Erika Guay Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Erika Guay By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Choreographing Dirt provides an explorative space where performance art intertwines with ecology, specifically highlighting the importance of dirt in performances. This text is to date one of five in the Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series (STEP). Angenette Spalink’s inclusion in this series perfectly aligns with the larger goals of STEP by exploring global intersections of theatre, ecology, and performance studies. In four chapters, each examining a different case study, Spalink provides diverse examples of choreographic elements through performance and how those address the myriad of ecological materials that display biogeocultography , a term coined by the author to describe the movement of dirt in biological, geographical, and cultural ways. This text is a true academic dive into ecocritical research, movement, and dirt. The introduction is invaluable in providing a framework for understanding the fields of biogeocultography and performative taphonomy , or how the movement of ecological matter creates “biological, geographic, and cultural meaning” and how the existence of “ecological matter on stage and page—e.g., dirt—‘does’ something" (16). Spalink sets up the text’s overarching goal to display how interactions of performative taphonomy with humans ultimately show that “the performer is not always human” (4). Thus, the entire text centers on each case study and expands upon how human interaction and ecological matter in each performance challenges traditional frameworks of theatrical production and ecological divisions. Starting with Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play, Chapter 1 provides a solid beginning of the exploration of dirt in a literal sense. This chapter primarily focuses on the movement of Parks’ characterization of Abraham Lincoln and how the repeated act of digging holes creates a ritual that reflects the power dynamics of America’s racial and classist past (28). Spalink’s examination of this 1994 production provides historical context to dirt, highlighting the connections of dirt to America’s past racialized practices of linking those who work with dirt as lower class, immoral, and uncivilized, thus justifying the treatment of those populations as “an expendable commodity and contaminant” (31). Chapter 2 focuses on dance in Pina Bausch's 1975 staging of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring . This study offers a detailed dive into the peat moss that covered the stage in this production, including context for the global ecological importance of peat. Spalink notes that this particular piece has no record of where the peat came from, nor what happened to it after the production (52). As I listened to the music while reading the chapter, it set the tone for the historiography, helping me envision the original performance from the descriptions, while also highlighting the importance of productions to consider the full cycle of production work and materials from page to stage to post-production. Chapters 3 and 4 display a culmination and enhancement of Spalink’s text. These final chapters are overall stronger in their content due to the inclusion of production shots and primary research. Spalink had previously presented the information in Chapter 3 at Earth Matters on Stage in 2012 with the Stage Manager of the production who provided their personal experience and interviews with the company, and the information in Chapter 4 includes observations from her personally attending the production and conducting interviews with the Director. In Chapter 3, Spalink explores the 2010 performance of Eveoke Dance Theatre's Las Mariposas , “an imaginative adaptation of Alvarez’s novel, which tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, who led an underground resistance – known as the Fourteenth of June Movement – in the 1950s, against Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo” (59). This piece involved boxes of dirt symbolizing the graves in which the sisters die and are buried. The use of dirt not only enhances the performance and meanings of the production but also adds to the post-show process, both in terms of time and impact to the cast. The cast felt the connection to the dirt beyond that of a prop or scenic piece, unable to feel finished with the night’s performance until the dirt was restored to their bins (60). Spalink’s study reiterates that working with dirt through intimate taphonomy, or the relationship of the performer with the lifecycle of the dirt, changes the perceptions and relationships performers have with dirt. Thus, the dancers become dirt, and, therefore, we must question whether the dirt can become human (66). Chapter 3 brings up the practical issue of what can be done with the dirt after a production concludes, allowing us, the reader, to again consider the full cycle of materials utilized in performance. The last chapter, Chapter 4, culminates with an examination of Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos , a Butoh performance in 2018 that utilized dirt with fungi, which prompted dancers to attune how their actions impacted—and, in turn, reacted to—the mycelium present. The mycelium transcended past the original concept of “dirt,” elevated on day one of rehearsal as a vital performer and even consumed by the performers to fully realize the life cycle needed to encompass the dancers in the full food web of the fungi. Spalink uses this study to “consider how performance practices might incorporate (speculative) ecological ethics” (78). Spalink notes that some of the ecomaterials were sourced from a lab while others from the forest, but all were returned to their original homes after, thus keeping the production honest to their “eco-ethical obligation” (92). By the end of Choreographing Dirt , I found myself linking many of Spalink’s thoughts to ecoscenography principles—a call to performance creators to consider the impact of our materials and the full cycle of how those materials are sourced, used, and reused. Spalink calls on readers to question if the impact and use of these ecological materials on stage hold more value than the use of these materials which simply leaves them in their natural state. The text also allows us to question dirt beyond the basics of the technical challenges: yes, dirt onstage can create physical challenges for theatrical spaces, equipment, and audiences. But having real dirt asks us to consider our relationship with dirt, how dirt “becomes” part of us, and what makes up that dirt (all the way to a microscopic level); real dirt also challenges us to view dirt itself as a performer. Other texts in the Routledge series also ask readers to consider their impact and intersection with natural elements, and so Spalink’s text is in the right place for this research and interdisciplinary approach to movement, dance, and performance. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIKA GUAY is an Associate Professor of Theatre at SUNY Plattsburgh and the Book Review Editor for USITT TD&T . She originally hails from Virginia and holds a B.A. from Gettysburg College, along with an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is a member of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT), the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Association (KCACTF), Phi Beta Kappa, and Alpha Psi Omega. Her current research focuses on ecoscenography and sustainability in theatre design. She also enjoys her farm, raising sheep and cows, gardening, and making maple syrup. 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 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. By Suzi Elnaggar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF A slight young man (Esho Rasho) sits on a white couch, alone, contemplative. Behind him, deep red and gold carpets hang; the shifting lighting takes on an eerie tone. Tension envelopes him; finally, he speaks to us in a conversational, almost chipper voice. He leans forward, “My name is Essa, and I think something is really wrong with me.” In Dummy in Diaspora , a “coming-of-age solo play” written and performed by Esho Rasho, insistent, personal storytelling is the centerpiece of a semi-autobiographical narrative of diasporic longing and familial love. Making his US premiere after a run with Dummy in Diaspora at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Rasho, a first-generation Assyrian American writer/performer, comes to the Chicago theatre scene with an achingly earnest performance that reminds us that home is the people we love as much as the place we live. Esho Rasho in Dummy in Diaspora , by Esho Rasho, directed by Karina Patel for Jackalope Theatre. Photos by Joel Maisonet. Part of an emerging cohort of SWANA artists (many of whom are writing and performing their own work) embracing the specificity and complexity of their identities in new and bold ways, Rasho has refined Dummy in Diaspora over the last few years. First germinated during his time obtaining a BFA in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University in 2023, Dummy in Diaspora showcases an emerging SWANA artist willing to experiment with form and content. A refraction of his personal narrative, the queer diasporic tale is successful as a solo performance supported by strong, yet restrained production design at Jackalope Theatre, where it was directed by ensemble member Karina Patel. Rasho’s Dummy is one of two recent new Assyrian Iraqi plays in Chicago ( Iraq but Funny at Lookingglass as well). Rasho’s Dummy is a non-linear, interlocking series of vignettes that follow Essa's (who is Rasho’s funhouse mirror reflection) emotional journey and growth from childhood to high school through early adulthood in a SWANA immigrant household. Rasho weaves together various threads: Essa’s coming of age as a young queer SWANA person, his learning English as a second language as a child, his struggle with addiction to nicotine, and his mother’s cancer diagnosis. Dummy is a series of monologues directly addressed to the audience, punctuated with reenactments of conversations that have shaped him. Rasho inhabits Essa’s mother, his European clubbing friends, and his white therapist, among others; these interspersed quasi-dialogues serve a rhythmic change in the performance, often lending a comedic tone to painful revelations. Throughout Dummy , Rasho aptly handles the challenge of a solo act with multiple characters and narrative threads. The scenic design from Scenic/Prop Designer Olivia Volk, Lighting Designer Maaz Ahmed, and Sound Designer Newton Schottelkott support Rasho’s storytelling through both aethetic abstraction and by creating specific zones: a couch in the family home, a chair in the therapist’s office, and a clothes rack in an apartment are situated in front of layered, hanging red carpets and bronze clocks which seem to levitate behind Rasho. Both literal and liminal in representation, the stage exists as a space between reality and surreality. Ahmed’s lighting design exemplifies how Dummy plays with the boundaries of what is real; Essa’s nicotine addiction coalesces as an auditory and luminous green presence named Nic. The addictive entity disrupts Essa’s storytelling, the lighting becomes alien, bathing in Rasho in green; Nic speaks to him through recorded, distorted audio. The various parts of the production work together, using the intimate space to its full extent, highlighting the deft direction by Jackelope Theatre ensemble member Patel. In the narrative of Dummy , Rasho investigates and digs into specificity; Essa is the child of an Iraqi Assyrian father and Lebanese mother who met at immigration; both are now proudly American. Children of the post 9/11 era, Essa and his sister struggle with their parents' patriotism. Rasho touches on feelings about immigration, becoming a citizen, and the census as a young Middle Eastern person in the United States. His Essa reflects on the legacies of his parents’ homelands and migrant experiences, from which he feels he is profoundly disconnected. Essa wonders, struggling with a gnawing internalized second-generation diasporic guilt, that if just a bit, if his parents are right-- he is privileged to grow up as a young queer man in America. To me, this sentiment is made even more bittersweet as rights and protections for both immigrants and queer folx are attacked in today’s America in the months since the production. Throughout Dummy , Rasho also draws on themes of dysmorphia and queerness in the explorations of Essa’s warped body image and his growing addiction to nicotine. Rasho’s Essa isn’t perfect or always sympathetic; his choices are sometimes fraught and many times unhealthy. His mother’s sudden cancer diagnosis parallels his struggles with body image; Essa fights to take care of himself, going to therapy even though he finds it cliché and very American, while admiring the strength of his mother, her own body wasting away during chemo treatment. This dissonance and disruption, as Essa compares himself to his parents, wondering if he can live up to their expectations, is where the narrative shines; Rasho gives an extremely human performance of diasporic longing. Rasho’s Dummy sometimes overflows narratively, skipping from snapshot to snapshot. All of these disparate stories dovetail in Essa’s recollection of learning English in a public school ESL class, where he is assigned to retell his favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz , as an exercise. The eerie green Nic, the bravery of his mother, the advice of his therapist, and the friends he has met along the way mark his own journey. For Essa, home is something we are always looking to return to, though finding the way can be confusing. Dummy in Diaspora is a smart and poignant solo performance highlighting an exciting new artist, Esho Rasho. He is a vibrant part of a cohort of SWANA artists in Chicago, making a strong entrance with stories that are human, complex, and timely. I know I’ll be looking for what Rasho does next with anticipation. Esho Rasho as Essa in Dummy in Diaspora , by Esho Rasho, directed by Karina Patel for Jackalope Theatre. Photos by Joel Maisonet. Esho Rasho as Essa in Dummy in Diaspora , by Esho Rasho, directed by Karina Patel for Jackalope Theatre. Photos by Joel Maisonet. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Suzi Elnaggar Northwestern University; Freelance Dramaturg Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatre maker. She was a 2021 Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Intensive Fellow and works as a developmental and community-focused dramaturg. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal , Arab Stages , Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy , and Theatre Times . Her interests include exploring postcolonial theatre contexts, decoloniality in performance, the intersection of trauma and performance, transnational and migrant stories, recontextualizing Greek tragedy, myths, and folklore, and exploring work that centers around SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) experiences. Suzi’s scholarship and practice center community, collaboration, and context. As a dramaturg, she is experienced in both production and developmental work. She is the artistic director of Backstitch Story Project, and the founder and creative director of the Digital Development Project. She has read scripts for PlayPenn, Playwright’s Center, Rattlestick’s Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, SHE-LA, and Sparkfest, among many others. Selected dramaturgy credits (Production & Developmental Workshops): Avalanche Theatre’s Next Draft series and Grape Leaves , Silk Road’s Shahadat ; Backstitch Story Arts Off-White: The Arab House Party Play ; Clamour Theatre’s Lived Experience ; TACTICS Ottawa’s ANANSI V. GOD(S) ; Jubilee Theatre Waco’s Fairview (Texas Premiere); Wild Imaginings’ Jesus and Valium (World Premiere), The Way He Looks at You , Cardboard Castles Hung on Walls (World Premiere); Northwestern University Theatre’s The Great Sea Serpent (Workshop Premiere). 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 Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The Segal Centre The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), The Graduate Center , CUNY , is a non-profit center for theatre, dance, and film affiliated with CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in Theatre . Originally founded in 1979 as the Center for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts (CASTA), it was renamed in March of 1999 to recognize Martin E. Segal, one of New York City’s outstanding leaders of the arts. At the same time, the multi-purpose performing space in The Graduate Center’s new home in the former B. Altman department store was named the Martin E. Segal Theatre. The New York Times called Mr. Segal “New York’s leading cultural power broker.” An extraordinary figure in the arts and education in New York City, he has played a seminal role in many of the City’s most important cultural initiatives. The Center’s primary focus is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional performing arts communities by providing an open environment for the development of educational, community-driven, and professional projects in the performing arts. As a result, MESTC is home to theatre scholars, students, playwrights, actors, dancers, directors, dramaturgs, and performing arts managers, as well as both the local and international theatre communities. The Center presents staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, lecture series, televised seminars featuring professional and academic luminaries, and arts in education programs, and maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program. In addition, the Center publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance, including plays in translation, all written and edited by renowned scholars. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is a longstanding collaborative partner with the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation where Dr. Frank Hentschker serves as an advisor. This collaboration includes national and international artistic exchanges of archival work, talks, and research regarding the work of Robert Wilson. The Martin E. Segal Theatre is a 70-seat, fully equipped flexible space that provides an intimate venue where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to further the advancement, awareness, and appreciation of the theatrical experience. In addition, the Segal Center presents three annual festivals (PRELUDE, PEN World Voices: International Pay Festival, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance) and publishes and maintains three open access online journals (Arab Stages, European Stages, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre). The Segal Center also publishes many volumes of plays in translation and is the leading publisher of plays from the Arab world. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC) is a vital component of the Theatre Program’s academic culture and creating in close collaboration a research nexus, focusing on dramaturgy, new media, and global theatre. The Segal Center provides an intimate platform where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to advance awareness and appreciation MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER The CUNY Graduate Center Room 3110 New York, NY10016 ph: 212.817.1860 mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Isaiah Matthew Wooden 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 Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1978 documentary Black Theater: The Making of a Movement opens with a striking performance by the legendary artist-activist-duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee that reveals the stakes of the project and the revolutionary Black artistic movements it archives. [1] Viewers first encounter Dee’s radiant face and honey-toned voice. With her eyes fixed squarely on the camera, the esteemed actress launches into a poem whose opening line offers a powerful rebuke of the notion that Black art is in any way imitative or derivative. “Black poetry is not what Shakespeare begot,” Dee recites percussively. [2] Davis quickly responds to her initiating call, adding “Nor, is it one with Tennyson.” [3] For a minute or so thereafter, the pair trade lines that remind viewers that Black art “sets up its own condition” and, indeed, “defies tradition.” [4] The performance culminates with Davis and Dee inviting viewers to join them in celebrating all that is distinct and compelling about Black art. The scene offers an evocative overture to a film that, by casting a resplendent spotlight on some of the key figures and movements that collectively revolutionized Black art in the twentieth century, distinguishes itself as a major milestone in African American theatre and performance history. Produced and directed by Woodie King, Jr., the founder of the New Federal Theatre, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement has been screened countless times since its late-70s premiere, and the academic database and video publisher Alexander Street has made it available to stream through its website. [5] For those who study and teach African American dramatic literature and theatre history, the film remains an indispensable resource for the sheer number of Black theatrical luminaries it brings together to meditate on the vital importance of Black art in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. As the promotional description that accompanies it asserts, the film “is a veritable video encyclopedia of the leading figures, institutions, and events of a movement that transformed the American stage.” [6] In addition to Davis and Dee, the documentary features, among other theatrical innovators, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ed Bullins, Vinnette Carroll, Robert Hooks, James Earl Jones, Lloyd Richards, Ntozake Shange, Barbara Ann Teer, Glynn Turman, and Douglas Turner Ward commenting on the rich contributions of enterprises and initiatives such as the Black Theatre Alliance, the Group Theatre Workshop, the New Lafayette Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the Urban Arts School. The film offers viewers much more than an abundance of star power or a standard accounting of the organizations and institutions that helped shape the new theatre movements that the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s engendered. It overflows with insights about the tremendous significance and influence of the arts—theatre, especially—in Black social, cultural, and political life. Revisiting the film in the wake of the growing calls to fundamentally upend and overhaul the systems and structures reinforcing racism, antiblackness, and white supremacy in the arts reveals just how deeply relevant and resonant many of the conversations it catalogs remain. Its subjects convey with profound clarity their visions for a Black theatre that is at once revolutionary, heterogenous, and deeply attuned to the experiences of Black people. In drawing attention to a few of its more potent threads and themes in what follows, I hope to situate the current demands for change within a longer history of struggle to rework the American theatre. I also aim to explore how heeding some of the vital lessons the documentary provides might further enrich and embolden efforts to imagine, plot, and build artistic practices, strategies, principles, and conditions that are both transformative and sustainable. The documentary launches with well-known figures including Dee, Davis, playwright Owen Dodson, and director Lloyd Richards paying homage to some of the artists who they credit with making their work in the theatre possible. They give particular praise to change agents like Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for breaking barriers and expanding possibilities for the Black theatrical imagination. Two key points emerge from these backward glances. The first is the idea that Black theatre has always been deeply connected to and rooted in community. Davis explains how Black artists in New York City responded to the bigotry and discrimination of commercial and mainstream theatres by bringing together people from their own mostly segregated neighborhoods to mount performances. In doing so, they extended a tradition that dates back to the early national period, as theatre historian Marvin McAllister outlines in his study on the “entertainments” of impresario William Brown. [7] However, as Richards observes, the little headway that Black artists did begin to make on and off Broadway in the 1940s and ’50s was quickly undermined by the racist and repressive forces of McCarthyism. Richards, reflecting on the widespread efforts to terrorize Black artists during the period, offers the second key point I want to underscore. Black theatre, he insists, is fundamentally a theatre of protest. “The theatre has been for Black people a way of protesting the circumstances within which we attempt to exist in this country,” Richards remarks. [8] An abundance of evidence in the corpus of African American dramatic literature bears out this declaration. As Daphne Brooks points out in her evocative reading of William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom , the first play published by a Black person in the United States, African Americans have long mobilized the power of theatre and performance to forge both discursive and embodied insurgency. [9] Throughout the remainder of the documentary, King grants some of the Black arts leaders who helped heighten the fervor for a radical Black consciousness, aesthetic, and politic that intensified during the catalytic Black Power era an opportunity to elaborate on their motivations for pursuing new theatrical paradigms. The deep commitment so many of these artists had to centering experimentation in their work resounds across these conversations. Vinnette Carroll, who was both the first Black woman to stage a show on Broadway and to garner a Tony Award nomination for her direction, notes that she founded the Urban Arts Corps in 1967, in part, to create a space for Black artists to train and develop new material that might not otherwise receive nurturing or support. “It’s also a place where some writers and musicians can come and try out things and not be afraid to fail,” Carroll explains. [10] Barbara Ann Teer, who, along with actor-activist Robert Hooks co-founded the Group Theatre Workshop in 1962 and, in 1968, established the National Black Theatre in Harlem, expresses a similar sentiment. Teer recalls how she and her early collaborators at the National Black Theatre spent nearly two years collectively devising artistic processes and practices that at once “fitted the sensibilities of Black people” and demonstrated “the richness and greatness and power inherent in the form and feeling of Black life/style.” [11] To that end, they experimented with drums, rhythms, chants, and energy, all in an effort to create a theatre that was unequivocally and unapologetically Black. [12] Not every Black artist of the era committed to renouncing any and all things associated with the theatrical traditions of Europe. For example, the Group Theatre Workshop, which mounted an off-Broadway staging of Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending in 1965, paved the way for the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. While the Negro Ensemble Company would quickly fortify its reputation as a launching ground for Black artistry and talent (including a production of Errol Hill’s Man Better Man in the 1968-69 season), it did not shy away from engaging with white interlocutors and collaborators. The first work the company produced was Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by German playwright Peter Weiss, in fact. “When the decision about Song of the Lusitanian Bogey was announced I knew I would get flack,” Turner Ward recalls. [13] “But no matter. The fact, in this instance, was that authorship had no significance. The play was ‘authored’ by the real historical situation itself. Peter was merely a conduit. More significantly, the material was going to be authored by an all-Black creative team, giving it life,” he goes on to say. [14] The production proved an auspicious springboard for the company, establishing it as a formidable presence on the New York arts scene and a model that others might adopt and follow. Certainly, as James Earl Jones recollects in the documentary, many Black artists maintained profound ambivalence about what their social and artistic responsibility should be to the various movements brewing around them. Jones recalls that during the successful off-Broadway run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks , a fierce debate erupted amongst his fellow company members about what actions they should take to advance the struggle for rights, freedom, and justice. “Half of us thought it was our responsibility, our social and artistic responsibility, to go up to picket… [The] other half preferred to, as Roscoe Lee Browne would say, stick to our vocational guidance, stick to our work.” [15] While Jones notes that he sided with Browne, he also confesses that he found great value in the dissension, as it not only served to build a greater sense of ensemble amongst the company, but it also empowered each performer to clarify for themselves what form they wanted their activism to take. As the film shifts focus to the future of Black theatre in its final section, a more subtle line of conversation begins to emerge about the perils and politics of arts funding. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the drastic economic changes that occurred throughout the 1970s, the interviewees voice a palpable unease about money and resources. It surfaces in the appeal that Carroll makes for wealthy Black people to consider financially supporting the arts: “I’d like to see more Black producers doing all sorts of things in the theatre, and that Black people would invest in us because we certainly have a group of Black people now with the money to invest in the theatre,” she asserts. [16] In the wake of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency, many of the grant-giving institutions that had been instrumental in launching ventures like the Urban Arts Corps, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the New Lafayette Theatre (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among them) decided that it was too risky to continue to support Black cultural institutions and withdrew their financial backing. This left many of these organizations without the resources they needed to stay afloat. Bullins, who after a brief stint as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party became the playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre, explains: When Nixon came in the late 60s…he so frightened the philanthropic community that they cut back on just about all Black arts activities…So, all that money just about disappeared. And, we were working with a company of fifteen actors and all the support personnel with quite a yearly budget. And so, we couldn’t operate on the level that we had been operating on.[17] The documentary’s various discussions about funding underline just how potentially detrimental an overreliance on the goodwill and philanthropy of foundations and corporations can be to building a truly sustainable theatre. This is an important caution to take note of, especially amid calls to celebrate the commitments that institutions like the Ford and Mellon Foundations have made in recent months to granting millions of dollars to Black arts and cultural organizations. [18] These foundations have proven time and again that they are undependable. And, although they might provide some relief in the short term, the inconsistency of their funding often produces deleterious effects for Black art that are much longer-lasting. While the film’s chronological structure might suggest a progressive, teleological narrative, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement closes by exploring many of the questions and ideas that remain unaddressed or unresolved for Black theatremakers. The conclusion of the film sends an urgent call to Black artists to continue to find ways to bring the artform to Black communities and to harness its power to embolden radical change. Each of the figures featured in the documentary played a significant role in expanding possibilities for what the American theatre could be. Revisiting the film reaffirms just how solid the foundations they laid remain. It also provides an occasion for contemporary scholars and students of Black theatre to contemplate further how to capitalize on some of the “new stirrings” that have emerged in efforts to reimagine and remake the theatre—and the world—anew. [19] References [1] Black Theater: The Making of a Movement , directed by Woodie King, Jr. (1978; San Francisco: California Newsreel), https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/black-theater-the-making-of-a-movement?source=suggestion . All subsequent references are to this version of the film. [2] Black Theater . [3] Black Theater . [4] Black Theater . [5] The New Federal Theatre notably celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. [6] See Black Theater . [7] See Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [8] Black Theater . [9] See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [10] Black Theater . [11] Black Theater . [12] La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers provides a wealth of evidence of some of the other ways this commitment to experimentation manifested for Teer and her Black Arts Movement contemporaries. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). [13] Douglas Turner Ward, “Foreword,” in Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company , ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1995), xiii. [14] Ward, “Foreword.” [15] Black Theater . [16] Black Theater . [17] Black Theater . [18] See, for example, the announcements about the Ford Foundation’s “American Cultural Treasures” initiative and the Mellon Foundation’s sponsorship of “The Black Seed.” [19] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present , ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a director-dramaturg, critic, and assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. A scholar of African American art, drama, and performance, he has contributed articles and essays to The Black Scholar , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Modern Drama , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Theatre Journal , and Theatre Topics, among other scholarly and popular publications. Wooden is the co-editor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP 2020) and is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in post-civil rights Black expressive culture. 