Watch Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Theater, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Thailand and Japan Language Thai, Japanese Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2024 This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. Co-Produced by Kyoto Experiment, The Japan Foundation and For What Theatre Supported by The Saison Foundation (International Project Support Program / Kyoto Experiment × For What Theatre Juggle & Hide [Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director]) About The Artist(s) Wichaya Artamat is a co-founding member of For What Theatre. He was long captivated by performances since when he was still studying Film. He started working in theater as a project coordinator for Bangkok Theatre Festival 2008. He joined the New Theatre Society in 2009, during which he grew to become a director recognized for various experimental forms and unconventional theatrical approaches. Hailed as ‘one of the most promising contemporary theater creators of Southeast Asia,’ Wichaya is especially interested in exploring how society remembers and unremembers its history through certain calendar days. He co-founded For What Theatre in 2015 and is also a member of Sudvisai Club and Collective Thai Scripts. Since the European premiere of his most prominent work ‘This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May)” at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, Wichaya has been extensively touring and creating in Europe, Asia, and beyond. Get in touch with the artist(s) forwhattheatre@gmail.com and follow them on social media http://www.facebook.com/theatreforwhat, http://www.instagram.com/forwhattheatre/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch My virtual body and my double by Simon Senn / Bruno Deville at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the style of a digital conference, Mon corps virtuel et mon double (My virtual body and my double) plunges us into the testimony of the artist Simon Senn who has the disturbing experience of embodying the digital replica of a female body thanks to virtual reality. Together with programmer Tammara Leites, he also creates an artificial intelligence powered by his own personal data and capable of writing. A film that reveals the unexpected entanglement between technology and human beings. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents My virtual body and my double At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Simon Senn / Bruno Deville Theater This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Switzerland Language French, with subtitles in German & English Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the style of a digital conference, Mon corps virtuel et mon double (My virtual body and my double) plunges us into the testimony of the artist Simon Senn who has the disturbing experience of embodying the digital replica of a female body thanks to virtual reality. Together with programmer Tammara Leites, he also creates an artificial intelligence powered by his own personal data and capable of writing. A film that reveals the unexpected entanglement between technology and human beings. Film director : Bruno Deville Production : Bastien Genoux Coproduction : Detours Films, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Compagnie Simon Senn With the support of : Fonds DE LA SCENE A L’ECRAN Partnership : TV5Monde. Based on the performances by Simon Senn About The Artist(s) Simon Senn is a Swiss artist. He works primarily with video and performance, exploring the effects of technology on human relationships. Bruno Deville, director and screenwriter, was born in 1976 in Ottignies, Belgium. Joint Swiss and Belgian citizenship. 1992 Receives degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wavre. 1995-2000 Attends ECAL (École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne). 2000 Receives degree in directing from ECAL. 2004 Cofounder of Le Flair production company in Lausanne. Detours Film : Detours Films is a cinematographic approach to apprehending reality, soaking up life trajectories, questioning the political positioning of the contemporary world, or flirting with movement and matter. Words and encounters are the keystones of this visual, often documentary, approach. It's a way of highlighting the inner worlds of people who are atypical or at odds with established norms. Get in touch with the artist(s) a.luthier@vidy.ch , bastien.genoux@detoursfilms.ch and follow them on social media Simon Senn : http://www.simonsenn.com Detours Film : https://www.detoursfilms.ch Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne : https://vidy.ch/fr/production/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Research The Martin E. Segal Theater Center is committed to supporting research about theatre and the performing arts in a myriad of ways, through written scholarly enquiries as well as audio-visual documentation of artist talks, performances, interviews, and more. Our rich archive includes practitioners from United States as well as international performing arts landscape. All material and media published by The Segal Center is made available for free on our website. Books The Segal Centre supports the creation, editing, translation and distribution of books that explore scholarly, practice and multifacted criticism of key areas and developments in the performing arts. Explore Books Visiting Scholars Program The fellowships offer theatre scholars 3-6 months of research in NYC. They get workspaces, library access, and opportunities to collaborate with other fellows, faculty, and students on their research. Explore Program Segal Talks Featuring conversations with performing arts professionals from all over the world, our Segal Talks aim to capture a cultural Weltzustand ie State of the World. Explore Talks Journals The Segal Publication Wing includes three open-access digital journals, namely Arab Stages, European Stages and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. The journals are all available for FREE online to a global readership. Explore Journals

Encounter Kinesis Project dance theatre's work Bridge Matter / The Reach in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event Kinesis Project brings new life into Inwood Hill Park with this excerpt of Bridge Matter/The Reach, created specifically for the park and Kinesis Project's uptown community, audiences will be led along pathways, waterways and bridge views with gorgeous dancing and the live music of Grammy Award winning musician, Johnny Butler. Bridge Matter / The Reach is a second collaboration with the research of geoscientist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, studying how our shifting climate is affecting even the bedrock of our earth. Featured Image Credits: Sabrina Canas Kinesis Project dance theatre Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company produces large-scale, space-changing and unexpectedly intimate dances. Kinesis Project is at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement with diverse communities and the cultural imperative of art in public spaces. Kinesis Project dances are inspired by Riker’s questions about the world around us. Those questions are excavated and answered through a generative, collaborative process with the dancers and designers of Kinesis Project. As the work moves into a site, Riker focuses on the expanse, scope and depth of the environment. Dances then further evolve based on the site, resulting in unique and custom performances in each space that the company enters. Aimed at democratizing contemporary dance for audiences at all ages and demographics, Kinesis Project injects movement and stillness into unusual and inspiring places, pushing the boundaries of how people see and interact with that space. As an educational and outreach organization, Kinesis Project teaches dance and creative thinking in schools, leads non-dancers in community movement making activities, and brings dance into public spaces. As a producing organization, Kinesis Project dance theatre founded Women in Motion, a platform to support female choreographers in New York City. Visit Artist Website Location Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Visit Partner Website

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Basel Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Marvin Carlson Image Credits: Article Basel, Switzerland, is surely not widely thought of as a major European theatre center, but each time I have visited it I have been impressed by the variety and quality of the work presented there, which regularly includes productions, even premieres, by some of the best known European directors. This was certainly the case when I visited the first week in May of 2024, where I saw four productions remarkable in their range and artistic achievement. The municipal Theater Basel is Switzerland’s largest venue offering theatre, opera and ballet and follows the standard European practice of rotating repertory, so I was able to see all of these productions in this single massive structure, although in different internal spaces. The theatre’s cultural centrality is reinforced by a large and complex fountain in front of its monumental main entrance, the work of Basel’s favorite native artist, the ingenious and whimsical Jean Tinguley. In the 2020/21 season the administration of Theatre Basel underwent a major restructuring. Benedikt von Peter, who had been in change of all three branches of the theatre, became manager only of the opera, while the ballet continued under the direction of Richard Wherlock, formerly von Peter’s subordinate. Most radical was the change in the drama sector, where a team of four were announced as of equal authority by the theatre, although the same report noted that “the central artistic signature” of the group would be that of Antú Romero Nunes, formerly the in-house director at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, one of Germany’s leading houses. There in 2018 his production of The Odyssey was invited to Germany’s most prestigious festival, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and in his third season in Basel, Nunes was invited again, for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, clearly establishing him among the leading contemporary German directors. Although I had not seen either of these two productions, awareness of them made me very eager to see Nunes’ new production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera my first evening in Basel. I was certainly not disappointed. It was one of the most original interpretations of this often revived piece I have seen, and surprisingly not because of its departures from Brecht but, on the contrary, by pushing Brechtian challenges to conventional theatre far beyond what most “Brechtian” stagings attempt. The tone of the production was set at the very beginning, when the audience was confronted with a totally empty dark space, not a touch of theatrical illusion visible. Into this space strolled a familiar, slightly stooped figure, wearing blue worker’s uniform with matching peaked hat and smoking a cigar. Even before he began to speak in a distinctive Augsburg accent, the audience applauded him as Bertolt Brecht, who acknowledged the identification and warned that the empty stage was an indication that the audience were going to have to put their imaginations to work and those unwilling to accept this “epic” approach might as well go home. In fact “Brecht” pulled out a rack with a few costumes on it to represent Peachum’s shop, and informed us of the invisible elements we must imagine. Indeed the only regularly appearing scenic element were a group of long neon lights, sometimes bright sometimes barely seen, which hovered above the actor to suggest ceilings or, upright, surrounded them to suggest various enclosures. Throughout the production written stage descriptions were regularly recited instead of being shown, and other stage directions indicating movements or reading of lines were similarly articulated. His general introduction over, “Brecht” announced: “Enter Peachum” and with a quick change of coat, became Peachum, one of a number of roles he would assume throughout the evening. This virtuosic actor, the remarkable Jörg Pohl, came with director Nunes from Hamburg and is now one of the four members of the directing board. If the production has a star, it is surely Pohl, but this term is really not applicable, since the company is a flexible ensemble all dressed in identical blue worker’s cap and jackets, occasionally covered with rough coats or removed to reveal body length white underwear. They switch roles freely, and anyone, male or female, may become Brecht, any other character, or an authorial voice. The plot outlines remain largely unchanged, but spoken material and songs are altered and moved about freely and side comments on the play or its presentation are frequent. In his opening speech, for example, as Peachum is explaining the tricks needed to get the public to part with its money, he compares his trade to that of the theatre, specifically reminding the audience of the expense of the seats they are occupying (Tickets in Theatre Basel run from $45 to $135, not shocking by Broadway standards but well above the average in Germany, where at a major theatre like the Deutsches Theater in Berlin seats run from $5 to $52). Although most of the words are Brecht’s, the cast feels free to experiment with readings—sometimes pausing, commenting on the line or the character, or repeating a scene to stress a particular point. From time to time a particular theatrical choice is explained, as when one actor suddenly remarks: “At this moment, before the main character is established, we add a retardant moment to increase the tension.” And often, quite unexpectedly, one of the cast will temporarily “become” Brecht, by producing the iconic jacket, cigar and slightly stooped posture, in order to make his own observations on the passing show. Music is provided by an eight piece live band led by trumpeter Anita Wälti, and although they beautifully captured the Kurt Weill tone, they, unlike the actors, were visually de-emphasized, mostly appearing at the back of the stage in semi-darkness and clouds of fog. Moreover the same sort of liberties were taken with the Weill score as with the Brecht text. The two most famous songs in the show—Mack’s Ballad and Jenny’s Pirate Song, were present, but far from their usual place and in much reduced versions, and similar changes were made in the music throughout. Again the effect was to keep the audience, especially those familiar with the opera, continually finding their comfortable expectations thwarted and challenged. Nowhere was this more evident than in the remarkable closing sequence. Mackie Messer, played by Basel actor Sven Schelker, sings his powerful final Ballad, in which he asks for general forgiveness. Anyone with reasonable knowledge of the play knows the shape of the following famous conclusion. Mackie ascends the scaffold and the waiting noose, but at the last possible moment Peachem stops the play to explain that although hanging Macheath would be the Christian thing to do, out of consideration for the audience’s feelings another ending will be substituted. Then comes the spectacular finale, the most famous deus ex machina in the modern theatre. A victorious messenger arrives on horseback to deliver a letter from the Queen pardoning Macheath and heaping honors upon him. Mackie and others exult in song, but Peachum and others in a closing chorus remind us that in real time, unlike in opera, happy endings are not common, and advise a more cautionary view of the world. In the Nunes production, the curtain abruptly and surprisingly closes immediately after Mackie’s forgiveness ballad, and the house lights go up. The astonished audience assumes that Nunes has taken the radical step of eliminating the calculatedly ridiculous happy ending and leaving Mack to his just fate. Hearty applause begins, but is immediately stopped by Peachum appearing from behind the curtains to announce that most of the company feel that the audience may feel cheated by being deprived of the famous traditional ending and so it will be offered for those who wish to remain. Indeed, the curtains part to reveal the usual almost empty stage except for the neon lights faintly gleaming above, and the blue clad actors lined up to present the closing sequence. When they come to the announcement of the victorious messenger, the neon lights blaze brightly and the orchestra sounds out in triumph, but no messenger appears, only a pathetic stuffed loose-limbed doll horse, about three feet long, triumphantly waved by a cast member at the end of the line. Once again, Peachum, at the other end, angrily interrupts, saying that this awkward nod to tradition was worse that nothing at all, and that if they were going to present the messenger scene at all it must be impressively done. Again the curtain closes and immediately reopens with lights and music blazing forth and a spectacular live white horse with richly festooned rider and cortege moving onstage to do the final scene. One more surprise awaited, however, when the curtain closed again on the play’s traditional ending, it opened for curtain calls, always elaborate in the German-speaking theatre. The entire cast had remove the blue worker’s aprons and caps they had worn for most of the evening, and appeared for the first time in a dazzling array of individualized costumes, copies in fact of the costumes of the first production of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928. After an evening of visual minimalism, this stunning tableau, in addition to its final reference to the operations of theatre itself, proved in fact as dazzling, and perhaps even more memorable, than the Queen’s messenger himself. Threepenny Opera. Photo © Inco Hoehn The following evening I returned to the theatre to see what turned out to be the most powerful production of my visit to Basel, a staging of Mozart’s Requiem by one of Europe’s most imaginative directors, Romeo Castelucci. The production opened to standing ovations in the festivals of Aix-en-Province in 2019 and Adelaide in 2020. Basel was scheduled to follow, but Covid intervened, and the much anticipated production did not reach Basel until 2024, though its silencing and resurrection added another powerful symbolic level to this already densely layered experience. Castellucci and his musical director, Raphäel Pichon, have created a radically innovating interpretation of one of the most family works in the Western musical canon. Perhaps taking his cue from the fact that Mozart left the work incomplete and it was finished by his student Süssmeyer, Pichon has woven together a collection of other related musical pieces, including Gregorian chants, other religious music by Mozart, and Masonic hymns. The resulting text is projected as supertitles in Latin, German and English. These translations often provide little explanation of the specific images on stage, however, which depart far more radically from the tonality of the original than do the arrangements of Pichon. In his production notes, Castellucci calls the work particularly suited for contemporary times, tormented by the idea of extinction both of us as individuals, of our species, and perhaps of our planet itself. This idea is most clearly and powerfully seen in one of the production’s most memorable features. Throughout the evening names are projected on the rear wall of the stage, changing every few seconds. For a considerable time these were unfamiliar Latin names, like Dunleosteos Belgicus or Panxiosteur ocullus, but at last a series of more familiar names appeared—Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannisaurus—and we realized we were seeing a chronicle of extinctions. Nor was this confined to plants and animals—as man appeared, his departed creations were added to the list, extinct languages, disappeared cities and monuments, lost writings and works of art. As the evening went on so the list inexorably drew closer to the present--Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima—and at last evoked a future in which even the present theatre and its audience must inevitably join the ever extending list. It formed a deeply moving and disturbing visual grounding for the production. Requiem Romeo Castellucci. Photo © Luciano Romano In front of this constantly changing roll, however, Castellucci developed a highly complex performance structure that in part reinforced and in part worked in counterpoint to the pain and suffering suggested by the music and projections. Running parallel to themes of mourning, anxiety and death, Castellucci also celebrated the continual counter-process of rebirth and renewal. His production begins with a sequence closely fitting the musical theme. In a black void, an elderly woman places a rose in a base, climbs into an isolated simple bed, and dies. Castellucchi however takes this end as a beginning, when, in the course of the evening, we will follow this woman backward, into middle age, youth, childhood and infancy, and as the litany of extinction rolls inexorably in the background, the stage is filled with the glories of her (and all human) life. The black background is torn away and replaced with a large white curtain. A stunning sequence follows, beginning with the chorus point brightly colored paints over the youthful incarnation of the woman who opened the show. She is then lifted by ropes up to serve as the central element in the white background, as the chorus surrounds her suspended figure with bright splashes of paint of all colors. The chorus itself remains onstage except for the opening and closing scenes, beginning in regular dress, then changing to a series of traditional folk costumes, and at the end, naked except for loosely wrapped shrouds. Through the major central part of the production they clearly represent the ongoing life force of the countryside, moving ,primarily in circle dances from many traditions, including an inevitable maypole. Trees and flowers burst up among them. Inevitably, however, the dances end. The trees and flowers disappear and the chorus obliterates the bright colors behind them by splashing black paint across them. A pile of soil pours onto the stage and as the lights fade to a low level, is spread out to cover the white stage floor by the actors, who have removed their festive clothes and now are either nude or loosely wrapped in shrouds. When at last they rest quietly in an indistinct pile of soil, bodies, and shrouds, the back of the stage slowly begins to rise and this mixture of material slowly slides forward to create a mound of refuse downstage. The old woman whose death opened the evening appears with her three younger avatars, gently place a young baby on the mound and leave. Offstage a boy treble sings Mozart’s In Paradisum, “May the angels lead you into paradise.” Silence follows, broken only by the baby’s contended gurgles as the curtain slowly lowers on this final image of hope and rebirth in the very face of death. For my third evening I returned to the Theater Basel, but to a different performance space there, the medium-sized Schauspielhaus (450 seats as opposed to 860 in the main house and 320 in the small experimental stage). The production was Maxim Gorki’s Summerfolk, a familiar work on the German stage, but rarely seen in the United States. The play has a very Chekhovian feel and is generally regarded to have been inspired by Chekhov. Chekhov in fact died in 1904, the same year Summerfolk appeared. Chekov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, with a tonality and characters especially close to those Chekov used. Summerfolk has been often considered a kind of sequel to The Cherry Orchard, though the Chekhovian echoes must have come from earlier plays. While the Chekhov play focuses upon the departure (literally and symbolically) of the old social order represented by the Renevskaya family, that of Gorki takes place a few years later, when the materialistic and pragmatic generation represented in The Cherry Orchard by Lopahin have come to power. Each summer they gather at the summer house of one of their number, presumably to relax and enjoy this vacation from the pressures of the business world, but actually to pass the time in empty discussion, tedious quarreling and flirting, and lamenting the pointlessness and joylessness of their empty lives. In the background, the audience, knows, the impending revolution will sweep all this away. This production has a special relevance in the career of director Stephan Pucher. After launching his career with a series of pop and disco-oriented works, much influenced by the Gob Squad, he achieved his first major success with a radical reworking of a classic text, which has been his major type of work since. This first triumph was his reworking of The Cherry Orchard in 1999, created in Theater Basel. Since then he has premiered only two other productions in this theatre, Uncle Vanya in 2005 and Faust I in 2012. Summerfolk, just 25 years after his first major success with the closely related Cherry Orchard at this same theatre, thus seems a kind of homecoming. In addition to a particular fondness for Chekhov (Pucher’s first invitation to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffn was with his 2001 The Seagull, created in Zurich), Pucher has from the beginning been one of the German directors especially interested in experimenting with the combining of live action with video and digital technology. The unconventional ending of Pucher’s 1999 Cherry Orchard clearly indicates this and eerily anticipates the technological world of his current Summerfolk. In Chekov’s original, the dying Firs sits alone within the locked confines of the abandoned Renevskaya home. In the Pucher staging, two large doors opened upstage to reveal an electronic wasteland. The verdant cherry orchard dissolved into a frozen ice-glue tundra inhabited by the ghostly images of the departed family, still carrying on their empty and directionless activity. The opening scene of Summerfolk might almost be seen as a parodic variation on this unsettling conclusion. We see a healthy middle-aged couple ( Annika Meier and Jan Bluthardt) relaxing in front of a beautiful mountain landscape—but immediately recognize it as a bit too beautiful, and indeed the landscape is a video projection with the glowing colors of a TV travel advertisement, and even the three-dimensional scenic elements surrounding the couple suggest advertising stage properties. The theatricalized summer wear they display has elements of both the early twentieth century and current fashion, since Puchner has moved the play from pre-revolutionary Russia to the modern world of international capitalism. Summerfolk. Photo © LuziaHunziker The basic situation remains unchanged, a group of nouveaux riches, disappointed by the lack of fulfillment in their current lifestyles, withdraw to a country retreat, where they find not relief but an even keener awareness of the emptiness and lack of direction in their lives. Pucher’s contemporary summerfolk assume that the emptiness they feel in their everyday live is caused by their growing reliance upon non-human technology—cell phones, video games, the internet, and ultimately AI. The retreat to which they withdraw promises to provide relief from these forces specifically bans cellphones and internet access, to provide the direct experience of nature. The difficulty of finding such a retreat is suggested by Pucher locating it in Davos, one of Switzerland’s most popular (and crowded) Alpine resort areas, and equally significantly, the regular meeting place of the World Economic Forum. The impossibility of escaping contemporary technology is a central theme of both text and staging. Almost every character has a hidden presumably banned cellphone hidden somewhere about the set, and the resort itself attempts to reinforce its ban on technological devices by technological means, including hidden cameras and even more intrusive video projections about current information of presumed interest which are created by rather robotic announcers in a small isolated area to the side of the stage, and appear on the central screen. The operations of this system, and its frequently malfunctioning, are the continuing preoccupation of the arrogant but inept local engineer, very amusingly portrayed by Ueli Jaeggi, constantly complaining to the audience of the stupidity and pointlessness of his tasks. The other major character Pucher adds to his band of Swiss escapists is Rick Roaming (Julian Anatol Schneider), a half-demented American visitor to the resort who is already much more seriously affected by the current digital world than his Swiss companions. Neither he nor they are entirely sure whether he is an actual computer addict or his avatar which exists both in and out of the game. In any case, Rick is convinced that he is threatened with death by his digital foes, and frantically is attempting to construct a coil gun to defend himself. Eventually is appears that he (or his avatar) is indeed killed, but since the visual background of the stage shifts continually between the idyllic landscapes of Alpine vistas, in which the actors from time to time appear, official but garbled video announcements from the resort staff, apparent video interventions from the resort engineering center airing the grievances of the engineer, and digitalized segments of Rick’s ongoing Star War type battles with his mechanized adversaries, it becomes increasingly unclear to both audience and characters whether the world in which they are operating is real or digital. Perhaps not only Rick but all of them are in fact AI figures. Desperately they seek a way to discover which is the truth and decide that the question “What do you desire?” is reportedly one that computer intelligence cannot answer but living humans can. In fact none of the characters are able to provide a satisfactory response to this test, and so we are they are left to wonder whether they are all in fact empty forms of AI or whether they have essentially become such by their immersion in the new technological world. Clearly, as most reviewers were quick to admit, this concern is far from Gorki, despite the well-known socialist sympathies of translator and adaptor Dietmar Dath, but German directors like Pucher have long turned classic texts in radical new directions to make, as this production clearly does, surprising new insights into our most pressing cultural concerns. For my final evening in Basel I returned to the major house for a new production by one of my favorite modern directors, Herbert Fritsch, who has defied the traditional view of a lack of humor in the German dramatic tradition by establishing himself as the leading director of farce in Europe today. I first encountered Fritsch’s dazzling and over the top visual and physical theatre in 2011 when he was first invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, with a stunning and hilarious version of Ibsen’s Doll House played in the grotesquely exaggerated style of a gothic horror film. Since then I have followed his work whenever possible, as he continued to put his own particular spin on classical authors like Dürrenmatt and Molière and, to my mind, even more successfully in his own works (like the well-known Murmel, Murmel, with an eighty minute text composed only of those words—the German for “murmer, murmer”). Although internationally his work in theatre is most frequently compared with the great French farce writers of the late twentieth century, so far Fritsch has only staged two of their works, both by Eugene Labiche, The Affair in the Rue de Lourcine in 2010 and the current Italian Straw Hat in Basel. Seeing Fritsch’s interpretation of this masterpiece of modern farce was one of the major reasons for my choosing Basel for this European excursion. Perhaps my expectations were too high, because although I certainly found the evening entertaining, and occasionally hilarious, I did not consider it as a whole among the director’s best works. All the elements of successful farce were there—the constant frenetic movement, including of course the continual slamming of doors, the elaborate physical routines based on the manipulation of physical objects like hats, glasses, flowers, and walking sticks, the repeated handstands, pratfalls, and inadvertent collisions and near collisions. Music is almost always an important part of a Fritsch production, and that promised to be the case here, with the play advertised as an Opera, co-produced by the Komische Oper of Berlin, and with lyrics and a score by a cultural icon with an even larger following than that of Fritsch, the rock-pop star Herbert Grönemeyer. The plot, however and even the songs, often tended to disappear in the activity, but that did not seem to me a great loss. Grönemeyer’s lyrics were rather banal (though not much less so than the originals) and as for the plot, it is largely an excuse for all the confusions and rushing about in search of the rather ridiculous object which gives the play its name (here changed from the French original [and traditional English and German translations] An Italian Straw Hat, to the admittedly somewhat more active and comic [at least in German] Pferd frisst Hut [Horse Eats Hat]). Pferd Frisst Hut. Photo © Thomas Aurin Fritsch’s company are virtuosic actors, acrobats and musicians, and although the latter skills were less used here than in some pieces, the stage provided essentially a machine for the display of their physical abilities and endurance. Designer Oscar Meteo Grunert has created essentially a colorful open box with side walls consisting mostly of doors (actually five on each side) and at the back center, a semi-circular bright yellow platform with five steps leading up to a revolving door. All the doors and the spaces between provide locations for every sort of physical activity, with actors constantly running into doors and walls, running up and sliding down stairs, and performing complicated routines around the revolving elements. The familiar saying that the manipulation of doors is the heart of French farce was never more imaginatively developed than here. The Basel chorus, which plays the confused wedding party running about in search of the elusive hat, moves well and sings nicely but they lack the virtuosic skills that Fritsch likes to encourage and which are stunningly displayed in the leading actors, especially the harassed protagonist Fadinard (Christopher Nell). In all, despite the ingenuity of Fritsch and his company, the three hour production , entertaining as it often is, is also rather exhausting. The Threepenny Opera. Photo © Ingo Hoehn References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker By Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Encounter Keith Josef Adkins's work The Heat Will Kill Everything in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival The Heat Will Kill Everything Keith Josef Adkins Theater Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 3pm Riverside Park South, Manhattan Performance on Locomotive Picnic Lawn @61st street on the Hudson River. Enter at 59th St, or 66th St and Riverside Boulevard Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event A Black man’s daughter disappears during an extreme heat event. Excerpts will be performed by Francois Battiste and directed by Russell G. Jones. Keith Josef Adkins Keith Josef Adkins is a writer and artistic director. His plays have been produced around the U.S., and include The People Before The Park, about the 19th-century black community Seneca Village that was razed to create Central Park. Keith received Samuel French’s inaugural Award for Impact and Activism in the Theater Community, and a Helen Merrill Playwright Award. Keith is the co-founder and artistic director of The New Black Fest, dedicated to new and provocative playwriting and discussion from the African Diaspora. He has written for CBS’ The Good Fight, ABC’s For The People, and P-Valley on STARZ. Visit Artist Website Location Performance on Locomotive Picnic Lawn @61st street on the Hudson River. Enter at 59th St, or 66th St and Riverside Boulevard Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy Summer on the Hudson is Riverside Park and West Harlem Piers Park’s annual outdoor arts and culture festival that takes place from 59th Street to 181st Street along the Hudson River, from May to October. Events include concerts, dance performances, movies under the stars, DJ dance parties, children’s shows, educational workshops, special day-long festivals, wellness activities, and more. All programs and events are free to the public and no registration is required unless specifically noted. Visit Partner Website

