Loren Kruger
Biographic Data
| ID | 3698756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Loren Kruger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Loren |
| FAMILY NAME | Kruger |
| SIGNATURE | KRUGER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Theatre and Capital Once Again: An Essay on an Informal Archive
This essay reviews Theatre Journal articles that examine the intersections of theatre and capital, to highlight the challenge of analyzing neoliberal transformations of global and glocal economies, in particular, the trend to financial speculation to the detriment of investment in public resources, and the impact on theatre and performance. Commentators in the "global" North can better understand the scale of transformation-the concentration of w…
Fourth Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival
Performance, Politics, and Historiography in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune
American echoes of the Paris Commune have been muffled by the nation’s obsession with freedom at the expense of solidarity, but performative responses to social upheaval, including drama, parades, and protests, have tested the boundaries of public space and multiple temporalities from 1871 to 2021. This article notes traces of the Commune in the writings and performances of nineteenth century American anarchists but analyzes this legacy primarily…
Participatory Theatre and The Urban Everyday in South Africa: Place and Play in Johannesburg by Alexandra Halligey, and: Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and The Fragmentation of the Rainbow…
Reviewed by: Participatory Theatre and The Urban Everyday in South Africa: Place and Play in Johannesburg by Alexandra Halligey, and: Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and The Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber Loren Kruger PARTICIPATORY THEATRE AND THE URBAN EVERYDAY IN SOUTH AFRICA: PLACE AND PLAY IN JOHANNESBURG. By Alexandra Halligey. Routledge Contemporary South Africa series. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020;…
Glocal South Sides: Race, Capital, and Performing against Injustice
This injustice and ongoing discrimination between affluent and deprived groups within one country or even one city has prompted activist, analytical, and theatrical responses that link, directly or indirectly, representations in South Africa and in African America. The essay will therefore lay out the contexts, past and present, of explicit as well as implied links between Chicago and Johannesburg, onstage and elsewhere, before turning to two rec…
Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson
Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Loren Kruger Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. By Laura Edmondson. African Expressive Cultures series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018; pp. 400. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson explores several intersecting lines of activism and analysis, politics and performance, humanitarian intervention from wealthy g…
Diana Taylor. Performance . Trans. Abigail Levine. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2016. 220 pp
Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows ed. by Mark Fleishman, and: Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space ed. by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, and: The Magnet Theatre 'Migra…
Reviewed by: Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows ed. by Mark Fleishman, and: Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space ed. by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, and: The Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays by Jenny Reznek et al. Loren Kruger PERFORMING MIGRANCY AND MOBILITY IN AFRICA: CAPE OF FLOWS. Edited by Mark Fleishman. Studies in International Performance series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; pp. 236. MAGNET …
The Soweto Uprisings Forty Years On: Usable Pasts and Uncertain Futures
The Soweto Uprisings Forty Years On:Usable Pasts and Uncertain Futures Loren Kruger Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Schoolchildren's Revolt That Shook Apartheid BY BARUCH HIRSON (with a new preface by Shula Marks) Zed Books 2016 ( 1979) xv + 350 pp. ISBN 9781783608966 paper. The Soweto Uprising BY NOOR NIEFTAGODIEN Ohio UP 2014 165 pp. ISBN 9780821421543 paper. The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 BY JULIAN BROWN …
Beyond Borders: Twenty-Eighth Annual Dance Umbrella
Reviewed by: Beyond Borders: Twenty-Eighth Annual Dance Umbrella Loren Kruger Beyond Borders: Twenty-Eighth Annual Dance Umbrella. Produced by the Dance Forum. Various venues, Johannesburg, South Africa. February 25–March 6, 2016. Despite its transnational slogan “beyond borders,” the twenty-eighth Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg was quieter and perhaps less ambitious than the twenty-fourth edition’s “dancing all over Johannesburg,” which I review…
Brecht: Our Contemporary?: Un/Timely Translation and the Politics of Transmission
