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ERIC Number: EJ895190
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Aug
Pages: 7
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1356-9783
EISSN: N/A
Future Nostalgias
Schechner, Richard
Research in Drama Education, v15 n3 p309-315 Aug 2010
In this article, the author discusses how the new age influences the place of manifestos and shares his view on how manifestos become a yearning as a thing in the past. Traditionally, manifestos are writing intended to provoke actions. There are many manifestos authored by artists. Often these are rhetorical, not to be taken seriously. Taken together, these manifestos, and other similar ones, issued by key avant garde artists and influential theorists, reiterated for more than a century, call for the destruction of the current order and the creation of a new order. So-called high art and pop have merged just as "news" has melded into entertainment. Popular culture shows its tattoos, piercings, and cosmetic surgeries which, whatever their psychological and sociological meanings, enact the desire to be beautiful and, paradoxically, both individually distinctive and signalling a belonging to a community. All this signals that writing manifestos is superfluous because actions, immediately mediatised, are their own message. Who can write an effective manifesto today? Isn't such an enterprise a yearning for what once was, a future nostalgia? The age of Thomas Jefferson, the Rights of Man, and Karl Marx has passed. The author said that today's effective manifestos are not screeds, but actions. Some of these are positive from his perspective--the work of social action theatres, work in prisons, performances among, with and for the dispossessed. Indeed, in these arenas actions--theatrical actions included--speak lot louder and more affirmatively than manifestos. He emphasizes that the underlying impetus behind manifestos is that a new world is at hand if only the injustices of the old can be overthrown.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A