Babbage, F. and Pinchbeck, M. orcid.org/0000-0001-8444-5549 (2023) Acts of unsettling: an immersive adaptation of Berger and Mohr’s A Seventh Man. Arts, 12 (2). 50. ISSN 2076-0752
Abstract
This article examines Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of A Seventh Man, the 1975 book by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr studying the experience of migrant workers in Europe. Pinchbeck and Smith’s 2020 adaptation uses immersive performance strategies in dialogue with a multi-voiced, cross-disciplinary publication that itself aims to produce an immersive or ‘animated’ reader engagement. In this article, Babbage and Pinchbeck present source text and performance as examples of practice-as-research, referencing Nelson’s paradigm that establishes different modes of knowledge and points of connection- and dissension-between them. They discuss the book’s cross-disciplinarity and the attempt to reflect this in a new creative context that is spatiotemporal, embodied, social, visual, verbal and aural. The article’s theoretical context draws on writing by Barthes, Berger, Said and Sontag, applying Barthes’ notion of the studium and the punctum to reflect on the dramaturgical rendering of the source text’s ‘interruptive shocks’. Babbage and Pinchbeck argue that, in book and performance, the juxtaposition of different formal languages elicits an encounter with the material that is productively ‘unsettling’.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | performance; adaptation; A Seventh Man; theatre |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 Apr 2023 12:50 |
Last Modified: | 21 Apr 2023 12:50 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI AG |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/arts12020050 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:198351 |