Musa Dagh: Tage Des Widerstands dir. by Hans-Werner Kroesinger (review)
Reviewed by: Musa Dagh: Tage Des Widerstands dir. by Hans-Werner Kroesinger Loren Kruger Musa Dagh: Tage Des Widerstands. Adapted by director Hans-Werner Kroesinger from the novel by Franz Werfel. Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin. 20 March 2015. Hans-Werner Kroesinger has earned a reputation for making political theatre out of historical documents. Yet, his approach differs both from the emphatic dramatization of records, as in Rolf Hochhuth’s indictm…
Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg
Johannesburg’s location in the Southern Hemisphere and status as the wealthiest city in a middle-income country grappling with a growing wealth gap, many languages and cultures unevenly matched with English, and scarce resources place it in the global south, but it is a modern city whose representation in fiction, film, performance and poetry, and built environments is both uncivil and innovative. This book examines writing, performing, building,…
Imagining The Edgy City Writing Performing And Building Johannesburg
Dancing All Over Johannesburg, South Africa—Twenty-Fourth Annual Dance Umbrella (review)
Reviewed by: Dancing All Over Johannesburg, South Africa—Twenty-Fourth Annual Dance Umbrella Loren Kruger Dancing All Over Johannesburg, South Africa—Twenty-Fourth Annual Dance Umbrella. Produced by the Dance Forum in various venues. 17 February–4 March 2012. The Dance Umbrella began in 1988 in the twilight of apartheid as a showcase for original modern work in a dance field dominated by rather uneven ballet companies that were subsidized by the …
The Great Fire (review)
From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization
From the Cape of Good Hope:South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization Loren Kruger (bio) Experiments in Freedom: Explorations of Identity in New South African Drama. By Anton Krueger. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010; pp. xvi + 254. Armed Response: Plays from South Africa. Edited by David Peimer. Delhi: Seagull Books, 2009; pp. xviii + 216. At this Stage: Plays from Post-apartheid South Africa. Edited by Gre…
Handspring Puppet Company (review)
Reviewed by: Handspring Puppet Company Loren Kruger Handspring Puppet Company. Edited by Jane Taylor. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2009; pp. 280. $85.00 cloth, $55.00 paper. Although Handspring Puppet Company has toured internationally since the 1980s, they first came to the United States in 1994, when Woyzeck on the Highveld, the first of several collaborations with the animator-artist-designer-director William Kentridge, appeared at the…
Our Future Metropolis: Mr. Daniel H. Burnham Presents a Plain Talk for the Development of Chicago (review)
Critique by stealth: Aspiration, consumption and class in post-apartheid television drama
The national broadcaster in post-apartheid South Africa still uses the rhetoric of nation-building and commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle, but its practice follows neoliberal norms of maximising revenue from advertising on fictional series that celebrate the conspicuous consumption of the new elite. The endorsement of individual consumption as the sign of national prosperity sets in sharp relief the rhetoric of success that encourages the …
Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form, and Performance in the Upstart City
Since the Haymarket massacre of 1886, Chicagoans have buried and resurrected the city's experiences in performances, politics, and built environments. From Sullivan to Gehry to Chris Ware, from socialist militancy to immigrants' rights, from 19th-century commemorations of the Paris Commune to 21st-century stagings of architectural and political conflicts, Chicago has generated drama in urban theory and practice as well as in theatre
Tasks, masks and borrowed robes: Urgency, Irony, and Other Rhetorical Poses in Post-Apartheid Letters
(2009). Tasks, masks and borrowed robes. Scrutiny2: Vol. 14, The ‘States’ of Popular Culture, pp. 95-102
Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island (review)
Reviewed by: Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island Loren Kruger Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island. Edited by Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. 264. $125.00 cloth, $37.95 paper. Goat Island’s work is done. Their most recent piece, The Lastmaker (2007), was their last after twenty years of performances, workshops, and written reflection in “schoolbooks” and “reading com…
Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa (review)
Reviewed by: Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa Loren Kruger Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa. Edited by Roen Schoenmakers and Michiel van Oosterhout. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2008; pp. 240. €24.50 paper. This compilation of essays and photographs may document only a single series of “interventions in public space” in central Johannesburg in 2007, …
