Books by Sarah Balkin
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernis... more Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.
Reviewed in Theatre Survey 61.2 (May 2020), The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 28.1 (2020), Supernatural Studies (December 2020), Modern Drama 64.1 (March 2021), Theatre Journal 73.1 (March 2021), Studies in Costume & Performance 6.1 (2021), and Genre 54.3 (2021).
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Journal Articles by Sarah Balkin
Textual Practice, 2024
This article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2024.2380575.
There i... more This article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2024.2380575.
There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula’s defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché’s 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché’s play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters’ expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché’s nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama’s pictorial renderings of environment in its ‘vision’ scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871). The Vampire’s vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life.
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TDR: The Drama Review, 2023
Like Hannah Gadsby, Dave Chappelle understands the art of quitting. At the end of his 2021 Netfli... more Like Hannah Gadsby, Dave Chappelle understands the art of quitting. At the end of his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, a show full of jokes about LGBTQ people, Chappelle announces that he is “done” making such jokes “until we are both sure that we are laughing together.” Chappelle’s performance of quitting inverts the politics and structure of Gadsby’s Nanette (2017), in which she infamously quit comedy because it reinforced her marginalization as a gender-nonconforming lesbian.
This article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000958.
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Theatre Research International, 2020
This article can be read for free at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theatre-research-int... more This article can be read for free at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theatre-research-international/article/killjoy-comedian-hannah-gadsbys-nanette/9B685EEB4E24CB6D1B1D06512D6E6E16/share/56e7f616478bf894dcdf8ba3ec969beef68d0cdc?fbclid=IwAR2hf6TKd0G2Gg6_3MEHYxQ4QCkmmqMr_PrQ8q-EWAjt8Fw0GJErftH9JAs.
In her 2017 show Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announced that she was quitting comedy. In the show, Gadsby argued that as a marginalized person – a gender-nonconforming lesbian from rural Tasmania – she was doing herself a disservice when she invited audiences to laugh at her trademark self-deprecating humour. Gadsby framed her decision to quit comedy partly as a problem of persona: her practice as a comedian was to take actual, sometimes traumatic, events from her life and turn them into jokes, which she described as ‘half-told stories’. So framed, the problem with Gadsby’s comic persona is the way it both presents and truncates her traumatic experience. When she refuses to be funny, Gadsby casts herself as something like Sara Ahmed’s ‘feminist killjoy’, a spoilsport figure whose unhappiness positions her as a source of tension. In this article I consider how Gadsby’s decision to quit comedy, and the terms in which she articulates that decision in Nanette, can help us think about varied modes of humourlessness and comic possibility.
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Textual Practice , 2020
Ernest Scott (1867–1939), an early history professor at the University of Melbourne, left thirtee... more Ernest Scott (1867–1939), an early history professor at the University of Melbourne, left thirteen thousand books to the university library after his death. This article considers Scott’s books, many of which contain subject-specific newspaper clippings and annotations, as an archive in a state of institutional flux. Scott’s books and clippings give us insight into what historian of the modern research university William Clark calls ‘the material practices of academics’. I examine such practices as they intersect with the kinds of institutional inertia that ‘new institutionalists’ from the fields of sociology and political economy see as scripting human actions and encouraging stasis. The institutional afterlives of Scott’s library focus our attention on mundane, low-stakes, and obsolescent research practices even as they work against the idea of archives as rational and disenchanted. By examining two of Scott’s clipping-filled books, both collections of essays by late nineteenth-century theatre critics, I ask what we can learn from considering provenance, media, and modes of storage and access as part of a collection’s content.
80 free eprints of the article are available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SHT9E4JRB7FTKKRNEXZK/full?target=10.1080/0950236X.2020.1731588.