Vivian Appler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF [T]aking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts. -Donna Haraway [1] Imagination and Representation: Laurie Anderson and the Performance of Science Science, a liberal cultural domain, carries certain gendered expectations with it. [2] Science disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and engineering tend to be the most heavily laden with prejudices that continue to manifest in unequal hiring practices and disparities in wages within those fields. [3] In this special issue of JADT dedicated to “Scientific Research and Inquiry in American Theatre,” it is important to recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts, and that gender bias exists at all points of our social spectrum. This interdisciplinary perspective reveals that problems of inequality apply to the domain of science as well as other cultural and economic domains such as art, business, and education. Theatrical performance has long been a popular mode of social critique, and when science is understood as a part of culture, not apart from it, the potential arises for theatre’s critical pen to address science issues as social. Representation of women as contributors to knowledge production within the domain of science is an important part of the critical power of theatrical performance. The use of the theatre as a laboratory to extend and create new knowledge about science is an exceptional quality of Laurie Anderson’s performance of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in The End of the Moon (2004). In this article, I offer an explicitly feminist analysis of one high-profile piece of science-integrative performance art that is implicitly feminist in its deconstruction of science practices and transparent representation of science ideas within the community of a general theatre audience. This article contributes to a body of scholarship that is growing to match an increasing amount of science-integrative theater on the twenty-first century stage. Laurie Anderson’s performance art tends to be critiqued within a non-representational framework. Moon is no exception: she embodies her own experience as a NASA resident-artist while performing science within the experiential context of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). However, the unfamiliar and unavoidably removed nature of the science objects central to her story must be considered within a somewhat representational context. The representational quality of her female body stepping into the domain of science onstage is a critical step towards expanding liberal notions of who has access to physics and astronomy careers. Her artist’s body is equally significant because it blurs the cultural boundaries that separate science discourse and practice from other cultural realms. Anderson’s embodied intervention into the arts-science divide suggests that science should be a part of a holistic cultural conversation, one that is equally accessible to all curious participants. Interdisciplinarity is central to the realization of feminist scientific discourse. Twentieth century science writer C.P. Snow infamously observed a “two cultures” divide that has long defined interdisciplinary discourse as antagonistic. Snow’s philosophical intervention into this cultural schism often (although perhaps not intentionally) situates scientists as better culturally read than their literary and artistic peers. [4] Snow’s binary question of “arts versus science” oversimplifies a much larger issue of empathy among cultural domains which have unequal levels of inclusivity and access. Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective. Artists such as Laurie Anderson, Lauren Gunderson, and Critical Art Ensemble are informed by feminist theory even when their science-integrative performances explicitly address other socio-scientific issues. Overtly feminist analyses of such arts-science hybrid performances expose a cultural imbalance in access to fields such as astronomy and physics even as they suggest alternative pathways to these apparently elite jobs. Science-integrative performance can reveal practical and theoretical interdisciplinary commonalities among diverse cultural domains. NASA Art Program Curator Bertram Ulrich observes of Anderson’s process, “her mind works very much the same way a scientist’s would. They’re both reaching out to try to understand what’s unknown.” [5] Moon was created as an outcome of Anderson’s arts residency at NASA; in it she uses performance art to invite the average theatre-goer into the space agency’s relatively closed ranks that she, an artist, has tenuously joined. Anderson shares her research with her audience, whom she imagines to be “a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh.” [6] Randy Gener praises Anderson’s “faux-naif mutability, her techno-artist reputation and cross-wiring of art modes [that] are part of her idiosyncratic appeal—the reason she was selected by NASA’s Art Program.” [7] It may come as a surprise that NASA even has an art program, but artistic interpretation of the space agency has existed since its inception. The NASA Art Program was founded in 1962 as an attempt to make NASA’s enterprises more available to a popular American audience. The Program’s original director, James Webb, “wanted to convey to future generations the hope and sense of wonder that characterized the early days of space exploration.” [8] While many of the artists funded by NASA have been visual artists—alumni include Annie Leibovitz, Robert Rauschenberg, Terry Riley, and Norman Rockwell—Anderson was the first performance artist invited for a residency. [9] The selection of Anderson to participate in the Art Program reveals the agency’s desire for a more inclusive performance of science within traditional scientific spaces and an understanding that a theatrical performance artist is qualified to ease access to this elite domain in ways that other science outreach activities have been unable to do. Yet, Moon , the second in a trilogy of performance pieces that Anderson has devised in response to the post-9/11 cultural climate in the U.S., is not uncritical of NASA. [10] Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. She gives the audience glimpses into elements of the monolithic science institution through sparse verbal narration, lyrical soundscapes, and iconic images. Anderson fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. Her position as a woman artist engaging with science issues models a culture in which all citizens are empowered to participate in disciplines that have historically, and habitually, been restricted to professional scientists that physically resemble hegemonic figures of scientific authority: white, able-bodied, Euro-American men. Anderson’s Moon intervenes into this perennial limitation of American imagination with regard to inclusive practices in astronomy. Her storytelling is a proposal for citizen engagement with the process of exploratory and experiential astronomy as it was being practiced by NASA in the mid-2000s. Anderson’s combination of the human, the technological, and the animal—represented onstage physically, imagistically, and textually—constitutes a cyborg system intent on subverting culturally accepted notions of science that have come to be, she implies, accessible only to those agents performing almost exclusively within the secret domain of the military. [11] Anderson’s citizen-scientist performance opens with a pastiche of iconic twentieth century images that have come to define an American idea of the night sky. These images’ ubiquity in American pop culture contributes to an atmosphere of familiarity that enables an empathetic relationship between general audiences and science-oriented performance to transpire. The tableau is reminiscent of Clement Hurd’s illustration of the children’s book Goodnight Moon , by Margaret Wise Brown. Anderson is seated in the downstage right chair (where Wise’s mother bunny sits), surrounded by stars—tea candles—scattered across the stage, and the moon in its upstage left corner. Anderson’s moon is a fragment, indicative of the partial relationship that a human has with any piece of the universe. This synecdochal moon is a reproduction of the well-known photograph of Neil Armstrong’s lunar footprint. Taken in 1969 and projected onto a classroom-sized screen, Anderson’s deconstructed moon is nonetheless familiar to a general American audience in 2004. Anderson transduces NASA into a familiar object by isolating a sound that is a piece of a human: a voice. The tale begins with a description of a typical day in her studio in the company of her dog. The telephone rings. She describes the NASA representative on the other end of the line not as a person, but as a voice. “The voice said, ‘this is so and so and I’m from NASA and we’d like you to be the first artist-in-residence here.’ ‘You’re not from NASA,’ and I hung up the phone.” [12] Anderson continues to recount how the voice from NASA called back, and so her astronomy-integrative performance research began. Anderson’s choice to depict NASA as a voice renders the giant organization manageable. One voice can have a conversation with another voice on the telephone, but an individual might not as easily encounter a high-profile science institution such as NASA in its entirety. Feminism and The End of The Moon In this article, I draw primarily upon theories of the posthuman, performatics, and the cyborg in order to tease out the feminist aspects of Anderson’s performance of astronomy. N. Katherine Hayles’s [13] and Rosi Braidotti’s [14] approaches to posthuman theory help to articulate a line of thought that is at once socially aware and embodied. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” playfully addresses the shifting roles of feminism, informatics, and hybridity within the domain of science even as she argues against notions of cultural boundaries. Diana Taylor’s use of performatics is also rooted in a desire to transcend geo-political borders. Taylor suggests the term “performatic” rather than “performative” when critiquing embodied performance, “to denote the adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of performance… [b]ecause it is vital to signal the performatic, digital, and visual fields as separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism.” [15] Here, I extend Taylor’s term from its original “Americas” context and apply it to the analysis of performances that deliberately blend technics, politics, and informatics in order to disrupt liberal disciplinary boundaries. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, whose performance theory in Cyborg Theatre is deeply inspired by Braidotti’s cultural criticism, asserts that, “arguments for alternate subjectivities—nomadic, non-unitary, hybrid, cyborgean—permeate a theoretical technological landscape reflecting a need for radical rethinking about human positioning in the world.” [16] Anderson’s performatic intervention into the problem of inclusive science access alters the positionality of critique—from without—that is vital if change in a cultural imagination of science and scientists is to transpire. Anderson’s narrative is overtly cosmopolitan and science-driven, but feminist principles are implicit to the science-integrative framework that makes her global critique possible. A feminist approach to the performance of science might include the identification of the following qualities: Transparency. As hybrid technologies make more of the universe detectable to the human, so the social machine that makes these new technologies possible must maintain open and inclusive environments. Hybridity. Feminist performances of science might acknowledge the networks over which the knowledge-productive elements of socio-scientific labor are distributed. Alignment with post-colonialist and post-human “insights about the importance of the politics of location and careful grounding in geo-political terms.” [17] Cultural position in relationship to access and authority within the domain of science is directly related to the liberal, humanist social contract of the West that post-colonialist and post-human theories seek to dismantle. Performances of science that transparently enact hybrid and inclusive knowledge production practices are a step towards the realization of an equitable culture across multiple disciplinary domains. Analyses that elucidate these qualities go hand-in-hand with the realization of theory as practice. Transduction—the communication of information across different media—is caught up in the feminist analysis of the performance of science because of its potential to equalize access to disciplinary-specific information. Citing James Berkley’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, Hayles invokes the power of mimesis to communicate data while also providing a framework for the transfer of power from one performing agent to another through mediated interactions: “Mimesis, in [Berkley’s] account, becomes a transducer transferring the power to evoke wonder and terror from one site to another, while the sublime sets up the transfer by presupposing that a connection exists between environment and system, stimulus and affect, externalized object and internalized subject.” [18] In a broad theatrical context, the performance process begins with information found in the world and that information is transduced through the dynamic body of a performing agent. Mimetic transduction moves information from one medium (the page) to another (the stage, screen, or other performance venue) so that audiences might understand that information differently than they would were they to encounter the same information via a different medium. Embodied transduction that occurs in a science-oriented theatrical context can empower audience members to participate in science concepts even when liberal social norms deny the non-scientist easy access to the domain of science. Theatrical transduction can encourage an empathetic audience response and therefore often results in the creation of an array of culturally imaginative possibilities for audiences of science-oriented performance. Anderson’s position as both resident of NASA and science-outsider allows her to empathize with NASA scientists as well as with general audiences. She establishes herself as an artist who is qualified to comment on science issues through her performed encounter with contemporary astronomy. Her feminist intervention is implicit; she, a woman artist performing science, is also fluent in scientific discourse and therefore challenges astronomy’s habitually exclusive practices. The kind of science mastery that Anderson exhibits falls into a category that philosophers of science Kyle Powys Whyte and Robert P. Crease, citing H.M. Collins’s and R. Evans’s 2007 study, refer to as “interactional expertise,” in which a non-scientist achieves “knowledge of a scientific field that is sufficiently advanced to understand and communicate within the discourse yet unable to contribute to research.” [19] But Anderson’s work is research. She uses her “interactional” expert position to conduct performance research that endeavors, at least in part, to discover what may be missing from the domain-specific attempts to diversify the laboratory. Anderson’s passion for astronomy and cosmology is infectious, and her performance craft transduces not only science concepts but also her enthusiasm for the subject. Her knowledge of NASA’s scientific processes grew through her residency, but her status as an outsider remains and necessitates the empathetic bridge-building of her science-integrative performance. Such interdisciplinary connections are needed if NASA and other physics and astronomy laboratories are to achieve the inclusive atmosphere that they purport to desire. Yet Anderson’s stakes are higher than the interests of a single government agency. The empathetic bridges she builds are also necessary for our society to function as a whole. Anderson and the Hubble Space Telescope [20] Historically, many scientists who began as astronomy outsiders made their most remarkable discoveries, in part, because of the field’s non-normative worldview that restricted outsiders’ access to mainstream spaces in which astronomy research had been conducted. These scientists were forced to introduce a new perspective if they were to perform science at all. American women such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) and Vera Rubin (b. 1928) made remarkable discoveries about the cosmos that were directly connected to their limited access to traditional methods of astronomical research and experiment. Like the introduction of women and other socially excluded groups to the observatory , the addition of each new component—including machines—to the hybrid project of knowing outer-space holds the capacity to radically alter conventionally held notions of humanity’s place in the world. This was the case with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which produces breathtaking images of the universe that are now readily available in a variety of contemporary media. [21] Anderson’s performance renders the HST’s process at once transparent and curious. History, astronomy, and technology are necessarily entwined enterprises because of astronomy’s methodological reliance upon the reference to and manipulation of many different visual representations of individual astronomical objects captured over long periods of time. [22] HST images add to an archive of telescopically transduced celestial imagery that has been accumulating around the globe for centuries. HST images have become a popular way for astronomers and curious amateurs to get an idea of the appearance and composition of objects in outer-space. In Moon, Anderson speaks for the non-expert as she performs her curiosity about the way that HST engineers manipulate images of celestial objects. She explores the knowledge-generative labor performed by the HST (and its team of astronomers, technicians, and astronauts) with her audience. Her performance of HST image transduction systems creates a metaenvironmental space in which spectators participate in NASA’s transductive processes. HST images are developed through networked transduction systems in a cyborgean enterprise designed to bring previously undetectable information about deep space objects into the optical spectrum. [23] Anderson illuminates this esoteric process for her audience, but she also indicates that the process is imperfect in its ability to align perception of distant objects with the spectral truth of those objects. In astrophotography, the distant celestial body may really exist, but it is also a product of the technology that detects it, the telescopic camera that captures previously unknowable information, and a transductive process that involves choices made by intentional human agents. [24] The original object—the Andromeda Galaxy, a mountain on the moon, the Great Nebula of Orion—disappears even as it is created for observation by a general, earthbound audience, and this presents a problem for Anderson. She voices a discrepancy between how celestial objects exist in their original environments and how those objects are represented to consumer-audiences of science media. Anderson brings her critique of technologically mediated images back to the human body: “We’re always fixing up photographs,” she remarks as she compares the work of HST engineers to photoshopping a “miserable family Christmas” photo. [25] “One of the things that really bothers me about photography,” she continues, “is that you never know how hot it is in the photograph.” [26] Anderson’s problem with photoshopped family pictures analogically grounds her critique of heavily mediatized HST images. Both types of images are fragmented, removed from first-hand experience, and therefore indicative of the posthuman condition necessary to the performance of astronomy. Mary Thomas Crane points out in her examination of early modern science that much of the experience of the laboratory (and, by extension, the observatory) counters “basic sensorimotor experience.” [27] Anderson describes her frustration with astrophotography’s incapacity to accurately convey the environment of a star or a galaxy in a two-dimensional image. HST pictures, she argues, are simply archives of data that document conditions that remain forever outside the experiential grasp of the human observer. A family photograph’s observer cannot distinguish the difference between the photographic subject’s embodied experience and the record of that experience. [28] The photograph is an index of original environmental conditions; the colors, texture, and size of the sweater, and who was wearing it are indicated by the photograph, but the embodied experience of wearing the sweater, as well as the circumstances surrounding the photographic event, is a much trickier experience to share with an observing agent across distances of time and space. For consumers of HST media images, this translates to an inability to sense data that does not normally appear on the human visual spectrum, such as ultra-violet rays and x-rays. Meanwhile, these inexact documents become iconic in their representation of events in cultural memory. Colorization is one way that HST engineers attempt to transduce spectrally invisible information collected by the HST into images that are meaningful for popular audiences and astronomy experts alike. Art historian Shana Cooperstein explains that colorization “encourages people to imagine links between photography and vision, as well as between ‘truth’ and visional perception.” [29] Elizabeth A. Kessler finds that ascriptions of authenticity and authority to colorized HST images depends “on a definition of truth that rests on human perception; but color carries a greater range of meanings. . . . [C]olor can be used to label, to measure, to represent or imitate reality, or to enliven or decorate. Furthermore, it incorporates both objective and subjective elements.” [30] Kessler describes the process of colorization as one that depends upon the variability of human perception as well as a number of possible choices that might be made by individual imagists working across history. Kessler discusses “false color” as “hues” that need not have any relationship to the visual appearance of the phenomena or the wavelengths of light registered by the instrument. Instead, different colors might indicate another dimension of the data….In addition to what the color indicates, false color has come to describe a particular color palette—flat, garish hues that do not resemble natural phenomena in our world.[31] A colorized image emotionally engages a general audience because of that audience’s memory of the familiar icon and subjective associations with the colors in the image. The process is creative in that some personal choice is involved on the part of the HST engineer, but these choices are constrained due to the indexical ends of the photography experiment. Such images are breathtaking, but Anderson is unsatisfied because of the HST’s inability to transduce celestial objects in their complete spectral splendor. She describes an encounter with some of the scientists who work on HST transduction. She performs the kind of expectation that the woman in “Row K” with a casual interest in science might share by asking NASA scientists, “Could you have used a whole different color range…. How did you arrive at these colors?” [32] By “these colors” she means pinks and blues instead of her suggested alternatives of brown and gray. The answer the scientists offer is simple: “We thought people would like them.” [33] She pauses as the audience laughs at the arbitrariness of human choice involved in the transduction of information that comes to us via the space telescope, is interpreted by human engineers who manipulate that data, and manifests in journalistic media images detectable on the visual spectrum. Anderson’s tone waxes lyrical and her text shifts back to the sublime as she muses, “It looks like a painting of heaven.” [34] Colorized HST photographs affect science media viewers in a manner similar to that of acting technique with regard to audiences of realist theatre: both are capable of engendering simultaneous states of curiosity and familiarity on the part of the spectator towards the observational object. Creators of HST outreach images must weigh factors of emotional connectivity, scientific objectivity, and personal memory in the subjunctive work of representing truthful information while also stimulating popular imagination towards distant celestial phenomena. Much like the unnatural techniques that actors deploy to convey a sense of realism in representational theatrical genres, HST astronomers isolate wavelengths that are not on the visible spectrum and ascribe an unrealistic color to them. The effect is a fantastic image that the unaided human eye could never see, but that nevertheless registers as realistic and familiar in the imagination of the observer. Neither realist acting techniques nor HST image manipulation replicate identical copies of the original object of observation, be it a fictional character or a distant star. In theatrical and photographic forms, a sense of familiarity with a scenario or an image is essential for spectators to empathetically engage with the representation of a novel object. Ultimately, it is the creative agency of the individual scientist that determines how distant astronomical events appear to a general public. The subjective memory of the scientist affects the color choices made, even when those color choices don’t represent the “true” color that the human eye would see. Cognitive theatre scholar Amy Cook claims, “[t]o represent the previously invisible, to perform the seemingly impossible, is vitally important to creating the visible and the possible.” [35] Such imagination is necessary each time astronomers reinvent a familiar celestial object with a new technology. In a similar way, Anderson reinvents the domain of astronomy through her critique of HST. Astrophotography distorts the truth while representing reality; it encourages audiences to learn something new about celestial objects through the process of composite imaging. [36] A composite photographic image is created by layering several negatives and thereby blending information of each to create a single image that represents the idea of a photographic object but does not reproduce visual information in a one-to-one manner. HST images are not only colorized, but composite, consisting of layers of captured spectra that have each been assigned colors representative of different aspects of the object’s qualia. Through HST composite, colorized imaging, astronomers create new pictures of familiar objects that index more information than ever before, but that continue to resemble the iconic images captured by earlier astronomers. Visual reference to earlier astronomical icons encourages non-scientist viewers of these images to access any memory they may have about what they already know of these objects, and thus to cognitively build upon previous memories in a continuous development of learning about the objects in question. In Anderson’s composite performance of NASA, she doesn’t work simply with color, but she blends cultural memories and impressions of NASA in order to elicit a simultaneously curious and critical audience response. While her inclusion of Armstrong’s footprint brings to mind a familiar moment in the history of science, it also conjures the Cold War context surrounding the space race. As discussed above, her female artist’s body might trigger a number of associations from different audience members. For those who work within the science industry, Anderson’s performance might signal the disciplinary exclusion of certain social groups from the field. Other audience members who remember Anderson’s previous performances as works of cultural critique may expect an unsubtle criticism of NASA’s affiliations with the military. Still others who have come to expect a spectacular array of high-tech gadgetry from a Laurie Anderson production might be disappointed by the apparently simple stage technology in a piece that deals with technics that are off-limits to the average American citizen. [37] In Moon , Anderson’s trademark electric violin solos create time and space for viewers to process her performatic transduction of NASA as it mingles with subjective associations among the audience. Defying Gravity (And Other Socio-Scientific Forces) In the midst of the multi-layered web of cultural memories that individual audience members experience when faced with the iconography embedded in Moon , Anderson deconstructs NASA even as she composes it. She questions whose bodies have the authority to occupy the subject position in a national conversation about science through her cyborgean relationship to culturally familiar objects that are commonly associated with Americans in space. Parker-Starbuck, in her discussion of the fragmentation of multimedia performance, states, “[a]bject and object bodies are both bodies at a distance, bodies outside of our ‘selves.’ These bodies triangulate around the ‘subject’ as those who are refused, rejected, desired, critiqued, or negotiated with. These are the bodies that reiterate who we think we are and where we fit in the world.” [38] On Anderson’s stage, Neil Armstrong’s body, invisible save for his footprint projected on the small screen, is at once abject and object. Anderson is the subject performing astronomy “in play with” the abjected object of the first man on the moon. [39] The physical and technological space created on her cyborg stage makes room not only for her, but for the witnesses to this feminist comment on representation and authority in the domain of astronomy, to join the cultural conversation. Further altering the triangular relationship she has established among herself as subject, audience as participatory witness, and abjected icons of American space exploration, Anderson playfully manipulates simple video technology in order to defy notions of a familiar physics concept: gravity. Her challenge to physics provokes audience members to increase their engagement with socio-scientific government actions. Towards this end, she performs a spacewalk that introduces NASA’s innovative space suits as war machines. In this sequence, Anderson uses a live-feed video camera to create a performance of weightlessness. She makes her illusory technics transparent to her audience by exposing her stagecraft even as she performs it, letting spectators in on the joke. “Our moon is just the moon,” she muses as she switches the camera on and focuses it toward herself, the audience visible within the camera’s frame. [40] The image of Armstrong’s historic footprint on the upstage left screen is replaced with a live projection stream from Anderson’s camera; now she occupies both subject and object positions on her cyborg stage. She holds the camera upside-down so that her projected image appears to be floating on the space of the stage, also upside-down, with a stage light shining like a sun behind her disembodied head, which bobs gently in accord with the movement of her live body. The camera captures some of the tea candle stars on the stage, and in an instant doubles the amount of “space” represented through the handheld projection device. Through this fragmented stage presence, Anderson raises the issue of gravity, verbally reflects on the experience of seeing old photographs of astronauts “suspended, floating in space” during her residency at NASA, and imagines what it must be like to walk on the moon. [41] As she begins to perform her spacewalk, Anderson describes the technology built into NASA’s new spacesuits that will, according to Anderson, “increase your strength, say, forty times.” [42] The suits contain all kinds of “liquids” and “entry points for medicine.” [43] Just as the audience starts to dream about space suits capable of transforming the human into the superhuman (posthuman?), she disrupts the audience’s reverie with news about the grim reality of war times. The super-suit project’s contract has been transferred from NASA to a “new joint team” between MIT and the U.S. Army. [44] The suits will not be worn by astronauts but will be sent “out into the desert. Out into the world.” [45] Like the touched-up family portrait and HST photographs, no matter how much a person learns about a thing—a physical force, a moon, a space agency—there is always something that remains outside the realm of immediate experience. What remains outside the grasp of the everyday American, Anderson suggests, is the end to which NASA puts its ingenious inventions. Her criticism resonates with Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that “how bodies are modified and by whom are the ethical concerns that surround what already is, and will continue to shape both humans and non-humans alike.” [46] Parker-Starbuck’s theatrical cyborg ethic echoes Haraway’s late twentieth century cyborg provocation: “Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups?” [47] Anderson’s performatics model an alternative way of doing science—in public—that resists traditional power structures hidden within the practice of space exploration. While the spacesuits that Anderson describes resemble more conventional popular imaginations of the cyborg in their immediate melding of human body with technology, Anderson’s “reliance on corporeal-technological relationship” in performance is also cyborg in its technics and its critique. [48] She weaves her criticism into the fabric of transparent video-play about gravity, made strange within the space of the theatre. She proclaims, “Gravity is an illusion, a trick of the eye, not a force.” [49] In the metaenvironment of Anderson’s science-integrated theatre, imagination and illusion enable non-astronaut humans to participate in this rare aspect of the human experience and critique the politics within the institution that makes such experiences possible for a select few Americans. Saying “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” [50] she segues into a musical interlude that provides the reflective space for her audience to ponder the experience of weightlessness and the role of the individual in the socio-technological tangle of post-9/11 culture. She raises her electric violin and now the image on the screen takes the perspective of the bow as it meets the instrument’s strings. The illusion of space persists as the audience is presented with the live Anderson playing her violin beside the projected, more intimate, close-up image of her face. Quantum Anderson twins are separated by the space of the stage and connected by the electromagnetic force that powers her performance technologies, all in support of the artist’s efforts to transduce the hidden nature of NASA for the general audience assembled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Anderson’s performatics encourage her audiences to engage with the domain of science in order to stay informed and active in a culture that would apply detection-related technologies developed in the domain of science to the art of global warfare. She presents herself as a science outsider, shares her socio-political performance response in an empathetic manner, and thus multiplies the number of non-scientists participant to the process of astronomy in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, Moon can seem to be internally contradictory—should the non-scientist viewer love NASA or fear it? Seen as parts of a cultural whole, the balance between science and art, fear and wonder, becomes evident. This ability to isolate individual components in order to realize a whole system is integral to Anderson’s posthuman stage presence. Her doubled image—on the stage as well as on the projection screen—is an embodied metaphor for the ways that humans can hold contradictory opinions about one subject. She raises the social stases of war and peace as poignant examples for 2005. “Yes,” she says, “you can keep two things in mind.