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis , ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe
Reviewed by: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Loren Kruger Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, Eds. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4284-7 (cloth) $99.95; ISBN 978-0-8223-4262-5 (paper). $29.95 This volume reproduces Public Culture's special issue on Johannesburg (2004), omitting only Nuttall's interview with artist Rodney Place. It also includes some new essays and evocative images, especially charc…
Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
Western culture has a long and fraught history of cultural appropriation, a history that has particular resonance within performance practice. Patrice Pavis asks what is at stake politically and aesthetically when cultures meet at the crossroads of theatre.? A series of major recent productions are analysed, including Peter Brook's Mahabharata, Cixous/Mnouchkine's Indiande, and Barba's Faust. These focus discussions on translation, appropriation,…
Theatre, Crime and the Edgy City in Post-apartheid Johannesburg
Crime and money have been persistent themes of writing about Johannesburg since the 1890s, barely a decade after the city's founding in 1886, when Winston Churchill allegedly called the city "Monte Carlo on top of Sodom and Gomorrah." 3 Crime in the [End Page 223] city has inspired drama about Johannesburg, from Helena's Hope Ltd (1910), the gold-rush melodrama by actor-manager Stephen Black, via anti-apartheid plays about the struggles of newly …
Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 100, Number 1, Winter 2001
Filming the Edgy City: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Form in Postapartheid Johannesburg
From its early years to the present, Johannesburg has escaped the strictures of literary as well as civil decorum. The city has appeared to planners and artists alike to be unimaginable as well as unmanageable. While the deep divisions of apartheid Johannesburg inspired the clear-cut conflicts of anti-apartheid drama, the more ambiguous fractures of the contemporary city have lent themselves to the creation of vivid but elliptical narratives of s…
Critique by stealth: Aspiration, consumption and class in post-apartheid television drama
The national broadcaster in post-apartheid South Africa still uses the rhetoric of nation-building and commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle, but its practice follows neoliberal norms of maximising revenue from advertising on fictional series that celebrate the conspicuous consumption of the new elite. The endorsement of individual consumption as the sign of national prosperity sets in sharp relief the rhetoric of success that encourages the …
Africa Thina'? Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency in Johannesburg's Film and Television Drama
The characterisation of Johannesburg as a city of crime perpetrated by foreigners and other outsiders is as old as the city itself. What is new in the post-apartheid period is the tension between the fear of foreigners as shadowy figures who allegedly spirit away the livelihoods of locals, and the attempt, in planning as well as imaginative initiatives, to reconceive of strangers as cosmopolitan agents of new modes of ‘belonging and becoming’. Th…
Black atlantics’, ‘white Indians’ and ‘Jews’: Locations, locutions, and syncretic identities in the fiction of Achmat Dangor and others
Narratives of migration, diaspora, settlement and naming on and around the 'Cape of Storms' burst the bounds of apartheid racial classifications or, indeed, of anti-apartheid categories
The drama of country and city: Tribalization, Urbanization and Theatre Under Apartheid
In an ironic reversal of the classic modern paradigm where the city represents progress and the agency of citizens against the ‘idiocy of rural life’, the Africanized city, especially Johannesburg, came in the apartheid period to signify barbarism for white South Africans, the very group that saw itself as the vanguard of modernity in Africa. Fearful of the hybrid urbanity of the ‘city native’ in Sophiatown, Afrikaner Nationalists and their Engli…
Theater for Development and TV Nation: Notes on an Educational Soap Opera in South Africa
"South Africa—a world in one country." This sunny slogan of the South African Tourist Board is also a sober reminder that post-apartheid—or, more accurately, post-anti-apartheid—South Africa contains within its borders at least two worlds. Development and underdevelopment or, in the current global vernacular, North and South, are separated not only by residual racial boundaries but also by physical as well as socioeconomic barriers between rich a…
Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York
In the metropolitan context, South African theater has largely been promoted and received as dramatic testimony to the antiapartheid struggle. Created and performed under particular local conditions and sometimes for quite different occasions and audiences in South Africa, plays such as Woza Albert, Born in the RSA, Asinimali, and Bopha have been marketed and consumed abroad as the authentic and univocal issue of a "blood-filled society staggerin…