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Performance Research, 2018
As a gesture applause is both a demonstration of etiquette and an expression of feeling. This art... more As a gesture applause is both a demonstration of etiquette and an expression of feeling. This article asks how applause can help to conceptualize affective atmospheres in academic performance genres, focusing on the undergraduate lecture and the conference keynote. Historical and theoretical accounts of applause in theatre illuminate its expressive, evaluative and mannered modalities, which are relevant to but distinct from the conventions of applause in the lecture theatre. I analyse anecdotal evidence from social media and my own experience as a lecturer and conference organizer in dialogue with these accounts. The lecture genre raises and sometimes thwarts expectations of seriousness, affirming, in Erving Goffman’s terms, ‘that organized talking can reflect, express, delineate, portray—if not come to grips with—the real world’. That the lecture raises such expectations conditions audiences’ affective responses. One important function of lectures in disciplines concerned with fiction and aesthetics, then, is to challenge what constitutes the real.
I conclude by examining Rebecca Schneider’s keynote, ‘Extending a Hand: Gesture, Duration, and the Posthumous Turn’, which was delivered at the 2016 Performance Studies international Conference in Melbourne. ‘Extending a Hand’ was a political intervention into new materialism, a strain of interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to counter anthropocentrism. Schneider modified her keynote in response to Black Lives Matter protests in the United States during the conference. The lecture’s content and the political and affective climate of its delivery activated peripheral conventions of Australian conference hospitality—the Acknowledgement of Country and the presence of Auslan interpreters—as relational performances. The thunderous applause that followed the keynote marked its felt convergence with a ‘real world’ inclusive of history, hospitality and performance.
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TDR, 2017
Marina Abramović: In Residence (2015) was a participatory public art project that relied on “faci... more Marina Abramović: In Residence (2015) was a participatory public art project that relied on “facilitators” trained in the Abramović Method. As in other later works of Abramović’s performance practice, the artist’s presence is implied in the bodies of facilitators and participants. Situating In Residence in a longer history of institutional performance takes into account Abramović’s self-positioning as the charismatic undead.
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Modern Drama, 2017
During his Inferno period (1894–97), August Strindberg studied
Ernst Haeckel’s monism, which soug... more During his Inferno period (1894–97), August Strindberg studied
Ernst Haeckel’s monism, which sought to bring the divine back
into Darwinist natural science and proclaimed the unity of all matter.
Monism influenced a range of late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury
artistic, social, and political movements, including art nouveau,
the historical avant-garde, spiritualism and the occult revival,
the early women’s and homosexual rights movements, and eugenics.
Strindberg’s study of Haeckel’s monism coincided with his alchemical
investigations into the transformability of matter. These occult studies
altered Strindberg’s dramaturgical approach to human and nonhuman
stage matter, particularly the affective relations among characters,
settings, and props. This article tracks Strindberg’s engagement
with Haeckel’s ideas and posits nineteenth-century monism as an
inverse predecessor to present-day new materialisms.
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Modern Drama, Mar 10, 2016
Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) both c... more Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) both centrally feature imaginary persons. In “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Wilde’s narrator says that “all Art” is “to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality.” The Importance of Being Earnest assigns actors’ bodies to the imaginary person of the title. My essay examines what it meant to realize a personality on the late-nineteenth-century stage in light of recent scholarship on character, stage properties, and materiality. I argue that – because theatre shows the constructedness of material and corporeal being, because farce renders male identity a matter of genre, and because Wilde unifies the characters’ desires under one name – The Importance of Being Earnest uniquely locates personality in a living human body.
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Genre, Mar 2013
August Strindberg once claimed that his novels and stories were “plays in epic form.” But Strindb... more August Strindberg once claimed that his novels and stories were “plays in epic form.” But Strindberg's fluid formulation of genre and medium is complicated and enriched by his understanding of narration and authorship as vampiric. In the novel The Red Room (1879) and the play The Dance of Death (1900), Strindberg attributes vampiric qualities of authorship to characters that function as narrators. Strindberg's vampires sustain themselves with language rather than blood, and the forms they use to drain their victims are inextricable from the epic narration Strindberg explicitly adapts and develops in his dramaturgy. By assigning formally generative movement across genres to vampire characters that perform the functions of narrators, Strindberg depicts dramatic character as a parasitic performance—and a locus of formal change in modern drama.
