research is the structural and content-related features of contemporary dramatic texts, arising under the influence of the digital environment and the integration of works into the global hypertextual space. The focus is on the ways of organizing plays that utilize hyperlinks, generative algorithms, and autonomous systems as integral elements of artistic structure. The transformation of traditional dramatic categories in the context of cybertext is analyzed, as well as the change in the nature of interaction between the text, the reader, and the performer, which requires the recipient to exert physical effort, make choices, and participate in the construction of the artwork's meaning. The material for analysis includes the works of E. Augusteniak "Lorem Ipsum," D. Gursky "Ikonostas.mp3," and E. Demidova "Text Generator 'Distant Relatives,'" presented within the framework of the fringe program of the dramaturgy festival "Lyubimovka." The theoretical basis of the research consists of concepts such as the "multimodal turn," hypertext by D. Landow, understood as a decentralized structure connected through hyperlinks, and cybertext by E. Orset, emphasizing the figure of the reader as an integrated participant who makes non-trivial efforts to navigate through the text. The scientific novelty of the article is due to the fact that it identifies and systematizes the main strategies for utilizing digital technologies in contemporary Russian dramaturgy for the first time. The article highlights two strategies for using generative technologies: the conflicting montage of machine and human text (Augusteniak) and assigning the program a co-author role with a fundamentally different perspective (Demidova). It concludes that hypertextual dramaturgy presents new demands on the reader and the performer: physical effort in reading, the right to choose, and independent text construction, along with new possibilities for the topological organization of the play. Although the analyzed plays were created within the framework of a specific festival project, the identified principles of their structure are subject to broader extrapolation. There are broad prospects for further studying digital dramaturgy.

Shalom Ibironke, Roseline Ande YACIM

Theatre scholars and practitioners have expressed concerns about the state of theatre, with some even proclaiming that it is dying or dead. This viewpoint is often rooted in the observation of the growing competition in the art and culture sector, driven by the advancements in technology that have led to the emergence of digital art and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). While these technological innovations have the potential to enhance the quality of theatre content, they also present a new alternative that theatre finds hard to compete with. This article builds on Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, to explore the concept of aura and its relevance in contemporary Nigerian theatre. The study delves into the nature of the aura's manifestation, examines Benjamin's claims on the decay of the aura, and investigates how the aura has survived in the past. It further examines how modern art, particularly digital art and NFTs, have created a new form of utility. The study aims to identify strategies that can amplify theatre's aura to compete favourably with modern technology and attract new audiences whose tastes are heavily influenced by modern technology. The study finds that the theatre and its artists can use NFTs to record the provenance of their physical artworks, such as costumes, props, and set designs to allow potential buyers to easily check for the authenticity of the artwork and preserve the aura of the piece. Thereby, providing insights on how the aura can be preserved and revitalised to ensure theatre's continued relevance in the age of technology.

Emily Madison

This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.

Dejana Prnjat

During the examined period, the state exercised ideological control over all segments of public life including artistic creation. This control was particularly pronounced in the years following the Second World War, even though it was present throughout the entire period. In theatres, it was expressed through various forms, of which the most significant were political censorship on the one hand, and on the other, their dependence on state financing. Since a lot has already been written on the significance of the ideological factor, we will instead focus on the influence of the financial circumstances on the formation of theatre repertoires in Belgrade, between 1945 and 1980. Roughly speaking, two major phases were identified. The first one, the period of centralization, was the period of strong state control of the theatre repertoires in Belgrade, also accompanied with firm financial support. The other period, the period of decentralization, allowed theatres to create their repertoires more freely, but also meant that they had to partly obtain financing from other sources.

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi

No abstract is available for this record.