Our National House: The Ideology of the National Theatre of Great Britain
As the debates on the Theatre Bills confirm, the role of Britain's National Dramatic House has, since its initial conception, been explicitly linked to that of the Houses of Parliament. This idea of representing the nation in the theatre, in the double sense of summoning a representative audience that in turn recognizes itself on stage, resonated in the nineteenth century with the full consciousness of Empire. After suffering a decline in the wak…
Glocal South Sides: Race, Capital, and Performing against Injustice
This injustice and ongoing discrimination between affluent and deprived groups within one country or even one city has prompted activist, analytical, and theatrical responses that link, directly or indirectly, representations in South Africa and in African America. The essay will therefore lay out the contexts, past and present, of explicit as well as implied links between Chicago and Johannesburg, onstage and elsewhere, before turning to two rec…
Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson
Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Loren Kruger Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. By Laura Edmondson. African Expressive Cultures series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018; pp. 400. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson explores several intersecting lines of activism and analysis, politics and performance, humanitarian intervention from wealthy g…
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (review)
Reviewed by: Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes Loren Kruger Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. By Martin Puchner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006; pp. xiv + 315. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. Published in Theatre Journal in 2002, Puchner's article "Manifesto = Theatre" gave readers a promising advance on a study of this emphatic equation and its serial rupture. Three years la…
Genres of Johannesburg
The question posed in Nadine Gordimer's A world of strangers, “Johannesburg has no genre of its own?” invites reflection on the ways in which prefabricated genres, such as melodrama and crime fiction, have been applied to the city since its early days and, in turn, further questions about alternative “genres of Johannesburg”. This article finds in prose and cinematic fictions by authors from Pamela Jooste, JoAnn Richards and Christopher Hope to Z…
Scholars, gypsies, teachers and Bohemians: On the Function of South African Letters at the Present Time
Es'kia Mphahlele's allusion to Matthew Arnold's 1862 essay on “the function of criticism” in his own 1996 essay on “the function of literature at the present time” may seem surprising, since Mphahlele represents an African humanist view of literature and defends a curriculum that includes major writers in Africa and African American letters rather than the European canon promoted by the Victorian. Nonetheless, Mphahlele shares with Arnold not mer…
In a minor key: Narrative desire and minority discourses in some recent South African fiction
Introduction: Scarcity, Conspicuous Consumption, and Performance in South Africa
While anti-apartheid theatre was known worldwide for dramatizing the struggle against apartheid, theatre in South Africa today is hampered by the loss of a focused movement for change and by inefficient and compromised institutions of patronage and development. Well-placed administrators and stakeholders channel limited subsidy to large institutions such as the Market and the State Theatre, whose repertoires are dominated by nostalgic revivals, w…
Shoo-This Book Makes Me to Think!" Education, Entertainment, and "Life-Skills" Comics in South Africa
This article examines the ways comics contribute to nonformal education in contemporary South Africa, especially the Heart to Heart project,produced by the Storyteller Group, and Body and Soul, by the Soul City project. While Soul City follows the urban bias of many educational programs in its focus on urban stories and contexts, Heart to Heartis the result of a collaboration in which rural secondary school students produced and revised a graphic…
Acting Africa
I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Afri…
The Dis-Play's the Thing: Gender and Public Sphere in Contemporary British Theater
Recent feminist investigations into narrative fiction have moved beyond what Teresa de Lauretis calls mainstream feminism--an insistent emphasis on finding women's voices for an alternative feminist canon--toward feminisms that include the critique of the gendered nature of all literary form and social relations as well as the interaction of gender with other allegiances such as class, age, and race.2
Ritual into myth — ceremony and communication in ‘The blacks’
“But what exactly is a black? first of all, what's his colour?”
