Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Wrestling with Mode and Meaning : The Play of Poetry in Theatre
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Sitting high in the John Golden Theatre on Broadway, the opening moments of Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play leave me open-mouthed. A black woman, dressed simply and of another era – one might presume as a slave – enters the space with a broom. She is sweeping. After a moment, the song ‘Work’ by Rhianna starts to play. Loud and jaunty. The woman is aware of the music. She starts to enjoy it. She starts dancing, and twerking. We are in a mixed world. It is exciting and disorienting. She is interrupted by the arrival of a white man, scrawny, not a rich man, but holding power largely by the whip evident on his person.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review No Theme IX no. 96 May 2020 19248762 2020 periodical issue

    '‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and then he was acquitted. Australia burned and did not stop burning and in the middle of that national crisis the Australian Prime Minister flew his family to Hawaii. He was an Australian being an Australian, and if we, like him, keep on being Australians, we will, as Australians, get through this. (This not being the national crisis of the past but the international crisis of the present.) Unprecedented rain flooded the North of England at the same time as new-normal rain emptied biblically into East Africa, quickly followed by a plague of hundreds of billions of locusts, forcing Somalia to declare its own national emergency. The Indian Prime Minister revoked the articles in the Indian Constitution that protected the safety and autonomy of the Muslim state of Kashmir, and, in Delhi, mobs burnt Muslim homes and lynched the people who lived in them, while the government and the police stood by and watched, and, in some cases, participated. The United Kingdom was paralysed by the extended death throes of Brexit, then Megxit – following one on the other like a fever dream of Empire’s end. And then came the collapse of our global health care system, a cataclysmic failure that held capitalism to the light like a soiled white cloth.' (Mindy Gill, Jeet Thayil, Editorial introduction)

    2020
Last amended 11 May 2020 12:48:56
http://cordite.org.au/essays/mode-and-meaning/ Wrestling with Mode and Meaning : The Play of Poetry in Theatresmall AustLit logo Cordite Poetry Review
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X