…[W]e can hold both at once without dropping.” [51] The show closes with a monologue in which Anderson imagines the end of time with a mixture of theories of quantum physics, dream sequences, and, of course, the haunting musical accompaniment of her electric violin. She offers a parting comment on the hybrid nature of human cognition at the dawn of the quantum age: “Sometimes, I think I can smell light,” a suspicion that resonates with her earlier human frustration with the inadequacy of transductive technologies to replicate original conditions of deep-space phenomena. [52] Here, she suggests that such previously undetectable information is accessible by means of our extended and imaginative posthuman state. Access to the previously inaccessible becomes a matter of a change in critical, embodied, and disciplinary perspectives. Feminist, posthuman, and cyborg criticisms of the domain of science in the space of the theatre model possibilities for non-traditional bodies to participate in interdisciplinary actions and conversations having to do with science. The representation of women performing scientist roles in performance is a critical move towards a culture that might imagine, accept, allow, and encourage the female body as normative for the task of practicing physics and astronomy. Anderson is transparent in her own creative process that also renders NASA a bit less opaque for non-scientists. Her presence as a woman onstage, performing science from the perspective of an artist, offers an empathetic bridge for other curious science-outsiders to critically participate in the experience of astronomy. References [1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 181. [2] This article was written, in part, during a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in 2015. Thanks also to the New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collections for granting me access to review the archival footage of The End of the Moon . [3] The 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) found that “the proportion of [science and engineering] degrees awarded to women has risen since 1993. The proportion of women is lowest in engineering, computer sciences, and physics.” National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015 , accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15311/digest/ . There is much action that is currently being performed within astronomy in particular to emend these disparities. Blogs such as Women in Astronomy and Astronomy in Color are evidence of actions performed by women and racial minorities who work within the discipline of astronomy towards the end of equalizing access to astronomy. Women in Astronomy , accessed 14 November 2015, womeninastronomy.blogspot.com. Astronomy in Color , accessed 14 November 2015, astronomyincolor.blogspot.com. [4] “They [literary intellectuals] still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture,’ as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all.” C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 14. [5] Ulrich in Grossnov, Michael Joseph, “Inviting the Cosmos Onto the Stage,” The New York Times, 11 November 2004, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [6] Anderson in Solomon, Deborah, “Post-Lunarism,” The New York Times Magazine , 30 January 2005, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [7] Gener, Randy, “Fly her to the moon: what’s art got to do with NASA? Laurie Anderson listens to the cosmic pulse,” American Theatre 22, no. 3 (2005): 26+, accessed 2 December 2014, http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA130570546&v=2.1&u=upitt_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=1d8012ba9f173f1b83d9bc51f4d0ad28 . [8] NASA ArtSpace , accessed 6 December 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/connect/artspace/ . [9] The Smithsonian recently curated an exhibit dedicated to the NASA Art Program’s history, documented in the book, NASA/ART—50 Years of Exploration . Selections from it may be seen on NASA’s website, https://www.nasa.gov . [10] Other pieces of the trilogy include Happiness (2001) and Dirtday! (2012). [11] Anderson has a history of connecting the dots between the domains of science, technology, and the military. Friedrich Kittler points out that she adapts the military technology of the vocoder for her representation of the voice of a pilot announcing a crash landing in the song, “From the Air” on the record Big Science (1982), also featured in the live performance, United States (1983). Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: the Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 21, no 1 (2012): 110, accessed 19 October 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/491050 . [12] Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon (New York: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theatre, February 27, 2005), videocassette, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Research Collections, Theatre on Film and Tape. [13] N. Katherine Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no.3 (2004), accessed 11 May 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247415 . [14] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). [15] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. [16] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14. [17] Braidotti, The Posthuman , 39. [18] Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” 313. [19] Kyle Powys White and Robert P. Crease , “Trust, Expertise, and the Philosophy of Science,” Synthese 177, no. 3 (December 2010), 411-25, accessed 26 July 2015, 417. [20] The HST is a 2.4m-wide reflective telescope that is situated three-hundred and eighty-one miles above the Earth’s surface. On 24 April 1990 it was carried in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Discovery and placed into orbit. Its “improved wavelength coverage,” will come to bear on this article’s examination of the HST role in detecting invisible spectra in the accessible performance of astronomy as it appears in The End of the Moon. Robert W Smith, “Introduction: The Power of an Idea,” Hubble’s Legacy: Reflections by Those Who Dreamed It, Built It, and Observed the Universe with It , ed. Roger D. Launius and David H. DeVorkin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 3. [21] HST has its own website that is operated by NASA. Hubblesite , accessed 19 October 2015, http://hubblesite.org . [22] Repeated observations and visual documentations of celestial objects like stars and galaxies allow astronomers to track changes in an object’s location and appearance over time and therefore learn about the object’s distance, heat, and movement. [23] The visual spectrum refers to the small portion of the energy, emitted by all objects to some degree, detectable to the human eye. [24] In a discussion of mid-late nineteenth century photographs that contain extra-visual data, art historian Josh Ellenbogen states, “[p]hotography does not reproduce data in such images, but instead it produces them.” Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Maray (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 6. [25] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [26] Ibid . [27] Mary Thomas Crane, “Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies , ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 107. [28] The relationship of experience to the documentation of experience is a recurrent trope in Anderson’s lifelong explorations of the connections that exist between science, culture, and the military: “Stand by. This is the time. And this is the record of the time.” Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” in RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 96. [29] Cooperstein’s case study is of the imagistic history of the Orion Nebula in which she compares nineteenth century astrophotography and the photography techniques used by turn-of-the-millennium astronomers. Shana Cooperstein, “Imagery and Astronomy: Visual Antecedents Informing Non-Reproductive Depictions of the Orion Nebula,” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (2014), 133, accessed 27 May 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/len/summary/v047/47.2.cooperstein.html . [30] Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 154. [31] Ibid., 157. [32] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] Amy Cook, “If: Lear’s Feather and the Staging of Science,” The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive ,” ed. Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59. [36] Ellenbogen defines the composite image as “a synthesis of data—a condensed, abbreviative representation of the kinds of information one might otherwise derive from a binomial curve, or better, a series of binomial curves that measured the particular features a given composite shows” (Ellenbogen, 9) . [37] Most reviews remark upon the pared-down technology of Moon , when compared to the technological complexity of her earlier work. [38] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 95. [39] Ibid. [40] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 194. [47] Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women , 169. [48] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 101. [49] Ibid. Gravity is (probably) a force, but one that physicists are still seeking to adequately explain. See Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (HarperCollins ebooks, 2009). [50] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [51] Ibid. [52] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Vivian Appler is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. A former Fulbright fellow, her current research focus is on feminist performances of science. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. 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Iris Smith Fischer Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer By Published on June 2, 2016 Download Article as PDF This special issue, sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society, explores forms of research and inquiry offered by theatre and performance in the age of STEM—that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [1] The issue also presents developments in the scientific fields of information technology, biology, and medicine that employ techniques and approaches drawn from theatre practices. The issue poses a number of questions: What challenges and opportunities does this historical moment present for theatre to assert its relevance and necessity? How does theatre engage in alternate forms of inquiry? How does scholarship aid theatre, both by bringing theatre’s methods of inquiry into view or engaging in them itself? Can alternate forms of inquiry close the gap between practice and analysis in theatre, and counter claims that research occurs only in STEM disciplines? How can theatre offer an ethical perspective on STEM research, which claims to be value free? These are humanists’ questions, fueled by recognition that the arts themselves involve forms of research and inquiry, and that the concept of scientific objectivity, with its concomitant rejection of subjectivity, should be reexamined. Scientists, on the other hand, want to know how theatre and performance techniques can aid them in their research and teaching, or in the dissemination of results to colleagues, administrators, and the general public. For many scientists, valuable research is objective and ideology-free, separate from applications of already-produced knowledge, and clearly distinct from the creation of plays, the activities of performance artists, or the types of analysis and evaluation involved in theatre history or dramatic criticism. Yet some scientists question the exclusion of subjectivity, ideology, or empathy from STEM research and inquiry. These inquirers ask how the STEM disciplines can incorporate methods of learning borrowed from the humanities and arts, be opened more fully to participation by women, minorities, and the disabled, and teach students in the STEM disciplines to recognize, value, and use forms of embodied knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the term research is not proprietary to the STEM disciplines, defining it as “systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject.” Yet the OED also recognizes later disciplinary and institutional usages: “original critical or scientific investigation carried out under the auspices of an academic or other institution.” In a similarly broad fashion, the OED defines the term inquiry as “the action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something,” and offers “search, research, investigation, examination” as related terms. [2] Theatre and performance inquire and investigate, often proceeding carefully and methodically, but offering knowledge through acts, processes, and conceptual lenses such as the mimetic, the epic, the postdramatic. These types of knowledge are often not recognized as knowledge of an objective world. The current cultural dominance of the STEM disciplines is driven both by economic exigencies and underlying ideological assumptions about what constitutes valuable research and inquiry. Identifying performance as research can be seen as a response by artists and scholars to institutional, political, and economic pressures, and as a corollary effort to break out of academic silos and loosen funding restrictions. Performance approached as research allows inquirers to recognize commonalities among disciplines and share their methodologies and techniques. This turn reflects in twenty-first-century fashion the moment in the late nineteenth century when higher education was being organized in institutions but disciplinarity had not yet taken on its more rigid twentieth-century forms. Inquiry in science was not so isolated from inquiry in philosophy or literary history. One thinks of the American pragmatists—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, and others—who sought to keep in view the connections between scientific advances and humanistic inquiry. A similar desire has emerged recently in many fields, among them complexity science, biosemiotics, and epigenetics, which encourage awareness of the role of embodied knowledges in research. In this regard Wendy Wheeler usefully distinguishes between conceptual, experiential, and tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge, or “creaturely skillful phenomenological knowledge,” is essential to human flourishing and artistic creativity but incapable of formulation in propositional language. Yet conceptual knowledge or “abstract intellectual knowledge that ” cannot by itself account for experiential knowledge or “phenomenological embodied knowledge how ,” i.e., readable acts created “in engagement with the world and other embodied creatures.” Biosemiotic methods of inquiry, Wheeler argues, allow access to necessary tacit knowledge through the reading of such acts. While applicable to many realms of life, human and otherwise, she notes, “Skillful being in cultural complex totalities is a specifically human skillful being in the world. Actions (especially, perhaps, political actions) driven mainly by abstract thinking, which forget embodied experience, local knowledge, and skillfulness, are always, almost by definition, dangerous.” [3] Research and inquiry should engage the phenomenological how along with the conceptual that . In an effort to claim the term research for performance practices, some have questioned the tendency in the arts to distinguish between practice and analysis, as Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter point out: While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR) and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.[4] The movement known as Practice as Research (PaR) first developed in the United Kingdom, Riley and Hunter note, in response to government assessment tools introduced in the early 1990s to apportion funding based on departments’ research productivity. While humanities scholarship—as opposed to arts creation—more readily fits existing definitions of conceptual knowledge production (in the form of scholarly articles and monographs), arts departments in the U.K. faced the challenge of developing criteria for assessing creative activity as research, a process begun later at U.S. universities, and still ongoing. [5] Today embodied knowledges are being widely discussed at conferences and in publication. In their recent call for a working group on “Transfusions and Transductions: Science and Performance as Permeable Disciplines,” Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti argue, “As with the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, the theatre serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, a place to penetrate barriers and test innovative ideas, approaches, and practices.” [6] Also promising in closing the practice/analysis divide is the concept of situated knowledge, drawn in part from black feminist thought and summarized here by Lynette Hunter: Unlike scientific knowledge in which the effect of the observer is often a ‘problem’ and many experiments are devised in order to minimize it, in situated knowledge the whole point is that the observer is engaged. It is only through their engagement that knowledge can be manifested, and the observer is both the practitioner who makes things and the audience or respondent.[7] Calling such current developments “a moment of discovery and transition” in the long history of research in performance, Arthur Sabatini emphasizes that the training of performers is built upon considerable research into the capacities of the human body and mind. Use of the voice, breathing, manual dexterity, movement techniques, directing or choreographing for performance are all outcomes from highly proscribed and ever-evolving systems that have been researched, repeatedly tested, and advanced by practitioners worldwide.[8] Institutional pressures and burgeoning terminology may actually present opportunities to explore and document the need for embodied and situated knowledges that cross the institutional divide between arts and humanities on the one hand, and STEM disciplines on the other. Invested in both creativity and discovery, initiatives are coming from all sides to bridge that gap in terms of how research is conducted, students are trained, and knowledge is disseminated. * The articles that follow argue for the value of embodied knowledges from the nine contributors’ rich and varied backgrounds in theatre history, playwriting, both arts and science education (including science museum education), physics, molecular biology, medicine, engineering, information science and technology, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, acting, directing, and—not least—stand-up comedy. Each perspective contributes in its own way to this special issue. Bradley Stephenson, in “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls ,” approaches embodied knowledges offered by theatre in terms of disability studies, epic theatre, and recent theories of animacy. Building on Mel Chen’s concept of animacy as “the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present,” Stephenson argues that, in Gregory’s re-telling of the historical events involving young female workers poisoned by their interactions with radium-laced paint, “radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.” Citing disability theory as an ally of performance and theatre studies, Stephenson explores the interactions of biological life with radioactive half-life in order to rewrite our medical understanding of radium’s effects on the body as a complex of transcorporeal agencies. Vivian Appler approaches science—in this case physics, astronomy, and engineering—as “a liberal cultural domain,” a formulation that recognizes the STEM disciplines’ roots in liberal humanism. “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon ” argues that scientists and artists alike have a social responsibility to “recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts.” Appler calls for a “holistic cultural conversation” to bridge what C. P. Snow once termed ‘the two cultures divide’: “Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective.” Appler focuses on Laurie Anderson’s arts residency at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the resulting 2004 performance piece The End of the Moon : Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. . . . [She] fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. By means of transduction or “communication of information across different media,” Appler continues Anderson’s intervention, revealing in the performance a “cyborg system” that invites discussion of gender assumptions active both within science and outside of it. By documenting a woman performance artist embodying representations of gendered scientific research, Appler’s article shares concerns expressed by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Suzanne Trauth about the barriers women encounter in thinking of themselves as researchers and gaining access to the sciences. Suzanne Trauth’s play script iDream , based on Eileen Trauth’s research and documented by Karen Keifer-Boyd, is designed to “raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who [can] participate in the STEM field of IT [information technology].” The authors of “ iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” have found that the scientific professions have difficulty creating gender balance. Just as scholarly publications on information technology are not written in language accessible for the general public, “the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation.” The authors turn instead to girls, their families, and their teachers, to raise awareness of the cultural narratives at work. Transforming Eileen Trauth’s research findings into theatrical scenarios, the authors seek to “stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields.” iDream employs several story lines to engage audiences during staged readings and the discussions that follow. In a work process resembling what Appler terms “interactional expertise,” albeit not in a full production or performance art but rather in a script-centered experience, the authors created an exploration of “science opportunities . . . and barriers . . . [focusing] not so much on overt barriers [but] rather the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams.” Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio also investigate theatre’s applications in the interaction between STEM researchers and the general public. Rather than raising awareness of constraining social narratives, the authors report on their use of Viola Spolin’s improvisation techniques to prepare undergraduate life science students to communicate complex concepts to non-experts. Duckert and De Stasio developed a required capstone course to rehearse students in performance skills they need as professionals and public intellectuals, i.e., to make their discoveries “accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows.” Moreover, We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues the audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and . . . to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work [in order] to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. Often initially resistant to engaging in theatrical improvisation, students find that even minimal awareness of performance circumstances improves their ability to communicate. While this would not surprise theatre majors, the incorporation of performance skills into a life sciences curriculum appears to leave life science majors with a new respect for the role that movement, gesture, and facial expression play in communication. The authors also note that, as teachers, they became more aware of public speaking’s embodied character, as well as physiological and neurological elements such as the linkage between mimicry (empathetic physical behaviors) and the action of mirror neurons in fostering an audience’s receptivity. Could performance techniques become part of the life sciences’ methods of disseminating discoveries? Duckert and De Stasio’s capstone course, embedded in their department’s curriculum, suggests that improvisational performance could assist STEM researchers in communicating more effectively with administrators, legislators, and the general public. This possibility also appears in “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters,” in which George Pate and Libby Ricardo address the use of simulated patients in training medical students for clinical encounters. A relatively recent development, simulated patients—non-actors who volunteer their participation—do not learn a traditional standardized script but are given their characters’ medical and personal histories and also acting guidelines for behaving as their characters would in real-life consultations with their doctors. As the authors note, such “high fidelity” encounters rehearse the performance of empathetic responses to improvised, often unpredictable patient behaviors. The authors’ use of simulated patients follows “recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measurable ways.” In this regard, Pate and Ricardo’s project resembles that of Duckert and De Stasio, both in regard to the medical students’ initial reluctance to role-play and in the authors’ successful use of workshop exercises to integrate clinical skills with medical knowledge. Drawing a parallel to literary techniques of storytelling, Pate and Ricardo found that such improvisational exercises, like fictional narratives, helpfully “suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them. . . . [Further,] improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can.” Of all the activity going on in performance as research and research-informed theatre, this special issue presents only a sampling. Many other projects incorporating theatre and performance offer embodied and situated knowledges that can inform scientific research, suggest alternate forms of inquiry, and allow inquirers in the age of STEM to communicate effectively as public intellectuals. References [1] It has been a pleasure to work with JADT editors James Wilson and Naomi Stubbs, and managing editor James Armstrong. I extend my appreciation to them and also to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the opportunity to edit this special issue. My special thanks go to Cheryl Black, ATDS President, and the members of the special issue publications committee, ATDS members all, who both served as readers and provided me with excellent advice. [2] “Research,” “Inquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000-). http://www2.lib.ku.edu/login?url=http://www.oed.com . [3] Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 49. [4] Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, “Introduction,” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xv. [5] Ibid, xvii. Riley and Hunter distinguish among the relevant terms: “The acronym ‘PaR’ in the United Kingdom refers to ‘practice as research’ in its most inclusive sense to embrace music practices, the visual arts, dance, and theatre [while] ‘PbR’ refers to ‘practice-based research’ with a wider reach across the arts and sciences. . . . PbR is also well-established in the United Kingdom and Europe, and contributes to many areas, from the medical sciences to spectatorship studies. PbR emerges from different academic areas, but seems to have particular usage in the sciences. . . . In the United States, especially in the fields of performance and theatre studies, the acronym PAR is common shorthand for ‘performance as research’.” [6] E-mail communication from Meredith Conti, 23 May 2016. [7] Lynette Hunter, “Situated Knowledge,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 151. [8] Arthur Sabatini, “Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance and the Arts,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 120, 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) Iris Smith Fischer is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches modern drama, semiotics, literary and dramatic theory, and avant-garde performance. From 2007-2010 she served as editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her publications include Mabou Mines: Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (author, University of Michigan Press, 2011); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, by Thomas A. Sebeok (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Her current book project, "Charles Peirce and the Role of Aesthetic Expression in 19th-Century U.S. Semiotics," examines the intertwined histories of theatre (Delsartist approaches to actor training and public speaking) and the still-emerging field of science-based semiotics. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cailyn Sales Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Cailyn Sales By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida , by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Karen Jaime’s love letter to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a primarily spoken word venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moves the reader toward an aesthetic practice aside from, but also part of, the Nuyorican identity marker. She marks the café’s history extensively in a single passionate breath, hopping from moment to movement in a stunning analysis of Loisaida, the “Spanglish version of ‘Lower East Side’ by the neighborhood’s then [the 1970s] predominantly Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking residents,” (14) as a physical, mental, and cognitive space of bicultural existence. Thus, she suggests a lowercase n for a ‘nuyorican aesthetic’ that both subscribes to the fundamentals of providing critical and cultural space for Puerto Ricans living in New York, as intended in its founding, yet also expands the framework to include other pejorative subjects interacting within that metaphoric and literal space. By keeping the word “Nuyorican” within the named aesthetic modality and lowercasing the n , Jaime signifies the expansiveness she sets out to express while also preserving respect for the primary function of the term as it relates to and ignited the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s beginnings. The combination of acknowledging Nuyorican as a specific ethnic identity marker —and former pejorative—while simultaneously exploring the aesthetic’s capabilities to diversify and hold more stories from marginalized communities is emblematic of the entire book. Jaime’s Introduction proposes a nuyorican aesthetic subsumed by “recombination, positionality, gesturality, and orality,” (5) as formed by queer and trans artists who have moved through the Cafe’s history not unnoticed but, rather, buried in the sea of masculinist heteronormative chronicles. It seems pertinent to acknowledge that though this book is introduced as a means of restoring a largely concealed queer history, Jaime is regularly visiting the intersection between racial and sexual identities as a celebration of the Café’s queer artists of color’s aesthetic and artistic journeys. The argument laid out in the introduction is further developed by the book’s following four chapters, which serve as case studies of Jaime’s vision of nuyorican aesthetics. Through a focus on four specific sites of racialized queer and/or trans artists who have lived and breathed the space, Jaime poses how this Nuyorican aesthetic practice supports the Café’s founding principles without reducing the place to a specific ethnic narrative. Persuasively , the book analyzes the founding and obscured queer history of the Nuyorican Poets Café, challenging scholarship that frames the Cafe’s history in a purely heteropatriarchal context. In this, Jaime joins, or rather interjects into, the lively debate between Pedro Pietri and Bob Holman. Yet as she criticizes their debate, she claims that her scholarship “underscores the theorizations, the poetic formulations, the call-and-response interactions, and the histories and argumentation encoded in Nuyorican and nuyorican aesthetics.” (5) Oddly, she neglects to outline that debate. Perhaps she imagines a target audience of specialists who already know the context of their debate, which readers can surmise. Perhaps, the larger stakes she challenges relate to semantics more than historiography. One concept driving her argument of nuyorican aesthetics emphasizes recodification, which reinforces the survival technique of minoritized communities who reclaim terms that intend to demean and further marginalize them. Historically, she explains, the term “Nuyorican” was once used to condemn New Yorkans of Puerto Rican descent for their use of Spanglish, but co-founders Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero re-coded it with the Café to evoke shared identity. Recodification is further expressed, and extended in chapter two’s Regie Cabico, expressed by the way he “camps up his racialized ethnicity and his Filipinoness” (72) and in chapter four’s Ellison Glenn via their stage name and persona of “Black Cracker.” Anyone who rejects the efficacy of minoritized subjects reclaiming slurs or words that carry belittling historical connotations may doubt this crucial element of the nuyorican aesthetics Jaime analyzes. Nonetheless, most readers will laugh and recognize the activism of Ellison Glenn as Black Cracker performing their audacious poem about the homophobic and classist policies of the George W. Bush administration. Jaime’s metaphorical imagery in each chapter effectively paints the physical space and atmosphere of the Nuyorican Poets Café, making this book riveting to read. We not only feel like we are in the room but also that we are initiated into the deep connection and love to/of the space that Jaime shares. Despite this pleasurable non-linear narrative—which proudly displays a queeronology (a ‘not straight’ timeline) to intentionally center performance experience and marginalized aesthetics—the organization of this book somewhat obscures the thesis. Ultimately, each separate chapter operates as a love letter to its subject, while the entire volume resembles a museum, curating concealed performance history and genealogies of culture. The Queer Nuyorican has the potential to make readers hopeful for a queer future through its particular connection to the queer past. The book’s chapters, organized by artistic subjects, make for a gratifying read for specialists, as well as more general audiences, allowing for a more queer, and racially diverse, view of the field. Jaime’s intervention in performance scholarship is niche, in ways, yet also models a travelling aesthetic practice. It is easy to see how this book might supplement a course on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or histories of hip-hop and spoken word, or even cultural diversity in the Americas. Certainly, its discourse on expansive aesthetics as a site of queer of color critique adds significance. Although her rendering of ‘nuyorican aesthetics’ might be read to pigeonhole minoritized subjects into political existence, Karen Jaime nevertheless reminds us how our bodies, and therefore identities, are implicated in performance. The Queer Nuyorican reminds us that when we analyze performance rich sociopolitical histories interact alongside the words, gestures, and bodies of respective artists; thus, the volume advances our grasp of performance’s body politics and Latinx cultural studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CAILYN SALES University of Colorado-Boulder Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi By Marina Johnson Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. Directed by Emile Saba. Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah. 10 October 2024 Guernica, Gaza : A Surreal Exploration of Resilience and Humanity Amidst War at Ashtar Theatre in Palestine مش مفروض الطير يكون مقيّد، مثل ما الإنسان مش مفروض يكون محاصر -حمزه, غويرنيكا، غزة (١٧) A bird is not meant to be grounded, just like a human is not meant to be besieged. -Hamza, Guernica Gaza (17) What does it mean to make theatre in times of genocide? As the ongoing genocide in Gaza has persisted since October 2023, this question has weighed heavily on the minds of many artists. While some international artists make the choice in their artistic praxis to engage with or distance themselves from what is happening in Gaza, theaters within Palestine face a starkly different reality. For them, the question is not whether to respond, but how and when to continue their artistic practice—and what message that work must convey in the face of such devastation. Ashtar Theatre Board Member and playwright Naomi Wallace reunited with her long-time collaborator, Palestinian playwright Ismail Khalidi to write a play specifically about Gaza for Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Center of the Earth was directed by Ashtar Theatre’s Artistic Director Emile Saba and premiered on 13 July 2024, with five initial performances. I attended its second series of productions, which began on 10 October 2024, in their Ramallah space. Though Khalidi and Wallace wrote the original text in English, Alice S. Yousef translated it into Arabic for Ashtar Theatre, and all performances have been staged in Arabic. As the performance began, ominous music filled the intimate seventy seat theatre. At the same time, a striking video projection of a human eye spanned three strips of screens, overlaid with shifting faces—presumably those of the characters. The three projection screens formed a fragmented visual space: stage left featured a short and torn panel about two to three feet long, while the center screen, positioned slightly upstage, stretched from the ceiling to the floor. On stage right, another screen extended from the ceiling and draped onto the floor. Throughout the performance, abstract images filled these surfaces, layered and overlapping, creating a dynamic collage that echoed the fragmented, multi-layered imagery emerging from the play’s text. The visuals and projections added a haunting, surreal dimension to the performance, deepening the emotional and symbolic impact. The play tells the stories of five characters from Gaza: Yara, a young surfer and her father, Antar; Yamen, a young man with PTSD and his older brother Hamza, a resistance fighter; and Bilal, a beekeeper. While the brothers occasionally talk to each other, all of the characters appear to exist more in each other's memory than in the present moment. However, Saba’s staging made it clear that they sense each other's presence. Throughout the play, the audience experiences fragments of the characters’ lives that create a kaleidoscopic view of life in Gaza during the genocide. Wallace and Khalidi were inspired by the Picasso painting Guernica (1937), which was created after the small Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain was bombed by Nazi Germany and Italian Fascist air forces during the Spanish Civil War on 26 April 1937. The attack on Gernika was one of the first aerial attacks of its kind and was used as a testing ground for death and destruction from the air, in much the same way new weapons of war are being tested in Gaza. Piccaso’s Guernica “articulated the terror of it so potently that the picture has become almost synonymous with a sense of outrage and condemnation. Merely possessing a reproduction of it in Spain during the Franco era was an imprisonable offense.” [1] Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the painting into two groups, one made of humans and one of animals. The latter group consists of the bull, wounded horse, and bird. The group of humans consists of a dead soldier and several women, one of whom holds her dead child. [2] Many of these images were brought to life in indirect ways in the play penned by Wallace and Khalidi. Like the painting from which it takes its name, Guernica, Gaza illustrates the importance of the interspecies relationship between humans and animals. Through juxtaposing human and animal figures, both pieces vividly convey the violence and destruction from which no one, human and animal alike, can escape. Both art objects reflect on the fragility of life and the senselessness of conflict, emphasizing that violence spares no one. The human-animal connection immediately recalls Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's dehumanizing remark on October 9, 2023, when he said, "We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly." [3] While Gallant's rhetoric toward Palestinians is not new, Guernica, Gaza challenges this narrative by highlighting how Palestinians extend their compassion to all forms of life around them, including animals: YAMEN: When I first heard those two words, ‘human animals,’ I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Do they mean that we are animals that are human? Or humans that are animals? HAMZA: Animals and humans are two separate things. YAMEN: But they’re afraid of the bombs like we are. The dogs hear the drones and wet themselves. They whimper. A ‘human animal.’ Maybe it means we are inside the animals and they are inside us. يامن: اول مرة سمعت كلمة "حيوانات بشرية" ضليت افكر فيها. هم مفكريننا حيوانات اصلها بشري؟ ولا بشر اصلهم حيواني؟ حمزه: الحيوانات والبشر اشيين منفصلين. يامن: بس الحيوانات بخافوا من القنابل مثلنا. بشخوا تحتهم لما يسمعوا الزنانات، بيرجوا…حيوانات بشرية معناها انه الحيوانات عايشة فينا واحنا عايشين فيهم كمان. This exchange with Yamen (Fadi Murad), a character who appears to have PTSD (though it is never directly stated), and his resistance fighter brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) suggests that the struggle for survival for both groups is interconnected. Yamen is obsessed with sewing other animal parts back onto injured animals, even contemplating attaching animal limbs to himself if he becomes injured. Compassionately played by Murad, Yamen’s mind blurs the lines between human and animal suffering, viewing their fate as intertwined. Image 1: Yamen (Fadi Murad) with his brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) behind him; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre The play also uses insects as metaphors for the endurance and the fragility of life. Bilal, the beekeeper, played with nuanced care by Tamer Tafesh, shows deep consideration for the lives of his bees. He exhibits empathy over the destruction of their hives and fears for their future; so many farmers have been killed, their land destroyed, which means that there is less pollen for the bees, and the hive count has dropped to its lowest point ever. The destruction of the bees’ hives parallels the bombing of human homes, underscoring the shared suffering of all living creatures in conflict. Despite the devastation, the bees and other animals symbolize resilience. Bilal clings to the hope that he can protect his last hive, moving it to safety, even considering building an underground refuge for the bees, away from the drones. Even though he is hungry, he refrains from harvesting the honey so as not to deplete the hive. Bilal emphasizes their role in pollination, without which humanity would struggle to survive, and contrasts their harmony with the violence around them: Did you know the buzzing of the wings of a hive is in the note of C? Science suggests that this note melts away your worries, eases tensions, fights stress, and treats trauma. That’s why beekeepers have the highest quality of life and lifespan of any profession. A drone buzzes overhead. He ducks. The drone makes an ugly barking noise. That buzzing and barking is definitely not in the key of C! بتعرف يا غالي، إزا بتعمل موسيقى على زنّار الخلية، رح تلاقي الأزيز على نوته ال دو؟ العلم بيقول إنه هالصوت بيخفّف التوتر، وبيعالج الصدمات وبيهدي الأعصاب. عشان هيك مربي النحل عندهم أجمل حياة وأطول عمر، بتتخيل؟ نحن مبسوطين كثير بهالسيمفونية اللي بتطلع من أوركسترا الفليهارومنية تبعت النحلة على نغمة ال دو. هالزن والجعار اكيد مش ع ايقاع ال دو. In the above excerpt, Bilal describes the sound of the drones or "zenanas” as barking, while Yara later describes them as mosquitos from hell. The drones burn their unnatural buzz into the ears of Gazans, reminding the audience of the inescapable presence of surveillance and fear that they face when they’re overhead. Months ago, several commentators noted that the aerial images coming out of Gaza made the Palestinians there look like insects. By contrast, in Guernica, Gaza it is the military weaponry that becomes the insect reference. The stark contrast between the natural world and the unnatural elements of war is also evident in how water appears in the play. Water, typically a source of life, has long been a contested element in Gaza, with Palestinians receiving limited amounts of running water. While the Mediterranean offers Palestinians a glimpse of freedom, Isreal limits Palestinian access to the ocean to a narrow zone. This creates a paradox where the natural landscape, instead of nurturing, mirrors the captivity imposed on Gazans. Despite these circumstances, Yara (Sasha Asbah) is a young surfer, initially taught by her father Antar (David Tannous), though she eventually surpasses his surfing ability, fearlessly facing rip currents with a deep knowledge and respect for the power of the ocean. Yara was killed in the war; at the beginning of the play, her father enters the stage carrying Yara, much like the mother carries the body of her murdered child in Picasso’s Guernica . We see her reminisce (from beyond the grave) about her short life. Surfing provided her with a sense of freedom, her sole opportunity to experience childhood. She powerfully reenacts these memories for the audience. Image 2: Antar (David Tannous) carrying Yara (Sasha Asbah), an image that is mirrored in Picasso’s painting Guernica ; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre Even after her death, Antar imagines her still alive, surfing the waves, suggesting that water and surfing represent an enduring spirit that cannot be easily destroyed. He clings to her memory, imagining that if he can call out to her, she might return, bringing to the forefront the hope that love and memory can bring someone back, even if only in spirit. Despite the fact that she has died, Yara addresses the audience, her vigor for life haunting the viewers who have seen too many young children like Yara lose their lives before they have even really begun. Through his staging, director Emile Saba skillfully blended the real and the surreal, creating a space where the beauty and pain of the characters are experienced for 80 minutes, and where the characters haunt the viewers, as witnessing a genocide should haunt us all. The actors break the fourth wall, directly addressing the viewers as they move fluidly from scene to scene, drawing the audience into a surreal world, created by Yasmine Omari’s video and lighting design, that is both familiar—the Gaza seen in daily news—and abstract. The production relies on the ensemble's ability to tell their stories with sincerity and truth, without succumbing to intense emotions these stories elicit from the audience. Guernica, Gaza , the creative collaboration between Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, delivers a powerful and moving portrayal of the cost of war. Through compelling characters, vivid imagery, and a unique fusion of the real and surreal, the play draws attention to the devastating impacts of genocide that stand out from the media we consume daily. With poignant performances and a visually arresting production, Guernica, Gaza challenges dehumanizing rhetoric and offers a profound reflection on resilience, memory, and the shared vulnerability of all living beings, humans and animals alike, amidst violence. This play serves as a timely and necessary artistic response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, urging audiences to confront the horrors of war while holding onto the enduring hope that Gaza will, sometime soon, see peace. Bibliography Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’ . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. Khalidi, Ismail and Naomi Wallace. Guernica, Gaza . Unpublished script in both Arabic and English (translated by Alice S. Yousef). 2024. Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. [1] Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007, 2. [2] Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. [3] Middle East Eye Staff. “Israel-Palestine War: ‘We Are Fighting Human Animals’, Israeli Defence Minister Says.” Middle East Eye, October 9, 2023. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-fighting-human-animals-defence-minister . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Al Evangelista Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dance Planets Al Evangelista By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In every class remotely related to dramaturgy, I encounter performance studies scholar Elinor Fuchs’s critical essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet.” [1] When I was an undergrad, I was taught Fuchs’s article twice. Grad school? Twice more. When I want to teach choreography and composition, I teach Fuchs’s dramaturgy of planets. I’m grateful every time. When we take aspects of world-making as the work of a dramaturg, I believe that this is one way to arrive at our traumatic present. How to arrive in spaces of wide-ranging, inequitable, and systemic traumas? Or, how do I reveal this traumatic present as everyday, as repetition (ongoing, both physically and historically), as also a dramaturgy? My parents imagined brighter futures. Their planet made of dreams. I find myself in a constant battle with how their imagined futures sometimes were (mis)guided and influenced by colonial mentalities. [2] A planet of complication. Nevertheless, this planet is one in which their children flourished in opportunities, even though their own brown bodies did not. I even think my parents have multiple planets—worlds made in their imaginaries. In section V, “Theatrical Mirrors,” the shortest section of “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” Fuchs offers a consideration of multiple planets and how they could affect a dramaturgical world: “Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other.” [3] In the paragraphs that follow, I expand on section V through a queer Filipinx American choreographic strategy and explain how the dramaturgical planets in these choreographies relate, speak, and move with one another. This strategy takes into account a range of planets, their array of invisibility and gravity. This is a dance with the incomplete as a practice of care. It’s not just my planets or my parents’ planets or the number of planets. It’s also the orbiting pathways, the circuitous dance of repetition, release, and rotation through space. [4] Dramaturgy, to me, is an intimate act of analysis. Dramaturgy in dance—an analysis of bodies, movement, context, and performance—becomes entangled in these conceptual imaginaries even more when focused on queer Asian American performance. My choreography and dramaturgy, embodied by my Filipinx American body, fall into these traumas: my own, my family’s, and my ancestors’. These owned and inherited traumas are invisibilized in a landscape of systemic oppression, but performance can highlight their embodied worlds. And yet they are more than all of these things. My dramaturgy is not simply connected to my Asian American history or identity; my performances do not simply represent Asian American histories. Many other histories and planets, often not seen, are part of my dramaturgy. [5] Dramaturgy could be explained as research done for, by, and about a production. But what if those productions explicitly involve the personal and familial experiences of the researcher and performer? And why is it something worth revisiting within a container of performance? The practice of dramaturgy helps answer these questions. I work with the dance of planets to highlight the many complex pathways and vast space that, because invisibilized, become easier to ignore, to move with the emptiness and make it intentional. The process of making something not seen can be a choreographic or dramaturgical choice. In Fuchs’s work, the last instruction after all the amazingly detailed questions is to look at the planet from a distance, to squint. But these planets may not be visible or static, and they might not want to be visible. They move unseen. And as a choreographer noticing this movement and invisibility, repeating it in performance is one way to grow this complexity. If I were to expand on this, and move with and beyond Fuchs’s essay once more, I would further imagine what this complexity might mean within my own performance work. It might look something like this. A queer Filipinx American performer, choreographer, and artist-scholar’s visit to dance planets: My dramaturgy. or feelings about my feelings. My dramaturgy is a Barong. Which might mean a symbol of resistance or might mean a perpetuation of US colonialism. [6] My dramaturgy is singing Santo Niño because as a child, I loved the upbeat tempo and clapping despite the Catholic prayer event that lasted hours. [7] My uncles sometimes left the room because they were allowed a break outside, but children no matter their gender had to stay. My dramaturgy is the lack of primary interviews from the St. Louis World’s Fair “human-zoo” participants. [8] One of the few direct quotes I could find is from Antero Cabrera, the 14-year-old translator known for singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” [9] My dramaturgy is having to explain the preference to not be seen because sometimes being seen is more dangerous than they can imagine, not having had to imagine any sort of danger in their position. My dramaturgy is recording a phone conversation with my mother about how line dancing (cha-cha, electric slide) in Filipinx American bodies cannot be attributed to a single historical event. After conversations with family still in the Philippines and other Filipinx American artists, I still could not identify a definitive or specific event (besides the obvious: cultural imperialism). But to not know where it originated beyond that? Is it dramaturgically necessary? My dramaturgy is a complicated relationship to hip hop dance. Especially having grown up in the land of the Ohlone people, the San Francisco Bay Area, I tend to choreograph more productively when there is a good beat to a song. The dramaturgy in hip hop dance is starting to grow even more eloquently in academic spaces thanks to Imani Kai Johnson, Naomi Macalalad Bragin, grace shinhae jun, and J. Lorenzo Perillo, to name a few scholars. [10] But what does it mean that a good beat is what drives more movement in my choreographic practice? [11] This dramaturgical question could be essentialized to the steadiness of the beat, the bass better felt through the speakers, and the nostalgia of youth. It can also be complicated by the musicology and history of downbeats in dance or further complicated by the lived experiences of hip hop dance practitioners. Johnson mentions the nuance required in discussions of appropriation in hip hop culture. [12] This too is part of the dramaturgy. These orbiting pathways and their traces do not fully capture all dramaturgical motion in performance, nor should it. If the goal of dramaturgy is to create a fuller, more critical, and more nuanced performance and world, then my dramaturgy is intricately linked to but simultaneously complicated by the everyday and the loss in them. My dramaturgical practice as a queer, cis, Filipinx-American, artist-scholar (and as of this writing) Midwesterner takes all of these labels and throws them into the orbit of vast empty space. This dramaturgy, while performed onstage in singular events, is lived every day, unfolds every day, and dances every day. That is to say, we see only partially what is illuminated, what is possible, with detail we could never imagine, and that is okay. Otherwise, we reinforce a colonial approach of assuming we can and should fully know what it means to be any marker of difference. [13] My Filipinx-American dramaturgies are incomplete and whole at the same time. The missing and incomplete are part of my post-colonial Filipinx-American framework. To return to Fuchs’s “Theatrical Mirrors,” the invitation to dance with more planets is always there in an ever-expanding multi-directional universe. To which planets do we hold ourselves accountable? What are we doing to dance with this ever-expanding complexity? Through these complex dramaturgical orbits, I hope my performance work and dramaturgy provide care for the everyday. Sociologist Valerie Francisco-Menchavez demonstrates care work in Filipina migration as multidirectional. [14] In my screendance How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors? , I work with artist and scholar Julian Saporiti’s track, “Gimme Chills” as the underlying music score. Julian Saporiti, performing as No-No Boy , has dramaturgical planets rooted in cross-cultural loss, Japanese American incarceration, histories of war, and abuses in Asia and the United States. When Julian Saporiti granted me permission to use the track first for movement research and then for the screendance work, the care work was present not just in the song or in the dance, but in the unseen interactions in the building of relationships, the sharing of archives, and the everyday construction of artistic practice and research. To be clear, this is not the same as the care work studied in Francisco-Menchavez’s research that focuses on Filipinx export labor and the international flow of care. However, the multi-directional movement of care does link to the plural traces of planetary orbits rather than a dramaturgical planet in isolation. Queer Filipinx American dramaturgy offers a dance with incomplete colonial and postcolonial narratives. These rich diasporic stories parallel a complex colonial and postcolonial history. We intentionally do not see all of these planets. This withholding can sometimes fail. Ultimately, this failure and repetition are parts of the dance work, whether intentional or not. Suzan Lori-Parks might call this type of dramaturgy “rep and rev.” [15] Imani Kai Johnson might call this dramaturgy a dance away and with complexity, at the very least pushing away binaries that hold us back when repeated. [16] In the doing, I hope to choreograph invisible orbits that include the dramaturgical consideration of what is seen, not seen, lost, imagined, and moving in the opposite direction all at once, not in isolation. When my parents imagined opportunities in diaspora, the doing, the actual immigrating movement of their bodies is what put that dramaturgy into practice. And the moment here, now. References [1] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 4-9. [2] René Alexander Orquiza, “Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo,” in Eating Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 177-85. [3] Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” 9. [4] My deepest thanks to Kevin McDonald for dramaturging this article and helping me arrive at this point. [5] Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 87. [6] Mina Roces, “Dress, Status, and Identity in the Philippines: Pineapple Fiber Cloth and Ilustrado Fashion,” Fashion Theory 17, no. 3 (2013): 341-72. See also Mina Roces, “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines,” Gender & History 17, no. 2 (2005): 354-77. [7] Christina H. Lee, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). [8] Al Evangelista, “How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors?” in “Six Illuminated Videos,” Journal of Embodied Research 4, no. 2 (10 October 2021), https://doi.org/10.16995/jer.91. [9] Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also, Alfred C. Newell, Philippine Exposition: World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904: 40 Different Tribes, 6 Philippine Villages, 70,000 Exhibits, 130 Buildings, 725 Native Soldiers (St. Louis: s.n., 1904), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuc.2869262, and Carl Wilhelm Seidenadel, The First Grammar of the Language Spoken by the Bontoc Igorot: With a Vocabulary and Texts, Mythology, Folklore, Historical Episodes, Songs (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909), Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library. [10] Naomi Bragin, “Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, Yak Films, and the Oakland, California, Rip Project,” TDR/The Drama Review 58, no. 2 (2014): 99-114. See also, Imani Kai Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People: Hip-Hop Dance Beyond Appropriation Discourse,” in Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Simone C. Drake and Dwan Henderson Simmons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 191-206; grace shinhae jun, forthcoming, “Asian American Liminality: Racial Triangulation in Hip Hop Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook on Hip Hop Dance Studies , ed. Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press); J. Lorenzo Perillo, Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). [11] Alan Chazaro, “A New Generation of Filipino Hip-Hop Builds On a Deep Bay Area Legacy,” KQED , 26 October 2021, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13905208/a-new-generation-of-filipino-hip-hop-builds-on-a-deep-bay-area-legacy. [12] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. [13] C. Nicole Mason, “Leading at the Intersections: An Introduction to the Intersectional Approach Model for Policy & Social Change” (New York: Women of Color Policy Network, 2010). [14] Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018). [15] Steven Drukman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Liz Diamond, “Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-Dit-Dit: An Interview,” TDR 39, no. 3 (1995): 56-75. [16] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. Footnotes About The Author(s) Al Evangelista is Assistant Professor of Dance at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Al is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative process engages with social justice, queer Filipinx-American diaspora, and performance studies. His research identifies ways in which theatre and dance provoke and create change. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeffrey Ullom Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Jeffrey Ullom By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In May 2011, Marc Masterson departed Actors Theatre of Louisville for a similar position as the artistic director of South Coast Repertory Theater in San Diego. Reportedly, he initially offered to remain and assist with the search for a replacement, but his proposal was not accepted as the leadership of the theatre wished to proceed without [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700037 key=key-2mngwhiptfnekrms8lyg mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Jean-François Ducis, Marvin Carlson | An exciting collection of Jean-François Ducis' radical reworkings of William Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, penned on the eve of the French Revolution. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Shakespeare Made French: Four Plays by Jean-François Ducis Jean-François Ducis, Marvin Carlson Download PDF The first Shakespearian plays to be successfully presented in France offer one of the most odd and yet most successful cultural adaptations in the history of the theatre. These works, by Jean-François Ducis, were not exactly translations, and indeed could hardly even be called adaptations. They were complete reworkings of the dramas as if they had been conceived by a disciple of Racine, to make them compatible with contemporary French practice. This process affected every element in them, language, metaphor, and verse form, characters and character relationships, themes and action. Nothing perhaps could more illustrate the vast gulf that existed in pre-romantic dramatic practice in France and England than comparing the Ducis Shakespeares with their originals and seeing what was altered and why in this enormously successful if apparently somewhat perverse project of making a major English dramatist into a French one. Without attempting to see Ducis as a major dramatic poet, we can today, I think, view his work as a particularly interesting and on the whole successful example of the sort of intercultural mixing that today, as our consciousness becomes more global, is an increasingly important part of our study of how theatre changes in moving among cultures. Within the European tradition in the late eighteenth century, it would have been difficult to find dramatic approaches more antithetical than the English, primarily represented by Shakespeare, and the French, primarily represented by Racine. The project of attempting to reconceive one in the style of the other seems almost unimaginable, and yet Ducis managed to accomplish this, with considerable success. His works are unlikely to re-establish themselves on the stage, but they endure as fascinating studies of the dynamics of intercultural theatre. Translated by Marvin Carlson. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Sharrell D. Luckett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Sharrell D. Luckett By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF The body will tell the truth when all else fails, with or without you.1 Misty DeBerry, Performance Artist I am a black woman who wishes for a time That I could gain my weight back And still be fine Four years ago I lived as a fat black female, actress and teacher, trying to learn to love my curves and to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I was failing miserably. I ate McDonald’s and Zaxby’s nearly every day coupled with home cooked meals. I imagined myself unattractive, undesirable, and unworthy of love and attention from men. At the same time, through weight loss advertisements, public ridicule, and size discrimination, society made it very clear that I was the gross unwanted “other.” My body was classified as morbidly obese, and I was getting larger every month. Even I began to view my largeness as unacceptable, and the only way I knew to rectify my situation was to lose the weight. As body image scholar Kathleen LeBesco has affirmed: “the possibility of passing, trying to lose weight, wanting to become ‘normal,’ is about the only recognized option available to fat women in twentieth century Anglo-American culture.”2 However, losing a large amount of weight is extremely difficult, and even if this nigh-impossible feat is accomplished, only 5% of people who achieve substantial weight loss are able to keep the weight off for long periods of time.3 Still, we diet and diet again in hopes that one day we will cross the border that separates fat from skinny. Though the efforts of Fat Studies4 scholars have not gone unnoticed, their textual and political reach has not yet proved significantly influential in the weight loss and health industries. Both Fat Rights by Anna Kirkland and Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”5by Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg highlight the need for America to end the vilification, harassment and abjection of the fat body. As SanderGilman has noted, “Obesity presents itself today in the form of a ‘moral panic’—that is, an episode, condition, person or group of persons that have in recent times been defined as ‘a threat to societal values and interests.’”6 As my dieting failures multiplied, the constant, disapproving scrutiny of the world affected my well-being, and I spiraled into a deep depression. In America, a fat person is classified as diseased, one who must be cured of a pathological and physical illness, despite the acknowledgement that most people will fail at dieting; thereby making the border-crossing from fat to skinny a remarkable feat. In addition, physicians argue that an obese body creates exorbitant health costs and is directly correlated with mortality risks,7 while sociologists and cultural observers assert that the size and appearance of one’s body determines marriageability, upward mobility, and/or perceived attractiveness, especially for women.8 Feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky argues that “the disciplinary project of femininity is a‘setup:’ it requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail.”9 Yet, “diet we must . . . to be saved.”10 Thus my doomed quest to achieve “normal” weight was never-ending. My depressive state of failure rendered me hopeless. The sadder I got, the bigger I grew, until I experienced my first nosebleed. The illness of my body must have scared me skinny because only a few months later I enrolled in a low-calorie shake diet and lost nearly 100 pounds within 8 months. Having succumbed to the physical and mental attacks from society by nearly starving myself, I crossed one of the most contentious, palpable borders known to women in America: the border that separates fat from skinny. This essay recounts how my border-crossing journey from morbidly obese woman to slender11 woman shaped my awareness of my outsider-within12 identity as a black woman, a theatre artist, and scholar. It is an exploration of how straddling vastly different physical and psychological identities led me to performance, what I term transweight performance, as a means of understanding this experience for myself and as a means of communicating and perhaps illuminating such experience for others. Just as the Latin prefix trans has been attached to various identity markers to signify crossing from one condition or location to another, as in transgender, I employ transweight as a term to identify someone who willfully acquires a new size identity by losing or gaining a large amount of weight in a short amount of time.13 Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies on the black female performing body, including solo/black/woman, an anthology of scripts, interviews, and essays edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera; Troubling Vision by Nicole Fleetwood, which considers the visual commodity of black bodies; and Embodying Black Experience by Harvey Young, which investigates the black performative body in various socio-political contexts.14 While these works are all significant studies that explore the black female performing body, none focus specifically on the issue of weight, or the performance of “weighted” (fat/thin) identities. This lack of literature on the black/female/transweight performative body is most likely due to the absence of black transweight women writing about and/or performing weight loss, and can also be attributed to the fact that the fat body rarely transforms. Thus, my research aims to carve out a space in scholarship for the transweight black female, one that is intensely personal and, at the same time, profoundly political. With this exploration of my border crossing, I offer my slender palimpsest of a body as an entryway into a liminal world largely unexplored. The perception that black women do not wish to be slender is a myth situated in the American imagination. Oprah Winfrey’s decades-long public struggle with her weight, Kerry Washington’s recent admittance to battling bulimia, and Jennifer Hudson’s commercially marketed, drastic weight loss are only a few examples of the stark reality about black women and their bodies. Many African-American women aspire to Eurocentric standards of body size. As Bartky asserts, “There is little evidence that women of color or working-class women are in general less committed to the incarnation of an ideal femininity than their more privileged sisters.”15 Though authors Andrea Shaw (The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies) and Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight) provide compelling arguments as to how and why the presence of the fat female body serves as a marker of direct resistance to Eurocentric standards, one could offer that the very existence of these types of arguments hinge partially on the truth about weight loss, that is, weight is extremely hard to lose.16 Thus, in America, fatness leaves women few options, and one of them is to claim fatness as honorable and admirable. But do we love our large bodies because we adore fat or do we love our large bodies because we cannot lose the weight? I revere those Fat Studies scholars who are able to embrace their largeness, and I am in the fight with them against size discrimination. I wish I had the confidence to appreciate my largeness as actress Gabourey Sidibe, who seems not to have lost a pound since her big screen debut in Precious, apparently does. You go girl! However, in my case, I could not love the weight that categorized me in my eyes and in the eyes of others as ugly, disgusting, and non-sexual. I work to live in my honesty, and at this moment I lack the volition to re-embrace the fat body. So what occurs when the fat black female performing body transforms to slender and then engages in the performance of “thin-ness”? What happens when the black female body physically ‘passes’ in a new way? What happens when a formerly fat, black body experiences ‘double consciousness’ in a historically new way: a way in which how the ‘other’ sees the body affords that body a privilege that is unfamiliar, abounding with humanistic perks. This liminal space—the space around and within the border—is where my ethno-theatre work begins. When I crossed the border, not only was my physical body altered, but my psychological state was significantly affected as well. I changed physically and mentally in ways that I am aware of and ways that I am still discovering. I transformed from physically inferior to physically elite, from ugly to attractive, and from undesirable to desirable. My body now reads as happy, healthy, and worthy of protection. As an actress I went from mammy to mother (or wife), and from asexual, ensemble roles to sexy leading roles. I went from my body being fully costumed to scantily clad. My new body serves as a document of acceptance, my ‘passport,’ if you will, into a new privileged location. At near starvation, I crossed the border that allowed me to immigrate into an ideal American size. However, I’m just as morbidly obese mentally as I was morbidly obese physically five years ago. My outer appearance morphed, but my psyche remained the same. I do not believe myself to be a slender woman, so I feel as though I’m performing slenderness and femininity in life or in the virtual reality of the stage. As I experience fat and thin, unprivileged and privileged separately, I purposefully create and write towards a desegregation of identity. Though the world now experiences me as a slender black female actress, I process my current encounters, both on and off the stage, as a morbidly obese female actress, inhabiting an outsider-within identity. Coined by Patricia Hill Collins, an outsider-within identity initially referenced the social location of black women in the field of domesticated work. Here I use the outsider-within identity marker as theoretical framing to explore what it means to be a fat black woman living within a privileged body or ‘home.’ Simply stated, I am not fully who I appear to be, nor am I where I appear to be. I envision my mental location as one similar to that of Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza: a place where she could be all that she was.17 Furthermore, I am working to build a healthy ‘third space'18 both within my psyche and in performance where my two dis/identities encounter one another. The implications of my border-crossing from morbidly obese to slender first captured my attention as an artist and scholar when I moved away from home to attend graduate school. Being surrounded by all new people and a new environment, my recent weight loss remained a secret. I was not aware that my colleagues and professors were experiencing a different physical persona. I was still living and seeing myself as a morbidly obese person, but the people at the university saw me as a slender person who belonged. There, I auditioned for and landed the leading female role in the world premiere of Holding Up the Sky, a play adapted from folklore and tales from across the globe. In the play a young married couple survives a devastating war and proceeds to build a new life with the help of other members in the community.19 At the time of auditions, I hadn’t realized that my mindset was still that of a morbidly obese woman and actress. My habits of being a workaholic and a homebody did not change when I lost weight. I still rejected the nightlife scene, for I had little desire to mingle with or even talk to men who had consistently neglected me in the past. Furthermore, I was unaware that I was negotiating space as a new physical person. Thus, when I greeted the director and production associates in auditions I believed they were seeing me as I still experienced myself: a fat woman. In The Politics of Women’s Bodies, Rose Weitz affirms that “attractiveness typically brings women more marital prospects and friendships, higher salaries, and higher school grades.”20 In the theatre, attractiveness and a thin body bring more, and better, roles for women. In her dissertation, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen,” Claire Van Ens lists five stereotypical film roles played by overweight actresses: The Butch/Bitch Lesbian, The Dowdy Dowager, One of the Boys, The Asexual/Non-Woman, and The Maternal Earth-Mother.21 Not surprisingly, as a fat stage actress, I was usually cast in similar roles. So when I perused the script for Holding Up the Sky, I focused on the ensemble roles, ignoring the lines of the leading characters. During auditions, however, the director asked me to read for the lead female role. My heart started racing because I thought surely he had made a mistake. I glanced up at the table and just as I was about to ask whether I’d been given the wrong sides, he asked me to go out and practice the lines with a young man, who eventually played my husband. I was confused and anxious. In my mind I didn’t fit the lead role. This role was clearly written for a slender, attractive woman who could believably play a beautiful, sexually desirable female. Although the young man expressed his opinion that I was perfect for the role, I squinched my face in denial as I rehearsed the lines with him. I had never been asked to play a beautiful, feminine lead, and I didn’t know how to believably accomplish this in the small amount of time that I had. Judith Butler has argued that femininity is a “mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of flesh.”22 Furthermore, she identifies three types of discipline that produce the feminine aesthetic: “those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface.”23 I knew what it meant to perform femininity because the media and public had taught me; however, as a big woman I was rarely expected to perform femininity, so my repertoire of feminine gestures was lacking. Nonetheless, when reading the role for the director, I used my imagination in a way that I’d never done before, unknowingly employing methods that Butler mentions to accurately portray femininity. I implemented the stereotypical feminine gesture of loosely hanging my hand from my extended wrist. I made sure that my long kanekalon braids were flowing down my back during the scene, and I elongated my neck as if I were a giraffe to appear model-esque. I imagined myself to be thin as I walked daintily across the floor, because I knew I had to control what I sensed was my big body. I blocked my negative thoughts and read for the part. Later that week, I received the email that I, Sharrell D. Luckett, had been cast as the lead female in the play. Although initially excited by the opportunity, extreme panic soon set in because in my mind I was convinced that I could not play the part.Because of my history as a morbidly obese person and my lack of experience on stage in a newly transformed, transweight body, my work on this role led me to suffer from psychological and physical stress. I started to experience uncontrollable anxiety when I was told that my costume would be sleeveless and would reveal my legs and torso. Also, I learned that I had to be lifted in the show twice. I was so scared that my cast mates would not be able to lift me that I promised them I would not gain weight during the rehearsal period. They brushed off my promise as one from a slender, body-conscious woman. My character also simulates sex on stage with her husband, inclusive of a vocal orgasm. Morbidly obese actresses are rarely portrayed as sexually desirable, rarely lifted, and rarely have orgasmic sex on stage. As I worked to understand the extreme anxiety that I was experiencing during the rehearsal and performance process in Holding Up the Sky, I decided that I wanted to further explore the implications of mentally living as a morbidly obese woman and actress while physically maneuvering in a slender body. Thus, I began to conduct an autoethnographic study of my transweight identity as a black, female actress. Building upon Lesa Lockford’s use of Victor Turner’s theory of social drama to analyze a weight loss support group, I used Turner’s theories to explore my transweight journey.24 As Turner posits, “the third phase [of social dramas], redress, reveals that ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’ are indeed processes, not permanent states or givens.”25 When I began my shake diet I was entering the phase of “redress” for what felt like the hundredth time (yo-yo dieting). It is in the phase of redress that I lost my obese body, while still maintaining my fat psychological existence. Similar to the writings on the “new mestiza” and “third space,” the scholarship on liminal spaces in relation to transformation describes my state of entrapment as a person who lost a large amount of weight. The liminal space I am speaking of is one in which my mind manifests in both a fat body and slender body on a daily basis. Though I’ve physically crossed a border, I am trapped by psychological borders, thus my reintegration, or transformation, is incomplete. With this discovery I realized that I was performing on various levels. My morbidly obese psyche performs as the slender person, and the slender person performs as the slender actress, and the actress performs the character. In Richard Schechner’s familiar construction, I am not me (morbidly obese Sharrell), not not me (slender Sharrell), not not not me (slender actress), and then not not not not me (slender character).26 I constantly oscillate among these liminal spaces. I am always in between entities and never feel as though I’m one integrated self. The intensive exploration of my performed affectations of survival as a black actress culminated in the creation of a solo performance text, YoungGiftedandFat, which explores my various performative selves. As D. Soyini Madison notes in her foreword to solo/black/woman, the performativity that transcends the black female performing body is a “complex mix and blend of discursive circulations, gestural economies, and historical affects that break up repetition and scatter style across hearts and minds making black female performativity contingent, otherworldly, and radically contextual.”27 My work on body size and image perception joins a long lineage of other women of the Africana diaspora who dismantle hegemonic institutions and discourses through solo performance, including my favorites Beah Richards, Nina Simone, and Whoopi Goldberg. I approached the creation of YoungGiftedandFat as an actress, a black woman, and a Fat Studies scholar. YoungGiftedandFat was birthed out of my need to suture my fat world, slender world, and liminal world; to bring together my separate lived existences, so vastly different that they would be portrayed as two complete beings. With this performance I re-affirm that black women do have serious issues with body image. And when black women are cast as sexually desirable leading ladies, they too must conform to existing expectations of thinness. With my interests and various identities in mind, I developed questions: How much of my offstage fat identity is informing the textual creation of my slender performative identity? When I write my slender voice, am I writing first through the voice of my fat self? I am also thinking about the performance of identity in relation to space. What does it mean to create a textual space (border) in which both bodies simultaneously exist? What does it mean to have both voices speak through one organism/body? My goal is not to provide universal answers but to share one woman’s attempt to suture these two selves for a unified performance. By addressing the aforementioned questions, a malleable, yet tangible script emerged. My script is a testament to the trials and tribulations of fat women and a call for critical conversations about insecurities and oppression projected onto the fat body. Though my script is an autoethnography, I also consider it a testimonial. Regarding the history of testimonials in Latina feminist tradition, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued that “testimonials do not focus on the unfolding of a singular woman’s consciousness (in the hegemonic tradition of European modernist autobiography); rather, their strategy is to speak from within a collective, as participants in revolutionary struggles, and to speak with the express purpose of bringing about social and political change.”28 My collective consists of fat women, slender women (however brief my encounter with this culture), and the voice(s) in my head. My story is told through the voice of my fat identity (Fat), my slender identity (Skinny), and my liminal identity (Sharrell). ‘Fat’ often speaks from the past, when she lived in the fat body, but Fat recognizes that she is trapped in a slender, unfamiliar body. ‘Skinny,’ who lives and experiences the world in a slender body, is a purposefully under-developed character because she is relatively young, existing only a little over four years. ‘Sharrell’ is the character who straddles the border. She represents the fat psyche coupled with the premature slender psyche who both live in the slender body. By writing the voices of my fat body, my slender body, and my liminal existence, I work to disrupt the “solo” versus “multiple” cast dichotomy, an artistic trait of other solo performances by black women that highlights experiences with race and gender.29 In my case, however, I am highlighting race, gender, and various size identities, making this disruptive dichotomy even more complex. For my present body houses the lived experiences of both a fat and a slender person, as well as the psyche of a bordered identity. The characters are created through prose, movement, and poetry that aims to express the complex mental reality in which I exist. In “Fat’s Lament” I struggle with my desire for the sexual gaze of black men. I’ve always wanted my black brothers to be curious about my sexual prowess so when my slender body afforded me sexual freedom and an abundance of newfound attention from men, I found myself in virtual spaces, places, and relationships that I had ‘no business’ being in. In a slender body, I am no longer sexually invisible, and I have a difficult time negotiating sexual advances from my male counterparts. This poem was born out of my new sexual identity and the agency I was afforded in ‘pullin’ attractive men. [caption id="attachment_1125" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 1., Sharrell D. Luckett performs an excerpt of YoungGiftedandFat at for the Univ. of Missouri’s 10th Anniversary Life Literature Series. Photo by: Rebecca Allen[/caption] “Fat’s Lament” Look at you skinny Got me wide open and hot like a pot uv grits Now I’m getting served Bubbling brown hot dog sticks Too many I ain’t got enough holes They all won’t fit; don’t make me choose dumb decisions; I ain’t used to this abuse is bliss is this what dem thin bitches be complainin’ about count me in; let em out pass the cuties but save the cooties wink at the married ones cuz they smoking guns ready to burst, pop, spaz at any second shawty swang my way, I’ll be ur 2nd blessing dumb decisions I’m rolling my 3rd blunt; all thanks to my cuteness Yeah, I’m loose and I think I’m losin. I ain’t used to this Fullness; all wrapped up in his arms Don’t mind if he’s an alcoholic cuz He, he be my daddy remind me of my daddy That’s a shame; rolling blunts with my daddy Sexing up his frame Drowning in a spa full of cold water Posin for a pic that’s gone take me under I swear I’ll let him go if you promise to love me When he leaves Wither up and get off of me; I gotta go to school Big ambitions and a lot of talk But dem mens make me fall I asked God to send me a sign I’m layin on my back just taking it I wish she’d call I swear I’ll pick up and suck the milk from her breasts Even share my eggs cuz motherhood I missed. Now skinny has got me wide open Legs stretched and I’m hoping Something good will come out of this Whipped cream rushing All this like has got me blushing And I laugh; cuz all this like is something I ain’t never had . . . In “Riot,” the personal is political, beckoning collective resistance. Again, I am solo, while at the same time representing many women who struggle with the burden of losing weight. I speak from within the border, and on both sides of the border. In this piece, my liminal identity is exploring my haunted past of being neglected and abused by men, while working to make sense of what has happened to my body. Skinny admits that she feels as though she is living a lie, but she knows that teaming up with Fat would surely strip her of her privilege. Skinny is dreaming of an imaginary world in which size doesn’t factor into how she is valued. “Riot” Father of black back Mother of strong bones Consecrated in the middle to create my song Within me, his wit The curve of his smile pearly white teeth legs that run for miles Not to mention my mathematical genius Goes unused But who needs chemistry when u’ve got the blues Too much pressure In the crock pot To be like her: hot From Jane Eyre to Elizabeth Taylor, From Beverly Johnson to a fine black woman, just name her Nothing like her The woman who bore me pain Nothing like, yet identical all the same A thing for men who didn’t love me back A thing for boys that scolded my fat These rolls on my back This meat on my thigh cut it off and it’ll stand a mile high Big, black, bitch That was my name Big, black, bitch All the lil n*ggas would proclaim Threw me into silence Forced me into shame Ran from me while playing “take yo fat friend home” “take yo fat friend home” and don’t bring her back the next day I think those boys made me hide my song In this next section, the liminal identity (Sharrell), begins to speak from the border. At the border she envisions a song. Her song is a metaphor for her ‘true identity.’ One that she feels is fat, black, young, and gifted. But which identity marker is the first marker, second, and so on? One might assume that Sharrell’s skin pigmentation of deep dark cocoa brown is her primary identity marker, especially in America. It is at this point that I, the writer, would like to note that I ‘missed’ the colorism discrimination in childhood that other dark-skinned women endured, and am not able to clearly recognize pigmentation bias against my dark skin within the black community in my adult life. My dark skin color was rarely an issue in or outside of my home. In fact, when the boys on the back of the school bus titled me ‘Big, Black, Bitch’ I remember thinking that they had the ‘black’ identity marker correct, and not understanding why being ‘big’ was so bad. That they coupled ‘big’ and ‘black’ with ‘bitch’ was the signifier that their beat box performance was meant to hurt me. Lesson learned at age nine: don’t sit in the back of the bus. The world made me hide my song My song I’m not singing it yet It’s tucked away somewhere Catching its breath Been running far too long Hiding under clothes too small Under hate that’s well worn Under burgundy rivers that sleep in my womb In feathers of the pillow that catch my tears released too soon In long awaited nights In all my years My song transcends my fears Beah Richards says A black woman speaksAbout oppression, about slavery, about all this heat Fuck those little black boys and these grown men That withheld their drooling Down with skinny bitches and all this schooling Fuck the scale Fuck a diet Fuck fruits and vegetables This is my riot And although I open my mouth My song won’t come out It sits in silence I am a black woman who wishes for a time That I could gain my weight back And still be fine That I can let my curly hair show and blow in the wind Without being seen as a threat to all men So I wear straight wigs This degree that flows down my back; I want it for every black person that has been attacked All of my n*ggas that’s been held back I read and write and read and fight Read and write and read and cry Read and write, and when I speak I fly Bag lady, why you carrying all them bags I carry them to remind me of my past All of the “no you can’ts” all of the “you’re too bigs” All of the “why you so black and yo mama light skinneds” All of the “you won’t get a jobs” all of the “they won’t let you ins” All of the “you can’t ever be a teacher cuz you distract the kids” I wish I could fall into the arms of my father and do it all again I’d whisper in his ear, that he’s a great man, I’d tell him to keep his sperm Locked away in his pants, but I guess my mama felt too good and the universe decided to give me a chance. So here I am. At this point, the “I” in the final phrase “So here I am” is the borderland. “I” is the place and space that my obese psyche and slender body share. “I” is black, a woman, and a site of total confusion, while Fat is literally trying to catch up with Skinny. “I” is Sharrell, who waits patiently at the border, hoping to fully integrate with Fat and Skinny to build a new, complete life. “So here I am” also affirms my presence in this world and my right to interrogate my identity as a means to peel myself apart and put me back together again. As I continue to think through my various personas, I have come to understand that Fat and Skinny truly experience the world differently, while my liminal self acts as sort of mediator between the two. The work that I am doing in the borderlands is born out of a desire to love that part of me which is fat just as much as the world loves that part of me which is slender. My journey is a difficult one because I am consciously making an effort to erase the border, revealing a whole human being. As I continue my research and performative inquiry, I do so knowing that I may never reach a resolution. I am also aware that the possibility of being physically deported is quite real, as my genetic make-up and appetite work against my slender existence at every meal. Nonetheless, I do believe that peace, harmony, and healthiness can co-exist in my mind, my body and my art. Thus, I explore and I write and I perform and I write some more. The work at the borderlands is multifaceted. This work is integral to my survival, for crossing over is never an easy task. I went missing in 2008 Shed my skin, withered away This body ain’t mine; it never belonged to me Escaped like a thief in the night and now I’m tryna find me With all my might What is this in my hand? What is this in my hand? If you force me to speak, I will surely tell a lie When I killed myself, I had an alibi I was at home, alone, wanting to be let out Had to find my song And now my ancestors tell me it’s been within me all along so why in God’s name am I so far from home A skinny bitch could NEVER do this shit That fat, black girl sings my song -------- Sharrell D. Luckett is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University-Dominguez Hills. She is an award-winning director/producer of over 60 shows and has co-created four musicals. Luckett received her Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she was selected to serve as Doctoral Marshal and keynote speaker. Her upcoming projects include the world premiere of her one-woman show, YoungGiftedandFat, and a seminal manuscript outlining the Freddie Hendricks acting method. --------- Endnote: [1] Solo performance artist Misty DeBerry made this statement at the Mellon/Northwestern University Institute of Feminist Performance in the African Diaspora, 20 June 2011. [2] Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 62. [3] F. Grodstein et al., “Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program. Can you keep it off?” Archives of Internal Medicine (JAMA) 156, no. 12 (June 1996): 1302-1306. [4] Fat Studies is a field of study dedicated to ending discrimination against large people and accepting size diversity. [5] Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg, “Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”: Why Focusing on Body Weight Is Inconsistent with a Human Rights Approach to Health,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight Society 1-1 (2012): 32-46. [6] Sander Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 9. [7] Steven N. Blair and I-Min Lee, “Weight Loss and Risk of Mortality,” in George A. Bray, et al, eds. Handbook of Obesity (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 805-818. [8] Rose Weitz, introduction to Section III: The Politics of Appearance in Rose Weitz, ed.,The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133. See also Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York: Paddington Press, 1978). [9] Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 25-45. [10] Gilman, Fat, 13. [11] For this essay, I define slender as being in one’s BMI (Body Mass Index) normal range or lower overweight range. [12] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11-13. [13] 6 months to a year. [14] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Eds., solo/black/woman: Scripts, Interviews, and Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014; Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [15] Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 34. [16] Andrea Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). [17] See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). [18] See Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture for further discussion of the ‘third space’ (New York: Routledge, 1994). [19] Holding Up the Sky is an original play adapted by Milbre Burch, first produced in 2009 2010 at the University of Missouri-Columbia, directed by Clyde Ruffin. [20] Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies, 133. [21] Claire Van Ens, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999). [22] Judith Butler, “Embodied Identity in de Beauvoirs The Second Sex,” paper presented at the American Philosophical Association, 1985, quoted in Bartky, 27. [23] Ibid. [24] See Lesa Lockford, “Social Drama in the Spectacle of Femininity: The Performance of Weight Loss in the Weight Watchers Program,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19 (1996): 291-312. [25] See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 77. [26] See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 4-5. [27] D. Soyini Madison, foreword to solo/black/woman, E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds.(Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2014), xiii. Emphasis in original. [28] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 81. [29] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, introduction, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays, xx. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Fiona Gregory Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet Fiona Gregory By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1970 Judith Anderson, doyenne of the classical American stage, fulfilled a long-held desire to play the title role in Hamlet. Employing a heavily cut text and minimalist setting, the production relied on the power of voice to illuminate Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet most viewers were unable to see past Anderson’s seventy-three-year-old female body to the spirit of her Hamlet, and her performance was widely criticised. Anderson later described the experience as a “heartache and a tragedy.”1 Despite its disappointing reception at the time, Anderson’s performance merits recognition, and re-examination, as a notable event in theatrical history with significant aesthetic and social implications. Anderson’s Hamlet was an extraordinary exercise in boundary crossing—rejecting conventions of Shakespearean performance alongside those of age and gender. Furthermore it refused to be aligned with either classical theatre or avant-garde performance, existing in a state of otherness and demanding to be assessed on its own terms. Australian-born Anderson began her Broadway career in the 1920s, later balancing her stage work alongside steady employment as a character actress in film. Her career was transformed when she appeared as Medea in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s play. Anderson’s intense and archly theatrical performance met with popular and critical acclaim and enhanced her status, positioning her as “first lady” of the American stage. In the 1950s and 1960s she cemented this identity, touring both the full production of Medea and her program of excerpts from Medea and Macbeth in America and abroad. Although she continued to appear regularly on film and television, Anderson repeatedly figured the stage as her true metier. As well as lauding the performative freedom of the theatre, she expressed an understanding of the stage as a site that enabled communion with “genius:” “That’s why I like to do great plays—to be a part of greatness.”2 In the 1960s and 70s, Anderson became increasingly disillusioned not only with film and television but with the contemporary theatre. Her solution was to retreat into the classics: “There’s so little that is good. I would rather fail as Hamlet than succeed in something less worthy.”3 Anderson’s Hamlet, directed by William Ball and produced by Paul Gregory, performed predominantly at university theatres but also appeared at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall. Anderson’s performance, Ball’s direction, the supporting cast, and the design were all repeatedly deemed weak and ill-conceived by critics, but the production proved a commercial success: the two nights at Carnegie Hall sold out before rehearsals even commenced. [caption id="attachment_1124" align="alignnone" width="420"] Figure 1., Hamlet program, signed by Judith Anderson, in Author’s collection.[/caption] Anderson’s popularity suggests a nostalgic longing for the grand theatre of the past amongst some sections of the community during a period of immense change in America. The consequences of involvement in the war in Vietnam, the rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the gay liberation movement transformed American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These issues were explored in the work of avant garde troupes such as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company, as well as in more mainstream forms such as the rock musical Hair. Judith Anderson was removed from these trends; from the early 1960s, she repeatedly conveyed her distaste for modern theatre. In 1969, she told a journalist: “[there] isn’t anything that I want to see today. You hear about Hair and Oh Calcuatta! (sic) and it’s all disgusting to me. There is no quality or imagination in the theatre today [and] I object to the nudity.”4 She also raised her objections to “thrust” stages that brought the actors into the audience: “For her it’s too much reality . . . and not enough left to the imagination.”5 Anderson articulated a preference for performance that occurred inside the pictorial frame of the proscenium and maintained its distance from the audience. Yet despite her conservative outlook, her Hamlet was read as potentially radical, and she was obliged to deny that it held feminist intent or was an experiment in “camp.” Female Hamlets The desire to play Hamlet had been experienced and fulfilled by many women before Anderson, including Mrs. Furnivall, Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Inchbald during the eighteenth century.6 These women were led, Tony Howard suggests, by the desire to claim ownership over a role that was becoming identified as the greatest work of England’s greatest poet.7 Female Hamlets proved particularly popular in the Romantic age, a move attributable in part to changing conceptions of Hamlet’s character. Robin Headlam Wells notes the “age of sensibility invented a new Hamlet—sensitive, delicate, distressed,”8 and Elaine Showalter suggests this feminisation of the character opened the role to women.9 According to Tony Howard the first woman to essay the role in an American theatre was likely the touring English actress Mrs. Bartley at New York’s Park Theatre in 1819, closely followed by Fanny Wallack, Charlotte Barnes and, most notably, Charlotte Cushman.10 Departing from earlier models, Cushman privileged Shakespeare’s text in her production—she reinstated much of the play that was typically cut, as well as restoring her understanding of emotional “truth” to the Hamlet role, in a “conscious critique of what many men had done with it” before her.11 Anderson drew attention to the long tradition of actresses in the role and particularly cited Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, which the actress premiered in 1899 at the age of fifty-four, as a precedent for her own performance. Bernhardt performed her Hamlet within the tradition of “travesti” performance popular on the French stage. Actresses in travesti sought to create a stylised masculinity that male actors were thought to be unable to achieve in their representations of young men and boys. Gerda Taranow notes the object of travesti was not “androgyny.” Despite its insistence on the feminine within the masculine and vice versa, the aim of travesti was not to unite the sexes but to highlight difference through the contrast of female body and male attire. Female travesti “did not seek to intermingle opposite sexualities, but to emphasize, with delicate insistence, the feminine presence [of the actress in the male role].”12 Anderson, in contrast, would seek to direct attention away from her gendered identity and body when playing Hamlet. While many French critics applauded Bernhardt’s depiction of masculinity, some questioned the suitability of Hamlet for travesti performance, as they believed Hamlet’s feminine soul needed to be contrasted with a masculine body.13 English critics also objected to Bernhardt’s performance in terms of the body, finding it impossible to read this Hamlet as anything but a woman—specifically a very famous French woman named Sarah Bernhardt. In Max Beerbohm’s analysis, Bernhardt’s Hamlet “betrayed nothing but herself, and revealed nothing but [her] unreasoning vanity . . . her Hamlet was, from first to last, très grande dame.”14 The actress’s body and, more particularly, her celebrity, prevented critics from seeing the “real” Hamlet. The same phenomenon would attend Anderson’s appearance in the role. From Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, she appears also to have been interested in two lesser-known female Hamlets: Asta Nielsen and Esmé Beringer.15 These actresses demonstrate radically different readings of Hamlet by women in the twentieth century, and provide a counterpoint to Anderson’s own approach to the character. Nielsen played Hamlet in the German film, Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance (1920), directed by Svend Gade. The plot followed Edward P. Vining’s 1881 monograph The Mystery of Hamlet in suggesting Hamlet had been born female but was raised as a boy for political reasons. As the title suggests, this adaptation rejected the passive protagonist of Romanticism for an active avenger. Nielsen’s Hamlet is a young “man” of intellect and honour, troubled by “his” (inexpressible) love for Horatio and grief at the death of “his” father. The film disrupts traditional readings of Hamlet’s delay, or resistance to revenge, as a “feminine” trait. Nielsen had become renowned for playing freedom-seeking new women and enigmatic prostitutes, and Lawrence Danson contends that she brought the memory of these roles to her