An der Grossen Strasse (Along the Highway)
Die Fremdenfuehrerin
Konig Lear
Galileo
Our National House: The Ideology of the National Theatre of Great Britain
As the debates on the Theatre Bills confirm, the role of Britain's National Dramatic House has, since its initial conception, been explicitly linked to that of the Houses of Parliament. This idea of representing the nation in the theatre, in the double sense of summoning a representative audience that in turn recognizes itself on stage, resonated in the nineteenth century with the full consciousness of Empire. After suffering a decline in the wak…
Edward II
Dancing with "Faust": A Semiotician's Reflections on Barba's Intercultural Mise-en-Scene
The first week of the I987 International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in the Salento region of Italy took place under the sign of Faust. Eugenio Barba brought together Eastern performers (Japanese and Indian dancers1 and musicians) and (Western) spectator-participants in a collective response to Faust-especially Goethe's Faust, but also Marlowe's as well as the whole Western tradition of the popular character and myth. The work, which la…
The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard
Directors' Theatre
The Dis-Play's the Thing: Gender and Public Sphere in Contemporary British Theater
Recent feminist investigations into narrative fiction have moved beyond what Teresa de Lauretis calls mainstream feminism--an insistent emphasis on finding women's voices for an alternative feminist canon--toward feminisms that include the critique of the gendered nature of all literary form and social relations as well as the interaction of gender with other allegiances such as class, age, and race.2
Dispossessing the Spectator: Performance, Environment, and Subjectivity in Theatre of the Homeless
ness, the performance appeared at best indifferent, not to say insulting, to the squatters' actual attempts to survive in the park. This whole spectacle seemed much too pat for the critical audience who heckled the performance with demands that attention be drawn to the impoverishment of Africa, U.S. support of Israel, and the U.S. arms industry. One park dweller in particular objected to the intonement of statistics and asked why the performers …
Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York
In the metropolitan context, South African theater has largely been promoted and received as dramatic testimony to the antiapartheid struggle. Created and performed under particular local conditions and sometimes for quite different occasions and audiences in South Africa, plays such as Woza Albert, Born in the RSA, Asinimali, and Bopha have been marketed and consumed abroad as the authentic and univocal issue of a "blood-filled society staggerin…
Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
Western culture has a long and fraught history of cultural appropriation, a history that has particular resonance within performance practice. Patrice Pavis asks what is at stake politically and aesthetically when cultures meet at the crossroads of theatre.? A series of major recent productions are analysed, including Peter Brook's Mahabharata, Cixous/Mnouchkine's Indiande, and Barba's Faust. These focus discussions on translation, appropriation,…
Discourse as Performance
Locating Theatre: Regionalism and Interculturalism at Edinburgh
A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre
The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America
Cold War Theatre
The Ambiguous Status of Art in Modern Society
The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America
idea of staging a nation dates from the Enlightenment, but the full force of the idea emerges only with the rise of mass politics. Comparing English, French, and American attempts to establish national theatres at moments of political crisis from the challenge of socialism in late nineteenth-century Europe to the struggle to salvage democracy in Depression America Kruger poses a fundamental question: in the formation of nationhood, is the citizen…
[Letter from Loren Kruger]
Dossier: Socialist Realism and East German Modernism—Another Historians' Debate
(1994). Dossier: Socialist Realism and East German Modernism—Another Historians' Debate. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 36-44
Saboteur as Model Worker: Socialist Realism and the Labor of Socialism
Stories from the Production Line: Modernism and Modernization in the GDR Production Play
Five years after the breach in the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Democratic Republic (GDR) appears-under Western eyes at least--to be buried in the trash heap of history. To be sure, GDR culture, and especially theatre, received serious scholarly attention in some quarters in West Germany and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and, as indicated by Theatre Journal's recent special issue, German Theatre after the F/Wall (March 1993), continues to …
Art (65 works) · History (54 works) · Sociology (50 works) · History (43 works) · Political science (43 works) · Law (39 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (28 works) · South African History and Culture (26 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (26 works)