Class Dramatic Reading Workshop IV

Dramatic Reading Workshop IV is organised around a comparative, transhistorical corpus centred on three female protagonists: The Human Voice, by Jean Cocteau, Salome, by Oscar Wilde, and Antigone, by Sophocles. The plays confront a woman's speech with an absence, a desire, and a law, tracing a movement from the intimate to the political and from the isolated voice to public action. Close reading enables students to examine three dramatic forms - modern monodrama, Symbolist drama, and Greek tragedy - and to explore voice, body, gaze, romantic suffering, transgression, mourning, and resistance. The approach is extended through intermedial comparisons: Cocteau with films by Pedro Almodóvar and Salome with Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance. The course combines textual analysis, historical and aesthetic contextualisation, and comparison between theatre and cinema.

Not applicable

1. The Human Voice, by Jean Cocteau 1.1. Monodrama and telephone dramaturgy 1.2. A nameless woman and an absent interlocutor 1.3. Voice, silence, lies, waiting, and stage directions 1.4. Cocteau and Pedro Almodóvar: adaptation, quotation, and rewriting 1.4.1. The Human Voice (2020), Law of Desire, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 2. Salome, by Oscar Wilde 2.1. Biblical rewriting, Symbolism, and Decadence 2.2. Gaze, desire, body, dance, power, and death 2.3. Transgression and punishment 2.4. Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance (1988): metatheatre, excess, and camp aesthetics 3. Antigone, by Sophocles 3.1. Greek tragedy and the Theban cycle 3.2. Antigone and Creon: unwritten laws and the law of the city 3.3. Kinship, mourning, burial, and female speech 3.4. Heroic action, sacrifice, and the political endurance of the myth 4. Synthesis: women between voice, desire, and law 4.1. From intimate suffering to public action 4.2. Subjection and self-determination.

The methodologies combine theoretical exposition, guided reading, reading aloud, and collective analysis of the works. Their innovative dimension lies mainly in the intermedial approach: excerpts, films, and performance recordings allow students to compare the text with adaptations, quotations, and rewritings. For The Human Voice, comparisons with Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Pedro Almodóvar's short film reveal changes in space, voice, and the protagonist's agency. For Salome, Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance supports the analysis of metatheatre, visual excess, and camp aesthetics. Comparing text, stage, and screen relates dramatic forms, modes of representation, and effects on the spectator.

ALMODÓVAR, Pedro (real.), La voz humana. El Deseo, 2020. BUTLER, Judith, Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. COCTEAU, Jean, La voix humaine. Paris: Stock, 1930. DIERKES-THRUN, Petra, Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. RUSSELL, Ken (real.), Salome's Last Dance. 1988. SÓFOCLES, Antígona. Introdução, versão do grego e notas de Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2018. STEINER, George, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. WILDE, Oscar, Salomé: Drame en un acte. Paris: Librairie de l'Art Indépendant, 1893.