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Modern Drama, Feb 15, 2009
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Book Chapters by Sarah Balkin
Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1960, 2021
Though early nineteenth-century American comic performers often took English actors and roles as ... more Though early nineteenth-century American comic performers often took English actors and roles as models, by the 1860s “Yankee humour” was much discussed by the English press, who understood it as indicative of American national character. This essay examines 1860s accounts of American humour in British newspapers and periodicals, which are prominent intertexts in the theatrical repertoire. Digital data reveal a quantitative intensification of attempts to define American humour in response to the writings and lectures of Yankee showman Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne). In interpreting these patterns of reception, I give particular attention to the contrasting example of minstrelsy, the most popular nineteenth-century American comic genre, which staged exaggerated, racialised imitations of African Americans. Although touring American minstrel troupes were ubiquitous in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the genre appears infrequently in British attempts to define American humour during this period. These differences in reception show the limitations and affordances of print databases as sources for performance scholars and reveal how regionalised and racialised affects shaped public discourse on national humour.
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A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire, 2020
This chapter considers deadpan’s historical emergence in light of comedy theory, giving particula... more This chapter considers deadpan’s historical emergence in light of comedy theory, giving particular attention to theories that bracket the nineteenth century: the “incongruity theory” that arose during the eighteenth century, in which “some thing or event we perceive or think about violates our standard mental patterns and normal expectations,” and Henri Bergson’s understanding of the comic as “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”
The full chapter is available in A Cultural History of Comedy. The six-volume set is available for purchase by libraries (or as part of the digital collection Bloomsbury Cultural History) at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-cultural-history-of-comedy-9781350000827/.
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Performance & Book Reviews, other short pieces by Sarah Balkin
The Conversation, 2022
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Australian Book Review, 2022
A review of Hannah Gadsby's memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette.
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Australian Book Review, 2022
A short language column.
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Australasian Drama Studies, 2019
Remembered Presences collects in print Alison Croggon's selected reviews and writing about theatr... more Remembered Presences collects in print Alison Croggon's selected reviews and writing about theatre from 2004 to 2017. Most of these reviews were first published in Croggon's influential blog, Theatre Notes, which was active from 2004 to 2012. Other reviews first appeared in mainstream newspapers such as The Australian and The Guardian, or in independent publications such as The Monthly or the online Australian literary magazine Kill Your Darlings. The collection is a lively and intelligent record of Croggon's considerable contributions to Australian theatre discourse, and will be of interest to scholars, theatre-makers, critics, students, and lay readers invested in or looking to learn about Australia's and especially Melbourne's contemporary theatrical and critical cultures.
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The Conversation, 2019
My Dearworthy Darling is a collaboration between playwright, fantasy novelist, poet, and theatre ... more My Dearworthy Darling is a collaboration between playwright, fantasy novelist, poet, and theatre critic Alison Croggon and feminist theatre company The Rabble (Kate Davis and Emma Valente). In her criticism, Croggon champions good writing for the stage, rejecting the idea that the literary and the theatrical are opposing concepts. In their dramaturgy, The Rabble reject the male-dominated tradition of play scripts, instead pursuing experimental, design-led re-imaginings of iconic stories from the Western canon. Their philosophies met and sometimes clashed in My Dearworthy Darling, which was inspired by the autobiography of an illiterate woman, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe.
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Plumwood Mountain, 2019
Lara Stevens’ one-woman live art piece at Melbourne’s Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Not Now, Not... more Lara Stevens’ one-woman live art piece at Melbourne’s Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Not Now, Not Ever, emphasised the interconnectedness of human and animal life and asked what the future holds for girls born in the twenty-first century. The show was influenced by ecofeminist philosophy, which holds that ‘the mistreatment of women and the mistreatment of the environment have a shared history’.