Matthew J. Ferrence

When Natalie Maines spoke into her microphone in the spring of 2003, the crowd at London's Shepherds Bush Theatre responded with cheers. Said Maines: “Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas” (“Shut up and Sing”). The result—perhaps inevitable in the build-up to the Iraq War and its concurrent patriotic swell—struck Maines's group, the Dixie Chicks, from the top of the country music charts, drove them from the good graces of country music fans across the United States, and lingered for years in the form of reduced attendance and weaker album sales. Opponents were incensed that Maines—and by extension, the full trio of the Dixie Chicks—would openly criticize a wartime president and saw the comment as nearly an act of treason, particularly since the words were uttered abroad to an audience who likely needed little encouragement to disagree with the policies of George W. Bush. Within the dominant conservative element of country music, such a stance lay in stark contrast to the implied common values of that culture, and the Dixie Chicks were villainized for failing to adhere to those standards. At stake, for the vocal opponents who effectively barred the Dixie Chicks from country music radio and who discarded or destroyed old albums en masse, was the nation itself. This chink in the thematic armor of patriotic country music suggested a weakness within the resolve of the citizenry that demanded immediate and sure response. Thus, the Dixie Chicks were figuratively cast out of the nation of country music, were stripped of their citizenship and recast as dangerous outlaws—but not the good kind that popularized country music in the ‘70s. In fact, though the Dixie Chicks recently swept the Grammy Awards in 2007—winning in five categories, including Album of the Year and Best Country Album—it is notable that their success did not come within their “home” community of the Country Music Awards. The outlaw Chicks were not with the president, and were therefore against America; worse, they were not with country music, and were therefore against a culture that has increasingly become an insistent site of American identity in contemporary America. Call it Redneck America, a version of the United States that defines itself through self-identification as rural, country, working class, simple, true, patriotic. It is through this identification that a large portion of the U.S. sees itself or, more importantly, how the U.S. can define itself in the face of a globalizing force that threatens to undermine the previously unchallenged dominance of an America predicated on “traditional” values of home, hearth, heterosexuality, whiteness, and patriarchy. Country music, then, becomes an anthem for this America, as the form celebrates and shares these common ideals. There are scripts to country music, which the Dixie Chicks failed to follow, just as there are scripts for this idealized Redneck America. It is by following these scripts that individuals enact citizenship and prove their fidelity to the nation, and it is through these scripts that the U.S. sees itself, or perhaps how the U.S. can separate its citizenry into categories of proper and suspect. Under this system of classification the Dixie Chicks, of course, are suspect. The division inherent within this Redneck Nation is more than mere classification, as it serves to establish a baseline of normalcy for the broader American culture. That is to say, in the Redneck Nation model I'm employing, “Redneck” ceases to be a pejorative classification of the rural, southern, white working class, and instead becomes a new mode of the mainstream, one that is simultaneously unbound by the very real pressures of class and status that defined the “traditional” redneck or hillbilly even as it seeks to reify certain social situations inherent within a white, hetero, masculine America. As a theoretical construct, the Redneck Nation is certainly much broader than the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of war, broader than country music, even broader than the concept of scripts I am examining here. In fact, the modern iteration of the Redneck, as a socio-political construct of self-assignation, spreads throughout American literature and culture, with the roots of the Redneck Ideal in early American frontier literature, then continuing though modern and contemporary Southern literature and, now, a broader popular culture. In the current state of our Redneck Nation, individuals may choose to claim membership as a means to establish an incontrovertible American citizenship. Based in American ideals of self-reliance (consider Emerson and Jefferson as proto-Rednecks) and anti-elitism, the ethos of the modern Redneck identification evokes a distinctly American sense that can be defined by what it is not: not elite or high-falutin’, not overly intellectual, not overly-socialized and, perhaps most crucially, not not-American. Here I turn back to the Dixie Chicks and their violation of the American Redneck scripts. In this context, the issue of Patriotism looms largest, both overtly as a mechanism for displaying ones allegiance to a national power (and, here, Maines violated Patriotism by choosing to be “not-with” the nation) and covertly as a sign of acceptance of the ideals of the less-tangible Redneck Nation that defines contemporary American political/patriotic discourse. The two go hand in hand, of course, as the scripts I'm suggesting require fidelity to the national power as evidence of membership in the ideological Nation, just as full citizenship in the Redneck discourse predicates unwavering allegiance to the U.S. government. In the wake of 9/11, several country stars released hyper-patriotic songs that tapped in to the general American sentiment of shock, anger, even war-readiness: Clint Black's “Iraq and Roll,” Alan Jackson's “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)”, Darryl Worley's “Have You Forgotten,” Chely Wright's “Bumper of my SUV,” and of course Toby Keith's aggressive “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”1. Each of these, in its own way, followed the accepted guidelines of the Redneck Nation, as each song displayed a reaction that expressed emotions and reactions proper for the idealized American citizen. The shock, anger, and latent (or less-than-latent) desire for retribution fit the national Zeitgeist perfectly, just as it fit the acceptable conservative parameters of the Redneck scripts in operation. Keith, in fact, became an anthem-writer for the American troops themselves, as his melodic desire to stick a boot in the collective terrorist ass was soon adopted as an unofficial fight song for the nation. Keith himself seemed plenty willing to wave the flag, support the troops, and act the part of the ideal, masculine, aggressive, hetero citizen—an angry white man ready to do battle for the good of the nation. And, even as support of the ongoing war in Iraq declines, the determination for “true” Americans to support the troops, to display fidelity to the homeland, to emphasize and defend good old-fashioned American values, remains steadfast. Put another way, Chevy truck commercials are still on the air. Enter the Dixie Chicks, who must be considered as tangential citizens of contemporary America, as defined by the scripts of the Redneck Nation, because of their failure to fit the masculine ideal. Still, before the 2003 uproar, the Dixie Chicks fit the scripts just fine, singing their way to the top of country music, even if their brand of country might be a little too bluegrass for the usual mainstream. But so long as the Chicks acted within the accepted parameters of their scripts—as pretty girls singing pretty songs, raising pretty children—they were acceptable citizens. But in going off-book, so to speak, by criticizing the president and his desire to go to war, the Dixie Chicks exposed themselves as deviants from the Redneck Nation. Their resistance, then, immediately called into question their status as citizens. And, in fact, with their lack of maleness already working against them, they were quickly condemned as poseurs to the Redneck Nation and were summarily evicted. That their status could be no more than tangential pre-Shepherds Bush is revealed in the way that criticism against the Dixie Chicks quickly took an ugly gendered turn. Maines was called “The Dixie Bitch,” and at least one country music listener called in to a station to offer this advice: “They should send Natalie over to Iraq, strap her to a bomb, and just drop her over Baghdad” (Shut Up and Sing). Similarly, the band was relabeled as the “Dixie Sluts” or “Ditzy Twits,” who Pat Buchanan suggested were “the dumbest, dumbest bimbos, with due respect” (Shut Up and Sing). That a patriotic snafu could so quickly result in the assignation of status as Bitches, Sluts, Ditzes, and Bimbos displays how tenuous the band's citizenship in the nation had been prior to the flap. Further, that such gendered epithets were so close at hand displays the inherent masculinity and anti-feminism within the script of the Redneck Nation. Any woman who breaks from the standard line is instantly cast as sexualized and empty-headed, removing her ability to offer intelligent debate (after all, she's just a bimbo ditz!) and reaffirming the woman's role as sexual object. Following the script allows temporary relief from or, at least, sublimated patriarchal dominance. Citizenship can only be won, though, by strict submission to the ideals of the Nation; deviance risks banishment and loss of protection. Most importantly, here, are the scripts themselves, not the authenticity of the actors nor even presidential opposition itself—at least not exactly. The trick of the Redneck Ideal is that it does not require actual membership of social class. As I mentioned before, the phenomena that strikes me most is how individuals assume the role of Redneck despite socio-economic positions that would seem to nullify their inclusion. George Bush, obviously, fits this bill, as his personal image depends heavily on his role as self-acclaimed Redneck. But as Country Music Television chief Brian Philips has said: “There's a real dichotomy between the raising of the son, George W., and the way most of our audience has been raised. But God bless Karl Rove if he was able to connect those two and make people feel like he was one of us” (Willman 111). The function of the scripts, then, might be best explained as a sort of Althusserian hailing, where self-assignation as Redneck comes about because of the interpellation enacted by ideological state apparatuses, which creates an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (693). So, individuals who are not of the marginalized working class recast themselves as such and, more, themselves convert into an apparatus that demands others who are conceived as part of the imagined class act along the lines of the scripts that govern properly inclusive behavior. George Bush, here, might be considered as equally hailed as other individuals, as his presidential policy is restricted by the ideology of the Redneck Ideal: he must follow the guidelines of white, Christian, masculine America. To prove his validity as leader of the United States, he must act within the ideal, thereby offering both model and defense of citizenship. The Dixie Chicks, then, threatened the solidarity of the Ideal, acting from within the culture in opposition to the leader of that culture. Martie Maguire of the Dixie Chicks read it best: “It had to be somebody or some group that seemed like the All-American girls. It was perfect. It had to be the unlikely voice from what looked like the conservative heart of America saying it. That was perfect” (Shut Up and Sing). Their greatest threat to the Redneck Ideal was to disrupt the ideological image, to prove that the so-called “conservative heart of America” was a constructed heart, to reveal just how the nation hails its citizens and dictates a particular way of being. That an All-American girl group could, in fact, break from the script showed