Hamlet, thereby aligning the character with sexual transgression. In Danson’s analysis, this Hamlet thus became a spectacle of simultaneous liberation and containment: “In Nielsen’s polymorphous sexuality a viewer could read the strong image of a conceivable freedom from gender restrictions, crossed with the pathos of that freedom’s bafflement by actual social conditions” as represented in the material circumstances of the play.16 Nielsen’s Hamlet demonstrates the radical potential of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare, a potential that would also circulate around Anderson’s Hamlet. Esmé Beringer played Hamlet in London in 1935 at the age of sixty-three, and later published an article in which she justified actresses playing Hamlet. She repeatedly figures the character in emotional terms: prior to the catastrophe he is “happy,” “highspirited” and “in love;” following it he is “grief-stricken,” and “runs the gamut of love, scorn and despair.” Beringer does not explicitly comment on the implications of cross-gender casting, but the aspects of the character to which she draws attention are those that seem particularly suited to female performers. She stresses Hamlet’s sensitivity, and finds his interpersonal relationships with Ophelia, Horatio, and Gertrude amongst “the most vital themes of the play.”17 Even within a normative reading of the play, and a conservative approach to theatre, Beringer implicitly validated actresses playing Hamlet. As an older woman performing Hamlet, Beringer also functioned as a precedent for Anderson. Had Anderson read the Times’s review of Beringer’s performance she would have seen that the actress’s age was ignored by the critics, but her ineffectual representation of masculinity and male behaviour, and her “monotonous, sing-song intonation,” were openly criticised.18 Anderson decided not to attempt a representation of masculinity in her reading, and to focus her performance on her greatest asset—her powerful and flexible voice. Anderson on the road to Elsinore In 1954, Anderson told an American journalist she wished to play the role of Hamlet.19 She reiterated this desire in the press that attended her appearance in Medea in Epidaurus in 1955.20 The opportunity to do so did not arise until 1969, a delay she attributed to the difficulty of finding a suitable director.21 Bernhardt had also stated that her desire to play Hamlet was long-standing but she had been delayed by production difficulties—in her case the search for an appropriate translation.22 This discourse of desire thwarted by circumstances beyond the actresses’ control has a number of effects: it foregrounds the actresses’ professionalism; inhibits reading their decision to play Hamlet as a “whim” or rash act of folly; and frames their eventual appearance in the role as in some way “destined.” Anderson’s trouble finding a director also suggests the limited commercial potential of a female Hamlet on the American stage in the late twentieth century. Anderson did eventually find someone to guide her Hamlet: William Ball, founder and director of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), based in San Francisco from 1965. Under Ball’s vigorous leadership, ACT presented modern classics by authors such as Chekhov, Pirandello and Tom Stoppard, rising to become “one of the most active and prosperous resident repertory companies in the country.”23 During the 1960s, Ball also directed John Gielgud, Edith Evans and Margaret Leighton in A Homage to Shakespeare, and worked at a number of America’s major Shakespeare festivals. The venture was produced by Paul Gregory, who had worked in Hollywood and the music industry in addition to the theatre. In 1953, he had produced John Brown’s Body, a dramatic reading starring Anderson, Tyrone Power, and Raymond Massey. In this production, Anderson had demonstrated two things above all else: her range, and her ability to build characters through voice—she created, through recitation, “anything from a great Southern hostess to a child of the woods.”24 In the Hamlet program, Gregory and Ball are described as initiators of the production and, if this was the case, it may have been Anderson’s creation of diverse characters through voice in John Brown’s Body that inspired the project.25 The program notes state Gregory and Ball have (like the actress herself) lived with the idea of Anderson as Hamlet for a long time: “It has been a long cherished dream of [Gregory and Ball] to bring Dame Judith back to the stage as the doomed heir of Elsinore, and when she became available, they lost no time in bringing it to fruition.”26 This comment “authorises” Anderson’s performance by framing it as the “brainchild” of two respected and experienced theatre practitioners, and forestalling its being read as the whim of an aging actress. The idea of Anderson as Hamlet held a popular appeal few might have anticipated. The actress herself stated she originally intended the play for university audiences (a decision she framed in part as a pedagogical exercise27), but Lewis Funke noted that when “the big city managers heard that she would be going out in the production they “demanded” that she play for them too, hence Carnegie Hall.”28 Anderson’s desire to remove the production from Broadway and other avenues of “high status” theatre suggests she was conscious of the risky nature of her venture. The managers’ insistence that she play Carnegie Hall shows the actress remained tethered to a position of status within the American theatre. This status meant Anderson was obliged to present herself as an item of consumption to the critics and patrons that would descend on Carnegie Hall—some of whom then read the “failure” of her Hamlet as a transgression of her status. While some reviewers (especially those from regional and university papers) supported Anderson’s performance, most were critical of her interpretation and of Ball’s production in general. Dan Sullivan, of the Los Angeles Times, found Anderson’s performance “so far off the mark in conception and execution that it is hard to know where to start to describe it.”29 Chris Curcio, of the California State University at Hayward, described the performance as “misconceived,” “monotonously boring,” and “awkward and contrived.”30 Nathan Cohen, of the Toronto Daily Star, suggested Ball had “done nothing to benefit Dame Judith or the play,” and the New York Times’s Mel Gussow described Ball’s Hamlet as “a bloodless production, with no power, poetry, or humour.”31 The reviews indicate the voice was the focus in this Hamlet. As Nick Milich noted in the Watsonville Register, the “point” of this production was “Shakespeare’s poetry, not action, not swordfights.”32 Indeed Milich and Cohen referred to the production as a “recitation,” and Gussow felt “it was almost like a concert reading.”33 In A Sense of Direction, his manifesto on directing, Ball lists “language” as one of the five basic elements of a play, alongside “theme,” “plot,” “character,” and “spectacle.” In any production, writes Ball, a director should identify one of these as the “predominant element;” this element then becomes the focus of the work.34 In keeping with a focus on language, Ball devised a minimalist production: “There are no props, and red velvet backdrops take the place of sets. All the characters except Hamlet wear variations of the same costume, deep red velvet and silk. In vivid contrast, Hamlet is garbed—boots, tights and vest—all in black.”35 Such costuming of Hamlet in black can be read as a further effort to erase the body, but with the set and remainder of the cast in red it is likely that it highlighted not only Hamlet’s body, but also the character’s singularity and Anderson’s star status. [caption id="attachment_1123" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Judith Anderson as Hamlet, production still. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.[/caption] A number of critics went so far as to describe the production as “stylised.”36 The actors used gestures rather than realistic movement, and there was little “action.”37 These factors enhanced the sense of a recital, although Ball also incorporated some more striking production choices, such as when “the ghost makes its entrance to the sound of amplified heartbeats.”38 The performance text was cut to run under two hours; it was in fact so abbreviated that one critic suggested “a more honest title would be ‘Gems from Hamlet.’”39 Anderson’s degree of input into the performance text is difficult to determine. In Ball’s 1985 manifesto on theatre, A Sense of Direction, he states that his preferred method was to cut the text himself and distribute the arranged script to the cast at the first rehearsal.40 Such a method was unlikely to appeal to Anderson, and Lewis Funke in the New York Times notes “[some] of the original pruning wasn’t to Dame Judith’s liking.” However, the text developed in performance, and Funke added that “things are better now [in November] than when the tour started out [in October].” Anderson later admitted: “[Hamlet] wasn’t done the way I wanted it done.”41 Yet, despite the friction between them, Ball and Anderson actually held the same vision for the production: the desire to focus on language, and a belief in the power of the voice.42 Anderson had played Gertrude opposite John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936, and this actor’s reading is likely to have influenced her. Gielgud evoked the character’s grief, sensitivity, intellect, and emotional connectivity to those around him. The actor himself described his Hamlet as “introverted,” and located his voice as his focus during the performance: “[I was] more worried about the inflection, the phrasing, and the diction [when I played Hamlet].”43 Anderson also used “grief” as a keynote of her reading, and one critic pejoratively described her as the “Melancholy Dame.”44 The actress conveyed grief through vocal effect: reference was made to her “frequent sobbing voice.”45 While some reviewers criticised her “blubbering” and “sobs,” another admitted, “nobody hovers on the edge of tears so thrillingly” as Anderson.46 In one of the few interviews discussing her interpretation of Hamlet, Anderson suggested she would “be a more emotional Hamlet than, say, Gielgud or Olivier. I might cry.”47 This seemingly innocent comment provides a clue to the critical reception of Anderson’s performance. As Tom Lutz notes, “the meanings assigned to tears are always compounded by the age and sex of the crier.”48 The performance of Hamlet by an elderly woman held the potential to radically destabilise the play’s accepted meanings. James W. Stone has explored Hamlet in terms of its ordering and expulsion of the feminine through language and action. In Stone’s analysis, the feminine is represented in the play in images of dissolution, of movement into water, and therefore in tears: “Whether tears . . . represent Niobe’s sincere expression of grief or Gertrude’s masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to define the bifurcated feminine.”49 Stone describes Hamlet’s journey in the play as a movement away from the feminine. Anderson’s decision to make Hamlet more emotional, to cry noticeably and often, had the potential to instead show him collapsing into the feminine. Such a reading of the text would unsettle critics by its unconventionality, and by its disturbance of the play’s symbolic function: the ordering and expulsion of the feminine. And while the focus on the voice in this production was to draw attention away from the body, the act of crying—a manifestation of the feminine—may have actually underscored the presence of the actress in the role. “She is Judith Anderson” Critic Dan Sullivan described Anderson in Hamlet as the “victim of three obdurate facts. She is a woman. She is a rather short woman. She is Judith Anderson.” For Sullivan, the actress’s association with performative evil through her appearances in Rebecca, Macbeth, and Medea prevented her from becoming Hamlet.50 Frank Hains found Anderson’s Hamlet in conflict with her celebrity, rather than her performance identity. He found he “was never able to associate in any way that Great Lady of the Stage before me with the character which my program told me she was playing.”51 In his review, Hains divides “Judith Anderson” into two personae: “Miss Anderson” and “Dame Judith.”52 “Dame Judith” is linked with Sarah Bernhardt, connoting celebrity, wilfulness, and performative excess. In contrast, “Miss Anderson” is linked with roles such as Lady Macbeth and Medea, which signify tradition, professionalism, and the craft of acting. Lady Macbeth and Medea are described as Anderson’s “property,” suggesting these roles form the basis of her “authentic” performance self. The appearance as Hamlet is a transgression of this self, or as the critic himself puts it, “madness.”53 We can also read Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and established identity in Chris Curcio’s response to her performance as “grotesque,” and Bernard Grebanier’s description of it as a “strange [undertaking].”54 For Grebanier, Anderson’s Hamlet became “strange” when considered alongside her “brilliant” performances in Medea and Macbeth.55 Like Medea, Hamlet explores the protagonist’s desire for revenge that leads to murder, but does so via contemplation rather than hasty action, and through lyric, philosophic musings instead of raw and bloody dialogue. It is, paradoxically, a more “feminine” role than was usually associated with Anderson. In addition, unlike the wicked and wilful Medea and Lady Macbeth—Anderson’s most famous roles—Hamlet aims to do good and is obsessed with “right.” Hamlet thus exists at a considerable distance from Anderson’s trademark roles. Anne Davis Basting’s analysis of another actress’s return to Broadway helps us appreciate the transgressive effect of Anderson’s Hamlet. In 1995, at the age of seventy-four, Carol Channing played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, a role she originated in 1964, and with which she was strongly identified. Basting suggests the popularity of Channing’s 1995 performance resulted in part from its performance of “authenticity”—its nostalgic affirmation of a much-loved actress’s identity, and of a golden, “lost” period in Broadway’s history.56 Anderson’s Hamlet, in contrast, denied her authentic self, and was compromised not by the lingering presence of Medea or Lady Macbeth, but by their very absence. While critics figured Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and performance identity, I would like to suggest Anderson herself perceived it as an escape from her performance identity—an identity epitomised by the emotion and arch theatricality of Medea. Emerging as it did in the early 1950s, Anderson’s desire to play Hamlet arose in the midst of her journey with Medea. In 1969, Anderson reflected that playing Medea had been a physically and emotionally draining experience: “Medea consumed every bit of me . . . I saw nobody and did nothing, other than concentrate entirely on my work. It took everything out of me, including all my blood. I had to have a blood transfusion.”57 Anderson read Hamlet in distinctly cerebral terms and perhaps Shakespeare’s sensitive, reasoning Danish prince appeared to her here as a tantalising retreat from the physical onslaught of Medea. The body and its sufferings were at the centre of Medea, but Anderson’s vision for Hamlet virtually elided the body: the actress told Robert Feldman that the production “will be in chiaroscuro with lots of shadows,” and the “shadows will include everything from the waist down.”58 Anderson made this comment ten months before the production opened and it is not clear from the reviews and still photographs if her vision was realised in performance. What is apparent is that in Anderson’s approach to the text (she focussed on the poetry); in her performance style (she privileged the voice); and in her proposed design (she hoped to mask the body), she turned away from the mode that the physical had been configured in her landmark role, only to have it reinscribed by the critics. During the tour, Anderson expressed frustration at the media’s interest in her age. As she told the New York Times: “Sure I’m old . . . but I am sick and tired of you writers who keep dwelling on that. I want people to see me and not be thinking of how old I am.”59 In this conceptualisation of her identity, Anderson distinguishes between her essential self and her physical self. She spoke of Hamlet in similar terms: figuring the character as a “soul” rather than a “body.” In her vision for the production, Anderson denied Hamlet a physical identity, but she also denied him a gender identity. Lewis Funke noted that “she doesn’t think of [Hamlet] as being a man . . . She sees the role as asexual.”60 Anderson refused to align Hamlet with either male or female subjectivity. She asked a student reporter: “‘Well, what did you think of me as while watching the play? Did you think of me as a woman or as Hamlet?’” The student replied: “‘At first I thought of you as a woman . . . [but later] I thought of you as Hamlet.’”61 Hamlet is here not female but is also, perhaps, not male. For Anderson, Hamlet appears to have been simply “human” and “his” experience “universal,” and there is a suggestion here that at least one viewer shared her vision. Despite the negative criticism, there were other viewers who approached the play on Anderson’s terms. Nick Milich suggested the majority of critics were searching for the wrong production: “[this Hamlet] is very hard for a modern audience to take . . . [For the players] offered nothing else but the poetry; their production was stripped down to essence, to a dreamlike state.”62 Prior to its opening, Variety predicted Anderson’s Hamlet would dismay theatre purists.63 Most reviews suggest this prediction was realised, as does Bernard Grebanier in Then Came Each Actor, his 1975 history of Shakespearean performance, in which he lists Anderson’s Hamlet as a “total failure.”64 Yet for Milich, Anderson’s Hamlet did not fail. Rather it affirmed the significance of Shakespeare’s poetry and the power of performance to transform the written word. In addition, for several viewers it provided a glimpse of some universal human “essence” that transcended age, gender, celebrity and the body. It was for such transcendence that Anderson had essayed the role: to escape her seventy-three year old body and the yoke of established celebrity and performance identities, and become “part of Shakespeare’s riches and poetry.” Anderson seems to have received the most positive responses from students, her intended audience. The audience at La Crosse University, for example, was described as “rapt” in the production; they gave Anderson a standing ovation.65 Anderson told the New York Times she regularly received letters from appreciative students: “I had a three-page letter only the other day from a girl thanking me, saying ‘Thank God you exist, thank God I saw you’.”66 Grebanier refers to this letter in Then Came Each Actor. It had prompted him “to wonder whether or not the college girl had not already been enlisted in that branch of the woman’s lib movement which would like to see men unsexed.”67 He was not the only writer to suggest Anderson’s performance held some affinity with contemporary feminism. The New York Times told its readers not “to go running over the landscape in praise of Women’s Liberation . . . [as Anderson is] not the first and surely not the last of her sex to essay the Dane.”68 Chris Curcio admitted, “Women’s Liberation proponents may be astatic [sic] that Dame Judith Anderson is playing Hamlet, [but] theatre aficionados were dropping in the aisles.”69 In common with much contemporary media commentary on the women’s movement, these critics’ alignment of the production with feminism was done jokingly and/or disparagingly. Anderson herself denied any feminist agenda in her work, and described “Women’s Lib” as “a lot of tommy-rot.”70 And yet, although she seems unaware of it, Anderson’s Hamlet performed a destabilisation of gender distinctions that, like the discourse of women’s liberation, questioned gender boundaries. “I’m Not Going to Camp it Up”71 When Anderson announced her desire to play Hamlet, the media recognised the camp potential of such a project: a syndicated newspaper article published throughout America “predicted that [Anderson] would camp up the role.”72 “Camp” had entered the American mainstream with the publication of Susan Sontag’s influential essay, “Notes on Camp,” in 1964.73 Fabio Cleto notes that “within weeks” of this essay’s appearance, camp “exploded as a mass media keyword.”74 In 1970, as a consequence of Sontag’s essay and its application by the mass media, the word “camp” signalled excess, incongruity, and theatricality, and while recognised as an important part of gay culture was not thought of as exclusively “homosexual.”75 In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag describes an enormous variety of cultural moments, objects and persons as “camp,” and her essay has been criticised as “unsystematic” and “inconsistent.”76 Yet, due to its influence, Sontag’s essay provides a useful insight into how camp was perceived at the time of Anderson’s Hamlet. For Sontag, the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”77 Camp is thus found in excessive and/or incongruous displays of gender, age, class, or style. A number of Anderson’s performances prior to Hamlet can be identified as camp in their excess. In films such as Salome (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and in Hallmark Hall of Fame television productions, “Elizabeth the Queen” (1968) and “The File on Devlin” (1969), Anderson’s overt theatricality could not be contained by the camera. Her performances in the above productions were characterised by emotionalism and exaggerated gestures and movement. In his review of “The File on Devlin,” George Eres described Anderson’s “dramatics” as “out of all proportion” to the script and the medium.78 The implication here is that Anderson’s performance is not only “excessive” but also “passé,” belonging to an earlier, and superseded, style of performance. As Andrew Ross notes in an important definition, the “camp effect” is created “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.”79 Ross notes that the distance between contemporary and historical performance was highlighted by the “recirculation of classic Hollywood films on television.”80 Repeated screenings of Anderson’s intense emotionalism in Rebecca and Salome, and the theatricality of her television appearances, rendered her anachronistic in a culture influenced by the understatement of the Method. These performances, and Anderson’s performance and celebrity identities, were liable to be received as camp in Ross’s terms. The idea of such an actress playing Hamlet, especially at the age of seventy-three, was so incongruous that some sections of the media automatically presumed her performance would become camp. However, as Anderson had shown in films such as Laura and The Red House, she could produce restrained and realistic performances when necessary, and her relatively measured Hamlet did not become camp solely on the grounds of “excess.” Nor was its old-fashioned style purely to blame, despite Bill Marvel’s description of Anderson as “out of her depth” in “attempting to make the Bard come alive for members of the Woodstock generation.”81 Indeed, as discussed earlier, some of the most appreciative viewers of the production were university students. Anderson’s Hamlet is more completely read as an example of what Sontag terms “naïve” or “pure” camp, the “essential element” of which is “seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Sontag goes on to note that “not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”82 This Hamlet was expressive of each of these elements: “exaggeration” in its style; the “fantastic” in its casting of a seventy-three year old woman as a young man; “passion” in that woman’s intense desire to play the part; and “naivety” in her belief it could work. Ultimately Anderson’s experiment with Hamlet stands as an audacious, boundary-defying act, yet one that also demonstrates the very fixity of the boundaries it was attempting to cross. ------------------------- Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research on issues of celebrity representation and performance identity has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Australasian Drama Studies and Affirmations: Of the Modern. She served on the editorial board for Twenty-First Century Drama: The First Decade (Gale, 2012). She is currently undertaking a major research project on representations of the actress and mental illness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. ------------------------- Endnotes: [1]“A Heartache and a Tragedy,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1973. [2] Michael Clowes, “Dame Judith Anderson,” Adelaide Advertiser, 19 February 1966, 8. [3] Barbara Cloud, “Judith Playing Hamlet,” Pittsburgh Press, 3 January 1971, 19. [4] Louis Calta, “Judith Anderson Plans to Play Hamlet,” New York Times, 19 November 1969, 44. [5] “A Theatre Great is Still ‘A Country Girl,’” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1973, 2. [6] For a fascinating analysis of the history of actresses in the role into the twenty-first century see Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [7] Ibid, 36. [8] Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81. [9] Ibid.; see also Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 79. [10] Howard, Women as Hamlet, 43. [11] Ibid, 49. [12] Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 83. [13]Ibid., 85. [14] Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Greenwood Press, 1930), 36-7. [15] Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, boxes 10-11, Dame Judith Anderson Collection, PA Mss 6, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). [16] Lawrence Danson, “Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret,” Shakespeare Survey 45 (1993): 45. [17] Esmé Beringer, “Woman’s View of Hamlet,” 15 October 1953, unidentified fragment, UCSB. [18] “Miss Esmé Beringer in Hamlet,” Times, 22 January 1938, 8. [19] New York Herald Tribune, 18 October 1954, Judith Anderson Clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL). [20] Fragment from unidentified article dated 4 July 1955, NYPL. [21] Morning Telegraph, 11 August 1970, NYPL. [22] Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre (London: G. Bles, 1924), 139. [23] Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre across America: Approaching a New Millennium, rev ed. (New York: Applause, 1997), 78. [24] Power’s opening speech, page from Anderson’s script of John Brown’s Body, UCSB. [25] Nick Milich states Anderson “selected Ball to direct her,” in “Critics Missed the Point,” Watsonville Register, 13 October 1970, DJA. This does not preclude the possibility that Gregory initiated the project. [26] Hamlet program, in author’s collection. [27] Ibid. [28] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [29] Dan Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1970, UCSB. [30] Chris Curcio, “Anderson’s Hamlet: A Fiasco,” Daily Pioneer, 6 October 1970, UCSB. [31] Nathan Cohen, “Female Hamlet Never Satisfying,” Toronto Daily Star, 27 October 1970, UCSB; Mel Gussow, “Stage: A Lady ‘Hamlet,’” New York Times, 15 January 1971, 18. [32] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [33] Ibid; Cohen, “Female Hamlet;” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet.’” [34] William Ball, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1984), 27-8. [35] Bill Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother Plays Him,” National Observer, 5 October 1970, 17. [36] Frank Hains, “Dame’s Dane: Madness in Great Ones Must Now Unwatched Go,” Jackson Daily News, 17 November 1970, DJA; Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [37] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times. [38] Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother.” [39] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [40] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 99. [41] Robert Berkvist, “When a Great Role is Passed Along,” New York Times, 2 May 1982, NYPL. [42] Anderson referred to the “friction” between herself and Ball in an interview with Clyde Packer, in No Return Ticket (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984), 67. [43] Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (New York: Random House, 1967), 294. [44] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [45] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [46] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet;’ Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet.” [47] Robert Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park, Adelaide,” Bulletin, 27 December 1969, 54 [48] Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 151. [49] James W. Stone, “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Woman in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 76. [50] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [51] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [52] Ibid. [53] Ibid. [54] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Bernard D. N. Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor: Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise (New York: McKay, 1975), 262. [55] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [56] Anne Davis Basting, “Dolly Descending a Staircase: Stardom, Age, and Gender in Times Square,” in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 251. [57] San Fernando Sun, 19 November 1969, UCSB. [58] Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park.” [59] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [60] Ibid. [61] Fragment of article by Melinda Wojtasiak, circa 1971, UCSB. [62] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [63] Variety, 30 September 1970, NYPL. [64] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [65] Grant Blum, “Dame Judith Triumphs,” La Crosse Tribune, UCSB. [66] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [67] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 263. [68] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [69] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet.’” [70] Wojtasiak, “Dame Judith Anderson.” [71] Show, 20 August 1970, NYPL. [72] Kernan, “Dame Judith.” [73] Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was first published in Partisan Review in 1964 and reissued in Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). It is reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53-65. [74] Fabio Cleto, “Introduction to Section One,” in Cleto, Camp, 46. [75] See points 50-53 in Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 64. [76] Mark Booth, “Campe-Toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp” (1983), in Cleto, Camp, 67. [77] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 53. [78] George Eres, Long Beach Independent, 25 November 1969, UCSB. [79] Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp” (1988), in Cleto, Camp, 312. [80] Ibid., 310. [81] Bill Marvel, “One View of Will Shakespeare: Let’s Respect the Stories,” National Observer, 23 November 1970, 20. [82] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 59. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Mary Said What She Said Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Marvin Carlson Image Credits: Article This report on a current work by Robert Wilson, will hardly come as a surprise to long-time readers of European Stages or its precedent journal, Western European Stages . Wilson’s work was noted in the first issue of WES (Fall, 1989) and the following issue contained not only a full essay on his recent work in Germany, but also a complete chronology of upcoming Wilson productions. Since then Wilson has been one of the artists most frequently mentioned in both journals, and although he was born in America, he has created the majority of his many works in Europe, as is the case with Mary Said What She Said . First presented at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 1919 and subsequently in Vienna, Amsterdam, Florence, Hamburg and South Korea. The work finally appeared at the Skirball Center in New York in March 2025. Its success has been great everywhere and in New York, the five productions at the 850 seat Skirball were totally sold out. Mary Said What She Said by Robert Wilson / Photograph © Lucie Jansch When the audience entered the theatre, they found the proscenium filled with the representation of an elegantly draped traditional red theatre curtain, with a rather odd addition, an ornately framed image high in the center, perhaps three by four feet, containing a continuously running black and white film loop of a small English bulldog chasing its tail and then pausing to look at the camera and be temporarily replaced by the silent film type title “You fool me. I am not too smart.” Carousel type music, seemingly unrelated to the Philip Glass type score for the rest of the production, composed by Ludovico Einaudi, accompanied this introduction, which did not actually begin until almost fifteen minutes after the announced curtain time. The scene occupied most of the audience’s attention for a strangely long time. Apparently, most reviewers found it as incomprehensible as I did, because I found it mentioned in only one report, that of Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Times, who boldly suggested the dog’s action represented the obsessiveness of Mary Stuart as a character, which to be honest makes as little sense to me as the dog does. Thankfully, the production contains few other interpellations of this sort but takes us into familiar Wilson territory. Wilson has worked with leading actress Isabel Huppert before, most notably in 1989 when they created a structurally and visually similar staging of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with a performance text created by Darryl Pinckney, who also created the text for Mary Said , as well as for several other Wilson creations. The M ary text, like others by Pinckney, is extremely demanding, with frequent echoes and repetitions, text clusters, and unconventional arrangements of material. Rather than attempt to make the text more accessible, Huppert has done quite the opposite, employing the incredible range of her voice to constantly vary the pitch, volume, speed and intensity other lines. A common pattern is for her to begin a sequence in silence and then gradually increase the speech and intensity of her speech until she is pouring out upon a stunned audience an avalanche of verbal material, sometimes interspersed with strangled chocks and laughter or half-intelligible cries. This common pattern though is subject to infinite variation, resulting in as dazzling a display of linguistic virtuosity as I have ever seen on stage. From time to time this already mixed text is further complicated by laughter, cries and phrases apparently re-recorded by Huppert and now projected on top of or alongside her live voice from various locations in the auditorium. Of course, this means that early into the production even French-speaking audiences realize that they are not going to be able to follow the text, but must simply let it wash over them, relying upon key words and frequent repetitions to provide what orientation they need. Mary Said What She Said by Robert Wilson / Photograph © Lucie Jansch English speakers are even more challenged, despite the presumed aids of English supertitles above and to both sides of the stage. The normal problems of such devices are always present—the impossibility of accurately coordinating even moderately faithful translations with the timing and rhythms of stage speech and the necessity of focusing away from the stage action to read the translation—but here both problems are exaggerated. The complex text of Pinckney and explosive delivery of Huppert guarantee that the projected texts often flash by too quickly to be read and in any case often have no relation to the spoken one. In addition, the intensely bright Wilson backdrops overpower the relatively dim projected texts except in the rare blackout scenes. Wilson’s settings tend toward the minimalistic, and that is especially the case here. Aside from Mary herself (and at one point a silhouetted double of her upstage) the stage is totally devoid of scenery, consisting only of a large rectangular background, almost always divided into three blending layers, the middle one tending toward white, the upper and lower ones normally some shade of blue or grey, the hue often changing but the brightness fairly consistent except for complete backouts. Two narrow bands of horizontal white light complete the stage picture one running across the stage below the backscreen, the other at the front of the stage, about where footlights would be located, if used. The only object which appears other than the queen is a white Cinderella-type slipper which she picks up from the floor and briefly examines before discarding it. This being a Wilson production, it is picked out by a distinctive Wilsonian white mini spotlight as Huppert holds it up. Similar accents, virtually a trademark of Wilson’s theatre, are elsewhere used to pick out one of Huppert’s outstretched and posed hands or her enormously expressive face. The first such facial accent comes almost twenty minutes into this ninety-minute production and is particularly striking because up until that point Huppert has remained largely motionless as a striking black silhouette upstage center. The sudden focus upon her flowing white face and especially her brilliantly red outlined mouth created an impression remarkably like that of Beckett’s powerful Not I, which I had recently witnessed at the Irish Repertory. An even more striking visual echo occurred soon after, when Huppert’s expressive visage, now twisted in anger, for a brief and unique moment, turns green. For a New York audience at least, she momentarily became the wicked witch of the popular theatre and film. Huppert’s simple but elegant Renaissance costume, with flowing gown and puff should sleeves (designed by Jacques Reynaud) serves as a kind of ornate visual pedestal to her constantly changing face. Thie gown is so dark that even when she is in full light there is a suggestion of a silhouette. Around her neck, however, she wears an ornate lace collar which, especially when the tight spot is focused on her face, gives the appropriate if chilling impression of a severed head. Mary Said What She Said by Robert Wilson / Photograph © Lucie Jansch Huppert’s physical movements are far more restricted than her voice, and are often mechanical, even puppet-like, especially in the closing moments which suggest a slow and stylized period dance. Her first movement, from her long held post up center diagonally to far downstage right, is done so slowly and gradually that she seems to glide almost imperceptibly to this new position. As the evening progresses, however, she repeats this same downward cross, almost mechanically but it a very wide variety of ways, often quite frantically with slashing movements of her arms. These are also the sequences which are delivered with the most verbal force. The final fifteen minutes or so of the production are a series of brief scenes recapitulating, with slight variations, previous sequences, with one notable exception, which seems, like the dog clip in the opening sequence, to have dropped in from some other production. For the only time in the evening, the figure of Mary almost disappears, covered by a rolling cloud of stage smoke, while the action is carried on by three projected recorded voices. One is apparently Huppert’s, listing a series of historical names (all martyrs?), another is an American voice, perhaps Wilson’s, who repeats slowly and deliberately a series of short phrases in English, primarily “I am NOT not here.” A French child’s voice then apparently attempts to repeat the phases in French. A colleague helpfully suggested to me that this scene was meant to suggest Many’s concern with his son being forced to learn English. This certainly gives the scene more justification than the dog video and occasional other seemingly gratuitous directorial touches, but I still found the production essentially a memorable showcase of the formidable talents of one of the world’s greatest living actresses. References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac By Published on May 20, 2023 Download Article as PDF Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) Change is constant. (Be like water.) There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it. Never a failure, always a lesson. Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.) Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass–build the resilience by building the relationships. Less prep, more presence. What you pay attention to grows. – adrienne maree brown , Emergent Strategy [1] Introduction In this co-authored essay, we describe and analyze the interdisciplinary course and devised theater production that we created with our undergraduate students at The Pennsylvania State University, Abington College in Spring 2022, titled “Emergent Strategy: The Winter’s Tale” and Exit, a banquet piece , respectively—their methods and content inspired by Black feminist activist adrienne maree brown’s book of the same title, as well as William Shakespeare’s play—both of which also served as core texts. brown defines emergent strategy as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”[2] Part thick description, part manifesto, this essay details the teaching philosophies and performance strategies that we enacted, why, and to what ends, bearing brown’s growth- and change-oriented framework in mind. Paying careful attention to affect and lived experience, this essay blends academic prose with autotheory, with brief personal reflections embedded throughout. Ultimately, our goal is to make a case for the efficacy of abolitionist pedagogy in higher education—especially in this historic moment of late capitalism and the ongoing pandemic that it has produced. In a precarious world increasingly attuned to questions of racial equity, class consciousness, disability justice, harm reduction, and community care, professors and students alike, we argue, can benefit from adopting commensurable revolutions in our pedagogical work.[3] But what does abolition mean in the context of teaching? For us, abolitionist pedagogy has meant 1) acknowledging that schools, including colleges and universities, are deeply caught up in a project of perpetuating harm, often meted unevenly onto the most marginalized students and employees; 2) knowing that the harm that schools and schooling does is animated by a carceral logic which often situates faculty in a disciplinary, punitive and/or reward-based, and surveillance role in relation to our students; 3) consciously deciding to adopt teaching philosophies, curricula, and methods aimed at shifting these power relations in and out of the classroom toward a model of care; 4) staying vigilant that our working relationships remain aligned with our politics, modeling for our students what ethical collaboration and right relationship looks like in shared leadership; 5) being committed to shifting our thinking and practices as needed.[4] Here, it’s important to note that this framework of “abolitionist pedagogy” is partly in hindsight. When we began creating this course in December 2020, at the fore of our minds was the fact of a global pandemic that had forced us out of classrooms and onto screens—with many students and faculty variously navigating acute sickness, family emergency, burnout, depression, anxiety, addiction, technology barriers, death, grief, and financial hardship in heightened ways. While the most marginalized among us have always already been dealing with access barriers, the pandemic produced the conditions in which these issues of disparity became more mainstream discourse, and rethinking our approaches to pedagogy was urgently necessary and encouraged —including even by those institutional structures that are complicit in histories of harm. So it was nine months into this new business as usual that we began our collaboration. Marissa was a soon-to-be tenured Associate Professor and Jack a new Assistant Professor at Penn State; we met during Jack’s campus visit when Marissa served as one of the search committee members that made the hire. As luck would have it, we soon became neighbors in South Philadelphia; pandemic walks became our way of swapping resources and cooking up ideas of courses we might teach when in-person learning would recommence. Queer, anti-racist, intersectional feminists with decades of combined teaching experience, we decided to co-teach a class that would bring together our shared research interests and center the needs of our individual students and the collective whole.[5] For us, this meant designing a curriculum that enabled us to have explicit conversations about race, gender, labor, capitalism, trauma, and repair, as well as dramatically shifting the ways that we relate to our students and the work that they “produce.” We abolished grades (everyone gets an A, no exceptions); deadlines (the pace of our work can and will change as needed); and attendance policies (come as you are, when you can).[6] We built in “rest days,” where class did not convene. We moved at the speed of trust , adjusting lesson plans and activities on a week by week, day by day, moment by moment basis, with an eye always kept on what truly needed to happen next. Our choice to implement ungrading, relaxed attendance, and flexible assignment timelines meant that we could center learning, self-reflection, being present together, and group process while dispensing with traditional modes of top-down surveillance—what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, speaking in another context, calls acting as a “deputized cop.”[7] Make no mistake, the course was intellectually and physically rigorous, and students and faculty alike were pushed to the edges of our comfort zones. But we tried to always balance rigor with access, refusing to sacrifice our bodies and spirits in the pursuit of academic knowledge or aesthetic virtuosity. Here, we were guided by brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy cited in the opening epigraph, as well as theologian and performance artist Tricia Hersey’s imperative that we place our bodily needs above those of capital’s. The class was a resoundingly transformative experience for the six students enrolled, as well as for us. This essay is our attempt to archive that experience, as well as a public forum in which we attempt to urge readers to consider similar transformations in their own work. Thursday December 3, 2020 We slip on the ice-slick sidewalks of South Philly as we walk, masked, carrying our coffees from Shot Tower. Much later, in the summer of 2021, we will spend an entire afternoon together, sitting in the sunshine outside this same coffee shop, preparing for our upcoming course. We will have brought our marked up copies of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale ; Elinor Fuch’s “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”; Scott Maisano’s “Now”; and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV”—and it will start to become clear that this is a project about time, suspended.[8] But on that Thursday at the beginning of winter, we don’t know any of this yet: we are just two new colleagues struggling to walk without falling. When we get to Jefferson Square, we find a bench in the sun. Beside us, a streetlamp, where someone has busted open its electrical panel and plugged in a cell-phone charger block—cord dangling in the wind. We remark on the brilliance of the unhoused to tap into the city’s electrical grid for free. The conversation turns to the community refrigerators sprinkled throughout our neighborhood; our shared love of gritty Philly; the astonishingly large gap between its wealthy and its poor, but also decades of mutual aid networks aimed at resource redistribution.[9] And the conversation broadens to collaboration. What if we brought together our shared interests in theater and temporality, adapting one of Shakespeare’s plays into an original performance that resonated with the themes of this moment? We riff on the Shakespeare plays that we like, that we love, that we feel might connect to the moment: Hamlet , Lear , Richard III. But we also carry with us some doubt about starting with a tragedy. The body count at the end of these plays does not inspire thoughts of healing or repair. We discussed an article about COVID time and time on ships, and how we are all living in wait. It brought The Tempest , Pericles , and The Winter’s Tale to mind—plays that move the reader from rupture to remedy. Winter in the Spring House The Pennsylvania State University’s Abington College is a small (3,500 student), public, four-year, local-serving, minority majority campus in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia. Students choose Abington for a variety of reasons, but often it is because they work, live at home, or need to stay near kin. Many students have significant financial need; the majority self-identify as people of color, many of whom are immigrants or first-generation Americans; a substantial portion are international students, largely from China; more than a third are the first in their families to go to college. But at its founding in 1850 and for the next 100 years to follow, Abington College was the “Ogontz School for Young Ladies”—a preparatory school for white, wealthy women (Amilia Earhart famously among them) on settled Lenape land. Our class convened twice weekly for three hours each in a tiny cottage called Spring House—the oldest freestanding building on campus, initially constructed to store dairy for the “girls.”[11] When the windows of Spring House are open, you can hear the gurgle of the stream that runs through the tree-filled gorge at the center of campus. The stream also feeds an ornamental pond where geese, ducks, and blue herons swim, huddle together on the ice, and stalk in the reeds. Tucked away from the other buildings and containing only two classrooms, a bathroom, and space for silent prayer, our work in the Spring House feels distinctly removed from the bustle of the college. With its rattling, broken heaters and glitchy technology, our classroom space is somehow simultaneously cold, hot, dry, damp, sunny, shadowy, alienating, and welcoming. Through a small basement window, you can see ferns growing underneath—a greenhouse blooming beneath our feet. (We chose to see these plants as inspirational fauna thriving in the darkness rather than a dispiriting result of institutional neglect.) We gather in the Spring House in early January 2022 and begin to study The Winter’s Tale (c.1610). Shakespeare’s tragicomedy is a work of profound loss and marvelous repair in which jealous King Leontes defies an oracle and loses his family only to reunite with his lost daughter, Perdita; wife, Queen Hermione; and beloved friend, King Polixenes, at the play’s end. The play requires a profound suspension of disbelief as extreme shifts in feeling and fortune befall its characters—a bear famously “pursues” and then devours Antigonus after he saves baby Perdita; Time arrives as Chorus to explain a sixteen-year gap between acts; a statue of Hermione comes to life. Tragedy is averted, but not forgotten, as the play explores the potential of art, and our wonder at its workings, to restore what has been lost.[12] We began the semester by reading the play out loud in its entirety, pausing frequently for clarification. Reading The Winter’s Tale together provided a foundation for discussion and aligned with our pedagogical philosophy, as we prioritized using class time for the most important labor and did not assume that students had unlimited time outside of class. Less prep, more presence. Typically, we divied up class time such that one of us taught for 75-80 minutes, we took a break, and then the other took the lead for the second half of class. Under Marissa’s guidance, we studied the play through literary methods—practicing close reading, reading literary criticism, and conducting archival and embodied research. She introduced the working practices of Shakespeare’s theater through lecture and by getting students up on their feet to perform a scene using reconstructed cue scripts. We learned about the publication and circulation of early modern drama by handling eighteenth-century printed books and looking at the spelling and punctuation in the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works held by the library via Zoom.[13] We drew on Marissa’s research on food and medicine to discuss humoral theory as a framework for understanding character and emotions, such as Leontes’ self-diagnosed tremor cordis , the heart-palpitations of incandescent rage. A number of Marissa’s lessons were linked to sequenced writing assignments which asked students to focus on interpreting specific, brief passages from the play. But we jettisoned inflexible submission dates for written work as a part of “ungrading,” aware that flexibility accommodates a range of student needs in an ongoing pandemic, many of whom are just trying to get by in a culture of harm. After Marissa’s lesson on using the Oxford English Dictionary to interpret Shakespeare’s language, Jack did a little research: the etymology of “deadline” can be traced back to carceral origins, the line beyond which a fleeing prisoner would be shot if they crossed. The shift from deadlines to student-paced learning also meant that students were placed in the position of scholar/researcher in their own right, rather than producing work for us on an arbitrary timeline we have set without their consent.[14] We paired these literary modes with dramaturgical research and embodied theater practice, facilitated by Jack. This dramaturgical research was guided by Fuchs’s foundational “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”—which we began the semester by discussing. Rather than focus on language and character, we paid attention to how time, space, climate, mood, light, sound, color, shape, texture and other sensory clues embedded in the text informed our visceral understanding of the world of The Winter’s Tale. Students gathered images inspired by their research, tesselating the linoleum floors with found art. These images were translated into music, music into movement.[15] The aim of this work, we instructed the students, was to move us away from Shakespeare’s world and into our own—which would be best accomplished by tracing its affective outline. Adaptation was the name of the game. So was play. We built a cohesive sense of ensemble, playing team-building games drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed arsenal and the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. Jack led the ensemble through a codified sequence of activities derived from Lecoq’s journey of the mask, beginning with a physical exploration of the elements: water, fire, earth, air—which we did outdoors in the cold sun, wind, rain, and snow. The aim was increased embodiment, fierce wakefulness, and jeu (Lecoq’s word for the spirit of “play”) —getting actors to trust their kinesthetic impulses and one another, while learning to tell stories with their bodies. In the studio-based context, ungrading came easily: it is common not to grade performance-based work solely on merit and customary to privilege process over product. Relaxed attendance, however, poses some challenges: a show usually needs to be made on a particular timeline; the presence of the ensemble is crucial to its cohesion; and devising requires building a consistent set of skills and aesthetic vocabulary for the work in progress. So while our theory of “intrinsic motivation” was generally successful (students genuinely cared about the class and one another, and commitment was high), the reality of their complex lives meant that occasionally we had a skeleton crew at crucial moments.[16] We over-hired a production manager (Lisa Suzanne Turner), stage manager (Jaleel Hunter), and music director (Emily Bate)—anticipating that we would need some semblance of a production team to pull off what we imagined would be a large-scale, site-specific, outdoor performance in an institutional context with no regular production season; no production staff; no costume, prop, or scene shop; a very modest budget for theater; and a tiny ensemble. Musician and composer Emily Bate was pivotal, working with students to create an original libretto. When Marissa got COVID, Emily and Jack were left at the helm for several weeks. When Emily got COVID, too, music rehearsals moved to Zoom: Jack holding their tiny iPhone in the outdoor amphitheater on campus with janky wifi and two, then three, then five of the six performers present for rehearsal. Change is constant. (Be like water.) And so we were. Tuesday February 15, 2022 (Jack) We have told the students that their assignment today is to “rest.” No reading, no writing, no class. To prepare the week prior, we invited them to lay down on the floor. Heads together, feet splayed, eyes shut, we listened to an interview with Tricia Hersey, where she discusses capitalism and anti-Blackness, and rest as resistance. Originally broadcast in June 2020, the cover image for the podcast—which we close-read with our students—features a photograph by Charlie Watts: Hersey, in glorious repose; her long, yellow gown and bright, tulle petticoat dangling leisurely from the bench on which she sleeps. Behind her, a brick façade, boarded up windows, and broken panes amidst an abandoned lot. Beneath her, rows of cotton—this urban landscape turned magical real. Hersey begins: To not rest is really being violent towards your body. To align yourself with a system that says “Your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working. You are simply a tool for our production.” To align yourself with that is a slow spiritual death. [ . . .] When you don’t sleep, you’re literally killing your body. It’s not a dramatic over-the-top thing to say that. Our organs begin to break down. I remember wondering what our students—primarily working class people of color with two white professors—think of our unorthodox methods, our insistence on their rejection of domination at this school largely aimed at getting them jobs. I remember taking my place on the floor, nestled between Marissa and Trim, as Hersey goes on to refer to our bodies as “divine holding places of liberation.”[17] I remember thinking that I know this is edgy for her—a Renaissance scholar with a formidable dossier and flawless professional attire, Marissa in many ways is the portrait of “Professor.” But on this day she, like the students laying on the cold linoleum beside her, was “dressed to move,” as is the culture of our course. The following week, we regather to report back on our first day of rest. I begin by reading a short passage from Emergent Strategy , our ritual for the start of class. What are all your gifts? Are you living a life that honors all your gifts? If yes, how did you create all this possibility for yourself? If no, how can you create more possibility today? Tomorrow? This month? This year? [18] Kyleigh delights in telling the group that she took a really good nap. Aman went to the gym, and we debate the ontology of rest, of whether that kind of corporeal act constitutes labor or leisure. Madison did work and feels guilty. The only Black woman in the group, does she have the same luxury of enforced rest? We discuss. What nobody knows is that I spent our rest day not resting at all, but on a campus visit (read: interview) at the small, private and exceedingly elite liberal arts college on the other side of town—the one whose website unabashedly refers to itself as “the most beautiful campus in the known universe.” I was tired of the mold and asbestos in our buildings, of the emails inviting students and faculty to a casual donuts and coffee with cops. Ten months later, I will be driving home at 9pm from this very same room with the heater on the fritz—after wrapping up the semester with another group of gems—and as I pull out onto Woodland Road in the dark in the rain I will think to myself: I just can’t. I just can’t imagine telling these students I’m sorry, I’m trading you in for a better job on the other side of town. Sunday April 10, 2022 (Marissa) We knew that it was statistically likely that someone would get COVID during our semester together: It was me. I brought my COVID infection from Penn State Abington to an international conference in Dublin and found myself unwell, isolated, and stranded. I landed in Philadelphia less than two weeks before our scheduled performance, and just in time for our daylong retreat. We take over the Lares Banquet Room, with windows overlooking the pond. As students arrive, I stir a pot of hot chocolate and pour cups of the heavily-spiced drink—prepared from Rebeckah Winche’s seventeenth-century recipe for “chacolet”—seasoned with vanilla, chili pepper, and cinnamon.[19] We sit in a circle and I ask what they taste: they say spice, capsaicin heat, sweetness, oiliness from the cocoa nibs. I propose that tasting historical recipes, like reading The Winter’s Tale , is a form of attenuated time travel. We discuss. Our archives contain partial knowledge of past meals, past performances. We can taste a version of “chacolet” now, even if we cannot know precisely what tasting chocolate and chili pepper—newly-imported American ingredients, prepared using a recipe grounded in Indigenous knowledge—meant to Winche in England in 1666. The students teach me the music that they have been composing in my absence. I show them Frans Snyders’s “A Banquet-piece, c.1620”—a painting I saw at the National Gallery of Ireland the week earlier—as well as other contemporaneous still-lifes that are inspiring our scenic design. Jack guides us in rituals from the Passover haggadah —their holiday about to commence. What you pay attention to grows , and we are paying attention to food, movement, song, ritual, and paintings of tulips and fruit. Over pizza, Jonathan tells me that my voice and breath sound different. He is worried that I’m still sick. Later, as the light fades into a glorious pink sunset, Jack, Jaleel, and I walk the possible routes that our performance might take—singing the opening song from Exit as we travel: All you touch you change, all you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change, change, change. Adapted from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and invoked on the first page of brown’s book, these lines had become a kind of anthem—first metaphorical, now literal—for our group.[20] I stop singing. I’m short of breath. My chest hurts. My lungs can’t handle singing and walking in the cold air. April 21, 2022 It is a beautiful day in early spring; the campus is abuzz with another semester almost done. Audience members have been instructed to meet on the plaza outside the Sutherland Building—the one with Chief Ogontz eerily chiseled into stone above the door. Marissa and Jack make small-talk with guests: the dean and chancellor among them. An unassuming white, folding table—the kind on every college campus—is littered with COVID waivers and percussives: maracas, egg shakers, a xylophone. Jaleel, in black slacks and shirt and a bright orange durag that matches the glittery streaks above his eyes, greets us one by one—handing out instruments to those of us willing to play. An actor (Madison Branch), also in black with burgundy accents around her eyes, stands expectantly under the public clock on the other side of the lawn. She introduces herself to us as “Time” and teaches us a song: “ All you touch you change . . . ” We follow her, playing our instruments and singing in rounds. At the top of a hill, we glimpse a vast, green field: a banquet in the distance. We hear a drum, voices. We approach. Beneath a line of tall pines, long tables are draped in white linen and laden with flowers and fruit. Our voices join with the drums and the voices of the performers, who welcome us to their feast. Exit, a banquet piece is a site-specific, immersive performance with live music, song, monologue, ritual, and a community meal. In its conceit, it begins in the moments just after the action of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale has ended. In the last lines of the play, Leontes invites recollection: Good Paulina, Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand and answer to his part Performed in this wide gap of time since first We were dissevered. Hastily lead away. They exit. (5.3.188-192) Exit, a banquet piece accepts Leontes’s invitation for “each” member the ensemble to share their story of the “wide gap of time”—all that has happened in the time they have been apart, “dissevered.” To the beat of Polixenes’s drum (Jonathan Bercovici), each performer tells their story in turn: my name is Polixenes and I am the hunted man; my name is Hermione and I am the accused woman; my name is Leontes and I am the regretful man; my name is Perdita and I am the queer child; my name is Florizel and I am the lover; my name is Time and I am the seer—their monologues filling the spring air, the rest of the chorus chanting underneath. The ensemble then leads the audience in a series of healing rituals, inspired, in part, by the Passover seder (it is the 7th night). Hermione (Kyleigh Byers) invites us wash our neighbors’ hands with water blessed by the light of the full moon, while Florziel (George Ye)—in a deep green cape—plays a haunting melody on the xylophone. Birds chirp, geese honk and soar overhead. At Leontes’s command (Aman Zabian), we name the things that plague us, dipping our pinkies into our wine-filled cups and tapping them on our plates: the war in Ukraine, racism at home, patriarchy, student debt, addiction, COVID-19. Perdita (Trim Walker) asks us to toast the things we want more of: we say love, joy, learning. Night falls; music swells; the Ramandan fast has concluded for another day: we feast. Students Jonathan Bercovici, Madison Branch, Kyleigh Byers, Trim Walker, George Ye, and Aman Zabian perform their monologues in Exit , a banquet piece . Audience members of diverse backgrounds share their personal narratives of the pandemic with one another. Ritual devised and led by the student ensemble. George Ye performs a solo on the xylophone as Kyleigh Byers leads audience members in a handwashing ritual. Original score written by Ye. Madison Branch as Time (foreground), Jonathan Bercovici as Polixenes, Aman Zabian as Leontes; Kyleigh Byers as Hermione, Trim Walker as Perdita, and George Ye as Florizel in Exit, a banquet piece. Audiences perform a ritual inspired by the Passover Seder, naming contemporary “plagues” that harm them, while marking their plates with droplets of wine. Production Manager Lisa Suzanne Turner (left) and Stage Manager Jaleel Hunter (bottom, right) sit with audience members in a moment of silence. Audience members were comprised of faculty, staff, students, and the local community. Photo credit: Mendal Diana Polish Thursday May 19, 2022 (Marissa) I wanted time to stop as I sat in that field and listened to the students sing. I wanted time to stop as I named the things that plague me, named the things that I want more of in my life. I wanted time to stop as I looked at the tulips, fruit, objects, and place-settings on the banquet tables that I had arranged like a Renaissance still life. I wanted time to stop as water poured over hands, music and birdsong filled the field. I wanted to linger. I wanted to dilate that moment of joy, release, pride, and beauty. I wanted time to stop. But of course, time is relentless; performance “can never be captured or transmitted through the archive”; and “the only lasting truth is change.”[21] Nevertheless, I attempted to preserve the fleeting moment. I brought home the clementines that adorned the set and baked with them, transforming the performance into a cake.[22] I served it at our final class meeting as a way of saying I love you all so much, to say that I wanted time to stop. It was a temporary solution: We devoured the cake. Thursday April 28, 2022 (Jack) In our final class meeting, we form two concentric circles, inside facing out. Eye to eye, toe to toe, everyone is given three prompts to answer (before rotating to the next partner): What is my impact in the world? In three words, what am I embodying? Where do you think I could grow? [23] I am facilitating, so I don’t play, except for the round when someone steps out into the sun. For that brief moment, I face Marissa, struggling to find the words. I say something about her learning to integrate the work of the mind and the fact of the body in answering prompt number three. And she says something about my inextinguishable fire, about learning to cool, or direct, my flames. Indeed. Like Leontes, I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances, but not for joy. I’m not alone. Enraged by injustice, hot with desire, aren’t we all just learning how to direct the storms of our fires toward healing and justice for all? And isn’t performance always the work of the mind and the fact of the body brought together in the service of this? We carpool home, Broad Street all the way. Past the storefront churches and the mattress stores and Temple University and City Hall. When we get to South Philly, where I no longer live, Marissa and I part ways. “We did something really special,” she says, and we hug awkwardly in the car. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build resilience by building the relationships. At the heart of this course was our collaboration—a site where we modeled for our students how to move at the speed of trust. In many ways, we are incredibly different—as teachers, as artists, as scholars trained in distinct fields. But we agreed for four months to align our joint pedagogy with our shared politics and see what that might stir. Marissa is on sabbatical now, and I continue to teach at the former school for girls. I have carried on in our tradition of abolition: no grades, no deadlines, no attendance policies—which shares the Greek and Latin root, of course— politia— with “police.” I have continued with rest days, and, to the extent possible, decentering my authority in the room (which, quite possibly, sometimes reifies it; it’s hard to say for sure, but they know I care). And it’s not yet clear if I will stay for the long haul; but then again, it’s also not clear if the academy, the nation, or the planet will. So while we wait, and work, and wonder, I’m going to go ahead and place my bet on emergent strategy and/as abolitionist pedagogy for these pandemic times, and beyond—as the best we’ve got for figuring out, together, how we might get free.