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The Conversation, 2018
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Books by Sarah Balkin
Reviewed in Theatre Survey 61.2 (May 2020), The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 28.1 (2020), Supernatural Studies (December 2020), Modern Drama 64.1 (March 2021), Theatre Journal 73.1 (March 2021), Studies in Costume & Performance 6.1 (2021), and Genre 54.3 (2021).
Journal Articles by Sarah Balkin
There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula’s defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché’s 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché’s play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters’ expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché’s nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama’s pictorial renderings of environment in its ‘vision’ scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871). The Vampire’s vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life.
This article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000958.
In her 2017 show Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announced that she was quitting comedy. In the show, Gadsby argued that as a marginalized person – a gender-nonconforming lesbian from rural Tasmania – she was doing herself a disservice when she invited audiences to laugh at her trademark self-deprecating humour. Gadsby framed her decision to quit comedy partly as a problem of persona: her practice as a comedian was to take actual, sometimes traumatic, events from her life and turn them into jokes, which she described as ‘half-told stories’. So framed, the problem with Gadsby’s comic persona is the way it both presents and truncates her traumatic experience. When she refuses to be funny, Gadsby casts herself as something like Sara Ahmed’s ‘feminist killjoy’, a spoilsport figure whose unhappiness positions her as a source of tension. In this article I consider how Gadsby’s decision to quit comedy, and the terms in which she articulates that decision in Nanette, can help us think about varied modes of humourlessness and comic possibility.
80 free eprints of the article are available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SHT9E4JRB7FTKKRNEXZK/full?target=10.1080/0950236X.2020.1731588.
I conclude by examining Rebecca Schneider’s keynote, ‘Extending a Hand: Gesture, Duration, and the Posthumous Turn’, which was delivered at the 2016 Performance Studies international Conference in Melbourne. ‘Extending a Hand’ was a political intervention into new materialism, a strain of interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to counter anthropocentrism. Schneider modified her keynote in response to Black Lives Matter protests in the United States during the conference. The lecture’s content and the political and affective climate of its delivery activated peripheral conventions of Australian conference hospitality—the Acknowledgement of Country and the presence of Auslan interpreters—as relational performances. The thunderous applause that followed the keynote marked its felt convergence with a ‘real world’ inclusive of history, hospitality and performance.
Ernst Haeckel’s monism, which sought to bring the divine back
into Darwinist natural science and proclaimed the unity of all matter.
Monism influenced a range of late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury
artistic, social, and political movements, including art nouveau,
the historical avant-garde, spiritualism and the occult revival,
the early women’s and homosexual rights movements, and eugenics.
Strindberg’s study of Haeckel’s monism coincided with his alchemical
investigations into the transformability of matter. These occult studies
altered Strindberg’s dramaturgical approach to human and nonhuman
stage matter, particularly the affective relations among characters,
settings, and props. This article tracks Strindberg’s engagement
with Haeckel’s ideas and posits nineteenth-century monism as an
inverse predecessor to present-day new materialisms.
Book Chapters by Sarah Balkin
The full chapter is available in A Cultural History of Comedy. The six-volume set is available for purchase by libraries (or as part of the digital collection Bloomsbury Cultural History) at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-cultural-history-of-comedy-9781350000827/.
Performance & Book Reviews, other short pieces by Sarah Balkin
https://theconversation.com/comic-anticlimax-in-nat-randall-and-anna-breckons-set-piece-183624?fbclid=IwAR0vHB3Xsa9K7lyNwNMwQ1DUpfwU2rEtw8WCn3IBbiaQ3BY5iKfInMUhNEY
Reviewed in Theatre Survey 61.2 (May 2020), The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 28.1 (2020), Supernatural Studies (December 2020), Modern Drama 64.1 (March 2021), Theatre Journal 73.1 (March 2021), Studies in Costume & Performance 6.1 (2021), and Genre 54.3 (2021).