the scripts to be impermanent, which in turn called into question the accepted parameters of citizenship. Interestingly, even as the Dixie Chicks create that disruption, they cannot help but be bound by certain scripts. The documentary Shut Up and Sing, which chronicles the group's actions following their controversy, and which is clearly intended as a remediation of their image or, more, as defense of their position, places the women in the group within a clearly feminine ideal. Each is portrayed as mother, as wife, with many family scenes prominently featured. The point seems to be that the Chicks were unduly cast as rabble-rousers, that they actually fit the American ideal. Such is the power of the script: even those who break free from it find themselves inescapably written in. All of which leads me to WWE wrestling. Howdy. I know what you're all thinkin’. Now I reckon you're all a little confused out there. But I'm not what you think I am. [He pauses to put on his black cowboy hat] I ain't no foreigner. I ain't your stereotype. I ain't no Kung Fu fighter. And to me, chopsticks are just a piece of wood. Mattera fact, there ain't no yeller about me. But there's one color about me. A little red. That's right. I'm a redneck. My name's Jimmy Wang Yang. And I'm your boy. Giddyup. Yee haw (WWE website). The message is unmistakable, substituting one stereotype for another, but clearly aligning the wrestler with the Redneck Ideal instead of the foreign suspect. He marks himself visually as part of the culture, dressed in the videos in jeans, with the hat, standing in front of a pickup truck. He wears a black leather vest emblazoned on the back with the confederate battle flag. In the ring, he wrestles in a white tank top and blue jean-like trousers and wears a Fu Manchu mustache that presents an odd duality. Historically, such facial hair marks the ethnicity of the Far East, calling to mind stereotyped images of the Mongol warriors or Chinese Kung-Fu masters that Yang denies as his heritage in the video. Yet, at the same time, the Fu Manchu has more recently been adopted as a fairly typical marker of the good old boy. On Jimmy Wang Yang, the mustache could lend either way, reinforcing his Korean ancestry or helping to mark him as the redneck he claims to be. It is through scripting, however, that his appearance becomes unambiguous. He is a Redneck, as he proclaims, because he adheres to the expected, stereotypical parameters of the redneck. More, he substitutes—or, in the case of the Fu Manchu, transforms—the stereotypes of the Asian with the stereotypes of the white Southern good old boy, and in so doing eases anxieties that might appear because of his position as a minority within wrestling. In another video, he wonders why Asians are always thought to be good at math, why they are thought to set the curve. “Only curves I know is from my old lady,” he says, etching a silhouette in the air with his hands. In twenty seconds, he abdicates his role as stereotypically intelligent Asian, substituting instead a persona of the stereotypically chauvinist redneck, thereby enacting the properly anti-intellectual strain of the Redneck Ideal and proving that he is not claiming citizenship as anything other than American. As a visually obvious minority, Jimmy Wang Yang would not immediately fit the standards of the Redneck Ideal without these “credibility”-establishing establishing videos. Like the Dixie Chicks, Yang's status as minority places him in an always tangential citizenship. But unlike the Chicks, he ameliorates his position and guarantees his “naturalization” as American citizen through scripts that reinforce his desire to be American and proves through actions his willingness to be not not-American. Significantly, prior to assuming the identity of Jimmy Wang Yang, the man in the role wrestled on Smackdown as Akio, an “evil” Japanese wrestler whose unmediated Asianness proved his outsider status and guaranteed his situation as bad guy. He also used to wrestle as part of a trio of Elvis impersonators: there's surely grand significance there, even if it presently escapes me. Certainly, race is strongly in play with the case of Jimmy Wang Yang, and just as certainly, race is one of the most crucial issues in play with the Redneck Ideal. While scholars like Lucy Jarosz and Victoria Lawson see the construction of the redneck stereotype as a means for middle and upper class whites to deflect the guilt of racism—white racism is explained as “redneck” racism (11)—the self-assignation of Redneck that is so readily apparent in the case of Jimmy Wang Yang serves instead as a way to manage racism, to allow for it without accepting guilt. That is, the Redneck script exacts a strategic move that furthers the agenda of white dominance without accepting blame. Characters like Jimmy Wang Yang don't so much reinforce stereotypes as maintain them, allowing whites to both feel distance from “real” rednecks—since it's Jimmy, after all, doing the stereotyping—and to feel part of the group. The Redneck script maintains the power and prominence of traditional white values. By adopting the stance of “minority,” or by showing how a visually obvious minority can be included in the Redneck category, the Redneck can safely assume power without notice or critique. The Redneck becomes both an achieving “minority” and a permanent of The on the back of Jimmy Wang Yang's leather then, becomes a marker of his acceptance of the Redneck Ideal and a of the power of the Ideal. It has itself to the of Jimmy Wang Yang, him as part of the group and to the group's dominance. just as the ideology hails whites and them to follow the scripts of America, it hails and them the way to find membership in the nation. by adopting and accepting that which the Redneck Ideal demands can an be accepted into national citizenship. president, country or of American identity is predicated on of Redneck And increasingly in American culture, failing to status as ideological Redneck means failing to of full into national citizenship.