[24] References [1] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017), pp. 41-42. [2] Ibid, p. 3. [3] For more on care work, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). For a great introduction to abolitionist pedagogy, see Sujani Reddy, “School is a Tracking Device: On Deschooling as Abolitionist Practice,” March 9, 2019 THIS IS HELL! , produced by mixlr, podcast, https://thisishell.com/interviews/1046-sujani-reddy; see also Reddy’s chapter of the same title in the anthology Abolitioning Carceral Society (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2018). Thank you to Sujani Reddy for her correspondence about pedagogy and abolition over the years. [4] After the screening of Brett Story’s stunning documentary film, The Prison in 12 Landscapes (2016) at the Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia in December 2022, Robert Saleem Holbrook, the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, made the important distinction between decarceration and abolition. Decarceration, he noted, is dedicated to eradicating all prisons and freeing all captive people. Abolition, however, takes this project one step further: aiming to abolish all systems of oppression that uphold a carceral logic. This includes prisons, police, policing, police unions, surveillance and corrections technology and businesses that produce them, jails, detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), and the nation-state itself. Thank you to Lindsay Reckson for bringing this film to our attention and for being a co-conspirator in abolitionist pedagogy more generally. [5] We have each taught in a range of institutional contexts prior to our positions at Penn State, including public and private R1s and R2s, small liberal arts colleges, art schools, and the Ivy League. Marissa began teaching as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania; an adjunct at the University of the Arts; and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Scripps College. Jack first taught at the University of Texas at Austin as an M.A. and Ph.D. student; then a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Northern Arizona University, and Haverford College; before beginning the tenure-track at Reed College, followed by Penn State. [6] We modeled our syllabus language on Jesse Stommel, “Compassionate Grading Policies,” Jesse Stommel January 3, 2022 https://www.jessestommel.com/compassionate-grading-policies/; See also Asao Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse, 2019); Alfie Kohn, “The Case Against Grades,” Educational Leadership [7] Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition,” June 10, 2020 Intercepted , produced by The Intercept , podcast, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/; see also Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023). [8] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” in Theater , no. 34 (2) (2004): 5-9; Scott Maisano, “Now,” in Early Modern Theatricality , ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 368-85; Kathryn Bond Stockton, “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare , edited by Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 421-428. [9] For a good primer on mutual aid, see Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (New York: Verso Books, 2020). [10] Jack Isaac Pryor, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Marissa Nicosia, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). [11] “Historic Abington Campus,” Penn State Abington History Program https://www.abington.psu.edu/academics/history/historic-abington-campus [12] This framing of the play owes debts to Marissa’s undergraduate mentor and his scholarship. Peter Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), esp. pp. 153-168). [13] William Shakespeare, Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. (London, 1632). Eberly Family Special Collections, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, PR2751.A2 1632 Q. [14] “dead-line, n.” OED Online . December 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/Entry/47657 (accessed December 22, 2022); see also Heather Froehlich, Marissa Nicosia, and Christina Riehman-Murphy, “Transcribing Recipe Manuscripts Online: V.b.380 and the ‘What’s in a Recipe?’ Undergraduate Research Project at Penn State Abington.” Early Modern Studies Journal 8(2022). https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/transcribing-recipe-manuscripts-online-v-b-380-and-the-whats-in-a-recipe-undergraduate-research-project-at-penn-state-abington/ [15] The physical theater work that we did in class was informed by Jack’s training with director Anne Bogart/the SITI Company and choreographer Rosie Herrera/Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, as well as Pig Iron Theater Company and The Padova Arts Academy (Paola Coletto) where they trained in Lecoq. [16] The idea of complex lives is informed by Avery Gordon’s notion of “the right to complex personhood,” which she discusses in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 4). [17] “Tricia Hersey on Rest as Resistance,” June 8, 2020 for the wild, produced by Ayana Young, podcast, https://forthewild.world/listen/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185; see also, Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (New York: Little, Brown, 2022). [18] See brown, p. 190. [19] Marissa Nicosia, “Chacolet from Rebeckah Winche’s Receipt Book at the Folger Shakespeare Library” Cooking in the Archives January 28, 2016 https://rarecooking.com/2016/01/28/chacolet-from-rebeckah-winches-receipt-book-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library/. [20] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993), p. 3; brown, p. 1. [21] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 20. [22] Earlier in the semester, Jack had suggested that Marissa try this recipe. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, “Clementine & almond syrup cake” Jerusalem (London: Ebury, 2012), p. 294. [23] See brown, p. 185. [24] This notion of “how we get free” is inspired by the Combahee River Collective anthology; see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Footnotes About The Author(s) MARISSA NICOSIA is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Marissa’s first monograph, I magining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 , will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. She co-edited the collection, Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Emma Depledge and John S. Garrison. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture on Renaissance Futures with John S. Garrison. She has published articles on Renaissance literature, temporality, food culture, and book history and manuscript studies. Marissa runs the public food history website Cooking in the Archives ( www.rarecooking.com ). JACK ISAAC PRYOR is Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. They received their Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (2017), was published by Northwestern University Press and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. Jack is currently co-editing the collection, Transfixt: Transgender Aesthetics at the Tipping Point , with Jules Rosskam and a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre with Stacy Wolf (Sondheim from the Side, forthcoming 2023). They have published essays on pedagogy, queer temporality, minoritarian performance and visual culture, sex, state violence, and experimental modes of art and cultural criticism. Jack is also a director and devised theater maker. ( www.jaclynisaacpryor.com ). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK presents Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK 4:30-6:00 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Proshansky Auditorium RSVP Three artists, one microphone, and a large room; the idea and practice of improvisation; making somethings out of nothings; finding ways out of no way; “yes and…”; “no but…”; everything for everyone. For this event, the artist and writer Ethan Philbrick gathers three artists who work in an expanded field of performance—Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, and Anh Vo—to improvise and discuss the stakes and strategies of their improvisational practices. Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo, while each working in different modes and in relation to different social exigencies, all turn to improvisational techniques as part of a broader commitment to the unknown and the unpredictable. While improvisation can sometimes be understood as the activity of a heroically volitional individual, Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo improvise so as to expose politically fraught dependencies and entanglements. Each artist will improvise for ten minutes before coming together for a conversation about improvisation with Philbrick. Precarious Luxuries is a keynote event of ASAP/15 and is presented in partnership with Prelude. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Nile Harris (he/him) is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing. Alex Tatarsky (they/them) makes live performances in the unfortunate in-between zone of dance, theater, performance art, and comedy—drawing on traditions from vaudeville to futurist poetry. Their practice embraces the figure of the bouffon, a European clown type said to live in the swamps at the edge of the kingdom, who was not only allowed to mock the king’s power but rewarded for it. Tatarsky’s original solo pieces have been presented at a wide array of venues including La MaMa, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, Playwrights Horizons, and Abrons Arts Center, as well as comedy clubs, bars, basements, and trash heaps. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics and politics of rot. Along with collaborator Ming Lin, they form one half of Shanzhai Lyric and its fictional office Canal Street Research Association. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Anh Vo (they/them) is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Described by the New York Times as “risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous,” their choreographic work has received critical recognition for its research-driven and boundaries-pushing formal investigation. Significant fellowships and grants include Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, Dance/NYC Disability Dance Artistry Fellowship, USArtist International grant, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, Brooklyn Arts Council grants, and FCA Emergency Grants. Ethan Philbrick (he/him) is a cellist, performance artist, and writer. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently performance curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances at The Kitchen, NYU Skirball, Wesleyan Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Grey Art Museum. His musical performances have been called “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and his writing has been characterized as “rich and fascinating” in e-flux. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Kevin T. Browne Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Kevin T. Browne By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics . Eddie Paterson. New York: Methuen, 2015; Pp. 232. The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics by Eddie Paterson offers comparative analyses of solo performance artists Spalding Grey, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith, and Karen Finley. In his introduction, Paterson clearly lays out his arguments and the organization of the book, which focuses on the connections between “two trajectories – solo performance as an integral part of US culture, politics, and media, and monologue as it appears in Western dramatic traditions” (1). He examines these artists’ works as uniquely American, at once belonging to their time and commenting upon it as if observing it from a distance. In their own fashion, each of these artists performs politics as a critique of turn-of-the-century neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the assumed rightness of privilege inherent in these ideologies. Paterson is an Australian who came of age after these artists had achieved canonization, and he delivers his analyses with what he calls “the almost obscene benefit of hindsight and with a vision of American culture and performance that comes from afar and…is already mediated and filtered” (3). It is ironic that Paterson describes these solo artists as finding their form and meaning in performance, as distinct from and apart from traditional dramatic literature, and yet finds himself examining them from a remove, without having seen them live. Paradoxically, this vantage point serves him well. While his theoretical and historical contextualization and analysis are strong, and his scholarship is thorough, he is at his best when offering vivid and immediate close-reading descriptions of the performances of these artists. In his introduction, the author identifies three key features that distinguish the work of these American solo artists from the monologue genre in Western dramatic tradition: parody – ironic commentary on contemporary history and politics; mediatization – the works engage with and are often consumed as video (and sometimes audio) reproductions; and personae – the privileging of the performing personality over traditional character. In all four cases, the reliability of narrator and narration is a central issue. The first two chapters of the book provide historical context for the works of the American solo artists. First, Paterson traces the monologue as a genre in Western drama chronologically from the Greeks and Romans through the modernists and post-modernists. Building on the work of previous scholars such as Deborah R. Geis, he notes the direct relationship that monologue affords between the speaker and the audience, which often serves to disrupt and subvert narrative. Not surprisingly, Paterson finds in Brecht, Pinter, and especially Beckett the radical transformation of the monologue that informs contemporary work. In the second chapter, Paterson changes direction by arguing that the influences that gave rise to American solo performance owe less to the Western dramatic tradition and more to the oratorical tradition of political speeches, religious sermons, and the like. The “American Jeremiad” tradition began early in the development of the nation to define and uphold the status quo, especially to link together religious fervor with capitalist energies. Nevertheless, progressive voices such as those from the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements have also used these rhetorical techniques. It is these “anti-mainstream American voices” (45) that connect most closely to the solo artists, who each receive a chapter of analysis in the main part of the book. In examining Spalding Gray’s “confessional monologue,” Paterson notes that Gray’s best-known works, though originally performed live, have been widely disseminated as films and recordings. Paterson seems to have experienced them only in this way. The author posits that the “mediatization and the mass production of these monologues has been examined for the way they break down distinctions between high art and commodity culture” (55). In Gray’s conflation between the stage persona and the “‘real-live’ self,” (59) the charismatic performer ironically presents himself as both authentic and unreliable, obliquely critiquing American politics and culture while simultaneously confessing his complicity “through the eyes of a self-consciously privileged persona: a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon male” (55). In contrast to Gray, with his table, chair, and glass of water, Laurie Anderson’s “post-punk monologue” achieves parody by situating her small lone body within massive multi-media environments. Paterson nonetheless recalls the textual content of these technological performances. Focusing on her works from the 1980s, the author shows how they represent a critical response to Reagan-era social and economic policies. Sampling, cutting, and pasting serve to fragment narrative, and electronic voice alteration and androgynous appearance further deconstruct, confuse, dehumanize, and unsex the Anderson persona. Anna Deavere Smith is unique in this group as a solo performer of verbatim documentary theatre and as directly tied with the American civil rights tradition of monologue performance. Paterson finds that in her “rights monologue” explorations of race, class, and the diversity of American lives and attitudes, Smith’s work is neither overtly ironic nor self-reflexive. Yet, Paterson argues, Smith’s implied objectivity deserves critique. The authenticity of the speaker—who is never the performer herself—is asserted within the performance by her remarkable imitative skills. Still, Smith is the curator, selecting, editing, ordering, and performing. Her “acting practices,” Paterson says, “present identity as changeable, performative, and negotiated,” (116) thus enabling “ironic consideration of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology” (125). The persistent disconnection between herself and her subjects is deliberate. Paterson gives Karen Finley’s flamboyant, colorful, and transgressive performance the name of “radical monologue” because of the degree to which “she joyfully deploys and subverts multiple personae, non-linear texts and the wholesale rejection of coherent dramatic character” to “critique American culture and politics” (128). Paterson’s descriptions vivify the ways in which text and performance engender meaning and how “the real life persona of ‘Karen Finley’ intermingles with the personae performed in the spoken texts” (133). While Paterson quotes some of the more outrageous utterances in the works and notes how Finley’s membership in the NEA 4 made her famous, he understates the radical use she often makes of her own body (such as the infamous smearing of chocolate and honey over her naked self) as a site of ideological contention. The book’s closing chapter, “Future Monologue,” serves as a summation and conclusion. Paterson predicts the lasting effects of the modes of performance that he dubs “post dramatic” and “post monologue.” This theatrical landscape continues to break down distinctions between the fictional and the real and offers powerful theatrical means of interrogating the cultural assumptions of power. Paterson’s work is a significant addition to the critical studies of these four particular artists, the historical framework that contextualizes them, and the monologue form. Those who are led by the title to expect a monologue sourcebook for actors (as I was) will encounter much more. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kevin T. Browne University of Central Arkansas Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Khalid Y. Long Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long By Published on April 27, 2021 Download Article as PDF Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012) is often recognized as a pioneering Black woman theatre director. [1] A more expansive view of her career, however, would highlight Dickerson’s important role as a playwright, an adaptor/deviser, a teacher, and as this essay will illustrate, a progenitor of feminist theatre and performance theory. This essay offers a brief rumination on how Dickerson made a Black feminist intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory as she became one of the earliest voices to intercede and ensure that Black women had a seat at the table. [2] Glenda Dickerson’s intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory appears in her critical writings. Accordingly, these essays illustrate her engagement with Black feminist thought and elucidate how she modeled a feminist theatre theory through her creative works. Dickerson, along with other pioneering feminist theatre artists, “reshaped the modern dramatic/theatrical canon, and signaled its difference from mainstream (male) theatre.” [3] Dickerson’s select body of essays prompted white feminist theorists and practitioners to be cognizant of race and class as well as gender in their work and scholarship. [4] Moreover, Dickerson’s writings serve a dual function for readers: first, they offer an entryway into her life and creative process as a Black feminist artist. Secondly, they detail her subjective experiences as a Black woman within the professional worlds of theatre and academia. Feminist Theatre Theory: A Brief Overview of Inclusion and Exclusion Emerging as both an analytical tool as well as a methodology, feminism has been one of the foremost theoretical apparatuses to shape the field of theatre especially as it has called scholars’ attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality. The scholars and critics, such as those mentioned below, who have contributed to founding and shaping a feminist theatre theory are diverse in their historical ideas, cultural approaches, and theoretical foregrounding. While there is no singular definition or description of feminist theatre theory to encapsulate such a wide-ranging array of positions, a brief overview of the legacies of some of the most significant contributors may help to situate Dickerson’s contribution to the field. Some of the foundational voices to assist in establishing feminism as an area of study within theatre/drama and English programs during the early part of the 1980s include Dinah Louise Leavitt, Helen Krich Chinoy, Linda Walsh Jenkins, and Helene Keyssar. As Elaine Aston notes, their texts had an impact on the field of theatre studies, however, they focused mainly on the playwrights and theatre practitioners who came to prominence during the 1970s. Aston maintains, “Studies of this kind were instrumental in making feminist and/or women’s theatre work visible but, to develop this, what was needed […] was a more fully rehearsed critical response critical frameworks appropriate for feminist analysis and ‘looking’.” [5] The scholars to heed Aston’s call were Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan and Lynda Hart, among others. In Theatre & Feminism, Kim Solga provides a summary of the ground-breaking studies, including the works of Case, Dolan, and Hart, arguing that their scholarship indelibly changed the field of theatre studies and theatre practice by forging a relationship between feminist theory and theatre/performance. Solga singles out the year between 1988 and 1989 as “a watershed for feminist performance theory and criticism.” [6] The year witnessed the publication of some of feminist theatre’s major works: Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre , Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and Lynda Hart’s edited collection, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre . As this quick survey suggests, scholars, critics, and practitioners sustained a commitment to deconstructing the landscape of male privilege that positioned women on the margins or, in many cases, excluded them entirely from the histories of theatre and performance. Even though feminist theatre theory advanced theatre studies and practice, most of the earlier scholars and critics to develop a feminist theatre theory were predominantly white women concerned with gender , rather than race as a determining factor. And even though theatre scholar Sandra L. Richards pressed the issue back in 1991, declaring that it was “time that white women and men began to participate in the project of bringing more black women’s writing and theatre work to critical attention,” [7] the concerted efforts of white feminists still marginalized the lived experiences of Black women and other women of color. Within early theoretical studies of feminist theatre, the inclusion of women of color seemed an afterthought. A Return to 1987 Dickerson’s first significant contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theatre and performance theory appeared in 1987—predating Solga’s “watershed” moment for feminist scholars and artists. During the 1987 pre-conference of the Women and Theatre Program, a focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Dickerson delivered her groundbreaking speech, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.” [8] With this speech, Dickerson infused a Black woman’s voice into the field of theatre and performance while simultaneously theorizing a Black woman’s subjectivity. Dickerson made her speech the same year that pioneering Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian wrote her pivotal essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she suggests that we “read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.” [9] Just as Christian called for a new way to nuance Black women’s cultural productions (i.e., fiction, poetry, novels, etc.), Dickerson led the charge in theatre to reverse what she identified as Black women being “triply locked out: by class, by race, and history.” [10] Dickerson’s and Christians’ declarations underscores their engagement with the theory of intersectionality (foreshadowing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989). Dickerson’s concern with the “silenced voice of the woman of color” [11] fueled her mission to reclaim and re-center Black women’s voices and image through performance so that they no longer had to “depend on an often-distorted illustration.” [12] Throughout “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Dickerson also evokes the names of early “race women” [13] such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as more contemporary writers, cultural critics, and activists such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Helen Washington, Eleanor Traylor, and Winnie Mandela. Dickerson’s essay draws on Black feminist theory and literary criticism. As Lisa Anderson notes in Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) and La Donna Forsgren discusses in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatist of the Black Arts Movement (2018), Black feminist theory and literary criticism helped to propel a new critical language that, in turn, formulated a method to read and analyze Black feminist aesthetics within a plethora of literary and artistic mediums and genres. Dickerson’s “The Cult of True Womanhood” essay also invokes the concept of “womanism.” She writes, “I went searching with Alice Walker for ‘our mothers’ gardens.’ That’s when I became a womanist. So, naturally I had to incorporate her salty definition. . .” [14] Womanism encompasses the concept of being “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. […] Traditionally universalist…” [15] Theatre scholar Freda Scott Giles writes about Dickerson’s manifestation of womanism within her works: “Some feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is liberty and justice for all. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism, and sexism is mutually exclusive.” [16] A number of revolutionary Black feminist and womanist writers including Gloria I. Joseph and Audre Lorde have asserted that Black feminism, as well as womanism, offers a globally-inclusive framework. As early as 1979, Lorde called for feminist-activists (regardless of gender identity) to overthrow the ideologies that have contributed to racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and practices both in the United States and abroad. For example, in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde contends that feminist theory is not complete “without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” [17] Lorde’s theoretical manifesto calls for a liberatory praxis unequivocally focused on the absence of Black women, poor women, queer women, and third world women’s experiences, among others, from larger feminist discourses. Like Lorde, Dickerson also takes a global perspective with her work. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” she writes: When you start reading ancient myths and womanist literature and traveling to countries where the people look like you, you gain a so-called global perspective. Not only is the language of oppression the same the world over; the anguish of women is echoed around the world and resonates from continent to continent. The torture of mothers who lose their daughters to rape, war, drugs, poverty; the suffering of women who are tortured and die in Latin American prisons; the untimely death of young women who are killed by drunk drivers or yuppie lovers in New York’s Central Park and then twice victimized by the courts and press: these women are sisters in suffering, fixed on the fangs of the two-headed serpent. Their silenced voices, their stilled tongues are symbolized for me in the illegal banning of South Africa’s Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, whom the people call “Mother of the Nation.”[18] Seen in this light, Dickerson’s artistic mantra mirrors Lorde’s manifesto as she strove to create a theatre that materializes what Lorde considers “differences” among women’s lived experiences. This appears most clearly in Dickerson’s final artistic work, The Kitchen Prayer Series, a trilogy of performances inspired by the tragic events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Centered around the question, “What is it like for women all around the world to live with war and terror daily?” Dickerson’s triptych interrogates how women from across the globe, navigate a world where war and terror are quotidian experiences. Several white feminist scholars have recognized Dickerson’s contribution to the developing field of feminist theatre studies. [19] For example, in the introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes about Dickerson’s essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood”: Dickerson amplifies the audacity of that voice and its strength within a critique of the form of the drama – its predilection for heroes – particularly heroes of a certain gender and class. From the pleasures of those audacious roots, Dickerson creates a theatre, as a director, and a theory of the theatre, as a feminist theorist. Dickerson’s move illustrates one way in which the social movement and the feminist theorist/theatre practitioner traverse a common terrain – the pleasure of a historical moment, a material condition moving with the gestures of the stage and the dynamics of performative forms.[20] Interestingly, Case does not explicitly name race as a factor within Dickerson’s theoretical framework. Instead, she focuses on gender and class. However, by calling out the “historical moment, a material condition,” as a “common terrain” Dickerson negotiates, Case makes the point that Dickerson’s theory, as well as her theatre are formulated through materialist feminism which aims to critique the “conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures.” [21] Additionally, Case makes an important observation by calling attention to Dickerson’s role as an innovative feminist performance maker. As Dickerson laments, “Gone was the pompous director’s gaze, absent the royal director’s chair.” [22] Renouncing a longing to sit among the “ranks of directors,” Glenda Dickerson declared herself a “PraiseSinger.” “A true PraiseSinger,” Dickerson explains, is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. The chair in which I sit will no longer be called the director’s chair, but the blood-bought mercy seat. From that seat, my work will be a mission, my goal will be a miracle.[23] With Dickerson denouncing the patriarchal throne of the director in her pioneering essay, she emerges as one of the earliest women theatre artists to use a Black feminist lens to reconsider the position of the director and their function. Final Thoughts I hope that this essay will shed light on Dickerson’s role as an audacious critical theorist and excavate her from the hidden cracks of (theatre) history. A closer look at her other essays – written at various periods throughout her career – would further illustrate her deepening commitment to Black feminist theatre as well as Black feminist epistemology. As both her critical writings as well as her creative works demonstrate, Dickerson challenged conventional modes of theatre making while also using theatre as a platform to bring marginalized, silenced, and forgotten people center stage. Dickerson’s scholarly and artistic works offer a model for those looking to subvert the dominant paradigms. References [1] When Dickerson is referenced in studies that address African American theatre or Black women in theatre such as Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) or Anthony Hill and Douglas Q. Barnett’s Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), it is usually a small survey of her work as a director. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow’s reference book, American Women Directors of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) also provides a broad survey of Dickerson’s work in the theatre that is premised on interviews Fliotsos conducted with Dickerson. [2] My larger project in progress offers a richer exploration of Dickerson’s career, from her start as a student of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to her final creative project The Kitchen Prayer Series before her untimely death in 2012. [3] Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. [4] Dickerson’s essays include: “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” which was first published in Theatre Journal (vol. 40, no. 2, 1988) and republished in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 1988); “Wearing Red: When a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say ‘NO!’” in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter , edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); “Rode a Railroad that Had No Track” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performances edited by Annemarie Bean (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and “Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: Sanctifying Sullied Space” in Performance and Cultural Politics , edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). [5] Elaine Aston, “Foreword,” in Feminism and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 2014), ix -x. [6] Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism (New York: Palgrave), 16. [7] Sandra L. Richards made this statement in a paper she delivered, “Women, Theatre, and Social Action,” at the ‘Breaking the Surface” conference/festival held in Calgary, November 13-17, 1991. I learned of Richards’ paper, and subsequently her quote, from Lizbeth Goodman’s book Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) . [8] “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” was later published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and in 1990 re-published in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , edited by Sue-Ellen Case. I am utilizing the published version of Dickerson’s speech and will therefore refer to it as a written essay. [9] Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no.6 (1987): 53. [10] Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 110. [11] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 110. [12] Khalid Y. Long, “The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance , ed. Kathy A. Perkins et al (New York: Routledge), 183. [13] In her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women , Black feminist studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper defines the phrase “race women” as “the first Black women intellectuals [and activist]. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through the diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to proving the intellectual character of the race” (11). [14] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 115. [15] Alice Walker, In Search of Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose , 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi. [16] Freda Scott Giles, “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining Feminist Discourse/Pedagogy/Theatre,” in Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook , ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 141. [17] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Lorde’s essay was first delivered as a speech at a conference in 1979 honoring Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , and later published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (page missing?). The essay was republished in Lorde’s collection Sister Outsider . [18] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 115. [19] Similar to Case, Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, the editors of Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Gender and Race Matter, consider Dickerson a “godmother,” noting that her “intellectual and artistic courage and generosity have given us permission to think past the limits of our own cultural identification as white women and to begin investigating the way Big Daddy crosses into communities of color,” 5. [20] Sue-Ellen Case, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 4. [21] Aston, Feminism and Theatre , 9. [22] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 118. [23] Ibid., 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) KHALID Y. LONG is an assistant professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre studies at Columbia College Chicago. Khalid has published essays in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance . His forthcoming scholarship includes essays in Theatre Design & Technology , TDR: The Drama Review , and Critical Essays on the Politics of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Donald Gagnon. Khalid has also contributed essays to Black Masks , a long-established black theatre magazine. Khalid’s current book project is a critical study of Black feminist artist Glenda Dickerson. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.