There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula’s defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché’s 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché’s play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters’ expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché’s nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama’s pictorial renderings of environment in its ‘vision’ scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871). The Vampire’s vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life.
This article is available open access at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000958.
In her 2017 show Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announced that she was quitting comedy. In the show, Gadsby argued that as a marginalized person – a gender-nonconforming lesbian from rural Tasmania – she was doing herself a disservice when she invited audiences to laugh at her trademark self-deprecating humour. Gadsby framed her decision to quit comedy partly as a problem of persona: her practice as a comedian was to take actual, sometimes traumatic, events from her life and turn them into jokes, which she described as ‘half-told stories’. So framed, the problem with Gadsby’s comic persona is the way it both presents and truncates her traumatic experience. When she refuses to be funny, Gadsby casts herself as something like Sara Ahmed’s ‘feminist killjoy’, a spoilsport figure whose unhappiness positions her as a source of tension. In this article I consider how Gadsby’s decision to quit comedy, and the terms in which she articulates that decision in Nanette, can help us think about varied modes of humourlessness and comic possibility.
80 free eprints of the article are available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SHT9E4JRB7FTKKRNEXZK/full?target=10.1080/0950236X.2020.1731588.
I conclude by examining Rebecca Schneider’s keynote, ‘Extending a Hand: Gesture, Duration, and the Posthumous Turn’, which was delivered at the 2016 Performance Studies international Conference in Melbourne. ‘Extending a Hand’ was a political intervention into new materialism, a strain of interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to counter anthropocentrism. Schneider modified her keynote in response to Black Lives Matter protests in the United States during the conference. The lecture’s content and the political and affective climate of its delivery activated peripheral conventions of Australian conference hospitality—the Acknowledgement of Country and the presence of Auslan interpreters—as relational performances. The thunderous applause that followed the keynote marked its felt convergence with a ‘real world’ inclusive of history, hospitality and performance.
Ernst Haeckel’s monism, which sought to bring the divine back
into Darwinist natural science and proclaimed the unity of all matter.
Monism influenced a range of late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury
artistic, social, and political movements, including art nouveau,
the historical avant-garde, spiritualism and the occult revival,
the early women’s and homosexual rights movements, and eugenics.
Strindberg’s study of Haeckel’s monism coincided with his alchemical
investigations into the transformability of matter. These occult studies
altered Strindberg’s dramaturgical approach to human and nonhuman
stage matter, particularly the affective relations among characters,
settings, and props. This article tracks Strindberg’s engagement
with Haeckel’s ideas and posits nineteenth-century monism as an
inverse predecessor to present-day new materialisms.
The full chapter is available in A Cultural History of Comedy. The six-volume set is available for purchase by libraries (or as part of the digital collection Bloomsbury Cultural History) at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-cultural-history-of-comedy-9781350000827/.
https://theconversation.com/comic-anticlimax-in-nat-randall-and-anna-breckons-set-piece-183624?fbclid=IwAR0vHB3Xsa9K7lyNwNMwQ1DUpfwU2rEtw8WCn3IBbiaQ3BY5iKfInMUhNEY
The durational aspects of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music were necessarily lost in The Inauguration’s whistlestop tour. But Mac’s six headliner performances across 27 hours this October incorporate the festival itself into a durational Radical Faerie realness ritual. I left The Inauguration wanting to attend all 27 hours.
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
Historical, cultural, or generational shifts in the comic audience;
Live, mediatised, and/or digital audiences;
Majoritarian and/or minoritarian audiences;
Audience behaviour and/or sociality;
Conventions of comic spectatorship: laughter, applause, “clapter,” heckling, etc.;
Methodological reflections on researching the comic audience;
Challenges to traditional comic license, such as debates about cancel culture or freedom of speech;
Caring for the comic audience: for example, content warnings, accessibility, cultural safety, mental health.