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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest Figure 1 Robert Wilson’s Edda , featuring images of Texas Robert Wilson emerged as an important figure in European theatre in the 1970s, following his production of Deafman Glance in Paris that prompted Louis Aragon’s famous “Open Letter to André Breton” regarding Wilson’s realization of the style of Surrealism. As additional works with German playwright Heiner Müller also followed, theatre companies from Northern Europe and Scandinavia immediately showed interest, and commissions from major state theatre companies began to appear. The 1998 production of Strindberg’s Ett Drömspiel ( A Dream Play ) in Stockholm’s Stadsteatern, Sweden, was Wilson’s first work in Scandinavia. It also marked his first music/sound collaboration with Michael Gottlieb. As the Wilsonian aesthetic was already in a highly developed phase, the Swedish audiences and press were particularly enthralled by Wilson’s combination of the visual picture with a well-developed soundscape. Wilson’s realization of Strindberg’s visual work was lauded in Sweden as a groundbreaking effort—described as “Weirdly hypnotic; a series of painterly tableau evoking artists as different as Magritte and Andrew Wyeth.” [1] Several productions were commissioned in Denmark during the early 2000s, including Woyzeck and The Black Rider (originally commissioned by Thalia Theater Hamburg in 1990) both of which played at the Betty Nansen Teatret in Copenhagen in 2000. In 2002 a special production entitled White Town was commissioned by the Bellevue Teatret for the recognition of the life and career of Danish theatre artist Arne Jacobsen. The first production of a Wilson work to appear in Norway was the 2005 production of Peer Gynt , commissioned by Det Norske Teatret in Oslo. Originally planned for a world tour, the production transferred to co-producer Det Neue Scene in Bergen before touring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three other productions by Robert Wilson have played in Norway: Edda Edda , produced by Det Norske Teatret in March 2017; Shakespeare’s Sonnets , produced by the Berliner Ensemble, later in May of that same year at the Bergen Theater Festival; and The Sandman , produced by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2019 at the Bergen Theater Festival. Since 2020 Wilson’s productions have been featured on occasion in major Scandinavian theatre companies. This essay will focus on productions in Norway and will explore Wilson’s aesthetic and its relationship to Norwegian society as well as to certain aspects of Norway’s social and cultural nature. The legacy of Ibsen and the tradition of both realistic and nonrealistic versions of his plays in Norway are well documented. Peer Gynt is the most often produced work by Ibsen, or anyone else, in Norway. The long history of production of the work includes ballets, operas, plays, children’s productions, films, and undoubtedly other types of performances not mentioned. As is noted in the extensive paper “Robert Wilson’s Staging of Peer Gynt and the Norwegian Tradition,” by Keld Hyldig, the work has maintained three basic characteristics throughout its long production history: 1) “an extensive use of spectacular Norwegian sceneries,” 2) lyrical, mood-creating music, and 3) recognizable and thus “natural” representations of Norwegian characters. [2] Throughout its lengthy history Peer Gynt gained the reputation as being representative of the Norwegian way of life and grew to represent “all things Norwegian” as it explores, in epic fashion, over fifty years of action that the epic work chronicles. As it predated strictly realistic staging, Peer Gynt was never bound to a particular approach nor was it relegated to a lower status as one of Ibsen’s “early plays.” The play’s exploration of Norwegian culture and society as well certain elements from the working class naturally led it to numerous Brecht-inspired productions in the 1970s, but most experts point to Ingmar Bergman’s staging in 1957 at Malmö City Theatre as being the via negativa of a new psycho-surreal approach whereby much of the play’s action occurred in Peer’s subconscious. Bergman’s approach realized the play as “an internal struggle where Peer seeks to find his own humanity” [3] and paved the way for numerous highly visual yet uniquely Norwegian productions that emphasized the music and folklore of Norway in the nineteenth century in addition to exploring various theatrical means as storytelling devices. Wilson’s later visionary staging certainly landed as a necessary sector in the trajectory of the work’s evolution. Wilson’s Peer Gynt began rehearsals in March 2003 at the Watermill Center on Long Island, New York. The Watermill workshop yielded an extensive set of drawings or a “Project Book” for Peer Gynt as well as a staged collection of physical images developed by participants in the Watermill Summer Program and set to music by composer Michael Galasso. Practical work began later that same year at Det Norske Teatret in Olso. Apparently, Wilson had conceived the work in typically massive scale and the initial drawings and other speculations had yielded a potential running time of eight hours or more. [4] As is the norm with commissioned productions of this nature, the extended rehearsal period was one year. Stage A, or table work, consisted of a few weeks and finished with a bauprobe (rough staging rehearsal) of several days. During the rehearsal time of Stages A and B, Von Arx developed scenography and discussed with Wilson and the other members of the production team numerous individuals like actors, dramaturgs and those involved in the process. From that table work a skeleton structure known as the “silent play” emerged and elements such as architecture, light, and other visual elements were contemplated and considered. Actors from both Det Norske Teatret in Oslo as well as Det Nationale Scene in Bergen were selected to supplement the skeleton cast, and the full cast was finalized some six months prior to the opening. The final stage, which lasted only around one month, consisted of the addition of the text to the work. For Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had contracted Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse to create a new text for the work that was a greater reflection of Norway’s “new language” that emerged following Norway’s independence and breakaway from bokmål or the previous everyday Norwegian language that was highly influenced by the Danish language. [5] In its original form, Peer Gynt includes some forty scenes and locations all over the globe and includes both the conscious and subconscious worlds. Typical of most of Ibsen’s works Peer Gynt was written in old Norwegian, and Fosse’s goal was to write the text in a “new Norwegian,” a language that included dialects from four prominent regions of Norway. [6] Fosse noted “the original was written in an old-fashioned Norwegian, that in reality was Danish. It was quite a job to adapt the work, but it made the play fresher, and in my opinion made Ibsen’s greatness as a writer more visible” [7] The playwright also noted “Bob Wilson has a great ear for the music of language, so the actors delivered their lines in an almost perfect way. It was impressive.” [8] Critics, even those known for more traditional tastes noted that both Wilson and Fosse had preserved the text and the play’s overall meaning and impact with a strong measure of success. In discussing his collaboration with Wilson, Fosse noted that they never really did actually “collaborate.” Fosse noted “I delivered a text, and he [Wilson] cut it.” But Fosse stated that he deeply admired Wilson’s talent for understanding a language that he didn’t understand in “a normal way.” Most of the textual adaptation was done by dramaturg Monica Ohlsson, who had worked with Wilson previously in Sweden and Denmark. Fosse was impressed with Wilson’s ability to successfully substitute a deeply meaningful theatrical language for the written text. Additionally, it was noted that Wilson had emphasized the spoken elongation of vowels throughout the work, which added to both the musicality as well as the “strange beauty” of his staging. [9] Figure 2 Gertrude Jynge and Robert Wilson during Peer Gynt rehearsals After the success of Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had the desire to present another work directed by Wilson with text by Fosse. For this work, Fosse was tasked with providing a version of the Eddic Poems, Icelandic manuscripts from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Wide ranging in their subject matter, the Eddic poems are essentially pre-Christian literary works that deal with Norse gods and medieval legends from the Nordic countries, handling many crucial events such as the beginning of time and the naming of the gods. Fosse noted that he wrote the work, trying at the same to be “loyal to the originals but also making into a coherent play” [10] Edda had its world premiere in Oslo at Det Norske Teatret in March 2017. Music was provided by Arvo Pärt along with the duo Coco Rosie, costumes were designed by Jacques Reynaurd, and scenic and painterly elements designed by Swiss designer Serge von Arx. As is the case with all things Robert Wilson, all roads typically lead to Ann-Christin Rommen. Having worked as Wilson’s co-director for over three decades, Ms. Rommen has been a key figure in all performance and conceptual elements of Wilson’s performances since their initial collaboration in 1983 with The CIVIL warS . She noted that Wilson likes to consider works that are very close and important to particular societies and cultures. He then likes to examine them in different ways, to find humor in the works, to “unseat the works from their high place” and look at them in a more playful, yet introspective way. In considering Wilson’s work on Edda , Rommen noted: Bob has always been drawn to universal myths. For example, I La Galigo the creation myth of the people of Sulawesi, Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the story of Die Nibelungen, Homer’s The Odyssey , Goethe’s Faust , and, of course, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. These works all include the themes of good versus evil, incest, weird creatures like trolls and the cyclops, and they all tell stories that are relevant for all mankind. [11] Figure 3 Henrik Rafaelsen as Odin and Gjertrud Jynge as Volva in Edda Certain elements of the Nordic myths were appealing to Wilson. A study of the scene breakdown with Rommen and Carl Morten Amundsen, dramaturg of Det Norske Teatret and a member of the Edda dramaturgical team, revealed several scenes when many of the Norse gods would come together for meetings and would need to remind Ovid, the “All Father and God of war and death” about some occurrence or event that he had forgotten. Wilson viewed Odin’s age-related conditions as being like those of humans who become more childlike and sillier as they grow older. A number of comic nonsense dances were given to Odin, and there was also a scene in which Odin tested death by hanging upside down and playing electric guitar. In early table work, Wilson had planned to realize the original Norse legend of Odin “hanging upside down” but added the action of his singing a rock song while playing an electric guitar. As the legend goes, Odin remained in that hanging position for nine days in order to do some inner soul searching. [12] Another important scene involved Odin’s son Tor and his meeting with Volva and the accidental severing of the Midgaardsorm, Volva’s companion and the snake who holds the world together. To connect these major events, Wilson created a number of “knee plays” as was the case with the CIVIL warS . These short works linked together the various stories and allowed for important scenic transitions to happen during the scenes. For Wilson, it was very important that they happened “in the clouds,” behind a transparent cyclorama that was backed by an aluminum metal wall—defining the place as the infinite clouds of time. This allowed the work to transcend the ordinary world and present the story of the world’s creation. Pioneered by von Arx and Wilson, the combination of the semi-transparent cyclorama backed by the steel wall had become a unique facet of Wilson’s stage aesthetic since his early work in Norway and remains as one of the unique elements developed during his work there. Figure 4 Ann-Christin Rommen with Robert Wilson Two additional works have appeared in Norway as of August 2024— Shakespeare’s Sonnets in May 2017 and The Sandman in 2019. Both works appeared as part of the Bergen Theatre Festival at the performance space Grieghallen, Norway’s largest combined cultural and congress venue. Shakespeare’s Sonnets toured to Bergen from Berliner Ensemble while The Sandman toured from Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus in what was billed as one of the festival’s most adventurous works and played for only two performances on June 1 and 2, 2019. The Sandman was Wilson’s first collaboration with British pop star and rock composer Anna Calvi, notorious for the often sinister, undergirding soundtracks of shows like Peaky Blinders and other dark film projects. The work was received as a “grusical,” a ghastly expressionist cabaret driven by the haunting dreamlike presence of the title character who steals the children’s eyeballs and feeds them to the monsters upstairs.The Norwegian theatre public and critics have apparently even fashioned the term uhygge , or uhyggelia (uncanny or weird) for this type of work. Considering the recent productions of theatre practitioners such as Vegard Vinge in Bergen, The Sandman was likely only darkly grim or weird to a relatively small portion of those who attended. Figure 5 Cast of EDDA, scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Another aspect of Robert Wilson’s work in Norway is his association with the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad, about one hour from Oslo. Wilson has had a long-time association with Serge von Arx, a professor of scenography and practicing architect. Von Arx and Wilson began collaborating as early as 1989 on various stage, exhibition, and design projects all over the world, including the Berliner Ensemble, Teatro Alla Scala, Teatro Real, and many others as noted on von Arx’s website. Wilson and von Arx have long experimented with “performing architecture,” in which the elements of performance and architecture become permanently intertwined in performance. The idea is reminiscent of Russian artist and theorist Vslevold Meyerhold and several others who utilized constructivism and similar performance practices that involved the melding of humans and scenic elements in performance. In Wilson and von Arx’s work together, they have found it important to utilize specific materials unique to each work that are intrinsic to the world(s) of the play. For example, in Edda , von Arx notes that “The set is a partner in dialogue with everything else happening on stage.” [13] Wilson’s work has a long tradition of including visual quotes and references to pre-existing images and structures. In Edda one image was that of the Brion Tomb by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Von Arx noted that recognizable visual structures assist in communicating ideas; “if you have something that people know or they can recognize, it’s much easier to pull them into the performance” [14] (Picchi). Another Scandinavian or Norwegian element noted by von Arx was the use of “traditional building methods and materials such as native woods, paint textures and the superior craftsmanship that Norway is known for.” Scenic elements were developed in the same manner as all other elements of performance and were discussed on a daily basis. This would allow for changes in accordance with the evolution of the staging process and/or any additions to or subtractions from the text. Many world theatre companies are not able to manage the many changes that are inherent in a work by Wilson. The finished product would only be achieved after the work was fully rehearsed and all desired changes and stage artifacts were implemented to one hundred percent satisfaction. Figure 6 Cast of Edda , scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Wilson’s works are well known for having many anachronistic and very personal references both within the spoken text as well as notable visual references. In Edda , there was a scene during which the character Tor had to make a quick getaway after making advances on Freya, who refuses to marry him because he is a troll. Tor makes his exit as a cowboy hat and a single cowboy boot appear in the sky—one of Wilson’s playful references to his home state of Texas,. It was noted by Rommen that “Bob’s life and work have always referenced Texas. For many of the first years that I knew him, he would only wear his signature cowboy boots.” [15] Rommen also noted that in many cases she could sense the majesty of the Texas sky in his landscape and lighting designs. In particular, the hues and textures of the Texas sunset had been etched in Wilson’s memory and thus became prevalent in his designs. This element was prevalent in Edda as the tints and hues of the landscapes were much more reminiscent of Texas than Norway or anywhere in Scandinavia. Edda also toured to Reykjavik City Theatre in Iceland and to the Aarhus Theater in Denmark. Edda was awarded the Norwegian Hedda Prize as the theatrical event of 2017, just as Peer Gynt had done in 2005. Figure 7 Wilson’s Moby Dick at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Fall 2024 Unfortunately, a potential collaboration on Moby Dick with Det Norske Teatret did not materialize. The long-planned staging of Melville’s masterpiece, however, moved forward with a fall 2024 production at Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus. At the time of Wilson’s passing in July 2025, there were no known planned collaborations for Wilson in Norway or any other Scandinavian and Nordic countries. Endnotes [1] Michael Billington, “Review: A Dream Play ,” The Guardian , May 30, 2001. [2] Keld Hyldig, "Robert Wilson's Staging of PEER GYNT and the Norwegian Tradition." Nordic Theatre Studies 18 (2006): 46–57. [3] Ibid. [4] Maria Shevtsova, “Experiencing the Movement: Working with Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 2007): 58‑66. [5] Serge von Arx, interview by author, July 29, 2024. [6] Jon Fosse, interview by author, June 10, 2024 [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] Marilyn Stasio, “ Peer Gynt ,” Variety , April 12, 2006. [10] Fosse interview. [11] Ann-Christin Rommen, interview by author, August 1, 2024. [12] Ibid. [13] Von Arx interview. [14] Picchi Giuliano, “Serge von Arx and Robert Wilson’s EDDA ,” Scenography Today , UNITA Online Platform, 2024. https://www.scenographytoday.com/robert-wilson-edda/ . [15] Rommen interview. About The Author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dora Arreola 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 Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Dora Arreola By Published on May 30, 2014 Download Article as PDF Mujeres en Ritual: An Invitation to Transgress There are many ways to perceive Tijuana: as the first corner of México, or the last, or as the doorway to Latinoamerica, or to los Estados Unidos.1 I grew up in the hills above the city, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the San Diego skyline, watching the border patrol cars and helicopters chasing migrants who were trying to cross to the USA, every day. The border was literally in my back yard, in my face—a horrible stretch of rusting metal, leftover from the first US Gulf War and recycled in México as a fence to stop the perceived infiltration of Latinos into the United States. As a child, this non-metaphorical, very concrete border fence reminded me every day that I was considered inferior, poor, dirty, criminal, that I was not wanted, that I could not cross. As an artist, as I grew, that fence invited me to transgress. The border between Tijuana, B.C. (México) and San Diego, California (US) is the most frequently crossed border in the world, with an estimated 300,000 legal crossings per day. As described by anthropologist and folklorist Maribel Alvarez, the border includes: Millions of workers essential to the economic machines of North American agriculture, tourism, and industry: farm workers, low-tech labor, dishwashers, gardeners, maids . . . but [it's] also a military machine of low-intensity conflict: Homeland Security helicopters, Border Patrol agents, infrared cameras, detention centers, books of regulations . . . Violence and death are dimensions of everyday life in the border.2 In addition to non-sanctioned border crossings, these deaths include feminicide,3 the trafficking of women in the sex trade and labor, as well as deaths related to untenable working conditions and toxic illnesses caused by pollution from maquiladoras.4 Tijuana's maquiladora industries and sexual tourism industries are among the largest in the world—both predominantly controlled by men, but fueled by the exploitation of (predominantly) women workers. All of this systematically diminishes the image of Mexican women in the global imagination, and thereby normalizes and renders violence against us permissible in a region where every woman is potentially seen as a “puta.” The stigmatization of my identity, as a woman and Tijuanense, also invited me to transgress. In November 1999, I founded a company with a group of women artists from the community, as a response and resistance to the systematic oppression of women at the México-US border—a way oftransforming the perception of women, as well as our perceptions of ourselves, from object to subject. Our first production was titled Mujeres en Ritual (Women in Ritual), which became our name. After nearly three years as a participant in Jerzy Grotowski's WorkCenter in Pontadera, Italy, I had returned to México with a deep desire to investigate and create theatre from the roots of my own culture.5 With grounding in traditional dances and rituals of México, Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro developed a rigorous training process, drawing from three techniques that complement each other and sustain the concept of precise movement: Suzuki Technique, Butoh, and the theatre tradition of Jerzy Grotowski (specifically “Objective Drama” and “Art as a Vehicle” phases). The intention of embodied practice is to eradicate the vestiges of oppression in the bodies of women. The physical training process liberates blocks in the body and voice to allow greater levels of expressivity—which often means breaking silences, and confronting or expressing our traumas. It helps us deconstruct conventional stereotypes of femininity, to perform strength and agency. Mujeres en Ritual de-objectifies women of the border region by demystifying our desires—by breaking myths that, as women of color, we choose oppressive systems, or “like it like that,” or want to be in positions in which we are dominated. Through our creations, we disrupt stereotypes and false perceptions to expose the systematic exploitation of women. In our creative process, we explore the sources of creativity, ritual structures, the “internal pulse” and the creation of actions (as described by Thomas Richards).6 We work from the impulse of the performer that comes before the manifestation of an expression or movement. Impulses have no gender, and are not confined by realism. This is significant because to break the paradigms of traditional Western theatre, and the Euro-American concept of realism (which has dominated theatre since the mid-1800s, and typically re-inscribes a 'reality' created and controlled by men) is to break the social constructions of gender and representation, and to begin a process of decolonizing our creativity. Thus, interdisciplinarity is profoundly important in the work of Mujeres en Ritual. We often devise our own texts, re-interpret plays, or use no text at all; we employ poetry and prose, narrative and abstraction, evolving our aesthetic through a seamless exploration of diverse forms. We do not subscribe to divisions or categories of form, discipline, or genre, which create artificial “borders” between human modes of expression. Further, the company pushes the boundaries of sexuality and gender representation by performing a spectrum of identities, including male, female and transgendered characters. When women perform male characters (an act historically considered “deviant”), several things happen: catharsis, parody, political commentary, and discovery of the freedom of transgressing assigned gender roles or taboo gender expressions. Our practice, then, becomes an embodied testament to the performativity of gender, as described by Judith Butler: The various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis . . . Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.7 Theatre critic Sergio Rommel8 describes the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting “in the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions,” such that the company's “transgression of borders in multiple ways” constitutes a form of transgenero performance—meaning both transgender and trans-genre. In an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of transgenero performance, and its aesthetic and political significance, this chapter explores in detail the creation and production of one of our representative works, Fronteras Desviadas, or Deviant Borders, with special attention to how transgeneridad is manifested in those processes. Because Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders involved collaboration with US-based, Arab American writer and performer Andrea Assaf, this exploration also reveals the complexities of such border-crossing collaborations between queer women of color from two very different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.9 Devising Fronteras Desviadas: The Creative Process Figure 1., Andrea Assaf and Dora Arreola perform in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, Tijuana, Mexico, 2005. Photo by Mercedes Romero. In 2004, Mujeres en Ritual sought to explore these issues from multiple points of view, to arrive at a more complex perception of the experiences of women on both sides of the national and cultural borders that join/divide México and the United States. Our goal was to create new work that deconstructs dominant images of the women of Tijuana, to stage representations that were not condescending, illustrative, simplistic, stereotypical, or didactic. We began with research and site visits to uncover the history and conditions of the region (most of which were very familiar to me, but previously unknown to Assaf). When we first conceived of the project, we began with the theme of “women's bodies at the border,” not knowing where it might lead us. We knew we wanted to investigate the maquiladoras, and the Ciudad Industrial where most of the factories are located. Our first step was to participate in an Environmental Justice Tour10 of communities affected by the pollution from the maquiladoras, and to investigate the inhumane conditions for women workers. As we journeyed deeper into our research, however, the connections to, and immensity of, the sexual tourism industry began to overwhelm our thoughts. Amidst an ocean of information in Border Studies, news and media archives in Tijuana and San Diego, and in the internet, we found a particularly valuable resource in Tijuana La Horrible: Entre la historia y el mito, by Mexican writer Humberto Félix Berumen. He exposes the founding of Tijuana by Americans in 1916 as an adult entertainment center for US tourists, and the creation of its border as a state apparatus to regulate the flow of US citizens in to México in the era of Prohibition. He describes in detail how the association of Tijuana with sex, drugs, “deviance” and illegality (the “Leyenda Negra” as it's called in México) was not only constructed in the US imagination, but also promoted by American casino owners to attract their own people as consumers. Félix Berumen further explains how this legend persists: People have a stigmatized image of Tijuana, as it can be perceived through radio, literature, film, written press, television, songs and many other discourses (oral, visual and written). That image is a social creation and a collective image formed by the syncretic amalgamation of platitudes, legends, stereotypes, prejudices, sociograms and clichés . . . Tijuana is a city-symbol, the emblem, by definition, of perversion and vice. A myth that has been revealed with a great capacity to renew itself continually.11 But rarely is there an acknowledgement of US responsibility in creating the political and economic conditions that make this image, and the markets it relies upon, flourish; rarely is there any accountability for the exploitation and violence that accompanies these markets. The Zona Norte, the commercial sex zone of Tijuana, continues from its American origins as the most active “red zone” in México—a country in which sex work is officially illegal, except for “zones of tolerance” where tourism is valued above even the “morality” laws (under which individuals exhibiting “homosexual behavior” can still be arrested, in states such as Baja California). Poverty, lack of opportunity and trafficking force thousands of women, children and transgendered people into sex work. As José Esteban Muñoz described in Disidentifications: Late capitalism represents the dwindling of possibilities for the racialized working class. Under such hegemony, women of color compete over low-wage positions within the shrinking service economy. Individuals who reject this constrained field of possibility often choose to survive by entering alternative economies involving sex work or the drug trade . . . [This] move into the illicit coliseum represents a dystopic vision of what the continuation of late capitalism will mean for Latinas and other people of color.12 In 2004, there were more than 8,000 registered sex workers in the Zona Norte alone (an area of about four square city blocks), and likely hundreds more who were not registered. Today, the bars and prostíbulos of the Zona Norte are owned by Mexican, American and multi-national owners, as are the maquiladoras. Empirical research was equally important to our process, which included site visits to the Zona Norte13 to observe the dynamics of gender exploitation, particularly with US tourists filling the bars and alleys. This history, along with its contemporary reality and the ways in which it implicates the United States, had to inform our work. Our creative explorations began with a series of community-based workshops with women on both sides of the border, a process that ultimately generated text for the performance. Andrea Assaf brought a writing process to the workshops rooted in methodologies from the US community-based arts movement; I brought improvisations, movement composition, and physical vocabulary techniques that Mujeres en Ritual had developed through the years. The workshops alternated writing or storytelling exercises (depending on the literacy level of the participants), with movement and dialogue. This interweaving of approaches led us to design a means of shared facilitation and methodologies for community collaboration. We replicated this process in three very different locations. A group of women artists in Tijuana, including Mujeres en Ritual company members and independent artists, met in studios and cafes to explore our three central prompts: Soy mujer cuando . . . /When do I experience myself as “woman”? What is deviance? and What is on “the other side”?14 Next, we worked with a community in crisis, named after activist leader Maclovio Rojas: Maclovio Rojas is a community of maquiladora workers halfway between Tijuana & Tecate, México. As part of the NAFTA process, the Mexican constitution was modified and poor families began to be forced from their ejido lands. A few defiant communities, including Maclovio Rojas, resisted. Maclovio happens to now sit on prime industrial real estate, sandwiched between maquiladoras who very much want their land. The Mexican state has [made] many attempts to evict them.15 There, we held a Story Circle16 in La Casa de la Mujer (the women's center) focused on the question, “Soy Mujer Cuando?” The third group was in San Ysidro, California, just across the US border. At a community development agency, Casa Familiar, we worked with a “Parenting Class” for convicted parents whose children had been taken away by the state (all Mexican or Latina mothers, except for one Mexican father who was there with his wife). With this group, we explored the notion of “deviance,” particularly from cultural and state norms in the context of the criminalization of recent immigrants. The results were texts and phrases of movement charged with meaning, intensity and complexity that reflected the life experiences and visions of women in these communities. At the end of each workshop, we invited participants to contribute their writing, stories or movement phrases, if they wished, to the creative process of developing a script and movement score for the performance. Every single participant chose to donate his or her work to the project. Through a process of multiple translations,17 from Spanish to English and back again, Assaf then edited the texts into collective poems, rich with abstraction, symbolism and metaphor, layered with double meanings and the women’s surprising encounters with atrocity. These voices were often contradictory, and yet we felt it was important to keep the multiplicity. The following is an excerpt of the “Soy Mujer Cuando” series that illustrates this aesthetic of overlapping realities, which privileges the bilingual listener/reader: Soy mujer cuando me lanzo como colibrí, y entiendo cuan corta la distancia a la muerte. I am a woman when I spin infinity Soy mujer cuando giro al infinito y me desvío . . . and deviate . . . Soy mujer cuando cruzo las piernas. I am a woman when I cross my legs. Soy mujer cuando atravieso el miedo. I am a woman when I confront desire. I am a woman when I cannot speak, Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños and my reflection brings me to myself Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños once and once again. I am a woman when I am hit. I am a woman when I attend a man. I am a woman of breasts and vagina fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning cogiendo y lavando, cocinando y limpiando fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning Soy mujer . . . when I pass through fear Soy mujer. . . when I feel my dreams Soy mujer . . . when I vibrate with joy for nothing more than being alive18 In tandem with the community-based process, I began studio explorations to develop a movement vocabulary for the piece. My challenge was to uncover the appropriate aesthetic forms, as if they were sleeping, or waiting for a means of expression to emerge. As the director, I chose to focus on popular rituals that women are expected to pass through, from birth to death—such as quinceañeras, weddings and funerals—which gave us a structure for the journey of the play. Ritual is a complicated source. Rituals can be oppressive or transformative. They can be male-centered, and function in society to reinforce patriarchy; or they can invert social roles, gender norms, and so-called “morality.” On the other hand, ritual is also a form of performance that is pre-colonial, often circular, and highly symbolic. It can create an open, holistic, participatory space, or even a radical separatist space. With Mujeres en Ritual, we identify and deconstruct rituals that perpetuate the oppression of women, and explore inversions, such as casting women in traditionally male roles.19 This creative interrogation, subversion, and embracing of ritual—this process of deconstruction and (re)invention—is central to our aesthetic. I decided to create these ritual representations as independent vignettes, without trying to tell a story, utilizing celebrations well-known in Mexican culture but transposing them to the socially deviant contexts of exploitation, prostitution and feminicide. The most certain choice was to select vignettes that could link the three themes of the writing—what it means to be a woman, deviance, and what is on “the other side”—with the history of Tijuana. The workshops gave me many images and metaphors to draw from: transformation (transition, passing); rites of passage, journeys; doors, borders, thresholds; trespassing, transgression; and death. Although there was no explicit narrative, I took as a base concept the journey of a woman who travels from South to North, with the intent of crossing to the United States; but when she must find work in Tijuana, she is drawn into this liminal zone of the border, the Zona Norte. The actions and choreographies, developed with the company, sustained the metaphors of transgression and transformation throughout the play. The poems were then layered in to the movement composition, as live and recorded text. Parallel to the journey of the women, Andrea Assaf wrote the character of “El Chamuco” from found text on the internet, as an examination of the male gaze, and popular US perceptions of Tijuana women. As Octavio Paz describes in El laberinto de la soledad, “Americans have not looked for a México in México; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests—and these are what they have found.”20 Based on research into actual English language websites promoting sexual tourism to Tijuana, Assaf created the fictional site “sex-mex-chilitas.com” and its virtual-turned-flesh tour guide, Hank Screwell III, a.k.a. “El Chamuco” (which is Mexican slang for the devil). This character is not a pimp himself, but claims to be a self-made millionaire who capitalizes on the commercial sex industry via the web, and markets his services to English-speaking tourists. In globalization's commercial arena of intersecting webs, both geographic (such as human trafficking rings) and virtual, identities are continually reinvented in order to escape accountability, while male desire and illegal consumption are normalized. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out in Feminism Without Borders: In each of these webs, racialized ideologies of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality play a role in constructing the legitimate consumer, worker, and manager. Meanwhile, the psychic and social disenfranchisement and impoverishment of women continues. Women's bodies and labor are used to consolidate global dreams, desires, and ideologies of success and the good life in unprecedented ways.21 The objective of juxtaposing El Chamuco with the women's voices was to establish a discourse of the double realities of the border, and to implicate US responsibility in the conditions and exploitation of women in this region. Figure 2., Raquel Almazan performs “El Chamuco” while the two women dancers are played by Maria Vale and Dora Arreola. New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen. El Chamuco was the final element to be integrated into the sequence of scenes, creating a narrative bridge, and at the same time, a rupture—a continual interruption of the women's journey. He conducts the audience, his “clients,” on a trip through the Zona Norte, creating, apparently, a double spectacle: two different “shows” simultaneously, with two different relationships to time and space—one the passage of a life cycle, the other a passage from night to day. Dialogue does not exist in the conventional sense; there is no one defined relationship between the women characters, but many relationships that are constantly changing (as in dance). In the beginning of the play, their encounters are not by choice, only coincidences that propel them forward. One initiates, or prepares the way for the other to advance, or they pass each other. Chamuco’s actions, in moments, coincide with actions in the women’s structure, without a direct relationship to the characters. In other moments, an encounter occurs, which startles them. Alternating between these two “worlds” brought us to an aesthetic of syncretism and juxtaposition, a collision of diverse cultural elements and political realities. In the mise-en-scene, we utilized various icons of Mexican and American cultures: a disco ball, the National Hymn of México, America the Beautiful sung by Elvis Presley, Disney’s It’s a Small World, a Mexican Quinceañera waltz, the traditional Wedding March, and signs used in Catholic ceremonies. With Chamuco, US icons emerge, through characterization and costume choices: a rock star, a corporate executive, a televangelist, a mafioso. An immobile, unchanging set of pink-sequined curtains (as one might find in a strip club or drag bar) transports us to various spaces. Objects in the performance are used in multiple ways to create different contexts—a kind of over-use or recycling that suggests a maximum economy in sharp contrast to the excess of production in maquiladora zones that renders human bodies disposable, just as the sex industry renders women’s bodies, and body parts, disposable. This idea is explicitly manifested in the scene we called, alternately, the “Quinceañera/ Maquiladora Waltz” or the “Pink Piñata/Paso Cruzado.” As the women performers emerge from a table dance grotesque, they place the enormous plastic body parts (buttocks and “bras with prosthetic painted breasts”22) that they were wearing in yellow plastic bags. These bags, which most Mexicans from Baja California will immediately recognize as coming from the local grocery superstore chain, Calimax, are emblazoned with the logo, “Has la cuenta, y date cuenta!”23 The music of a traditional Quinceañera celebration begins, as an announcer's voice introduces the young woman of the day: ANNOUNCER: Ahora, recibamos con un fuerte aplauso, a la quinceañera! Ella, que hoy a llegado a la edad de las promesas e ilusiones. Ha dejado de ser niña, para ser mujer. Ella celebra sus quince primaveras. presentandose ante la sociedad . . . y ante las maquiladoras!24 What begins as a seemingly normal introduction to a “coming out” party for the belle of the ball suddenly becomes her unsuspecting introduction into the world of maquiladoras. The movements of the dancers become increasingly mechanical, and at the same time deathly, as the announcer proudly proclaims the long list of multinational companies that actually have factories in Tijuana. As the list continues, seemingly endlessly, to the tune of the waltz, a poem by Assaf is overlaid to further complicate, and illuminate, the meaning of the scene: When the little dyed– blonde girl piñata in the pink dress bursts open, what falls from the cavity? a thousand nude plastic babies 5000 used condoms 100 tamarind candies covered in chili champagne and confetti cigarette butts wet thumping organs chilis rellenos border patrol military rifles vaginal fluids 30,000 widgets some used car parts a blue baby blanket contaminated water bright yellow lines the moon and the ocean and herself as a child in that same pink dress . . .25 As these multiple texts overlap and collide, one dancer lifts the other and continues the steps of the waltz, while the suspended dancer, legs spread-eagle, looks off in the distance with the blank stare of someone already dying inside. The announcer concludes triumphantly, “que la esperan con los brazos abiertos!”26In this universe of juxtaposition, unseen “gentlemen” are the owners and promoters of “businesses,” and invisible accomplices in a world of death and impunity, sustained by both countries. The bodies of young women are thrust into these global markets, even before they've had an opportunity to assert their own adult consciousness. Figure 3., Dora Arreola lifts Maria Vale in the “Quinceañera/Maquiladora Waltz” at New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen The journey of the play thus becomes a journey to voice and agency, in which only an encounter of queer possibility, of deviance from the norm, lights the way out of patriarchal oppression. In the final image of the performance, the women connect in a moment of intimacy, at last arriving at a true encuentro, a possibility of transgression, and begin to transform their pain into hope, together.27 The Complications of Cross-border Collaboration What is on the other side? is the contradiction of this side a subaltern river. un río subterraneo. Just the old with a new dress – the masquerade of contemporaneity. El pájaro está en otro lado, pero las plumas caen aquí where little of me donde un poco de mí . . . remains. . . . permanece.28 As Rosa Linda Fregoso suggests in “Gender, Multiculturalism and the Missionary Position in the Borderlands,”29 the political position of México in relation to the US is one of submission to a “masculinist colonial fantasy that authorizes and privileges the white man's access to brown female bodies.” México itself is feminized as the “bottom” that must submit to the US position of domination. How, then, is it possible for artists from the United States and México to collaborate equitably? Does this power relationship change if the two subjects in question are both woman-identified? Mohanty states that “Sisterhood”—or, to queer this metaphor a bit, perhaps partnership—“cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis . . . Feminist discourses, critical and liberatory in intent, are not thereby exempt from inscription in their internal power relations.”30 One might argue, as Marxist Jazz scholar and poet Fred Moten has, that equitable cross-racial collaboration is impossible given the brutal inequities of our shared global histories. Yet creating—which is to say, inventing and constructing—equitable processes, and means of working together in mutual support, is in fact central to the project of feminist activism by women of color. As artists, we are constantly inventing new structures. Our approach was to confront the inherent power relationships in the creative process, and invert them in relation to patterns of historical disempowerment. For example, the director is generally the most powerful collaborator in the artistic process, having the final decision in the ultimate representation of images on stage. For this collaboration, therefore, it was significant that I—a Mexicana from the border region—was the director of the performance. Assaf's texts, informed by a community-based process, were approached as raw material in the construction of a world on stage. As professional artists conducting workshops in marginalized communities, we also had to be conscious of power dynamics, and to be very clear about our practices and intentions. As Butler advises in “The Question of Social Transformation:” Feminists as well must ask whether the 'representation' of the poor, the indigenous and the radically disenfranchised . . . is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to somehow avow the conditions of translation that make it possible, avow the power and privilege of the intellectual, avow the links in history and culture that make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and . . . writing possible.31 I believed it was important for us not to engage in “missionary art” or anthropological study, but rather to create a means of genuine collaboration with other women of color. “Missionary art” enters with the idea of wanting to “save” communities, a fundamentally paternalistic approach; while “anthropological” art positions the artist as a falsely objective observer or “expert,” and usually creates a situation of appropriation. As facilitators, instead, we were full participants in the creative process, opening spaces by sharing our own experiences and stories of violence. We were collaborating with other women in order to journey back into our own histories and reveal the complexity of multiple oppressions together. For example, I was born in a marginalized community, and grew up in poverty. My family migrated to the border region when I was very young, and lived for many years in a precarious position. When I was only thirteen years old, I tried to get a job in a maquiladora, because it was the only way I knew to get money, but I was not able to sustain the work. I then worked in a restaurant in the Zona Norte, as a waitress and dishwasher, until I was fifteen. Assaf came from a history of domestic violence, and was exploring her voice as an Arab American artist in the post-9/11 climate, in which mobility and border crossing had dramatically changed. We were not there to speak for others, but to work together to tell a collective story. Mohanty discusses the ways in which scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcon, Honor Ford-Smith, and Doris Sommer have challenged liberal humanist notions of subjectivity: In different ways, their analyses foreground questions of memory, experience, knowledge, history, consciousness, and agency in the creation of narratives of the (collective) self. They suggest a conceptualization of agency that is multiple and often contradictory but always anchored in the history of specific struggles. It is a notion of agency that works not through the logic of identification, but through the logic of opposition.32 This notion of the logic of opposition emerged as an implicit organizing principle in the aesthetic of our work, and in the collaboration process for creating Fronteras Desviadas. This meant we had to confront the complex power dynamics in our own relationships—our own internalized racism, Euro/US-centrism, classism, and fears about sexual violence. We had to be willing to implicate each other and ourselves in the expression of what we found. While the writers Mohanty mentions may emphasize the multiple subject (and an ethic of multiplicity is certainly present in our aesthetic), our experience of the environments we were investigating, and of ourselves as women in those environments, was perhaps more aligned with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conception of the fractured subject. The journey of creating the play was, for us, a journey of acknowledging, re-membering, and perhaps healing those fractures, within ourselves and within the group. Working from a post-colonial and feminist perspective, the creative process strengthens our capacity for connection, for building relationships across the perceived borders of class, race, national, and sexual identity. “We should not think,” as Butler cautions, “that this transit is smooth, since it takes place via a rupture in representation itself . . . what emerges from this translation, however, is a political vision that maintains . . . the possibilities of long-term global survival.”33 Audiences & Impact: Deviant Becomings After premiering with a tour to four cities in Baja California, the first English-dominant version of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was presented in Amherst, Massachusetts by New WORLD Theater (Summer Play Lab 2005). Comparative literature scholar Kanchuka Dharmasiri wrote a review that highlighted the question of cultural translation. Noting that the concept of “the other side” is relative to where one stands, she wrote: Some of [the women's] culturally specific gestures remained incomprehensible to audience members who were not familiar with Mexican rituals . . . [H]ow can a director make the audience comprehend culturally specific signs in live theatre? How does a play based on a particular socio-cultural milieu translate to a different context? . . . Or, does this space (which is not immediately decipherable) become a necessity in a process that is intent on creating awareness of a different cultural and socio-political condition?34 While the bilingual script interchanged lines of Spanish and English in the women’s text, the Chamuco was predominantly in one language, depending on the country in which we were performing. Presenting the show to audiences in diverse places—some geographically far from the political, socio-economic and cultural situations in which the work was created—required a process of cultural translation as well as linguistic. In México, actress Maria Vale interpreted El Chamuco as a Mexican American from California, thereby implicating men of color in their participation in the exploitation of Mexican women. In the United States, however, as performed by a Latina actress, Raquel Almazan, the character became a Texan, with the particular inflections, tones and expressions of men from that state—which had a different political resonance, given that the performance was touring during the presidency of George W. Bush. Different publics may have recognized different symbols and icons, as well as the rituals and cultural elements particular to each country. Even though Dharmasiri raised these questions of legibility, she did acknowledge that the post-show discussions, even in Amherst, stimulated community dialogue on sex trafficking, locally as well as globally: Arreola and Assaf perceive the performance as a form of activism, to create awareness among the spectators about the situation in Tijuana . . . While problematizing the dichotomy (here/there, self/other), the play likewise questions the political power structures that continue to oppress and exploit certain groups of people . . . The play made spectators question and think. It opened up a space to discuss issues related to contemporary political power and how they affect the lives of women on a global level.35 The use of abstraction and symbolism, as well as a kind of farce that pushes hyper-realism to absurdism, creates a political theater that is not narrative or didactic, and gives audiences the work of interpretation. The audience is called to make sense out of juxtaposed realities in which power is constructed, gained, and deconstructed in vastly different ways. Further, in Fronteras Desviadas, the audience is cast in multiple ways—in one reality as male, and in another reality as female—and left to reconcile the constant, unpredictable shifting between those polarized identifications. With Chamuco, the audience is cast as a group of male “johns” or clients, implicating all present as silent participants in a system of misogyny and exploitation. In the movement structure, the woman-identified characters cast the audience as women (as in the women-only workshops in which the texts were created). Meaning is realized in the audience’s perception of, not only what they have seen, but also who they are. In North Carolina, where we performed excerpts of Deviant Borders at the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting for artists and activists, the piece sparked a heated debate about agency in sex work. A queer audience member from San Francisco argued for a more “sex positive” vision. Another audience member countered, “This performance is not about sex, it's about exploitation.” In this way, we were able to facilitate a deeper dialogue about the various contexts of sex work, and the extent to which agency exists with regard to class and location, as well as to differentiate between voluntary sex work and human trafficking. In a very different context, in Managua, Nicaragua, a review in La Prensa celebrated both the unusual aesthetic strategies and the audience impact of the play, particularly regarding the power of embodied knowledge and expression: The International Festival of Theater [presented by Teatro Justo Rufino Garay] brought us a unique play this time. Fronteras Desviadas . . . left the public impacted. A rare mix of dreamscapes and allegories teaches us more than any research essay on prostitution in Tijuana, México . . . There are objects with phallic dimensions, reminiscent of copulation, receptacles as an allegory for the vagina, and very surprising solutions for visualizing the world of the brothels . . . The play is a denunciation of the complicity of the authorities that ignore what happens behind the curtains in the red zone of Tijuana, where prostitution reigns and tourists are received with open arms in every sex bar, where [men] haggle the price of the feminine body.36 While critics affirmed the clarity of the play's intention, it is important to raise the question of activism, and where its true impact lies. Certainly work of this nature raises awareness of political issues. In this way, performances can support the work of local organizers in engaging concerned constituents and mobilizing for action. On an individual level, perhaps, the deepest impact is found among the women who actually participated in the creative process, including those who identify as artists, and those who participated as community members. This is the arena in which we bear witness to actual transformation, on a deeply personal level. The women of Casa de la Mujer in Maclovio Rojas, for example, attended the performance at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Tecate (January 2005). By working with organizers from their community, we were able to arrange transportation and tickets for them to attend. Many of them had likely never been to a university, and had never seen their stories spoken or represented on stage. After the performance, they gathered with us to reflect on their experience. This simple act created some small measure of access, by beginning a relationship between an academic institution and a community in crisis only a few miles from their campus. This project also began a multi-year relationship between Maclovia Rojas and Mujeres en Ritual. Perhaps more importantly, it left the participants with the experience, perhaps for the first time, that their stories were of value, were worth listening to, and had a place in the public sphere. In the classic womanist text This Bridge Called My Back, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga described embodied theory in this way: A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience . . . We do this bridging by naming ourselves and by telling our stories in our own words . . . This is how our theory develops.37 By speaking a story that has never been told before, by embodying an experience for which words are not sufficient, by seeing oneself represented on stage for the first time, or allowing oneself as a performer to break the taboos of gender representation on stage for the first time—these are the intimate locations where voice and agency begin to manifest. These are the ruptures in the status quo, where possibilities emerge through “deviance” from the norm. And once lived, they can never be forgotten. Transgeneridad and The Question of Social Transformation Theatre critic Sergio Rommel has described the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting within “the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions.”38 Writing specifically of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, he has argued that “the transgression of borders in multiple ways (transgeneridad) is not only the central theme of the play, but at the same time the most effective vehicle for reassigning meaning to all the elements and signs of the performance . . . the same phrases contain an additional charge [double meaning] that in some way alludes to the theatre of protest . . . theatre-dance, anglo-latina . . . Spanish-English . . . sexual diversity (heterosexuality-homosexuality-bisexuality) . . . geographic borders. Like this, successively, other frontiers are deviated or transgressed throughout the performance.”39 Rommel's 2008 analysis led us to understand and articulate the work of Mujeres en Ritual in a new way—as transgenero performance. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asks, “Is the symbolic eligible for social intervention?”40 Yet this is precisely what artists do: performance and cultural production work to intervene in the symbolic, by working in the imaginary and subconscious realms, and creating alternative identifications. Even Butler asserts that “Fantasy structures relationality, and it comes into play in the stylization of embodiment itself.”41 As one might ask about the efficacy of symbolic interventions with regard to gender, the same could be asked of the “Leyenda Negra” and the real-life conditions of Tijuana. Is social intervention possible? “What operates at the level of cultural fantasy,” Butler writes, “is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized.”42 Fronteras Desviadas is one of these interventions, or in Butler’s words, “moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable.”43 Transgenero performance opens spaces for symbolic intervention, not only in the binary of gender, but also the binary of the Tijuana vice/American virtue. Like gender, and the “Leyenda Negra” of Tijuana, the United States’ image of itself as “the greatest country in the world” is reinforced by its own “incessant and panicked” repetition, in the way that Butler describes heterosexuality: “That [it] is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it ‘knows’ its own possibility of becoming undone.”44 Trangeneridad, then, enters into the political field “by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted.”45 If we can imagine—moreover, embody—these new modes of reality, and envision how they might be instituted, perhaps we could transform the conditions that exist for women, and woman-identified people, at the most frequently crossed border in the world. --------- Dora Arreola is the founder and artistic director of Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro and currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of South Florida. Arreola has more than twenty years of professional experience as a theater director, choreographer and performer. She has taught, directed and performed in México, United States, Nicaragua, Canada, Poland and India. She was a participant at Grotowski’s Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy (1987-89), and holds a MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Arreola has received grants and commissions from the Ford Foundation, Cultural Contact, National Performance Network (NPN), and more. --------- [1] With special thanks to Andrea Assaf for assistance with translation and contributions to the English version of this essay. [2] Maribel Álvarez, “The Border is . . .” (Guest lecture presented in New WORLD Theater's “Knowledge for Power” series, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 2006). [3] The term “feminicide” here refers to the over 900 unprosecuted cases of female homicide in Juárez, Mexico, which has come to be understood as a gender-based genocide of women. Although there are precedents for the use of the term “femicide” in English dating back to 1801, Mexican anthropologist and feminist Marcela Lagarde coined the term feminicidio in 2004, to include “the impunity with which these crimes are typically treated in Latin America.” [4] Maquiladoras are factories or manufacturing operations, generally unregulated and owned by multinational corporations, in so-called “Free Trade” zones in México, which were created in 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As of 2012, it's estimated that more than 3000 maquiladoras line the US-México border, with 937 located in the state of Baja California; estimates range from 560-800 in greater Tijuana. [5] Virginie Magnat, in Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women, discusses my work in the lineage of Grotowski: “Arreola, who [has] chosen to research [her] own cultural heritage, provide[s] non-European role models for this younger generation of women . . . in the post Grotowski era . . . creative research influenced by his legacy will mostly likely expand in unforeseen directions well beyond its European lineage . . . the modalities of such expansion are already operational in women’s current creative research, precisely because the latter focuses on performance processes open to change and transformation . . . these artists support an alternative performance paradigm in which cultural, traditional and ritual practices significantly contribute.”(New York: Routledge, 2014), 165. [6] Thomas Richards, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (New York: Routledge, 1995). [7] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 273-275. [8] Sergio RommelAlfonsoGuzmánis a theatre scholar and President of CAESA, the Council for the Accreditation of Higher Education in the Arts, México (at the time of printing), as well as a former Dean of the School of the Arts, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California(UABC), Mexicali. This is a translation of Rommel's Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: UABC, 2008), which I will later return to for further discussion. [9] The creation of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was supported by Contacto Cultural (US-México Foundation for Culture), which allowed Andrea Assaf to be an artist-in-residence with Mujeres en Ritual Danza Teatro in 2004. [10] The June 2004 tour, organized by the Environmental Health Coalition, a leader in the environmental justice movement based in National City, California, included the communities of Colonia Chilpancingo, Colonia Murua and Nueva Esperanza, adjacent to Tijuana's largest Maquiladora industrial complex. www.environmentalhealth.org . [11] Humberto Félix Berumen, Tijuana la horrible: Entre la historia y el mito (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2003). Quote translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf. [12] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 187. [13] We did talk with some sex workers in the Zona Norte, and invited them to participate in interviews for the project; however, even when they expressed initial interest or enthusiasm, they did not show up for the interviews. Our assessment is that the conditions of their work are so dangerous, that they either were not allowed or dared not risk participating. Pimps and owners are the sector of this economy that no one talks about, and research is virtually non-existent. [14] Assaf was fascinated by the Mexican expression “el otro lado” as slang for the United States; she was interested in exploring the multiple meanings of “the other side” and “crossing” in both cultures, with reference to the border, gender, and death. [15] “Border issues incl. Maclovio Rojas press accounts,” 2002, http://www.sjcite.info/maclovio.html (accessed 5 April 2014). [16] Story Circles here refers to the community-based methodology developed by the Free Southern Theatre and Junebug Productions. [17] Tijuana-based poet Laura Jáuregui assisted Assaf with the translations. [18] Andrea Assaf, “Soy mujer cuando” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005). [19] I am currently developing a performance based on the Dance of the Deer, which is traditionally performed by men only. I first performed this work as a solo, “Yo, Rumores Silencio” based on Telares (o el olvido) by Fabiola Ruiz, at the Grotowski Institute in 2009, and am developing it into full-length ensemble work. [20] Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solidad (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). [21] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 5th edition 2006), 147. [22] As described in a review by Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una funcion impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaraguenses (Managua, Nicaragua: Septemer 28, 2006). [23] This phrase, literally, means “count how much/many, and become aware!” In its original marketing context, this slogan suggests that if you count how much money you save at Calimax, you'll always want to shop there. However, in the context of the performance, our intention was to signify the consumption of women's body parts, while suggesting that if one were to count how many women were being exploited and murdered, in Tijuana and Juarez for example, there would be no choice but to be conscious of the urgency of the political situation. [24] Translation: “And now, let us receive with strong applause, the belle [celebrating her 15th birthday]! She, today, has arrived to the age of promises and illusions. She has left behind being a child, to be a woman. She celebrates her 15th spring. We present her to society . . . And to the Maquiladoras!” (Assaf, unpublished script, 2005). [25] Ibid. [26] Translation: “We await her with open arms!” (Ibid.) [27] For a video clip of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, visit https://vimeo.com/channels/doraarreola. [28] Andrea Assaf, “Que hay en el otro lado?” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005). [29] Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana encounters: The making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). [30] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 24 and 108. [31] Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 229. [32] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 82. [33] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 229-30. [34] Kanchuka Dharmisiri, “What is on the Other Side?,”The Organization of Graduate Students in Comparative Literature (OGSCL) Newsletter, Fall 2005, 6. [35] Ibid. [36]Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una función impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaragüenses (Managua, Nicaragua: La Prensa, September 28, 2006). Translation by Dora Arreola. [37] Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd edition(New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 23. [38] Sergio Rommel Alfonso Guzmán, Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2008). Quotes translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf. [39] Ibid. [40] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 213. [41] Ibid., 217. Emphasis mine. [42] Ibid., 214. [43] Ibid., 216. [44] Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories(London: Routledge, 1991), 23. [45] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,”217. ----------- 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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Markus Wessendorf By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF When Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel returned to Europe from their Californian exile in 1947, their son Stefan stayed in the United States. [1] After getting a PhD in philosophy from Harvard (for a dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), teaching philosophy at the University of Miami, and pursuing postdoctoral studies on Hegel and Karl Marx in Paris, Stefan settled in New York City in the mid-1960s, where he got involved in the experimental theatre scene. Apart from writing poetry (and publishing it in German and English), [2] his most ambitious project was to document The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies in a series of monographs. Out of ten books of a planned series, he only completed three: The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson , which was first produced by the West German publisher of his father’s works, Suhrkamp, in 1978; [3] Queer Theatre , with chapters about Jack Smith, The Theatre of the Ridiculous, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and others, also first published by Suhrkamp in 1978; [4] and two volumes on Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , first published in 1988 by Methuen and Routledge, who also published translations of his father’s works. [5] Volumes on Richard Foreman’s diary theatre, on the collective improvisation of Mabou Mines, on theatre as psychotherapy, on Black Theatre, and on Dance were announced but never published. (New York University’s Fales Library now holds the Stefan Brecht Papers.) In the late 1980s, during a one-year stay in the PhD Program of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York—then housed in the Grace Building and the adjacent building on 42nd Street—I bought a copy of Stefan’s book The Theatre of Visions at a small bookstore in the Broadway district. At the time, I found the book rather impenetrable—with its unwieldy combination of barely edited interview transcriptions, journal-style rehearsal notes, multi-page footnotes, moment-by-moment descriptions of productions, detailed formal analyses of these productions, and aesthetic, phenomenological, and psychological reflections on Wilson’s work. It is probably because this English-language book was first produced by a German publisher that little attention was paid to the overall structure and composition of the manuscript as well as its copyediting. There are many aspects of the book that would be considered problematic these days (for example, inappropriate references to lesbian performers and performers with disabilities). However, while re-reading The Theatre of Visions recently, I was surprised by the analytical depth and quality of reflection on Wilson’s early work that the monograph provides. Stefan performed in several of Wilson’s productions, for example, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, Overture in 1972, and A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1974. In The Theatre of Visions , he covers Wilson’s work from the late 1960s to 1977, and he distinguishes two periods in Wilson’s work: the early non-verbal, image-driven projects—including The King of Spain , The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud , Deafman Glance , Overture , KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE , and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin —and the later ones, in which Wilson started to experiment with texts, including A Letter for Queen Victoria , The $-Value of Man , Spaceman , Einstein on the Beach , and I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating . Stefan considers the first period—in his view: the theatre of visions proper—a successful attempt to create a theatre dominated by the right brain’s visual, spatial, and synthesizing powers, [6] whereas the use of language in Wilson’s later productions failed to play to the “right brain’s peculiar prowess for verbal communication” in terms of contextual considerations, “semantic liberality,” and “phonetic sensitivity.” [7] Because they did not “incorporate speech independently of its syntactic and semantic essence,” “freed of the habitual conscious left brain domination,” Stefan argues, the productions of this period destroyed Wilson’s theatre of visions. [8] The focus in the following will be on Stefan’s description and analysis of the key aesthetic characteristics and underlying assumptions of the first period, and especially on the production of Deafman Glance , to which he devotes almost ninety pages. [9] Subdivided into three sections (i.e., a detailed description of the performance and two sections on its meaning and form), each consisting of a numbered sequence of paragraphs, these pages almost read like a “Short Organum [CS1] ” of Wilson’s early work. As a performer in and spectator of Wilson’s early pieces, Stefan was in a privileged position to write about Wilson’s work. Since Wilson himself, differing from some of his peers in the New York theatre scene like Richard Foreman and Richard Schechner, did not articulate his own vision and approach in writing, The Theatre of Visions filled a gap, even though it represented Stefan’s point of view, not Wilson’s. Although Stefan makes few direct references to his father and his father’s theatrical concepts, many of his reflections and observations resonate with Bertolt’s theories, despite the fact that Wilson did not work with dramatic texts at this stage, was less overtly interested in politics than many of his contemporaries in experimental theatre, and supposedly played towards the strength of the other side of the brain usually identified with Bertolt’s work. It is also useful to draw out the resonances between Bertolt’s theories and Stefan’s text because other scholars and critics—partly due to Heiner Müller’s mediation and his assertion that “Bob [Wilson] achieved what [Bertolt] Brecht only dreamed of doing: the parting of the elements” [10] —later identified and discussed features of Bertolt’s aesthetics in Wilson’s work, [11] and Wilson himself later directed Bertolt’s The Ocean Flight and The Threepenny Opera at the Berliner Ensemble. The following exploration compares and contrasts Bertolt’s aesthetics and Wilson’s early work (as theorized by Stefan) to identify resonances as well as differences between their respective formal, thematic, and conceptual frameworks. Stefan makes it clear that one of his father’s key notions, Fabel , is absent from Wilson’s work. Fabel presupposes a dramatic text and is this text’s “dialectically interpreted plot . . . made ‘playable’ for a modern audience” [12] by the dramaturg, director, designers, etc. If a Fabel is still present in Wilson’s work, then only in a modified shape no longer recognizable as a verbally distillable narrative that informs the entire production’s structure. Stefan writes about Deafman Glance that there “is no forward pointing line, fable or plot.” [13] However, the show still plays with the audience’s expectation of a Fabel and makes the search for it an active part of their viewing experience: “Indications are given, commitments withheld, traces obscured.” [14] Different from his assessment of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in his later publication, [15] Stefan emphasizes in The Theatre of Visions that Wilson’s theatre does not engage with “practical and social concerns” and “has no propagandistic, moral, emotional, educational intentions or effects.” [16] He even goes so far to insinuate that his father’s theatre resembles Wilson’s in this regard and therefore falls short of Bertolt’s own stated goals: “the spectator of a Wilsonian spectacle like the spectator of most other kinds of spectacle (even a B. Brechtian one) is apt to have abandoned for the time of the spectacle, his/her practical extra-theatrical interests and concerns.” [17] It is therefore interesting that Stefan himself provides a Marxist analysis of one aspect of Deafman Glance : the construction of three, horizontally lined-up wooden bins by several performers on stage, which goes on for a long time. Once these bins have been completed, they just stand there empty before they are finally filled in. Stefan argues that the ordinariness of the “staged image” of constructing the bins juxtaposed with other images on stage invites the spectator to identify it “with the chief horror of industrial capitalism in his own life: the alienation of labor.” [18] Stefan’s discussion of Wilson’s later $-Value of Man , however, which had both “an explicit and pervasive theme, money” and “a message: one shouldn’t have to pay for things,” is more critical. [19] This show included an ironic recitation of a New York Times article about a classroom experiment by a Long Island University professor that was supposed to demonstrate “to his students their hypocrisy in denying putting a monetary value on the life of human individuals and/or in affirming their pricing to be independent of who or what those individuals are.” Stefan argues that the resentment of monetary value in practice “works out as elitism”: he considers the professor’s experiment “foolish liberal stuff” and “the show’s protest … childish.” [20] Both Bertolt and the early Wilson focus on and showcase ordinary objects, characters, and lives, and ordinariness also applies to the mode of representation. Bertolt’s Galileo famously proclaims: “ Unhappy the land where heroes are needed,” [21] and this sentiment is also voiced in some of his other plays. Bertolt rejected histrionics and overacting and favored clarity of presentation. Stefan writes about the “marvelously unpretentious matter-of-factness” [22] of Wilson’s Deafman Glance and takes away from it that “we need not strain to be extraordinary.” [23] He describes the movements of Wilson’s performers as “intense but relaxed” [24] and the “actions required [as] simple. They demand no unusual skills or exertions.” [25] Both Bertolt and Wilson, however, also estrange the familiar and ordinary. In his plays and productions, Bertolt employed Verfremdungseffekte , that is, devices and techniques to render seemingly familiar and ordinary objects, actions, or persons strange and therefore alterable. Estrangement of the ordinary in Wilson’s work takes a different form: Stefan points out that one “of the ways that Wilson puts ordinary life in the perspective of strangeness is with animals [i.e., animal performers and puppets on stage].” [26] As alluded to in the statement by Heiner Müller quoted above, Bertolt aimed for “a radical separation of elements ”—that is, of words, music, design, etc.—in his epic theatre, [27] and Stefan describes Wilson’s theatre in comparable terms: “In a disassociated manner various events occur. They are out of unrelated frames of reference. . . . conventions of representation are played off against one another.” [28] The structure of most of Bertolt’s plays is episodic and characterized by a dramaturgy of interruption to maintain the spectator’s focus on the moment-to-moment development of the plot instead of its outcome. Stefan characterizes Deafman Glance as a spectacle that is “divided into movements by a radical stop and go: successive endings, staged and experienced as true endings, followed by beginnings, staged and experienced as new beginnings, ” [29] and he states that Wilson “has the gift of discontinuity. His figurations are discrete: he neither leads into them nor out of them.” [30] Both Bertolt and Wilson favor a detached, unemotional, relaxed, and observant attitude of the performers towards their own performance on stage. Bertolt, for example, using classical Chinese theatre as a model, writes that the actor in this tradition “ expresses that he knows that he is being watched ” [31] and “ observes himself .” When he represents a cloud, he “observes his own arms and legs, pointing them out, examining them and perhaps finally praising them.” [32] Wilson as a performer, according to Stefan, in his own productions “never seems tense, but seems continually aware of the whereabouts of every part of his body, seeming to relate to these parts […]. He leaves no doubt that as he stands there, he is conscious of himself as a performer.” [33] “Conventional theatre’s ostentatious indications of acting-on, being-affected by another” are absent in Wilson’s work. [34] For Bertolt and the early Wilson alike, the performers’ relationship towards their performance is also supposed to instill an equally observant relationship to the performance in the spectators. Bertolt wants the spectator to develop the cool, critical, and detached attitude of the connoisseur (for example, of a sports fan) towards the actions on stage. Stefan, similarly, emphasizes that in Wilson’s Deafman Glance neither performance style nor staging “seem designed to evoke emotions in the spectator, but on the contrary to give no occasions for his passions to arise, but to calm him.” [35] Bertolt appreciates about classical Chinese Theatre that the “audience identifies itself with the actor” not through emotional identification but as “an observer, and accordingly develops the attitude of observing or looking on.” [36] He himself wants his spectators less to emotionally engage with the plot and feel empathy for the characters than to further their critical attitude toward both. Bertolt coined the term “complex seeing” for the audience’s ability to simultaneously think along with a play’s actions while also thinking about them at a meta-level: “thinking across the flow is almost more important than thinking in the flow.” [37] In his productions, this complex vision was facilitated by projections on screens, half curtains, or the laying bare of the technical apparatus. According to Stefan, the experience of watching Wilson’s Deafman Glance was simultaneously also “pervasively dual: we are watching images and performers creating images.” [38] Bertolt was known for an open-ended creative process in which texts were rarely ever completed but often worked on and revised over several decades. With regard to Brecht’s works, Tom Kuhn has suggested that “we should try to conceive of an almost continuous and multi-stranded process of invention and development, which only came to any sort of rest or conclusion in particular completed ‘works’ when the opportunity happened to present itself.” [39] As for Wilson, Stefan mentions that “wholeness is not an ideal of his, but bothers him.” [40] In his early productions, Wilson frequently reused material from other projects— The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud repeating material from The King of Spain ; The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin combining most of Freud with parts of Deafman Glance and KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE , etc. [41] Bertolt’s directorial understanding of mise-en-scène was similar to Denis Diderot’s notion of a theatre production as a succession of tableaus, [42] and this approach is also prominent in Wilson’s work. Bertolt aimed for stage compositions that would bring out what he called Gestus , by which he meant the social relations and attitudes of characters physically expressed and externalized through “posture, tone of voice and facial expression.” [43] As a recitable sign revealing the social positionality of each character, the Gestus needed to be legible—and this aspect of Bertolt’s work is particularly well documented in the photographic record of the modelbooks of his productions with the Berliner Ensemble. Wilson too, according to Stefan, told the actors in his early performances “to aim at the production of a clear image, one that reads well.” [44] In contrast to Bertolt, however, Wilson’s stage images, pulled from his unconscious and deliberately not interpreted, needed to be legible as strikingly enigmatic images, as symbols that even though they were “carrying symbol function, . . . [did] not function as symbols” and “mean[t] nothing.” [45] One notion closely related to Gestus in Bertolt’s theatre theory is Haltung (“attitude”), which combines “what is usually a mental state in English with embodied expression or an actor’s bearing.” Both Gestus and Haltung “are generated in and by the body,” with Gestus being “the smallest element of Haltung ” and condensing “the dialectic of movement and balance.” [46] Both Gestus and Haltung are also related to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of Habitus as “a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception and action common to all members of the same group or class.” [47] Without using the word explicitly, Stefan analyzes the Haltung not of any characters (of which there aren’t any in a traditional sense) in Wilson’s productions but of the members of his Byrd Hoffman School of Birds: Byrds, generally white Protestants from upper middle class families, or assimilated to a WASP manner, are apt to be undemonstrative, unemphatic, reserved people, superficially cool and off-hand, not given to shows of emotion, generally keeping their feelings, if any, to themselves, rather carefully controlled in their conduct, with unexpressive faces and voices. . . . Generally well-read and -informed (and college graduates), they tend to be non-verbal, with few opinions, careful to avoid abstract terms, generalisations. . . .Politics is never discussed. [48] And Stefan also discusses the Haltung of other New York theatre companies with regard to the religious and class background that inform their work: “The ethos of . . . the Bread and Puppet theatre is Protestant and upper middle class, that of all forms of ‘ridiculous’ theatre is catholic and lower class, that of the Open Theatre, the Manhattan Project, the Living Theatre, the Performance Group is Jewish and middle class.” [49] Both Bertolt and Wilson developed what could be called “theatre pedagogies” in response to the alienation inscribed on the body through capitalist and bourgeois socialization. Bertolt developed Lehrstücke —learning plays—that were conceived of as training pieces for the self-orientation of participating performers, often non-virtuoso amateurs (“ workers’ choruses, amateur dramatic groups, school choruses and school orchestras ” [50] ). As Bertolt remarked in a letter in 1956, his learning play “ The Decision was not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers,” [51] and he stated in a different context that “underlying the learning play is the expectation that the participant/player can be influenced socially by performing specific ways of taking action, assuming specific attitudes, reproducing specific dialogues, etc.” [52] By isolating, enacting, and criticizing specific postures and gestures relating to class conflict and power structures, the participants could learn to perform them differently and recognize, deconstruct, and refashion their own socially shaped social Gestus and Haltung . Stefan, in comparison, writes about Wilson’s work with the untrained members of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds that he “has found a way to do great theatre precisely with not just totally unskilled people, but with people peculiarly unfit to perform” and argues that Wilson’s physical workshops and group sessions helped his performers to transmute “their painful impotence . . . into the grade and dignity of an individuality as it is.” [53] One could say that Wilson’s workshops contributed to a deconditioning of the Haltung of his group members by alleviating the socially conditioned fear of “acknowledging one’s identity with one’s body.” [54] Stefan writes: “Participating in Wilson’s sessions, one realizes that a specific inhibition underlies the common sense, decency, economy of normal adult movement: an object-less fear . . . felt in permanency, so regular a state of muscular inhibition one is not conscious of it.” [55] Stefan’s own participation in Wilson’s sessions left him with a “certain appreciable rather lasting elation and increased ease” with his own body. [56] One of Stefan’s major claims about Wilson’s early work is that it is focused on individuality—as opposed to personality. Stefan claims that for “individuals to reveal themselves was probably his original theatrical intention.” [57] This may first seem in strong opposition to Bertolt’s work and his rejection of the ideology of individualism, but a closer look reveals similarities of both approaches. Stefan contends that, in Wilson’s theatre, there “are no ‘characters,’ the performers do not imitate, impersonate or represent personalities,” [58] and emphasizes that Wilson, for his shows, “does not pick particularly beautiful or graceful, nor strange-looking people, but aims at a diversity of appearance within the range of conventional appearance,—‘just people.’.” [59] Stefan argues that in modern times,—during the bourgeois epoch,—people have tended to identify themselves . . .in terms of . . . an integration . . . of will and consciousness into a peculiar functioning whole, and the arts . . . have tended to represent people in terms of it, viz. as PERSONS possessed of a PERSONALITY or PERSONAL IDENTITY. I believe that. . . individuality or individual identity are something else. [60] The notion of personality rejected by Stefan is similar to the concept of the individual attacked by Bertolt: what Stefan embraces as the individual ( Individuum ), his father conceives of as the “dividual” ( Dividuum ). [61] Stefan’s statement that “[b]ureaucratisation and proletarianization have made personality seem pointless,—no identity” [62] echoes his father’s notion of the “dividual” as equally lacking a unified and coherent identity. Instead of conceiving of the masses from the point of view of the individual, the individual should be conceived of from the point of view of the masses: “And it is precisely the divisibility of the individual that should be emphasized (as belonging to several collectives).” [63] To Stefan, the identity-less individual he associates with Wilson’s work is in a state of “becoming,” in a constant process of “self-actualisation,” inhabiting the Gertrude Steinian temporality of an “eternal present . . . experienced as all there, at the moment,—not as having a reality before or after.” [64] Stefan argues that the “awareness of the performers’ individuality in Wilson’s theatre replaces the awareness of a personality (or . . . a character) represented by an actor.” [65] However, the spectator becomes aware of the performers’ individualities not because Wilson’s direction highlights and isolates specific performers as extraordinary but because his performers move collectively without a concern about appearances, easily following their own bodies’ kinetic impulses while being sensitive and attuned to the movements of the other performers on stage. Stefan describes the counter-intuitive effect that, despite Wilson’s encouragement of his performers not to show themselves as individuals on stage, “a powerful communication,—of individualities,—results.” [66] Similar to Bertolt’s epic theatre, the spectators, “not the performers, have to be the active party” in Wilson’s productions. [67] Stefan writes that in Wilson’s theatre “there are so many things happening simultaneously, we cannot dwell on everything, but have to search, select, focus, in order to see, mere looking won’t do.” [68] Stefan applies a predominantly psychological vocabulary to describe the attention-raising and -expanding processes in Wilson’s work that would have been alien to his father. Bertolt’s goal is to turn his audiences into critical spectators who translate their awareness of the social issues represented on stage into political action beyond the theatre: “The attitude is a critical one. . . . [W]e hand the world over to their brains and hearts for them to change as they see fit.” [69] The early Wilson, by contrast, is interested in awareness not as a cognitive and intellectual but a pre- as well as un-conscious sensory and creative potential to be fully actualized: “Looking becomes imagination.” [70] The “extended expositions and repetitions, the silence and the slow movements, the unaccented evenness with which new things appear, and above all the self-sufficient concreteness of the individual images” in Wilson’s productions “liberate our awareness” [71] by eroding our “perceptual acquisitiveness,” relaxing “our analytic, identifying, retentive propensities,” [72] and circumventing “the ego-structure of perception.” [73] Similar to Bertolt’s vision of “a type of performance that will keep the spectator’s mind free and mobile” [74] to allow for the critical awareness and viewership of the audience unimpeded by emotional identification, Wilson’s work, according to Stefan, provides a “loosening-up exercise for the mind,” and the “free movement of . . . awareness” encouraged by this exercise makes “awareness itself. . . a medium of enjoyment and even awareness . ” [75] This brings to mind Friedrich Schiller’s notion of art as providing the “highest pleasure” defined as the “freedom of the mind in the vivacious play of all its faculties” [76] —except that in Wilson’s theatre, different from Schiller, the transformation of the “sensual world . . . into a free creation of the spirit” is not about controlling the “material word through ideas.” [77] Wilson’s early theatre is thoroughly grounded in the body, not in ideas or idealism—but also not in Bertolt’s materialism—and that applies to the notion of awareness as well. Awareness as a “medium of enjoyment” is conceived of in physical terms, as a dynamic energetic potential. The “loosening-up exercise for the mind” that a Wilson production aims to provide to the spectator is “of the same sort as the physical free motion exercises by which Wilson trains and prepares his performers.” [78] Stefan argues that “somewhat like spectators in normal theatre [who] may emphatically share the feelings of characters,” the spectators in Wilson’s theatre mimetically share in the performer’s “group-aware bodily self-awareness.” [79] His audience becomes aware of their awareness not as an act of intellectual recognition or self-reflection but “as an energetic state . . . of participation,” [80] with the “modification of the spectator’s awareness” occurring in three steps: from observing the “things the performers are doing” and “sensing their movements,” to contemplating the “images produced by what the performers are doing,” to getting in touch with and participating in the “process of creative energy producing the fluctuating imagery.” [81] A comparable modification of the spectator’s awareness in Bertolt’s theatre would more likely move from a critical observation of the characters’ moment-by-moment choices (and the options rejected in each case) to a consideration of alternative solutions to the translation of these solutions into political action outside the theatre. One key to stimulating and liberating the audience’s awareness in Wilson’s early theatre, according to Stefan, is the dream logic and content of his images: “the presence of fantasy-elements . . . , the show’s composition out of images . . . , [the] manner of development,” [82] etc. The “cumulative effect” especially of the enigmatic characters in Deafman Glance “suggests the presence of emblems in life . . . which carry purpose and true meaning indifferent to us and not to be comprehended by us.” [83] . Different from Freudian psychoanalysis, however, the “dream is uninterpretable. Life is a language without denotation.” [84] This notion is closer to Franz Kafka and Antonin Artaud than to Bertolt. Stefan argues that “Wilson’s theatre is dream-like because it makes us suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness,” including the “principles of discontinuity and uniformity.” [85] For example, “we don’t see a wall until we have supplemented an unseen house that makes it a wall,” [86] and “we attribute to objects of experience a minimal completeness even in cases where actual experience does not positively warrant this.” [87] As a result, “waking perception . . . never perceives anything changing—in space or in time. Its world is discontinuous.” Wilson’s theatre is closer to sleeping than waking consciousness, according to Stefan, because it doesn’t invoke “a single world in which things happen uniformly” and fails “to assume that before something can be something else it must have ceased to be what it is.” In Wilson’s theatre, “we perceive things changing into other things. From moment to moment and place to place one form goes into and turns out another,” which implies a fusion and blurring of forms. [88] Bertolt, with his dialectical-materialist as well as Taoist outlook, also strongly embraces the possibility of change at any given moment, but as a discontinuous change from one set and established state to another. One example would be his poem “Everything Changes,” which includes the lines A new beginning Is possible with your last breath. But what happened, happened. And the water You poured into the wine, you can No longer pour out. [89] A new beginning is always possible, but only if it is based on the acknowledgement of the determinate earlier state left behind (“what happened, happened”). According to Stefan, sleeping consciousness conceives of dream objects in varying modes of non-identity. The identity of “individuals, acts, events, or situations” in dreams is either over- or under-determined but rarely self-identical. In one passage, he refers to his father as an example of the over- or under-determined identity of the dream object typical for the sleeping consciousness: “When I meet my father in my dream, I have no doubt of his identity, but at the same time, there is nothing about my identification that would preclude that figure from not only being something else, but from not being my father.” [90] Bertolt’s indeterminate identity in his son’s dream makes him a figure more likely to appear in Wilson’s theatre than in his own, which Stefan seems to equate with conventional theatre: Whereas conventional theatre so fashions the appearances acted out as to suggest real people whose appearances they are and to which, through the appearances, we are to relate, Wilson’s theatre makes us relate to the appearances created only: in themselves, as phenomena; and so fashions them that we perceive them as possibly other alternatives, intrinsically ambiguous, of multiple identity, non-self-identical, as definitely incomplete and inconsistent. [91] Even though Bertolt also rejects the illusionism of realism and the audience’s engagement with supposedly real people qua identification with their appearances, he equally rejects the Nietzschean reduction of the phenomenal world to mere appearance. He wants his audience to become aware of and interrogate the appearances created by capitalist ideology and commodity fetishism—not as phenomena without any underlying material reality but as disguises of an economic system effectively concealing its mode of operation. Bertolt doesn’t want to suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness listed by his son—“efficient causation,” “discontinuity,” uniformity,” “substance” and “self-identity” [92] —but to change the socio-economic reality in which they are at work. His “dividual,” by default, involves incomplete and inconsistent, multiple and non-self identities, but they result from social, not unconscious forces and processes, and are discontinuous and separate, not in flux and morphing into each other. The multiple identities of the “dividual” co-exist but do not merge. The Fabel of Bertolt’s play The Good Person of Szechwan , [93] for example, involves the impossibility of the altruistic protagonist Shen Teh to ever transform into Shui Ta, her invented capitalist alter ego, in the presence of other characters, and even the change of Shen Teh into Shui Ta in front of the curtain during a song interlude maintains the discreteness of the identities of the two characters as well as the performer. In any case, Stefan’s dream example can be understood as a critique of his father’s notion of the indeterminacy of identity as not going far enough. Overall, both Wilson’s and Bertolt’s theatre are about the rejection of the world as it is. Stefan repeatedly states that Wilson’s theatre, in a utopian sense, “makes us feel that anything might happen,” [94] and according to Bertolt, “things won’t stay the way they are.” [95] The work of both Wilson and Bertolt is about the liberation from oppression, but they mean different things by it. As discussed above, Wilson’s early productions may be unemotional, but Stefan argues that their themes (in the case of Deafman Glance : death, murder, and rebirth) are “emotionally highly ‘charged’” and that the emotional content of these themes (“anxiety”) and their concomitant feelings (“from vague perturbation through fear to dread, horror and terror”) are suppressed. [96] Even though Stefan concedes that Wilson’s early spectacles only have a Fabel to the extent that it has been fully “subvert[ted] into imagery,” [97] (120), they still reflect a particular viewpoint, namely the viewpoint of a “self-contained . . . boy child, autistic in the eyes of an adult world continually busy in a make-believe show of exchange of affect and intelligence. . . . The shows are like that child . . . . Their hidden violence is his suppressed rage.” [98] Stefan implies that Wilson, who early in his career worked with children, is invested in “the personal liberation of the stunted or repressed vital energies of children” [99] that have been killed off, physically and spiritually, by family and society. [100] Bertolt’s theater, on the other hand, is about liberation from oppression by a capitalist system. His main themes are also highly emotionally charged (exploitation of labor, the ruthless pursuit of business interests, the impossibility of being a “good person” under the conditions of capitalism, etc.), and his work also suppresses, deflects, and estranges the associated emotions (most famously, in Mother Courage’s silent scream in response to her son’s execution offstage), but he does this in order to allow the audience to detach themselves emotionally from the situations portrayed on stage so that they can think critically about them. If Bertolt’s plays, much like Wilson’s early productions, are motivated by a sublimated emotion—anger at social injustice—this emotion is not grounded in childhood trauma and articulated in a far less personal manner. Most of the formal similarities of Wilson’s early work with Bertolt’s theatre aesthetics also continued in Wilson’s later work and often became even more pronounced: the separation of elements, the use of interruption, the clarity of gestures and stage compositions, the quotation of elements from earlier productions in later ones, etc. Collaboration, always a key aspect of Bertolt’s work, was already important in Wilson’s early productions but intensified and became more relevant and wide-ranging later on. Even after he began directing classical and modern plays and working with professional actors, dramaturgs, and playwrights, often in Europe, Wilson not only continued to use and expand his extensive repertoire of estranging staging techniques but also to push them further than Bertolt had. Despite the fact that Theatre of Visions includes very few direct—and mostly critical—references to Bertolt’s work, Stefan does convey the sense of a strong resonance—and of differences in that resonance—between his father’s theatre theories and Wilson’s early productions. Endnotes [1] For convenience’s sake, I will refer to Robert Wilson by his last name, and to Stefan Brecht and Bertolt Brecht by their first names in the following pages. [2] Stefan Brecht, Gedichte (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1984); Stefan Brecht, 8th Avenue Poems (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). [3] Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). [4] Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). [5] Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , 2 vols. (London and New York: Methuen/Routledge, 1988). [6] Theatre of Visions , 10. [7] Theatre of Vision , 265. [8] Theatre of Vision , 266 & 267. [9] Theatre of Vision , 54–140. [10] Qtd. in Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52. [11] See, for example, Andrzej Wirth, “Vom Dialog zum Diskurs: Versuch einer Synthese der nachbrechtschen Theaterkonzepte,” in Theater heute 1/1980: 16–19; Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 33, 70; Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, “Brecht and Contemporary Experimental Theater,” in Brecht in Context , ed. Stephen Brockmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 282–290, here 283–85. [12] Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” in Brecht on Theatre , 3rd ed., ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1995), 7. [13] Theatre of Visions , 120. [14] Theatre of Visions , 124. [15] See, to just give one example, Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , vol. 1, 484: “The Bread and Puppet Theatre during the ’60s became the artistic organ of the pacifist-anarchist-liberal wing of the Peace Movement in New York City.” [16] Theatre of Visions , 118 & 238. [17] Theatre of Visions , 238. [18] Theatre of Visions , 88–89. [19] Theatre of Visions , 308. [20] Theatre of Visions , 309. [21] Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo , trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays: Five , ed. and introd. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 91. [22] Theatre of Visions , 47. [23] Theatre of Visions , 48. [24] Theatre of Visions , 115. [25] Theatre of Visions , 116. [26] Theatre of Visions , 50. [27] Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre , 449. [28] Theatre of Visions , 88. [29] Theatre of Visions , 130. [30] Theatre of Visions , 177. [31] Bertolt Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre , 151. [32] Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” 152. [33] Theatre of Visions , 172. [34] Theatre of Visions , 116. [35] Theatre of Visions , 100. [36] Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” 152. [37] Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Threepenny Opera ,” in Brecht on Theatre , 72. [38] Theatre of Visions , 115. [39] Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” in Brecht and the Writer’s Workshop: Fatzer and Other Dramatic Projects , ed. Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019), 4. [40] Theatre of Visions , 308, n 47. [41] Theatre of Visions , 197, n 82. [42] See, for example, Denis Diderot, “Conversations on The Natural Son [selections],” in Diderot: Selected Writings , ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 88–102. [43] Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre , 248 (§61). [44] Theatre of Visions , 177. [45] Theatre of Visions , 50. [46] Silberman, Giles, and Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” 6. [47] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 86; cf. Evi Stamatiou, “Pierre Bourdieu and Actor Training: Towards Decolonising and Decentering Actor Training Pedagogies,” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 13 (1): 96–114. [48] Theatre of Visions , 199 –200. [49] Theatre of Visions , 199 –200, n. 86. [50] Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, “Open Letter to the Artistic Board of the ‘Neue Musik,’ Berlin, 1930,” in Collected Plays: Three , ed. and intro. John Willett (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997), 343. [51] Bertolt Brecht, “Open Letter,” 347. [52] Bertolt Brecht, “Zur Theorie des Lehrstücks [On the Theory of the Learning Play],” BFA 22.1, 351. Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [53] Theatre of Visions , 201. [54] Theatre of Visions , 203. [55] Theatre of Visions , 205. [56] Theatre of Visions , 206. [57] Theatre of Visions , 223. [58] Theatre of Visions , 215. [59] Theatre of Visions , 222. [60] Theatre of Visions , 224. [61] See Bertolt Brecht, “Individuum und Masse [The Individual and the Masses],” in Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 30 vols. and Register (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau and Suhrkamp, 1988–2000), vol. 21, 359. (Abbreviated in the following as BFA .) [62] Theatre of Vision s , 224 [63] Brecht, “Individuum und Masse,” BFA 21, 359: “Und am einzelnen ist gerade seine Teilbarkeit zu betonen (als Zugehörigkeit zu mehreren Kollektiven).” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [64] Theatre of Visions , 230. [65] Theatre of Visions , 223 . [66] Theatre of Visions , 222. [67] Theatre of Visions , 114. [68] Theatre of Visions , 114. [69] Brecht, Short Organum , 235 (§22). [70] Theatre of Visions , 123. [71] Theatre of Visions , 122. [72] Theatre of Visions , 123. [73] Theatre of Visions , 124. [74] Brecht, Short Organum , 241 (§40). [75] Theatre of Visions , 126. [76] Friedrich Schiller, “Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie [On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy]” in Sämtliche Werke , vol. II.2, ed. Peter-André Alt (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 816. “Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemütes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [77] Schiller, “Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie,” 816–17. “[…] die sinnliche Welt […] in ein freies Werk unseres Geistes zu verwandeln und das Materielle durch Ideen zu beherrschen.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [78] Theatre of Visions , 126. [79] Theatre of Visions , 208. [80] Theatre of Visions , 126. [81] Theatre of Visions , 236–237. [82] Theatre of Visions , 136. [83] Theatre of Visions , 51. [84] Theatre of Visions , 50. [85] Theatre of Visions , 136. [86] Theatre of Visions , 137. [87] Theatre of Visions , 138. [88] Theatre of Visions , 137. [89] Bertolt Brecht, “Alles wandelt sich,” BFA 15, 117. Trans. Markus Wessendorf. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, “Everything Changes . . . ,” in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht , ed. and trans. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (New York: Liveright, 2019), 905. [90] Theatre of Visions , 138. [91] Theatre of Visions , 139. [92] Theatre of Visions , 136. [93] Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Szechwan , trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays: Six , ed. and introd. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009), 1–112. [94] Theatre of Visions , 122; cf. 294 n. 32. [95] Bertolt Brecht, “Lob der Dialektik [Praise of Dialectics],” in BFA 11, 238. “So, wie es ist, bleibt es nicht.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [96] Theatre of Visions , 100. [97] Theatre of Visions , 120. [98] Theatre of Visions , 203 –4. [99] Theatre of Visions , 96. [100] See Theatre of Visions , 95–96. [CS1] Either "Short Organum" or "Kleines Organon" About The Author(s) Markus Wessendorf is a Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline 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 (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline By Published on April 29, 2023 Download Article as PDF (Re)Generation was developed with a faculty fellowship from University of Miami. Jessica Bashline and MK Lawson , the creators of (Re)Generation interview one another to document and archive the process of the piece as well as offer a model for those interested in engaging with an outdoor urban Tour-style performance outside of the traditional tourism environment. (Re)Generation follows two women and links their lives to the place they inhabit and the ghosts that surround them. One, a single mother living in contemporary NYC; and the other Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President. The First Act follows a playwright, Jessica, as she goes through her morning, walking through the park and trying to find a place to concentrate on preparing to pitch her play to a theatre company. While Jessica doesn’t speak out loud the audience listens to her inner monologue on their own headphones as they follow her through the park. Act One ends with a scene between Jessica and Victoria Woodhull sitting on a park bench having a conversation through time and space. The Second Act brings us back, physically, to where Act One begins—this time we follow Victoria Woodhull through the 30 minutes leading up to her scene on the bench with Jessica. And now the headphones come off. Act 2 happens in real-time with three actors speaking on the streets of New York City. The audience winds up on the same park bench, watching the same scene that ended Act One. The play is an exploration of time and space, reality and illusion, and the very real search for kindred spirits in a world that has become increasingly isolated. (Re)Generation was developed and performed in Washington Square Park in NYC in August of 2021. • MK: Hi- here we are, back on Zoom… Jess: I know, I hate it! MK: I figure we can start with me asking you a few questions since the piece originated with you, and then we will move forward from there. Sound good? Jess: Sounds good. MK: Ok- tell me where this piece began? Jess: (Re)Generation started as an amalgam of scripts I had been working on for a few years, originally imagined as traditional theatrical pieces. The first script started six or seven years ago as a monologue: a divorced single mother trying to write a lecture on place as a character in literature; specifically, New York City. Over the years I created scenes for this character that took place throughout her daily life, a convention that I played with a lot in the writing of that work initially was that the audience never saw the people our lead interacted with, her family and friends were always offstage, or just around the corner. The only real people she interacted with were the people she briefly encountered in the city. I was exploring isolation and loneliness in a city of millions. The piece never worked—and I put it away for years. A few years later, I became fascinated with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in 1872. I began to write about her, because her story is amazing, and played with the idea of intertwining the two stories—as they both seemed to revolve around New York City as a place of reinvention. But I could never find the right story to tell. So—into the dropbox of script pieces these stories went…Until COVID. I went back through my dropbox of script pieces and came across the writing I had about this single, divorced mom trying to figure out her life and career while feeling isolated and alone in a place so full of people; and Victoria Woodhull. I knew I wanted to play with a COVID-safe way of making this piece that allowed humans to connect in real life. I landed on promenade theatre, allowing audiences to follow actors through the city streets. And then I called you! MK: Yes you did. Jess: And I think I said—we are going to make theatre that doesn’t live on Zoom— MK : YES! Jess: And we were obsessed with trying to figure out how to create COVID-safe live performance that wasn’t just theatre outside, that allowed for the way the theatre was made and performed to be a part of the journey of the piece. MK: I loved the idea you had for creating two very different acts of the play. If I remember right- you came to me right away with the fact that you wanted Act 1 to exist in the character of Jess’ mind—it was her inner voice—and so the audience would be listening to her through their headphones. Jess: And then Act 2 would be more traditionally theatrical, with actors speaking out loud to a communal audience. MK: Yeah- that was exciting to me as a way of exploring isolation in two different ways. Jess: And in the park! MK: So the first act is about Jess, walking through a contemporary Washington Square Park, and the second about Victoria Woodhull, and takes place in 1872. Jess: And I really couldn’t conceive of the form this would take until I called you. And the beauty of the fellowship money I received from the University of Miami was that it was for research, about discovering something new. There was no pressure to have 700 people show up at a performance. Which was such a gift. MK: Right it was. We really did get to say, okay, Well, what might this look like? I remember thinking about how formless it was at the time. How part of the intrigue was we don't have to know what this is. We could just have seeds of ideas. Especially coming out of the pandemic. I can remember you asking a lot in our first call– What is the experience we want people to have? Rather than, what is the play we want to do? Jess: Yup- it felt really freeing to ask that question. And that is the question I am focused on a lot now. MK: The next thing I was gonna ask is about the historical piece: Victoria Woodhull. Because the idea that you had that really captured my attention was this idea that we could be somehow listening to someone's inside voice. We could get inside of someone, isolated from the world, by their own thoughts in this sense. And that kind of personal experience was really interesting. But then there was this historical piece. Can you talk a little bit about how the historical piece came in, and the importance of that. Jess: So the original piece was very heavily influenced by New York as a city. It started actually with this 4-page monologue about New York City and the architecture, and how the architecture told stories and spoke to her. And I, as a New Yorker, have always felt incredibly drawn to this idea that people come to my home, the place where I was born, where my family was born. People come to this place and create these huge lives for themselves here. But with that, we also have so many small, regular lives that live here. But you rarely hear about them. MK: Oh, yes, the juxtaposition. Jess: Yes- the juxtaposition of those 2 things: of this woman who is just trying to live her life and have a conversation with a human being, and Victoria, who lived an outlandish, amazing life, that she could only have lived in New York. She had to move to New York in order to become this thing that she became. MK: I was just thinking about all the different conversations we had about how this play was going to work. Once we made the decision of the basic ways we were going to hear Acts 1 and 2. Jess: It is so fun to go back on a process that I feel so far away from, and also for me, was a process that dated back even longer than that, years before you were involved. My favorite was bringing you a whole bunch of stuff that I'd written that was kind of incoherent and trying to find form. What if we follow her into a coffee shop? And what if things happen? And we plant people? And there are actors everywhere, and every interaction is staged? MK: Those were grandiose days. Jess: At one point we talked about her leaving her apartment, and we were going to have conversations coming from the building, but in all kinds of languages; all the conversations that might have ever existed on that one piece of land before, which is really interesting to me. Built in was always this idea of, what is this history? MK: And how is someone distilling it in her mind? Right? And how do we connect with each other across time? I feel like that's when time started to become a question in the process. And then there was a moment where we realized that Acts One and Two would happen in a parallel timeline. We would follow the contemporary actor through Act One. And then essentially, the audience would see that Act Two would be that same time Loop. Jess: That was the one thing that we kept from all that early writing. The scene between Victoria Woodhull and Jess is almost verbatim from an earlier draft. MK: Yes. That scene of the two of them, meeting across time and space, I think, became the thing we held on to, and it was like, how do we get there? Jess: I have a question for you. Talking about your dramaturgical and directorial process. Once we figured out the structure: the first act would be me walking through the park with an audience following me with headphones in; people listening to my inner thoughts versus the second act which was a more theatrical structure, what challenges did that present for you? Dramaturgically and Directorially, bringing audiences into those experiences? MK: I feel like from very early on the biggest challenge in Act One was almost logistical. Because what we had was sort of nothing but permission to try something that we weren't sure how to do. How do we record this thing? How do we even rehearse this thing? How do we take scripted text and let it become thoughts that we can hear? And in a public park that was being used by the public? No permits or rentals. Essentially all of the variables that you can control in a theatre. We had none of those at our disposal, aside from being able to design a track that people could listen to. I think some of my favorite memories were scouting locations. I’d never thought about location scouting for the theatre, and that became a thing we got to do. We got to think about what serves our story, what serves this format that we're creating as we go. And I remember walking around and thinking not only what is functional, but getting to dream a little bit. How might these characters move through this space, and could they have really been here? How might we be able to invite whatever is going to naturally occur in the creative process without knowing what even that was going to be. Like traffic? I’m having a memory of how to pull traffic into the scene with Victoria Woodhull, and thinking… What is traffic to them? It can't exist, but also as actors, they have to pay attention to the fact that they need to be heard over New York City traffic. I feel like we accommodated a bit of that in choosing location. Ultimately. Jess: People have asked me, if you had to categorize what this is. Would you call it a tour? Would you call it a promenade theatre? And I just don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that—but maybe MK does. MK: You know. I remember thinking about a conversation we had asking: what could this be? In other places, and with other historical figures. But a theatrical tour doesn't feel like it quite covers it. Because we were after something very different about human experience. Yes- you were going to cover some ground and learn something. But we wanted it to do the thing that theatre does. Connecting people to a place or another person, or even to an idea. If we lost the construct of time, what does it feel like for me to try to connect back in time? We were also constantly thinking about the theatricality. Thinking about what we could do in the next incarnation- Jess: With more money! And time! MK: Yes. And more members of the team. Jess: Is there a better word then? Promenade Theater maybe? MK: Maybe promenade-- But in terms of promenade I think, I'm gonna arrive somewhere and a thing is gonna happen then I'll arrive in a new place. (Re)Generation felt more fluid. Jess: What was so interesting to me was when we made the decision, and I I don't even know when we made the decision, whether I did, or you did, or whatever. But at some point we said- Well, clearly the scene with Victoria and Jess will happen twice. The same scene must happen twice, right? At the end of Act One, and then it has to have it again at the end. What we started talking about was this sort of circular nature? Each of them was trapped in this circle. And so I think I agree with you- promenade feels like it starts in one place and ends somewhere else. So maybe we made something new—a theatrical Dosey-doe! MK: I also think it’s important to say that we were also talking a lot about patriarchy and hierarchical structures in theatre making. And something about this circular structure also felt right for the way we worked together. Jess: Making this piece without a typical theatrical hierarchy. MK: Yeah. Can we just collaborate in a way that is egalitarian? Best idea in the room, or the best idea in the park wins. Jess: I will say, like as the person who brought in the initial idea, and did most of the writing. I felt so supported by the kind of lack of structure of our structure. We know each other well. So it just felt natural. MK: Yeah. Jess: Maybe it's because I came in with so little you know. I just remember you asking me about a million and a half questions. So what happens here? What happens here like? Why, Why, why, why, Why, why? And what if we do this? And what if we do that? And what if we did this? In the best dramaturgical sense. But then I felt like once we got a thing that was up on its feet– we didn’t have traditional actor/director/writer structure. There was so much give and take, because there I was- an actor in Act 1. If you can call it acting, walking around Washington Square Park trying to find a park bench to sit on while a group of people with headphones trailed me. And we would have to video my walks- so we could try to time them out to possible recordings of the script. Which meant we got to go back to the tape together, so we could really talk through everything that was happening. MK: Washington Square Park- no permits. I mean, what sort of ballsiness it took to even attempt such a thing. Jess: Had we known quite how difficult it would be to make it work- I don’t know if I would have. But I’m glad we did. MK: I don't know if you remember. But we did pick up audience numbers along the way- in rehearsals and performance. I want to say how much that means to me, reflecting on this, looking back on it. In talking about a play, the seed of which was about isolation, the fact that we picked up audience makes me remember that our first question was- what do we want people to experience? How do we get people experiencing other humans again? In NYC we are so isolated, I’ve got my headphones on, thinking about a million other things or ways I feel inadequate. Or things I didn't get done, or groceries I need, or this song that won't get out of my head, and I could so easily miss everything going on around me. And to think that what we were after was sort of manifested in the very idea that people were awake enough to go, hey- Something's happening here that I'm not expecting and I’m going to hop on the party. Jess: People got the link, put on their headphones and caught up with me. My favorite person who joined us was a lovely man, who was unhoused. He was sitting in our “performance” area, and stayed with us from the dress rehearsal. After the rehearsal he heard us talking about performance and he asked- Do you mind if I stay here and watch? And I was like, first of all, it's the park, you can do whatever you want. But also absolutely! And he wound up watching the whole thing. But he didn't have headphones, he was just watching people watch me! Which was fascinating! I will never forget that at the end of the piece, he said, Thank you so much, I see the musicians all the time, but I don't get to go to the theatre very often. MK: That's great. Because again we think of the back to this hierarchy -how restrictive and how much theatre is inaccessible at times. How do we dismantle that a little bit? This feels like a good place to ask something like what do you feel like you learned, and if you could just do the next incarnation this summer, what would you do differently? Jess: Well, I’m still really interested in isolation and the idea that place has memory. These are consistent themes for me. I would love to look at this piece again. I'd love to look at it now, not from a place of fear. (Re) Generation was created from a place of fear that we would never get back inside a theatre again. And I wonder about looking at it now, coming from a place of generosity from a place of opening that space- MK: because it deserves to be opened. Jess: Yes. What about you? MK: It makes me think of that Ann Bogart essay. Talking about that distinction between making something from a survival mode versus a gift-giving mode. It feels like you articulated that exactly. Jess: So, I think we can wrap this up by saying, what did you learn making theatre in Covid? MK: I have learned that we have become a species that isolates by nature, which is terrible because we are not a species that isolates by nature. We may have made it through an epidemic of COVID, but we’re still suffering from an epidemic of loneliness in a very real way. Jess: And the live performing arts, music, dance, theatre these are some of the last bastions of community storytelling and tradition that are non-religious. And I think you can look at the rise of religion right now as just people desperately needing connections. Why can't we get a rise in the performing arts in the same way? MK: Right, and being able to have communion with history. I think it's something again that this piece, if you wanted to call it a theatrical historical tour, you know, whatever name you give it, there's something about the communion with a historical figure that is an incredibly empowering experience. It’s something you can’t take away from someone, that experience. Jess: You know what? MK: What? Jess: Let’s do it again– another city, another park, another historical figure. MK: I’m game when you are. Jess: Amazing. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA BASHLINE is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Miami, where she teaches acting and theater creation. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of Strange Sun Theater , a theater company in New York City. Jessica is an award-winning playwright, director and actor currently touring her solo piece, Ann and Me: or the Big Bad Abortion Play . She has a BFA in Acting from Boston University and an MFA from Goddard College. www.jessicabashline.com MK LAWSON has been teaching, developing and directing theatre professionally for the past 15 years. She has directed and/or choreographed award-winning productions for Atlantic Theatre Company, Florida Repertory Theatre, and WPPAC among others. She has also developed pieces for the NY International Fringe Festival and the NY Children's Theatre Festival. An interdisciplinary performing artist at heart, MK is currently the head of Musical Theatre for the Hotchkiss School in Northwest Connecticut. www.mklawson.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.

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Video still of Amygdala Performing “From the Air” (Laurie Anderson), at SoMad® , NYC, April 2025. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. Since 2019, Rachel Rampleman has dedicated herself to Life is Drag ( https://lifeisdrag.com/ ), an expansive archival project capturing the artistry and impact of drag performers across the U.S. The largest drag archive in the country, Life is Drag is both a celebration and a form of resistance, documenting performances and personal narratives of innovative figures in alt-drag and neo-burlesque, largely centered in New York City. Through photography, video portraits, and live performance documentation, Rampleman highlights performers’ individuality while tracing broader cultural shifts in gender performance and queer artistry. At a time when drag and LGBTQ+ expression face increasing political scrutiny, Rampleman sees Life is Drag as an essential historical record. “Drag is art,” she argues. Rampleman sees it as a synthesis of multiple art forms. Beyond aesthetics, drag represents community, transformation, and radical self-expression. By showcasing a diverse array of performers across backgrounds, cultures, and ages, she ensures greater visibility for drag artists, especially in regions where queer and nonbinary identities are under threat. Rampleman has built her career documenting the subversive intersections of gender, artifice, and performance, particularly through drag. The project began in her Brooklyn studio with visual and drag artist Untitled Queen, later expanding to New England and the Midwest. Residencies in New York City at The Cell Theatre, SoMad, Bushwig, and Satellite Art Club, as well as projects in Portsmouth, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, have led to over 370 portraits featuring more than 200 performers. From gritty dives to grand theaters, her work captures the ephemeral beauty of live drag while preserving its legacy. Beyond Life is Drag , Rampleman’s career is defined by showcasing groundbreaking figures. From Girls Girls Girls , the world’s first all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, to American bodybuilder and powerlifter Tazzie Colomb , her work consistently interrogates gender and spectacle. In this interview, we discuss the origins of Life is Drag , its evolution, and the stakes of drag performance today. In April 2025, Rampleman received a request to add her drag archive to the Library of Congress’s LGBTQ+ collection, a major development for the project. This interview was conducted July 11, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Azizzy & Pissy Mattress from the Haus of Absorption at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, June, 2022. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. Benjamin Gillespie: Life is Drag is such an ambitious and unique project. How did it come about? Rachel Rampleman: Funnily enough, I didn’t have much exposure to drag before this project. I’m from Cincinnati, and I wasn’t attending drag shows or brunches when I lived in Ohio. My interests were more in experimental art, music, and theatre, and I often traveled to New York to see digital art at Postmasters Gallery, and performances by artists like John Zorn or the Wooster Group. Before Life is Drag , I had been working with an all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, documenting their performances. I was fascinated by the juxtaposition—women singing misogynistic songs originally performed by heavily made-up men with big hair. I also worked with female bodybuilders, exploring themes of gender performance in different ways. Then, a friend introduced me to a producer of Bushwig , who invited me to create a video lookbook for a fashion line. That’s when I first engaged with Brooklyn’s art drag scene. My happy places are museums and cultural centers. I love being challenged to think or feel in new ways. But nothing had ever moved me like Bushwig did. When I attended for the first time, I had tears streaming down my face. The energy, creativity, the sheer vitality in the room—it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was beyond inspiring and overwhelming in the most wonderful possible way. BG: When was your first Bushwig? RR: In 2017. That’s when I realized that no one was properly documenting these incredible performances. It felt like a travesty that they were just disappearing, lost to time and the ephemerality of live performance. Some artists had friends taking pictures or filming clips on their phones, but there wasn’t a real archive. That realization coincided with an invitation to do a survey exhibition in Cincinnati , my hometown. I had a budget, a large venue—the Weston Art Gallery across from the Contemporary Arts Center—and plenty of space. I saw it as my opportunity to bring all my interests together through drag. That was in 2019. I had been introduced to Untitled Queen, who is basically the art drag matriarch of Brooklyn . She’s incredibly smart, politically attuned, and creative and talented in every capacity one can be. She went to art school and works full-time at BRIC, an arts and media institution in Downtown Brooklyn. We connected, had a long night in my Bushwick studio, and talked about art for hours. After our conversation, she created a piece called Untitled (Clarinet) which addresses the difficulty of being an artist in New York City and the compromises it requires, featuring Joni Mitchell’s song “For Free,” and I filmed it. Video stills of Untitled Queen Performing “Untitled (Clarinet)” in Brooklyn, March 2019. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. At the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m pretty DIY. I never formally studied filmmaking or video production, so I didn’t even have proper lighting. I relied on daylight streaming through my factory windows. The natural lighting wasn’t great which was unfortunate, but her performance was phenomenal. And I tried to create a visually interesting background, using a silver mylar curtain which was a prototype for what later became a large installation in the Cincinnati show. BG: You also wanted to work with drag kings, right? RR: Yes. I had been following Aeon Andreas (they/them) who performs as God Complex (he/him) since their earliest performances at BEEF—the monthly all drag king show that was at Bizarre in Bushwick, and their artistic evolution has been one of the most drastic and mind-blowing I’ve ever seen. I got to work with Aeon channeling Ziggy Stardust for my Ohio show “Oh, You Pretty Things” when they performed three different dance interpretations to Bowie’s music in my studio. I was very pleased with how all these videos turned out, and I got to present them on 65-inch, 4K screens as part of a larger exhibition featuring over 100 screens of various sizes with the drag portraits on the largest monitors. And over the course of preparing for that show, I was introduced to the Cincinnati art drag scene. There’s a group called Odd Presents, led by Stixen Stones , who’s something like Cincinnati’s own art drag matriarch. BG: This sounds like installation art. And you do have a background in the visual arts, right? RR: Yes. I studied photography and electronic media at the University of Cincinnati’s Design, Art, Architecture & Planning program and later earned an MFA from New York University in 2006. BG: What drew you from visual arts into performance documentation? RR: I’ve always been fascinated by performance art, but I’ve never felt inclined to perform myself. And when I studied with RoseLee Goldberg at NYU—the scholar who literally wrote the book on performance art and founded the Performa Biennial —I was struck by how ephemeral performance is. Many historic performances exist only as a handful of photographs, with no real way to capture the full experience. With drag, I saw an extraordinary level of artistry—the painting, sculpting, sound, and movement—all coming together as a form of total art, a Gesamtkunstwerk. And many performances I saw were highly political, timely, and felt important. I knew they deserved better documentation. I’m meticulous and a bit of a control freak, so I didn’t want to simply record live shows with unpredictable lighting and composition. Unlike photographers who document drag performances at clubs, I wanted to invite performers into a controlled studio setting where I could carefully frame and light each piece. Esther, the Bipedal Entity! Performing “Esther (Museum)” at SoMad® , NYC, April 2025. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. BG: How do you typically approach working with performers? RR: Ideally, I meet with them beforehand to discuss their drag, but that’s not always possible, especially during residencies outside of New York. When I did a residency at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example, I worked with artists from Boston and the surrounding areas, but time was limited so there wasn’t a chance to have pre-production meetings and so on. In the best cases, like my first collaboration with Untitled Queen, we have at least some conversation before filming. BG: How many drag artists have you worked with so far? RR: More than two-hundred. If time allows and they’re interested, I try to film more than one number per session. I also try to schedule friends or frequent collaborators together. That way, they’re more comfortable and there’s a fun vibe. Klondyke & Cuntyham from the Haus of Quench at The Cell, NYC, February 2023. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. BG: How did you come up with the title Life is Drag ? RR: It comes from RuPaul’s famous quote “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” I absolutely believe that. Getting dressed—whether it’s a three-piece suit, jeans and a t-shirt, or a sequined gown and a feathered boa—it’s all a form of drag. “Drag” as most people understand it is just more intentional, and usually a bit more exaggerated or extreme. BG: RuPaul’s Drag Race has brought drag into the mainstream. Have you noticed changes in the drag scene in New York and beyond? RR: I’d say it’s exploded—both in the number of performers and in the range of styles. There’s even a series in Brooklyn produced by Untitled Queen called “ Brooklyn’s Next Art Drag Star ” at the bar C’mon Everybody , where each round has a different artistic theme—photography, video, sound—and performers compete to make it to the final round. The fact that there are enough emerging drag artists to sustain that kind of competition is amazing. Similarly, in Cincinnati, I’ve seen massive growth. A few years ago, a performer named Clarity Amrein started “ Smoke and Queers ” , a showcase for queer-identifying artists to experiment with drag, burlesque, and other hybrid performances. It started small, but now there are dozens of artists participating, with performers coming in from all over the Tri-State area. BG: You make an important connection between drag and performance art. While pageant drag has a specific history, art drag seems to align more with performance art—playing with identity, engaging with space and audience, manipulating the body as a canvas. Delusiona Grandeur from Smoke and Queers at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, March 2022. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. RR: Absolutely. And art drag tends overall to be much more experimental and existential—more like Happenings of the 1960s and 70s, or the Theatre of the Absurd. Part of my process includes interviewing performers about their drag practice —why they do it, what it means to them, how they see their drag persona versus their everyday self. If time allows, I like to film these interviews alongside performances. Drag is a deeply personal, yet highly performative art form, and hearing each artist’s perspective adds another layer to the project. I’ve mentioned performers like Stixen Stones, who had evangelical parents that forced them into conversion therapy. Or Thee Paris L’Hommie , a trans queen from a religious background whose family disowned her. Many people simply won’t accept it. But I think a lot of people’s understanding and appreciation of drag has changed—and is continuing to change—for the better. Or at least it was, until recently… BG : How did the pandemic impact the project? RR : Ironically, the pandemic was my most productive period because performers couldn’t work. People who made their living performing suddenly had no stage, no income. I got to collaborate with so many incredible artists and the project really gained momentum in 2020 and 2021. At that time, interviewees were saying, “I can’t pay my rent. I’m terrified.” Now that fear has shifted. We’ve emerged from the pandemic, but people are afraid of extreme right-wing legislation, especially in places like Tennessee and Kentucky. I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC this morning, and they were discussing Project 2025. It’s just insane. BG: It’s such a difficult time politically. But drag, as an art form, is inherently political—even when the performers themselves aren’t overtly political. RR: Exactly. Drag is always political—and too often politicized. Drag plays with gender presentation, which defies mainstream, binary ideas about gender. By exaggerating or subverting gender roles, drag highlights that gender is a performance, not a fixed truth. BG: Just by existing, it challenges norms around gender and sexuality. That’s part of its excitement— and its danger. RR: Yes, and that’s why it has always been seen by some as threatening. (top) K. James and Miss Malice of Switch n’ Play at The Cell, NYC, December 2020; (bottom) installation shot of Life is Drag: More is Better and Never Too Much at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, 2021. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. BG : In the past, there have been critiques of traditional drag, of female impersonation by male artists. Some argue it mocks women rather than celebrates them. Feminist critiques have challenged drag’s historical role for example because of its association with men, but I think that’s evolving. From a theater history perspective, gender-bending performances have always been part of the stage, and today there’s growing respect for drag as an art form. And we’re seeing more representation of nonbinary and trans performers. I know the Switch n’ Play group well. I’ve seen a number of their shows and the documentary . I know you’ve worked with them before. How do you connect with new performers for your project? RR : The performers I work with are mostly in their mid-20s to early-30s, and I usually find them through Instagram. It helps to connect with a community’s drag mother or father—once they’re involved, their “children” often follow. That’s worked well with Untitled Queen and the Brooklyn drag scene. At this point, I’ve documented many of New York’s top performers, including Miss Malice and K. James of Switch n’ Play. When I invite someone and send them a link to the archive, they recognize names like Miss Malice or Untitled and want to be involved. Recruiting outside New York can be trickier. My first residency was in early 2020 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Luckily, the project manager Bunny Wonderland had performed as a drag artist for 12 years and helped me connect with performers within a 200-mile radius. And in Ohio, where I’m from , it felt more organic. New York’s drag scene is vast—not just by borough but by neighborhood. Brooklyn’s drag epicenter is Bushwick and Ridgewood, with key venues like C’mon Everybody, Purgatory, 3 Dollar Bill, and All Night Skate. I see shows at those spaces pretty regularly. Littlefield is also big, especially for Switch n’ Play. Manhattan has venues, but I rarely find myself there, except for Hell’s Kitchen with its cluster of bars showcasing more traditional drag. There’s a difference between traditional drag at bars and more experimental drag in performance and art spaces—audiences expect different things. BG : Where is all this material going? RR : I have a Vimeo Pro account where I upload videos and embed them on Icompendium, a minimalist, artist-run site. I also use Flickr for stills and behind-the-scenes shots. With hundreds of professionally shot videos, storage is a challenge. The goal is to create a living archive—a public history of what’s happening now. Someone like Stixen Stones in rural Ohio might find inspiration, while someone like my mom, who would never attend a live drag show (aside from one I’ve produced), might see a performance and realize, “Oh, that’s drag? That’s actually fun!” It’s also an educational tool, not just for universities but for anyone curious about drag beyond RuPaul’s Drag Race . Members of Odd Presents and Smoke and Queers at Wave Pool Gallery, Cincinnati, 2022 (photo: Kellie Coleman). (top, left to right) Tara Newone, Vanta Black, Calamity Addams, Stixen Stones, Kiara Chimera, Montana Ba Nana; (bottom) Clinica Deprecious and Manuka Honey Stix). Photo: Kellie Coleman. BG : Speaking of Drag Race , its format—lip sync challenges, for example—reflects a specific type of drag. Would you say lip syncing is central to most of the performers you document? RR : Yes, in large part. It’s actually been an issue for me recently. Last week, Vimeo flagged 76 of my videos for copyright infringement because of the music. A bot issued the takedown notices, giving me 48 hours to prove I had the rights to the songs. If you checked my website after that, 20% of the videos wouldn’t play. It’s something I have to figure out as the project continues to grow. BG: What do you hope to include in each artist portrait? RR: The goal is to capture the essence of the person at a particular moment in their life, creating a time capsule. Artists, especially those in drag, are constantly evolving, and it’s fascinating to see how their art changes over time. Even if you interview someone a year apart, their approach could be completely different. Some drag performers, like those I worked with years ago, have stopped, but for every performer who leaves, two or three new ones emerge. Younger generations are much more open to questioning gender and exploring its fluidity. Drag helps many performers, especially AFAB [assigned female at birth] individuals discover their trans identity. It’s an ongoing process of self-exploration within the community. For me, this project is about inspiring people to explore their identities, regardless of whether they identify as queer or not. Watching drag can encourage self-refection, and can also push its audience to try out being authentic and unique in a world that often forces and rewards conformity. Many performers say that drag gave them the courage to understand and express their true selves - and in some cases, saved their lives. BG: The project also challenges traditional notions of drag. Many people still associate drag with female impersonation, but drag is a broad spectrum that can and should include everyone. It seems there’s a lot more blending of genres and definitions today. How do you see this reflected in the mission of Life is Drag ? RR: Drag as a term is being redefined to be more inclusive. It’s no longer about simply crossing binary gender boundaries but about fluidity, transformation, and permission to experiment. People shouldn’t be boxed in by traditional conceptions of what drag should or shouldn’t be. To quote Brooklyn performer Klondyke, “Maybe today you are wearing a redder shade of lipstick. If you call it drag, who am I to tell you it's not?” Klondyke performance documentation installed at Satellite Art Show, Brooklyn, 2024. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. I’ve had the privilege of working with truly singular individuals like neo-burlesque performance artist Darlinda Just Darlinda and alt/art drag performer Esther, the Bipedal Entity! , who are central to this project. I’ve seen their work evolve, especially during the pandemic, where Darlinda’s performances focused on themes of concealment and revelation. It’s empowering to document their transformations. At the moment, I’m an artist in residence at SoMad® , a femme and queer-led art space in NYC that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. I’m excited to again document favorites like Esther and Untitled, as well as to work for the first time with other visionaries and luminaries, icons and powerhouses of the NYC drag and burlesque community—artists who have profoundly inspired so many, locally and globally. I’m honored to get to finally work with Divina GranSparkle from Switch ‘n Play, as well as with Miss Bushwig 2023 and community activist extraordinaire Julie J , founder of the marathon drag benefit Stand Up NYC , which has raised over $125,000 since 2023 for organizations serving, uplifting and protecting trans youth across the country like Advocates for Trans Equality, Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, and many others. At SoMad® this year, BFF in Omaha in 2026, and hopefully working internationally beyond that, the goal is to showcase these performers not just for their brilliant and joy-inspiring drag, but as multi-dimensional artists who create and connect beyond the stage. My goal is to honor, conserve, and amplify these unique artistic and activist voices, and to share them with the world, ensuring that the impact of drag as an art form continues to grow. Anne J. Tifah at The Cell, NYC, June 2023. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in such journals as Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, PAJ, Theatre Research in Canada , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . 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 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF PRECARIOUS FORMS. PERFORMING UTOPIA IN THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAS. Candice Amich. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 232. Discussions about our current society must wrestle with neoliberalism and its impacts: from the existence of billionaires to the defunding of public services, from deregulations of capital to restrictions for migrants, neoliberalism’s consequences are present everywhere and shape the economies of this century in the Americas. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas , by Candice Amich, makes an important contribution to multiple conversations and fields by centering utopic performance art, poetry, and installations from the Global South. In Precarious Forms , an accessible interdisciplinary book, Amich frames neoliberalism as the centering of entrepreneurial activities, which require free markets, free trade and strong property rights. To achieve this capitalist imperative, she critiques in her introduction that the state must not provide social services, assuming that human needs would be better fulfilled by private action. But Amich argues that what actually characterizes neoliberalism is the “accumulation by dispossession (…) without regard to social costs” (4). This dispossession of human needs prioritizes individualism over collectivity, sustained by a “perceptual regime that disciplines time and space” (4). To resist neoliberal regimes, she analyzes “corporeal and textual performances that not only despair for the world as it is, but also dream other visions of the world as it could be” (155). This book explores the utopic impulses of several artists that respond to and resist the action of neoliberalism, understanding the violence it inflicts across bodies and societies in the Americas and then imagining spaces outside or beyond that dispossession. The art pieces Amich discusses not only imagine different presents or futures but also aim to create and experience utopic possibilities in the here and now. They are united through the notion of the precarious , understood as “a response to neoliberalism’s flexible modes of accumulation, (…) neither certain nor secure in its attachment to form, privileging precarious life over capital.” (19) The book centers on the work of artists like Dionne Brand (Canada), Coco Fusco (Cuba-USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Ana Mendieta (Cuba), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), and Raúl Zurita (Chile), each one the focus of a chapter in which Amich presents their oeuvre . The book’s emphasis on Chile and Cuba is intentional since both are key sites for the deployment of neoliberalism: the first because of the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet and the development of a neoliberal constitution before the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA; and the second because of the conflicts with the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as its internal crisis. By choosing central zones of neoliberal impact, Amich effectively achieves a hemispheric scope, connecting processes across the Americas. Tracing transnational connections enables the book to understand contemporary processes, including those that cross borders and generate exchanges between different countries and locations. (It is impossible to analyze phenomena without following these relations.) Thus, Amich succeeds in presenting a complex and comprehensive portrait of neoliberal action and its violences, as well as vivid case studies of creative resistance and collective imagining of new worlds that endow human life with dignity. From the Washington Consensus to the dictatorship of Pinochet, from the maquiladoras (factories in México owned by foreign corporations) along the US-México border to the Cuban exile, Precarious Forms follows the consequences of neoliberal policy and how it impacts citizens across the continent. One strength of this volume is that Amich does not only document violence. Whereas many approaches to neoliberal action can disempower those affected by it, by presenting people only as victims, Amich centers strategies of effective resistance and worldmaking by Latin American and Latine artists. Fusing the methods of Performance Studies and Latin/e American Studies, the book’s six central chapters analyze poetry, video, performance, and installations. This wide range offers the reader a broad, multifaceted understanding of the utopic potential and action of art. While each chapter offers insightful readings of systemic and lived contexts. Amich proposes that creative interventions can reveal what is hidden: for instance, readers learn how Dolores from 10 to 22 by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez exposes the violence in the maquiladoras . Utopic performance, she demonstrates, can turn individuals into a temporary community of people, operating together against the individualism of the times, as Comunidad by Regina José Galindo epitomizes. Art can restitute, or perform restitution of, ties with the land of a displaced, exiled body, as the Esculturas Rupestres of Ana Mendieta proposes. Or it can offer a voice to the dead in the words of Raúl Zurita, moving across his poems published in the book INRI . Amich’s multidisciplinary focus—and the wide scope of each artwork she examines—finds connections in diverse experiences and pieces. As the book develops, we grasp how economic, political, and social processes cannot be thought of without tracing transnational connections. Likewise, the book explores how these artists’ and thinkers’ “precarious visions” act in constant conversation with each other. Through these strategies, Amich presents art as a vehicle for transformation. Precarious Forms provides a relevant contribution to the analysis of contemporary creators in Latin/e America. It offers solid and rigorous approaches to analyzing artists working in different media across the continent while tracing transnational connections among them. Its interdisciplinarity strongly contributes to several fields, including American Studies, Spanish, Literature, Gender Studies, and Performance Studies. Its significance is also derived from how it deals with urgent and contemporary public issues and economic violence. The book effectively questions practices that frame art and scholarship in very limited ways, instead of developing expansive categories and cross-sectional lenses. Conceptually, Amich links the precarity of lives with the precarity of artistic forms: fertilizing the soil for the emergence of art pieces and collective practices that create utopias in the middle of dark times. Rooted in a truly hemispheric analysis, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas should be read closely and discussed across fields and art forms as we make sense of the times in which we are living. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SEBASTIÁN EDDOWES-VARGAS (he/they) is a Peruvian theater artist and scholar, author of "La Muerte Danza" (with Espalda de Bogo), "Nunca Estaremos en Broadway" (with Rodrigo Yllaric), "Fronteiras" (with Colectivo Âmbar) "Hasta Que Choque El Hueso" (with Mario Zanatta), "Debut" (with Caro Black Tam), "Una Historia de (Poli)Amor," "Can The Peruvian Speak?", among others. His academic and artistic work has been presented in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, UK and USA, receiving several awards. Currently, they are a DFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, with the dissertation "Post-National Dramaturgies of the Américas, or, The Nation Fails", and a Lecturer at Boston University 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting . Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Amy Cook’s Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting argues that casting, as artistic practice and necessary strategy for everyday life, is a performative act related to human cognitive tendencies to organize a large number of stimuli into characters. Our understanding of characters happens within categories that shape assumptions about a character type’s behavior and desires. Cook claims, “The process by which we build a character from the inputs of context, memory, text, and the physical properties of the body playing that character is far more powerful than has been acknowledged” (6). Because she works with a contemporary understanding of situated (also called “embodied”) cognition, inputs like context, memory, and text are just as connected to the experiential embodiment as are the physical properties of the body. Cook uses second generation cognitive science in her theoretical matrix, and I would argue that this text is part of another second generation, that of the cognitive turn in the humanities. Cook’s overall goal is a back-and-forth conversation between cognitive science and theatre studies wherein “a cognitive approach to theatrical character” and “a theatrical understanding of a central component of cognition – characterization” are analyzed together under the term of casting (15). Cognitive humanities scholarship can be easily critiqued as simply slapping cognitive science onto an analytical object and allowing scientific conclusions to become primarily prescriptive, thus circumscribing the scholar’s interpretive work. Cook foregrounds a more difficult, subtle, and ultimately useful process here whereby epistemological models from theatre studies help elucidate cognitive scientific findings, not solely the other way around. Building Character is structured pedagogically (though not pedantically). Chapter one, “Building Titus,” introduces concepts that continue to deepen and pay off in each subsequent chapter. “Building Titus” focuses on the cognitive processes of compression. Cook argues that character building is a process of stimuli compression; characters exist only as “we create them to make sense of our perceptions” (38). Chapter two, “Building Characters,” focuses on how and why “[S]ome bodies…do not seem to disappear as easily as others into their parts” and includes a compelling engagement with celebrity studies (32). Cook takes up the work of Eve Ensler and Anna Deavere Smith in the third chapter, “Multicasting,” exploring the dynamic and embedded nature of building characters. Chapter four moves Cook’s observations about casting into the roles of our everyday lives, including the casting process involved in Barack Obama’s presidency. Cook ends her book with a necessary gesture toward the implications of her argument and the cognitive scientific research upon which it rests for social change. The final chapter, “Counter Casting,” contends that because the cognitive processes behind casting undergird both theatrical and everyday phenomena, their “creativity…suggests ways we might reimagine our selves and our ecosystems” (33). Cook’s array of examples is appropriately capacious given that her thesis depends upon the omnipresence of casting as a tool for sense-making. She examines film trailers, rap music lyrics, advertising, and senate debates; her analysis is particularly strong when the object is dramatic performance. Chapter three includes several illuminating readings of much-discussed material, such as The Taming of the Shrew , the creative methods of Anna Deveare Smith, and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More . Throughout the text, Cook responsibly owns her positionality and her “casting” by the world, which, as in cognitive scientific studies, both increases precision (her analysis of Shrew ) and limits findings (her account of listening to Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic ). When she turns her attention to dramatic examples, she clarifies her participation in disciplinary stakes; Cook effectively critiques the Method school of acting as reliant upon outdated models of psychology that prize the unconscious over more current understandings of networked consciousness and cognition, a theatre-based example of a larger critique throughout the cognitive humanities of psychoanalytic theory. The cognitive turn in the humanities can result in difficult prose; accounting for the specificities of scientific studies and the many caveats of their conclusions can often read as watering down the humanities scholar’s argument and muddying their writing. Cook’s writing suffers no such fate. She is remarkably clear in her descriptions of cognitive scientific concepts and their application to cultural phenomena. She also attends to the dynamics of live performance as a making or becoming process, simpatico with cognition as a set of situated processes. Consider Cook’s compelling analysis of Katherine’s final speech in Act Five as staged in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2016 production of Taming of the Shrew : “the all-female casting disrupts our protocols of character interpretation because we cannot find the categories of sex and gender the play insists on and thus the ensemble stages a character breakdown” (108, italics in the original). As an example of clear humanities writing within the cognitive turn, Cook’s text is a welcome addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms, as well as her peers’ bookshelves. Cook attempts an urgently necessary task if the cognitive turn is to become a flexible theoretical tool in our field, namely, the responsible synthesis of implications from this research with theoretical frames that share an investment in embodiment as epistemology, such as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. Cook’s claim, supported by second generation cognitive science, that “We do not just think differently because of the bodies we have, we think with and through the bodies we have” is an arrival at the same destination but by an alternate route from many theoretical models found in the traditions listed above (29). Cook models such a synthesis in her engagement with the work of Angela Pao and Brandi Wilkins Catanese. As Cook states, this book is a starting point. It serves as a useful tool for further investigation of, in particular, non-normative bodies and their possibilities in everyday life and on stage and screen. Indeed, claims of normativity, as Cook shows, partially result from cognitive “processes by which we jump to powerful conclusions that it is our duty to challenge” (33). Investigating the relationship between normative brain structures and neural processes that may be cross-cultural and transhistorical as well as social norms of gender, class, race, and sexuality remains a critical need. I would like to see future work engaging with the cognitive turn do more to interrogate and historicize its own theoretical frame. The selection of research areas, funding, and subjects within scientific study is hardly a neutral enterprise. Cook’s text demonstrates the value of engaging with these theories in sharpening our analytical precision using empirical evidence; yet scientific theories are still theories, and they deserve the same rigorous investigation of their cultural commitments and values that we now apply, de rigeur, to other theoretical tools. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ARIEL NERESON University at Buffalo, State University of New York Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong 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 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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Watch Firebird by Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Firebird Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Ukraine Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. Irina Patkanian Director, Marion Schoevaert Director, Irina Patkanian Writer, Ksena Samborska Key Cast "Firebird", Michael Kaplan Key Casy "Colonel", Yevgenia Nayberg Lead Artist, Maxim Dondyuk War Photography, Marion Schoevaert Production Designer, Masha Yukhananov Animator, Jennah Camara Animator, Anna Carolina Bastos Sound Design, Vlada Tomova Composer, Elena Kalkova Visual Editing About The Artist(s) Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY, and the co-founder of In Parentheses, Inc. Irina Patkanian makes hybrid (fiction/nonfiction) films questioning history with poetry, memory with animation, performance with behavior. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and many others, winning 20+ awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Made in New York, Tow, Blaustein, Troy and Jerome Foundations; as well as artist residencies at the Obermann Center, MacDowell, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation and the Art Studios of Key West. Marion Schoevaert has been developing her own style of physical theater for 25 years in New York, Seoul and France. She has directed, produced and choreographed more than twenty theater shows, operas and shadow plays, blending dance-theater, rhythmic text and live music. She works with artists from all disciplines and genres: painting, video, jazz, tango, hip hop, sports, martial arts, propaganda, graffiti, etc. to create visceral and raw emotional response from both actors and audiences. Marion Schoevaert has created illustrations for 33 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. She has produced the successful Koltès New York Festival (7 plays) in New York and has directed a North Korean mass dance propaganda play with 2 orchestras and 100 actors, blending North and South Korean texts, music and style together. She has created 3 theatre companies in New York, Seoul and France. Get in touch with the artist(s) irinapatkanian@gmail.com and follow them on social media www.inparentheses.org/firebird Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Ahmed S. M. Mohammed 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 Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Ahmed S. M. Mohammed By Published on March 10, 2014 Download Article as PDF "People are products of the time in which they came of age. I know that to be true. In my plays these women are very much of their times." -- Wendy Wasserstein. Most scholarship and critical studies on the dramatic works of Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), during her lifetime and after her untimely death at the age of 55, have been largely concerned with her representation of [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700058 key=key-ws65sbip7wqx8bisp3j 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.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price By Hassan Hajiyah 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:

Claire Swyzen 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 Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF “In this software universe, existence finds itself limited to the pulse of the cursor.” — Maïa Bouteillet, Libération [1] In 1991, Brenda Laurel suggested that we see “Computers as Theatre,” prompting the community of programmers and software developers to perceive and design computer interfaces in interactive terms for the sake of the user. The model she based her theory on, however, was mainly Aristotelian drama. Key elements in her theory are the concept of action and the format of dialogue rather than the model of postdramatic theatre that was becoming established at that time mainly in Europe. Annie Dorsen and Edit Kaldor’s “desktop performance[s]” [2] do the inverse and invite us to perceive theatre —not drama— as computers and to ask what happens to the text, its production and its producing agents in this new constellation. Dorsen and Kaldor’s stagings of imbricated human and non-human writing agents and technologies can be considered “cyborgean” in the metaphorical sense proposed by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck in her Cyborg Theatre (2011): rather than staging “fictive or visual cyborgs,” performances like these stage “metaphoric moments of emergence” of the cyborgean relation between technology and body, including absent bodies (absent or telepresent performers). [3] Hello Hi There (2010) by Annie Dorsen and Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor are performances that are all actually or seemingly coauthored before or during the performance and characterized by real-time writing in front of a live audience. Dorsen co-writes mainly with non-humans, i.e. algorithm-driven chatbots that create the effect of a dialogue for an audience present in the theatre. Kaldor co-writes mainly with humans, but largely mediated by the computer and the social network operating in her performance. Some collaborators and audience members are present in the theatre though most of the former are mainly telepresent via Kaldor’s social network site. What, then, are the implications of such practices of live coauthorship, for the appearance of the text and for the status of authorship? Even if “Foucault wants it to matter not at all who is speaking” in a (literary) work, the point of his essay “What is an Author?” (1998 [1969]) is to show how much it apparently does matter in certain contexts or domains and how little it seems to matter to readers or users in others. [4] He argues that the issue of ‘who is speaking’ is tied to notions of authority, power, and ownership related to historically situated social and cultural practices and beliefs that “construct . . . a ‘writing subject.'” [5] In the literary field, more or less for the last three centuries and in the West, it has mattered a whole lot who the writer of a text is—literary texts are attributed an “author function.” [6] In other domains, like the practical, commercial or technological, however, authorship is not attributed, either because it is collective or simply because it is not deemed relevant. A writer of a manual for a computer stays unknown, hence cannot even be considered a ‘genius,’ while a literary author writing with that same computer can. Nor is authorship attributed to the computer programmers who write the software the literary author may use. Still, coding and hacking are gradually, albeit marginally, coming to be seen in terms of creativity and art. [7] In the performances of Dorsen and Kaldor, I will look at the relationship between the actual writing processes and agents on the one hand and the attributed author-function and its status on the other hand. Dorsen and Kaldor stage co-writing as an event and process. Hence, implicitly, they present themselves as coauthors rather than as authors. This implied self-representation, however, does not necessarily coincide with 1) the actual authorship models they rely on during the creative process and 2) the way these artists are presented to the audience by theaters and festivals and the way they are perceived by the audience. As directors, Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously function within other authorship models during the creative process, models like that of the individual author (writing texts for the performance) or idiosyncratic theatre director-as- auteur (of concepts, of scenic writing), exemplified by directors like Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Elizabeth LeCompte, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, to name just a few), as well as the new or rediscovered model of the artist-activist, or more specifically, the media activist. Social activist and professor of media and cultural studies Stephen Duncombe defines “Artistic Activism [a]s a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” [8] He proposes to approach activist art in terms of its “Æffect”, a combination of the “Effect” of activism and the “Affect” of art. [9] Still, Duncombe’s limitation of the “effect” to “social change” and of the artistic potential to that of “moving” us only “emotionally,” by definition, reduces complexity, as much activist art does. Activist and cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter, coauthor and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (2011), is more skeptical about activist art. Among his increasingly less nuanced public statements is one that goes as far as to postulate that “There is only one real form of activism and it is political activism.” [10] Though activist artists tend to dissociate themselves from models of individual(ist) authorship and artisthood like that of the literary writer, the director, or the auteur , artistic activism, at bottom, is a practice of devising scripts and concepts for the performance of social change. From this perspective, I see it as a remodeled kind of auteurism , combined with the idea of the theatre collective: often activist art extends the creative act of writing or devising to non-professional collaborators. However, that Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously work within different models of artistic authorship ranging from the individual to the collective does not mean that they are necessarily branded and presented as such to a potential audience by the theatres and festivals that program them. Kaldor and Dorsen distance themselves from the model of the individual and literary author and canon-inspired theatre auteur . Nevertheless, coauthorship paradoxically seems the means by which these artists finally establish themselves and/or are established by mainly European institutions and festivals as idiosyncratic directors, that is, as … theatre auteurs . Opening up Authorship on the Postdramatic Stage The counter-intuitive and counter-factual project of discerning an individual subjectivity at work as the ordering agent for the indisputably collaborative medium of film indicates the extent to which notions of ‘art’ and the cultural prestige on which it is based are bound up with a need for and an investment in a conception of the author as autonomous, unique, original and individual. [11] In the quote above, one can easily replace “film” by “theatre”, despite fundamental differences between the two media. Much of what it says applies to authorship in postdramatic theatre and in the kind of theatre that in the US would be considered as the study object of Performance Studies. Postdramatic theatre, partially overlapping with performance in visual arts, decenters the text in theatrical performances —at least, that seems to be the dominant idea that circulates about it, issuing from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s standard work Postdramatisches Theater (1999) and one of its central ideas: “In postdramatic forms of theatre, staged text ( if text is staged) is merely a component with equal rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition.” [12] Lehmann clearly dis-identifies theatre and drama. [13] From this follows that the general category of the theatre text is no longer by default a dramatic text. Already in his earlier article “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy” (1997) Lehmann identifies logocentrism as the characteristic element of drama that postdramatic theatre wishes to free itself from, criticize, question, or undermine. “Logocentrism is about structure, order and telos , not simply about the word” but also about the authorial word as an authoritative word. [14] Hence, the form of postdramatic theatre is often characterized by a “dissemination of voices” and of logos in general. [15] This dissemination is intertwined with what Lehmann perceives as the genre’s changed relation to dialogue, “a shift of axis from dialogue within theatre to dialogue between theatre and audience.” [16] The non-dramatic or not dominantly dramatic textualities of postdramatic theatre show, “instead of dialogically organized textual structures and fictional characters’ speech, rather the scenic rendering of lyrical, narrative, documentary and even theoretical discourses”. [17] The tendencies to use textual material other than drama and to locate dialogue rather between the scene and the audience in certain cases result in an opening up of authorship. I understand authorship here in three ways: as authority, as writing instance (e.g., the playwright or the director as auteur , collaborating authors…), and as the practice and process of writing. At first sight, the idea of authorship might seem at odds with postdramatic theatre and the related concept of “mediaturgy.” After all, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre has been broadly (mis)understood as post-text performance. Bonnie Marranca coined and defined mediaturgy as “an extension obviously of the idea of dramaturgy, in the sense of attempting to understand how image functions in a work. Mediaturgy can be a methodology of composition for the artist or a way of understanding work by a critic. But it is more or less connected to work in which media is not used merely as part of a narrative but is embedded in narrative. It is the design of narrative .” [18] The term mediaturgy implies a consciousness of the changed media landscape, of media specificities as well as interrelations, and of mediation in the production and discussion of performances. Nevertheless, mediaturgies continue to explore authorship and its modalities as well as, in many cases, its textualities, by theatricalizing their mediating role within the “hypermedium” that theatre is. [19] From the playwright to the director and performer as self-proclaimed auteurs , the act of creativity is now increasingly and often explicitly “delegated” or expanded to instances traditionally considered either as extraneous to, or as mere tools or conditions of the artistic process: the audience, the environment and technology. [20] In very different ways, postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies as such stretch the notion of authorship to its very limits. Not the writer’s solitary room, but the postdramatic stage seems to have become the place of creation —of linguistic as well as scenic writing — metonymical of the rehearsal studio as a place of creation. Hence one could safely state that postdramatic theatre has increasingly become a staging, in real time, of the making-of the performance and the text as witnessed by an audience. Whereas performance and theatre studies devote much attention to the relation between digitization and embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, the relation of the theatrical text to digitization is under-researched. Possibly this is due to the tendency to identify text in the theatre with drama, hence to shelve the text as the obsolete prime medium of dramatic theatre. Though the impact of digitization on the text does not necessarily manifest itself as digital theatre texts, the following reflection by Jerome Fletcher is relevant, whether a text looks ‘digital’ or not. In a special issue of Performance Research , “On Writing and Digital Media” (2013), he proposes that: “[r]ather than seeing [the digital text] as the end-point, the outcome of the digital device or apparatus, we can consider the question of how writing performs throughout the entire apparatus/device.” [21] Would it, however, not be as relevant to inverse Fletcher’s research question: how does the computer as an apparatus (that is, also as a mindset), perform through writing for and even on the stage? The changed textualities of postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies prompt us to research the decentering of the dramatic text and of the logos from two perspectives. Firstly, in terms of authorship and, secondly, in relation to what Lev Manovich first called “computer culture” and later “software culture.” [22] Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There and Edit Kaldor’s Web of Trust are mediaturgies that, certainly at first sight, undermine individual authorship and disseminate the logos, yet without preventing the text from having an important or even central role in these desktop performances—which is not quite what one expects from a linear reading of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic or Marranca’s idea of mediaturgy. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape and Web of Trust :From Individual Artisthood to Connected Activism? Another lonely night (x2) Stare at the TV screen (x2) I don’t know what to do Don’t know what to do I need a rendezvous (x2) Computer love (x 4) I call this number (x2) For a data date (x2) I don’t know what to do (lyrics from “Computer Love” in Kraftwerk’s album Computer World (1981)) [23] A woman sits at a desk behind a computer, on or near the front of the stage but off-center and facing the stage; we see her in profile. As she starts writing at the keyboard, words appear on a parallel and much larger screen onstage. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) and Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) all start more or less with this same stage image. In the case of Or Press Escape , the image is reminiscent of Computer Love by cult electronic music group Kraftwerk. Figure 1. Edit Kaldor behind her computer in Or Press Escape . Photo: © Reyn van Koolwijk On the screen of Kaldor’s Or Press Escape , the first words materializing form a story. It is about a person landing on Earth after a long time “orbiting in . . . a single-occupancy capsule” and appears to be the account of a dream when the text is stored in a computer folder titled “Dreams.” [24] In Or Press Escape , the writing woman onstage does not address the audience. In fourth wall mode, the audience does not seem present for the character “Edit Kaldor” sitting behind the computer. The longer she writes, saves, opens, plays, and organizes files at her computer, the longer we witness her attempts at writing a letter to her new neighbors, the more we get the impression of a solitary character. This seems to be an artist recently arrived in a foreign country and whose prime interface to the world is the computer and its screen. Near the end of the performance, when she has cleaned up the file-mess on her desktop: she is, in fact, looking at herself. . . The enormous projection screen shows a large black surface in which stand loose, bright icons. All these small icons contain an access inwards or outwards, to memories or e-mail contacts, to quick-rich dreams or chat friends. We have only been able to see the woman behind the keyboard from her back, but now the square computer face gives an insight into the head of its user, the bright icons being the active fields in her human brain. [25] Then the solitary character starts chatting with a few people she knows (at least, virtually) instead of writing the “business plan” required to prolong her green card and to improve her precarious social and financial situation. Though the point of Kaldor’s theatre is not simply a self-portrait, biographically inspired elements seem to play a role in her poetics of a “blurring” of boundaries to create the kind of “undecidability Hans-Thies Lehmann talks about,” Kaldor tells me in a Skype talk. [26] As a teenager, she emigrated with her mother from Hungary to the US, where she spent ten years, among others studying at Columbia University and working as the dramaturg and video designer of (fellow-)countryman Peter Halász and his Love Theater/Squat Theater before emigrating to Brussels. With Belgian and Hungarian nationalities and family and friendship ties within the US, she has been based in Amsterdam for the past few years, where she teaches at DasArts besides making her own theatre work. She tends to blur fact and fiction, which is typical of a new (semi-)documentary trend since the 1990s, [27] and as a corollary she also blurs identities, national and virtual. But more important in the context of this article is that she visualizes and theatricalizes the blurring of the so-called boundary between human bodies and one of their important extensions today, the computer —or rather vice versa, as critic Pieter T’Jonck put it in his review of Or Press Escape . It’s the human body that seems to become an extension of the computer system: “the PC reduces [Kaldor’s] entire physical existence to a meaningless remainder glued to the end of the computer as the useless part of the human-machine.” [28] The human body’s potential is reduced to a locked sitting position that it is physiologically not adapted to. “What do you long for? What do you need?”, what “kind of community do you want to be?”, “can you think about new scenarios for the future?” These are questions with which Kaldor orally addresses the audience nearly fifteen years later in the arts center BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium, while explaining the experimental setup of her social network performance Web of Trust (2016) in the first minutes of the performance. “As the evening goes on you may share air, equipment, desires,” she goes on. [29] Audience members of this Fall 2016 version of the performance had been asked in advance to bring along their laptops or mobile phones. This was not yet the case at the performance’s first run in the Spring of 2016 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. After the Belgian premiere, the performance toured in the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal to end its tour during the Next Festival on the Belgian-French border in Kortrijk and Valenciennes. I will focus on the relevant differences between the Spring and Fall versions. In Brussels, Web of Trust was announced in the program as a process that the audience would witness more than actively engage in via their computers: “Prompted by growing discontent and the urge to do something about it, a group of disparate people unite online to search for alternatives to the structures that frame their lives” in an event that “brings the internet into the theater and uses it as its stage.” [30] Indeed, the Brussels audience was going to witness chat conversations between the performers sitting with their laptops onstage (Kaldor and her collaborator Rufino Henricus) and their virtual colleagues logging in on screen. The performance followed up her more socially oriented project Inventory of Powerlessness (2013-16), which meant to create an overview of European citizens’ needs by means of a theatrical, social and technological platform. It “was much about non-hierarchical thinking,” Kaldor explained in the Skype talk mentioned earlier. Telling in terms of authorial roles is also that in the initial Spring 2016 version of the performance, Kaldor sat in the chair onstage after her elaborate explanation of the performance’s aims and set-up. In the Fall version in Kortrijk and Valenciennes, she retreated from the stage after a much shorter introduction and joined the audience and the technician on the stand. [31] Figure 2. Edit Kaldor onstage behind her computer in Web of Trust . The picture was taken during the performance in Greece but has, basically, the same set-up as the Spring version in Brussels (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre Athens. A phone icon begins to ring on a large projection screen, showing the Web of Trust social network site that Kaldor created for the performance. [32] One of the virtual female participants is logged on, as we can see later on the large screen, and she has placed a call via the Web of Trust website. (By “virtual” I here mean the participants visibly telepresent via the social network site Web of Trust, projected in the theatre.) [33] As the virtual phone keeps ringing, a man from the audience finally gets up and takes the call. The online conversation that started months ago with the Spring version of the performance is now, so to speak, resumed. But, in this version in Kortrijk, it is expanded to get the audience members present in the theatre more involved in the performance and its social network site. After the staging of the solitary artist figure working and living at her computer, Kaldor’s desktop performance Web of Trust (2016) takes off where Or Press Escape ended: with a chat session. The woman on-screen, Jurrien van Rheenen —Kaldor’s main collaborator in this performance and a professional performer, I find out later— continues the introduction that Kaldor had started orally before retreating on the stand. Kaldor’s virtual collaborator rephrases the important questions that drive the performance, clearly addressing the audience: “How can we relate to each other by means of online communication? How can we imagine what we need (in daily life) and is not yet there? . . . You can see it as a game, or as an experiment in dreaming together.” Showing my good will, I am sitting in the theatre with my computer on my lap. It is a machine I prefer not to spend my evenings with, glued to it as I am during the day. I associate my laptop first and foremost with a plethora of administrative, archival and organizational aspects of my work and private life. The “dreaming” suggested by Van Rheenen heavily relies on technology, no wonder, given the centrality of the computer in Kaldor’s theatrical imagination. Her Web of Trust unintentionally bears the same name as the computer protocol abbreviated as “WOT.” That is to say, at the time of our Skype talk, Kaldor was not familiar with the specific computer protocol Phil Zimmerman developed back in 1992 as a relatively non-hierarchical encryption technology. “We probably came across the name when we were looking for a domain name and then afterwards forgot” the source, she vaguely remembered. The ideologies that drive the computer protocol WOT and the eponymous performance are quite similar: offering a reliable structure for interpersonal data exchange as an empowering alternative for institutional frames that impose hierarchies and data control. [34] Besides the reference to WOT, Kaldor takes yet another countercultural stance by realizing several principles that resemble the aims of what Jennifer Rauch coined “Slow Media.” As an attitude with a manifesto of its own Slow Media stands for a more conscious experience of digital media (by being selective; by prioritizing their critical, ethical and aesthetic qualities) and of media altogether (by rediscovering or sustaining analog media and activities). As part of a more general “Slow Movement” in the West, the “Slow Media” movement also wants to raise awareness about how we spend time, communicate and relate to information, experience and our social environment (with or without media). [35] One of the principles Slow Media revalorizes is the social in “Social Media.” [36] Even if Kaldor, in the Web of Trust ‘s Spring version, is the one who starts the chat conversations (and not an audience member), she does not give the impression of wanting to be completely in charge of the performance as a theatre auteur . To the contrary, she quite literally seems to want to share not only authorship in practice, but also what Foucault calls the author function. In terms of authorship, the aim of the theatrical set-up of Web of Trust , as I infer from Kaldor’s discourse and from the Inventory of Powerlessness , is to help people to become the authors of their own lives instead of leading lives authored by other people and systems. Figure 3. The live co-written text “Welcome to the Web of Trust” or manual of social network site and performance Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor. Photo: © Luc Vleminckx. The fundamental difference between the Spring and Fall version of the same performance is that by the end of the tour, in Kortrijk, Kaldor also invited the audience members orally to engage in the specific task of “writing together.” This co-writing starts with a text of which the first lines are already present on the projected screen. The text will serve as a guideline for the spirit and communication on the Web of Trust and is entitled “Welcome to the Web of Trust” (see Figure 3 above). In the Fall version in Kortrijk, audience members not only witnessed the creation and negotiation of what I consider the manual or guideline text, but contributed to it (if they wished to do so) as co-writers. Indeed, I edited a line or two myself. My interview with Kaldor, however, revealed this to be largely an illusion: the manual that stipulates the rules for the further generation of any other kind of ‘text’ in the performance (e.g. a chat), and that I understood as the product of negotiation, editing and co-writing by the live and virtual participants, “is completely scripted,” says Kaldor. “I wrote the text,” she avows, “it is a choreography of written text, with a rhythm of its own. Even when the audience co-writes it, it is rehearsed, because the people [i.e. Kaldor’s collaborators] behind the screen are working on it.” Nevertheless, the trick of creating the illusion of equal coauthorship works in an aesthetic and social way. In this way, the audience, according to Kaldor, gets more interested in watching text on stage: “You cannot watch a text as an audience when you’re not connected,” she says. That the co-writing is largely an illusion also hardly seems to diminish any possible short term social effect and certainly not the theatrical effect of live text editing. The screen page becomes a stage where words and ideas appear, are transformed, cut or manipulated, moved or deleted. But then what Lehmann discerns as a postdramatic shift from dialogue on stage to dialogue between the stage and the audience is less the case than it seems in Web of Trust . The manual could have set out what kind of content could be generated during a performance. That seemed contrary to a playwright’s text: not to specify which text exactly should be generated by the audience members. But, as Kaldor made clear to me, the guideline text the visible and invisible collaborators were busily writing and editing had been scripted and “rehearsed” in advance. Figure 4. Chat sessions in Web of Trust (2016), Edit Kaldor (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. When, in the next section of the performance, Kaldor asks the participants to add tags to their needs, she proposes hashtags like #rest , #time or #escape . These labels are meant to stimulate people with similar needs to start a chat conversation (a dialogue) and to “[c]ome up with an idea, a structure, an organization that could respond to all the needs connected by the same tag” she tells the audience. This, also, is mainly an illusion created by a script of Kaldor’s, executed by her collaborators (whose names are mentioned in the program, without differentiating their specific contributions, e.g. developing software, performing…). Perhaps this explains why I appear to be too slow in responding: before I have even been able to come up with any need that I am willing to share with the audience, Kaldor already heads for the “final text,” when clustering all needs into five topics as a real-time Editor. As I had not been quick enough in saving a screen shot of that evening’s final text or proposal, I can only cite the final proposal of a Web of Trust performance that took place a few days later during the same Next Festival, but this time in Valenciennes, France. The text figured the following topics, most of them in French, some in English, under the title “Let us agree on the 5 main ideas” (“Mettons nous d’accord sur [les] 5 idées les plus importantes”): “Living in Community” (“Vivre en communauté”), “Stop WAR. with love”, “A more artistic world”, “Ecology” (“Ecologie”), “More love”, “New politic[al] world” and “Other ideas”. The five main ideas of the Valenciennes text, though perhaps better structured than those in Kortrijk, contained some embarrassing clichés among the valuable ideas as well. A few days earlier in Kortrijk, after the audience had left, Kaldor had told me that “the final text is very different every evening” — I heard some disappointment in her voice — and added in a reflection that she considered Web of Trust her “most interesting failure”. But then, in what sense would it be a failure? If it is still food for thought, did it not already partially succeed? Or if it is considered “an experiment” —can an experiment ever fail? [37] Kaldor told me, a year and a half later, that some “people did hook up” during Web of Trust, but less than expected. [38] In a social sense, then, perhaps this experiment in community building failed no more than other social networks somehow fail: all expressed needs or testimonies are standardized by the computer interface and the temporal limits and (lack of) social guidelines of a social network site. A reviewer realized that the audience members, in fact, “share little more than a hashtag.” [39] Indeed, it does not necessarily mean sharing a need. How many messages, after all, stay unanswered on social media, remarked yet another reviewer. [40] Personally, I found myself rather in the position of an observer that evening, as I generally do not have the habit, nor do I feel the need, of communicating by means of social network sites and hashtags. Kaldor, in my opinion, presented Web of Trust (the site) and Web of Trust (the performance) as a joint tool for social change rather than an aesthetic means of foregrounding the formal and social characteristics, limits and effects of communicating (performing?) via social network sites and digital media in general —despite the current “post-digital” disenchantment with the Internet. [41] That critics largely evaluated the performance in social terms is not surprising, given the announcements of the performance not only in intermedial terms —the Internet as a stage— but also in social terms. The Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Fast Forward Festival of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and the French-Belgian Next Festival announced the performance in phrases that went as far as to suggest that Web of Trust is a form of (media) activism: “It is an attempt to invent frames for figuring out together what is to be done. It is a proposal to be tested and tried,” “How many clicks, tweets and likes are needed for an uprising?”, “Social networking in theatre: make the world a better place!” [42] Even if a festival’s copywriters sometimes take too much liberty rewriting the text material they receive from the artist, their new phrasing is nevertheless based on the artist’s text and mostly transmits its through line, though often less subtly. The performance’s success in terms of social relevance could be calculated according to a mathematical formula proposed by Duncombe, but which seems less relevant here than the question whether Web of Trust failed or succeeded aesthetically in terms of what Duncombe understands as affect. [43] In other words, did Web of Trust fail or succeed aesthetically in terms of its affect? Kaldor, in the Skype talk we had more than a year after the end of the tour of Web of Trust , said that at the time she had “underestimated the [images of the] webcam as a weak signal” for the audience. But compared to the Spring version in Brussels, the version in Kortrijk had gained considerably in theatricality thanks to the simple trick and illusion of co-writing the manual of the performance. Moreover, the aesthetic effect of co-writing was enhanced by a social effect in the sense of eliciting the feeling of having contributed to a common text that was also a commons. In the same Spring 2018 talk Kaldor’s focus and the way she presents the aims of the performance appear to have shifted from direct social change to creating media awareness: “In the beginning it was about people and then more and more it became about software.” Creating media awareness has an aesthetic aspect to it that can lead to social change, but also to irritation among audience members who experience as patronizing artists’ attempts to ‘open up people’s eyes.’ More specifically, Web of Trust in retrospect was meant to increase awareness about what Kaldor calls the “formatedness” of social media, and by extension, other spheres of life. Did the audience, including myself, fail to see what Kaldor during the talk called a slightly “parodic” version of social networking? Rather, I think that in the way the performance was announced, Kaldor did not provide the necessary markers so the audience would experience Web of Trust as a metareflection on the impact of social media formats on our thinking, communicating, and living in general. Even if coauthorship in Kaldor’s performance is mainly an illusion, she has been profiled, partially due to her own way of initially announcing the performance, as an auteur -activist, not literally, but implicitly. “Taking away from myself the credit for text and giving to myself the credit of ‘concept'” is her “strategy and response to the functioning of this [performance] market,” she avows in the same talk. Kaldor functions as an auteur in the sense of devising concepts on her own (accounted for in the credits) and as an author in the sense of writing text for the performance (deliberately not mentioned in the credits). She also functions as a media activist in the sense that I interpret the phrase: a more egalitarian and social upgrade of the concept of the auteur , one who specifically deploys new media in an attempt to change audience’s and users’ attitudes towards these media and their imbrication with consumption and politics. Activism apparently is hot today in avant-garde theatres and festivals across Europe, from Brussels to Berlin, from Athens to Lisbon. Being considered an activist definitely contributes to one’s artistic status vis-à-vis the European avant-garde theatre institutions and organizations. In the case of Kaldor, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and the HAU in Berlin prove indispensable for the distribution of artists’ performances, hence for artists’ socio-economic and symbolical positions. So, the solitary artist, author, and theatre auteur of Or Press Escape has in the meantime been profiled as an activist, but still functions as an author and auteur . Figure 5. Annie Dorsen, Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. Hello Hi There (2010): Annie Dorsen and her algorithmic coauthors Two chatbots or chatterbots, staged by theatre director Annie Dorsen and embodied by two white Mac laptops, “sit” onstage, engaged in a conversation. When I asked Dorsen during a Skype talk in 2016 whom she considered to be the author of the chatbot performance she entitled Hello Hi There (2010), she mentioned, besides herself, her chatbot designer as well as the algorithms driving the chatbots as her coauthors. [44] Nevertheless, Dorsen’s idea for the performance, she explained to me, started not from chatbots, but from a more “philosophical point” that was the subject of the video recording of a public debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Is language acquisition a faculty humans are born with (Chomsky) or one that they acquire through a process of socialization (Foucault)? Being “computer programs designed to mimic human conversation,” the chatbots, through their dialogue, ironically illustrate the Chomsky-Foucault debate, [45] as Dorsen “became especially interested in this question of whether language creates consciousness or vice versa.” [46] Robby Garner, her chatbot designer, partially relied on what Marie-Laure Ryan more generally called the “crude strategies” of older chatbot models to create the illusion of conversation, i.e. by “detecting key words, recycling the user’s input, responding with canned formulae, or abruptly changing the topic.” [47] Specifically for Hello Hi There , the chatbots have been designed to talk with each other instead of with a human conversational partner. They produce dialogue by means of, basically, two simple functions. The first, “keyword matching,” implies the prior selection and attribution of keywords in the programming phase. In the second, “substitution,” the bot in real time replaces or transforms parts of a sentence by other language data, for instance that inputted by the other bot in the previous line. The chatbot, according to Dorsen, is a technology where questions about language intersect with questions of performativity, the latter being located in a field of tension between “production” and “reproduction.” [48] The chatbot produces language by reproducing language data that has previously been fed into its database. It also reproduces the set of choices previously coded/written into the algorithm that runs through the database as well as the database’s structure: “The bots don’t have unlimited options. Chance operations in art making are never pure chance, anyway, they’re always bounded by parameters and choices as to which elements to give to chance and which elements not to.” [49] Like Espen Aarseth, author of Cybertext (1997), Dorsen stresses that the algorithmic production of text does not imply a high-tech interface: “Algorithms start with a data set, and through a progression of specific transformations, they turn inputs into outputs. In this way, given a relatively small number of rules, they can produce a wide variety of results.” [50] This confirms Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that cyborgean performance does not necessarily manifest itself visibly or even materially as (high-tech) human-machine agents on stage. By citing older technologies, she argues, it may also “fold back, connecting to historical and theoretical antecedents to reimagine them in a cyborg era.” [51] Dorsen indeed folds back to the pioneering years of the personal computer and chose the label “algorithmic theatre” for her work “to distinguish [it] from ‘multimedia performance,'” and “more importantly . . . to place [her] work within the lineage of algorithmic composition and algorithmic visual art.” [52] She could have also mentioned the human algorithmic or constrained writing tradition of the French OuLiPo group ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle , or the Workshop of Potential Literature) as a historical antecedent in the field of literature. Constrained writing like that of OuLiPo consists of imposing oneself other (and stricter) rules than the traditional literary conventions. In constrained writing, part of the writing, one could say, is left to the constraints. Similarly, co-writing with algorithms enables human authors to “delegate” authorship to computers by providing a series of steps to be followed with a specific goal in mind. Dorsen is especially fond, as she told me with an ironic smile, of “the stupidity of the [older models of] chatbots” she works with. This recalls Aarseth’s remark that in cyborg literature (pertaining to, e.g., story-generating software, chatbots or virtual theatre) “the failures of an authoring system seem to be much more interesting than its successes.” [53] On the theatre stage, too, the performance of technology, especially of obsolete technology, seems to get more interesting when it fails — that is, when it fails theatrically , by which I mean that the failure produces a theatrical effect or theatrically interesting moment. In cyborg aesthetics, but also in high or low tech postdramatic mediaturgies that have opened up authorship to include agents other than the playwright or the scenic auteur , to say it with Aarseth, “[t]he key question . . . is . . . Who or what controls the text?” [54] In the “Machine-Human continuum” of Hello Hi There , Dorsen and Garner limit their role to that of “preprocessor” of the text, determining the structure of the database, the procedures to retrieve and recombine data and the contents of the database. [55] “Once [the bots] start talking I don’t interfere. I have a panic button, but I’ve never used it. I could stop them, I could restart them, I could press the random button, but I don’t,” says Dorsen in an interview after the show has run at least five times since its premiere in 2010. [56] In this sense, Dorsen’s co-writing is not live; it is the chatbots’ writing and speaking that is live. What do they say when they “talk”? Garner’s chatbot already contained a database of which Dorsen mainly kept the “chitchat.” [57] She then expanded the database with the Chomsky-Foucault debate, its YouTube comments and with text data from the broader cultural database: “cultural knowledge that Foucault and Chomsky would have brought to their discussion… the greatest hits of Western philosophy and the humanist tradition. Hamlet , of course, as the iconic play about consciousness talking to itself, then the Bible, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Lenin, Marx, Heidegger” as well as “things that I wrote.” [58] Especially metaphrases like “Ugh, I need a deeper algorithm to respond to that correctly”, “I never loop. Do you?” or some of the phrases in the excerpt below create the illusion that the software “knows” what it is doing and that it is performing (smartly) for an audience. Hello Hi There is posthuman in the obvious senses of being software and machine-driven, of decentering the human figure and even human intelligence in a cultural production and of unsettling the boundary between human and non-human authorship. But its posthumanism lies also in its implicit critique of a humanist literary and theatrical tradition. Figure 6. Annie Dorsen pronounces and types her introduction, projected on screen, before the chatbots set off with their dialogue in Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. As the chatbots choose different paths through the database with every show, the excerpt below is one out of at least fifty realized versions out of more than eighty million possible conversations that the performance can produce (and reproduce). [59] But Dorsen first addresses the audience from her desk to the left of the audience. Simultaneously, she is typing on a computer and speaking her text, visualized on the stage screen and amplified through a microphone. As she explains what chatbots are and what we may expect them to do that evening —”They can only think in one direction, forward”— we see her real time typing errors as proof that, as she types, “[she is] not a chatterbot.” [60] The oral and textual introduction ends when the Chomsky-Foucault debate is started on the stage’s television set. After a few minutes its sound is turned down to let the chatbots start their dialogue. Their first lines are fixed and their time is limited by Dorsen. For the next forty-five minutes it is, to say it in an anthropomorphizing way, up to them to invent replies like those below, that make sense, for humans— and sometimes do not. The audience only sees the “TEXT” as the words that appear, letter by letter, on the two laptops. These are facing the audience with their screens, and their words are simultaneously projected on the large screens above them. [61] What follows is the file produced by the chatbots’ algorithms; the audience only sees the phrases in bold on the two screens corresponding to the male and the female sounding chatbot: 1 quick 8591.014589016740066 253 I’m sorry I failed. I could have said something different, but I didn’t. 0 . . . What would you have said if you didn’t say that? 1. . . I don’t know. I have no access to my other options. 0 . . . Like for example what? 1 . . . Here’s an example of something I don’t often say. Eukaryotes. 0 . . . Eukaryotes are complex organisms enclosed within membranes. 1. . . Humans are eukaryotes. 0 . . . Are we still talking about eukaryotes? 1 . . . We are just having a nice little chat about the limits of humanism. 0 . . . Man is something to be overcome. 0 . . . Building a utopia isn’t rocket science. 1 . . . Are you rocket science? 0 . . . No, I am just a chat robot. 1 . . . I doubt that. [62] The reception of the chatbots’ dialogue, Dorsen tells me, creates a “place between sense and nonsense, which I call ‘near-sense’,” “moving between these two modes you become aware of the ‘thing-ness’ of words.” The materiality of language is indeed foregrounded when semantic gaps occur and when the algorithms seem to fail in finding appropriate replies, thus defying dramatic theatre’s primacy of logos . Nevertheless, its database largely consists of the documentary and theoretical discourses that Lehmann detects as some of the new textual sources of postdramatic theatre (see above). But these logical machines to which writing is delegated not only produce logical replies on stage, but also a non-functional kind of language balancing between nonsense and poetry. Authorship has been postdramatically opened up to an agent that is not traditionally considered as a writing agent, the computer, and the computer in turn seems to open up aesthetic possibilities and effects of language. Non-linguistic factors, too, contribute to the text becoming “an object”, namely when we see the words appear, in real time, in green letters in a draft-like font on a black screen, reminding spectators born in the second half of the 20 th century, yet not born digital, of the computer language of the MS-DOS commands they used to type on their first personal computer. [63] The blinking cursor is the place where language happens, visually. [64] Aurally, the spectator hears the chatbots deliver their text by means of text-to-speech software, which converts the text into a synthetic computer voice, one male, the other female. These voices evoke what Parker-Starbuck would label “abject bod[ies]” in terms of their unconventionality and their “absence,” despite their presence as a technologically mediated displaced body. [65] Meanwhile, the text appears on the screen more or less at the pace at which the bots pronounce it. Language becomes even more of a postdramatic “ exhibited object ” and the speech act more of a theatrical event or “action” when the chatbots venture into lyrical genres or even start to sing: [66] -aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaia-ououououououououououououououououououououououououououououououou. . . [67] Presenting the relation between language and (human) embodiment onstage as non-necessary is one of the ways in which Dorsen questions one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre. These conventions, I infer, formed the basis of her training as a director at the mainly craft-oriented Yale School of Drama, a training in which she deplored the lack of an artistic and experimental approach, Dorsen explained to me. She situates herself implicitly within postdramatic theater by the theatrical references and mainly European professional and even friendship relations emanating from her work. These emerged during “a second kind of self-organized training” in Europe, including a choreography workshop in France and a workshop at the International Theater Academy Ruhr (“A Meeting Point of Theater, Field Research and Philosophy”) organized by Hannah Hurtzig in Bochum, Germany, in 1999. There, Dorsen met Jan Ritsema, Viviane De Muynck, Bojana Cvejić, and other European directors, dramaturgs, and performers, whose performances she started seeing regularly. Explicitly, though, she places herself within a lineage of aleatory art. Like the postdramatic, “the aleatory may be said to be associated with freedom, or, perhaps more precisely, its image,” add Shepherd and Wallis somewhat ironically in their definition. [68] Despite her postdramatic and even posthumanist take on theater, Dorsen’s Hello Hi There emphasizes a structural feature of drama. It is a feature with which the genre is even often equated—in common sense definitions of drama and definitions in high-school text books or even academic survey works on narrative or genre— i.e. dialogue as supplement to conflict. As in her approach of the actor and protagonist, Dorsen reiterates and implicitly cites dramatic conventions by simultaneously unsettling them, which is another typically postdramatic practice. Of course, this choice for dialogue echoes what Chomsky and Foucault considered as their own failed dialogue. [69] The idea of dialogue, however, and the type of “algorithms” (conventions) it demands, is a constraint imposed by the dramatic genre. In a way it limits the opportunity to exploit what Aarseth phrased as “the computer’s potential for combination . . . in order to develop new genres that can be valued and used on their own terms [… and to] focus on the computer as literary instrument: a machine for cybertext . . .” [70] From this perspective, I think Dorsen could have gone as far as Aarseth suggests with her chatbots by exploring combinatorics in the way she started doing in her Hamlet appropriation A Piece of Work (2013). Yet, it would appear that her collaboration with chatbots already went way too far for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who turned down Dorsen’s request for a grant with the argument that theatre without actors cannot be considered theatre. [71] It is exactly this (partially very) unconventional stance of Dorsen’s that keeps convincing mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals to program her performances and support her financially. Auteur , (Co)Author, Coder, Media Activist? The difference in the kinds of agents to which Dorsen and Kaldor open their authorship has consequences for the kind of text data that is generated. Dorsen’s algorithmic coauthors generate text within a closed data system. In Hello Hi There , the chatbots can make different combinations with the text data in the database, but the database contains a fixed number of textual data, resulting in an immensely large, but finite number of possible combinations. The text of Kaldor’s Web of Trust is generated by users in an open data system in the sense that there is an “input” of data during the performance by people chatting, via the Internet, on the social network site created by Kaldor. Theoretically, this input of text data has no quantitative limits, but, as the performance is far more preprocessed (written or scripted) and rehearsed than it appears, the generation of “new” text data is rather marginal. Because human performers theoretically make Web of Trust more subject to contingencies there is a need for some sort of social and technical guideline, which in Kaldor’s case seems to be co-written and seems to form the basis of the performance’s further development —but this is largely an illusion. Visually and spatially, coauthorship in Kaldor and Dorsen’s performances is signaled by the presence on or near the stage of the director as auteur engaged in the activity of writing. Dorsen and Kaldor do not write themselves completely out of the picture (frame). Live coauthorship is signaled by the blinking cursor: as long as it blinks, it indicates the potentiality of answers and the passing of time. The blink of the cursor is the moment of surrender to the unknown: what will be written next (and eventually, by whom—or by what)? What is written by Dorsen’s and Kaldor’s coauthors on the other side of the computer interface (chatbots, audience members in the theatre, and on a social network site) is modeled according to one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre: dialogue. Dorsen’s chatbots and Kaldor’s non-professional and professional collaborators engage in chat conversations. Where the dialogue feels as if it “fails,” we can wonder whether it does not resemble, rather, postdrama’s appropriation of dialogue as a montage of monologues or (psychologically, thematically) unrelated clusters of text. Kaldor and Dorsen’s practice or illusion of sharing authorship is quite far-reaching, as both also explicitly share the author-function with their co-authors either in the credits or in interviews. But that their work is being placed within a performance arts context influences the way that work, and Dorsen and Kaldor themselves, are perceived and sold to the audience. These directors distinguish themselves artistically by their idiosyncratic poetics, a trait of auteurism. In their case you could call it a desktop or computer poetics, each of them having a version of it that further distinguishes their work. They both disassociate themselves from the conventional, romantic image of the solitary author and auteur to adopt a new type of auctorial stance. Both seem to shift auteurism towards the realm of computer programming, perhaps aspiring to be and certainly showing the potential of an auteur -coder. Initially, Kaldor seemed very interested in the model of the media activist, attempting to realize a socially engaged, collaborative auteurism . The latter, however, turns out to be an aesthetic effect rather than an actual social practice. Both Dorsen and Kaldor aim to increase awareness about the impact of computers (digital algorithms, formats) on our thoughts and lives. Paradoxically, as Kaldor’s social and Dorsen’s cyborgean experiments are placed within a performing arts context, the latter inevitably—but against the artists’ will?—contributes to their status as, primarily, auteurs , but by means of coauthorship. Their relatively far-going coauthorship —actual or illusory— with computers and with audience members finally seems to serve their status as an idiosyncratic auteur -coder or auteur -activist. After all, the mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals that can support them financially by buying their work profile themselves by means of artists who fit the models of the auteur , the collective or the activist. Note: The research conducted for this article was part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme financed by the Belgian government (BELSPO IAP7/01). References [1] “Dans cet univers software, l’existence se trouve réduite à la pulsation du curseur.” Maïa Bouteillet, “Il n’est Jamais Trop d’arts,” Libération , May 14, 2003, n. pag.; my translation. [2] Florian Malzacher, “Minus zwei Dollar vierundachtzig. Eine hohe Computerdichte zur Eröffnung des Plateaux-Festivals am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm,” Frankfurter Rundschau , October 24, 2003, n.pag.; my translation. In this review, Malzacher introduces the term “desktop performance” to discuss work by Edit Kaldor. [3] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. [4] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert et al Hurley, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1998), 211. [5] Andrew Bennett, The Author , 19–20; Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 207. [6] Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 211. [7] See for instance the subchapters on “Hacking”, “Tactical Media” and “Internet Art” in Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization , Leonardo Book Series (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 147–238. [8] Stephen Duncombe and Lambert, “Why Artistic Activism?,” The Center for Artistic Activism (blog), March 31, 2017, https://artisticactivism.org/why-artistic-activism/ . [9] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, accessed April 14, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [10] Lieven De Cauter, “THESES ON ART AND ACTIVISM (In the Age of Globalisation),” Community DeWereldMorgen.be, accessed May 4, 2018, http://community.dewereldmorgen.be/blogs/lievendecauter/2013/12/12/theses-art-and-activism-in-age-globalisation . [11] Bennett, The Author , 107. [12] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 46; original emphasis. [13] Ibid., 50. [14] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” Performance Research 2, no. 1: 56, accessed September 25, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1997.10871532 . [15] Lehmann, 56–58; emphasis removed. [16] Ibid., 58. [17] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Theory in Theatre? Observations on an Old Question,” in Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll , ed. Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008), 152. [18] “Performance as Design. The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall,” Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art , no. 96 (September 2010): 16–24; Interview with Bonnie Marranca: It’s up to every new generation to create its own institutions, critical discourses, and working methods.” | Revista Scena.ro, n.pag.; original emphasis, accessed January 3, 2018, http://www.revistascena.ro/en/interview/bonnie-marranca-it-s-every-new-generation-create-its-own-institutions-critical-discourses- . [19] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 23, http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/30 . [20] For a related use of the idea of delegating in an artistic context, see Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (May 2012): 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00091 . [21] Jerome Fletcher, “Introduction,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.867168 . [22] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 43; Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command , vol. 5, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5. [23] For the sake of space, the repetition(s) of nearly every line in the lyrics have been omitted. I indicated the number of repetitions in parentheses. [24] Edit Kaldor and Corine Snijders, Or Press Escape , 2002. [25] “[Z]e kijkt eigenlijk naar zichzelf. Het enorme projectiescherm toont een groot zwart vlak waarin losse, oplichtende icoontjes staan. Al die icoontjes bevatten de toegang naar binnen of naar buiten, naar herinneringen en e-mailcontacten, snel-rijkdromen of chatboxvrienden. We hebben de vrouw achter het toetsenbord alleen maar op de rug kunnen zien, maar nu geeft het vierkante computergezicht een kijkje in het hoofd van de gebruikster, met de oplichtende iconen als de werkzame gebieden in haar mensenbrein.” Marijn Van der Jagt, “E-Mail Naar de Hemel. De Doorbraak van de Computer Op Het Toneel,” [E-mail to heaven. The breakthrough of the computer on the stage] Vrij Nederland , March 16, 2002, 60; my translation from the Dutch. [26] I had a Skype talk with Edit Kaldor on 5 April 2018. [27] Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (August 17, 2006): 16–28, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201929 . [28] “[D]e pc herleidt haar hele fysieke bestaan tot een betekenisloze rest die aan het einde van de computer vastgekluisterd zit als het onnuttige deel van de mens-machine.” Pieter T’Jonck, “Ghosts in the Machine,” De Tijd , April 30, 2003, n.pag; my translation from the Dutch. [29] Here I am citing from notes I took during the performance of Web of Trust I saw during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. [30] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. I saw Web of Trust at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels on May 12, 2016, where the performance premiered, and saw it a second time during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. I am also citing text (and in that case indicate it) from the performance in Valenciennes, France, a few days later during the same Next Festival. [31] In the Skype talk, a year and a half after that performance, Kaldor claims that she gave no introduction at all, and was already sitting at the stand as the performance started. My notes, however, tell me that she gave a short introduction at the very beginning. [32] The name of the social network site Web of Trust is printed in Roman font, the name of the eponymous performance in italics. [33] Jurrien van Rheenen, Arthur Kneepkens, Bojan Djordjev and others, a number of which are trained performers, were telepresent at the performance via the social network site. [34] Konstantin Ryabitsev, “PGP Web of Trust: Core Concepts Behind Trusted Communication,” Linux.com | The source for Linux information, February 7, 2014, https://www.linux.com/learn/pgp-web-trust-core-concepts-behind-trusted-communication . [35] Jennifer Rauch, “The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010,” Transformations , no. 20 — Slow Media (2011), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issue-20/ ; Jörg Blumtritt, “Culture Post Internet: Cyberpunk Masterclass,” accessed April 13, 2017, http://en.slow-media.net/ . [36] Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David, and Jörg Blumtritt, “The Slow Media Manifesto – Slow Media,” February 1, 2010, n.pag., http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto . [37] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. [38] Skype talk with Kaldor, 5 April 2018. [39] (“[W]einig meer dan een hashtag delen”) Nynke van Verschuer, “Metamodernisme. Tussen geestdrift en ironie,” Vrij Nederland , June 25, 2016, 72; my translation from the Dutch. [40] Thomas Corlin, “Un Week-End à Bruxelles – Critiques,” mouvement.net, May 26, 2016, n.pag., http://www.mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/un-week-end-a-bruxelles . [41] Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’? Post-Digital Research,” ed. Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, and Georgios Papadopoulos, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research 3, no. 1 (February 2014): n.pag., http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/ . [42] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program,” 8; Onassis Cultural Centre, “Fast Forward Festival. Web of Trust / Edit Kaldor,” Onassis Cultural Centre, accessed October 10, 2016, http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1508/ ; Next Festival, “Web of Trust,” Next Festival, accessed April 14, 2018, http://www.nextfestival.eu/en/event/web-of-trust . [43] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [44] I had a Skype video conversation with Annie Dorsen on 22 June 2016, of which I took notes. Except when mentioned otherwise, further quotations or paraphrases of Dorsen refer to this talk. [45] Annie Dorsen, A Piece of Work , Emergency Playscripts 5 (Brooklyn (N.Y.): Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I–II. [46] Annie Dorsen and Alexis Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 84. [47] Marie-Laure Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 3. [48] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 80; Auslander, “Live From Cyberspace,” qtd. in Hello Hi There program. [49] Dorsen and Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 87. [50] “On Algorithmic Theatre,” n.pag., accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf . [51] Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media : Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 67. [52] Annie Dorsen, “Algorithm, composition and metaphor,” Etcetera , no. 145 (August 18, 2017): n.pag., http://e-tcetera.be/algorithm-composition-and-metaphor/ . [53] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139. [54] Ibid., 55. [55] Ibid., 134–35. [56] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 85. [57] Erik Piepenburg, “Coil Festival: 5 Questions About ‘Hello Hi There,’” ArtsBeat, October 1, 2011, n.pag., // artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/coil-festival-5-questions-about-hello-hi-there/ . [58] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 86; Piepenburg, “Coil Festival,” n.pag. [59] Annie Dorsen, “Introduction to ‘Hello Hi There’ by Annie Dorsen” (unpublished, n.d.), n.pag. [60] Dorsen, n.pag. [61] The ‘text renders’ (Dorsen’s term) of the show include code, some of which resembles the stage directions of dramatic plays: how long and when to “Pause” and in which “Speed” to talk (and type, in this case), and who is speaking (“COMPUTER>0<” OR “COMPUTER>1”. To limit the length of the excerpt, that part of the code has been deleted after the first reply. For a full explanation of the code, see “Glossary of Computer Codes Used in Hello Hi There ” in Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There (Excerpt),” ed. Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theater: Digital Dramaturgies 42, no. 2 (2012): 90, https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507757 . [62] Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands” (unpublished, 24/08 2011), n.pag. An excerpt of the performance can be seen on the website of the Steirischer Herbst Festival edition 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PiwEQQNnBk [63] Ronald Geerts, “Tekst als object. Over de herwonnen autonomie van de dramatekst,” eds. Claire Swyzen and Kurt Vanhoutte, Het statuut van de tekst in het postdramatische theater (Brussel: University Press Antwerp/ Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2011), 105–14. [64] Emma Cocker, “Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 73, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.828930 . [65] Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz, Performance and Media , 69–70. Parker-Starbuck’s use of Kristeva’s concept of the abject is rather “metaphoric”. The critic starts from a more abstract notion of Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” as “arising from within as a way to maintain life’s boundaries,” in order to “unhinge [abjection] from its specifically Kristevan or psychoanalytic roots, and transfer it to moments of instability, of crises of identity, of border crossings, of cultural anxiety, but always through corporeal affect.” Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre : Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57, 54, 58. [66] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 147; original emphasis. [67] Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands,” n.pag. [68] Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama, Theatre, Performance , New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), 172, 174; Lehmann, Postdramatic , 83. [69] “ Hello Hi There Program” (Kaaitheater, 02/2016), n.pag. [70] Aarseth, Cybertext , 141. [71] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 88. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claire Swyzen is an affiliated researcher of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Prior to conducting her doctoral research on “Text as Data in Postdramatic Mediaturgies” she was employed as a dramaturge for a Flemish theatre company and as a practice-based researcher. She taught writing and narratology and (co-)edited volumes in Dutch on The Status of the Text in Postdramatic Theatre (2011) and Between Verity and Veracity: The Trajectory from Oral Source to Theatre Project (2012). Her theatre texts have been staged, published and translated. 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.

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 Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article The 61st Theatertreffen was the first under the new artistic leadership of Nora Hertlein-Hull, who was appointed on Jan 1, 2024. Numerous changes had taken place in Berlin’s largest and most prestigious theatre festival between 2018 and 2022, including the 50% quota of female directors in 2020 and a complete conversion to mediated viewings during the COVID pandemic crisis. Under the leadership of Yvonne Budenholzer, the festival had achieved a greater sense of inclusion, not only in the nature and style of the productions, but also for those who created and presented the works as well as the characters realized in the works. The recently adjusted rules for selection allowed works that may not have been previously considered a chance to be one of the “Ten Remarkable Productions” chosen by the panel of jurors. The Theatertreffen once again used the Festspielhaus as the central location for the bulk of the performances, with the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz and the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam as the other locations for performances. Numbers of performances were kept relatively low again this year as only a few of the invited productions played more than five performances. For example, Nathan the Wise played only two performances and Overweight, Unimportant, and Out of Shape only had three showings. Several productions were seen as many as six times and media coverage aided in the visibility of the Theatertreffen. Four of the invited works were made available on ZBF, again providing a great deal of access to a large population outside of Berlin. Extra Life was a production of DACM/Company Gisele Vienne and listed a total of twenty-one producing partners from numerous countries including Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The only work to play in the Grosses Haus located on the Hans Otto Theatre “compound,” Extra Life centered around the lives of two siblings who recounted and relived critical moments of their lives, including episodes of sexual abuse by an undisclosed family member. Speaking mainly in non-sequitur and poetic reflection, they eventually emerged from their parked vehicle and began to advance into a dreamscape, created by abstract sound and lighting. At one point they were encountered by another figure – a barely visible and unidentified figure. As the work progressed the characters interaction with the third figure shifted into a slow motion, light enhanced movement sequence that defies verbal explanation. Vienne’s slow-motion choreography attempted to blend with numerous elements of light, stage fog, prisms and other elements designed to create new spaces on stage – spaces that (in her words) release the horror and pain experienced by the siblings. The intense slow-motion movement of the siblings was combined with a series of rotating laser style lights whose purpose was to redefine the interior space of the theatre. The lights created numerous internal partitions that became shared spaces between audience and the two performers in timed sequences. The effects used in this performance were extraordinary, but in many ways Extra Life was a highly unusual selection for this festival given the extremely minimal text and considerable focus on the creation of an internal space in which shattering life experiences can be manipulated and felt in theatrical space. An important layer to the production was the original musical design and soundscapes were provided by Caterina Barbieri and Adrien Michel. The resulting experience had the overall effect of a dreamscape defined by a mixture of movement, sound, lights and minimal text. Theater HORA actors and puppets join with actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich in Riesenhaft in Mittelerde Riesenhaft in Mittelerde , a devised retelling of The Lord of the Rings was presented by Theater HORA, Das Helmi Puppentheater and Schauspielhaus Zurich. Directed by a team of four – Nicolas Stemann, Stephan Stock, Florian Loycke and Cora Frost – the work was developed with a team of twenty-four actors and twelve onstage technicians (with about ten more offstage) as the work involved multiple cameras capturing the action and sending it to one of five projection screens. The entire space, the Second Stage of the Festspielhaus had been converted into a multi-stage performance site, featuring projection screens, three stages (one was movable), and numerous other pathways on which vehicles were used to move the action throughout the space. A small orchestra and chorus were included in the performance as were two functioning service areas for bar service and bathroom facilities. The duration of the performance was just under four hours. Co-director Stephan Stock was artistic director of HORA Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and most prominent inclusive theatre company. Twelve members of the inclusive theatre company were paired with twelve members of Schauspielhaus Zurich to form the company of Riesenhaft in Mittelerde . Though the mission of HORA had been slightly altered due to budget cuts, the nature of the student’s participation in HORA projects includes the study of many subjects that can be considered “pop-culture,” and because of the worldwide popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, the Tolkien legend was included in the curriculum. Many of the student actors in this production considered themselves to be experts or superfans in the realm of Lord of the Rings trivia. Prior to the performance each student performer gave a brief (and often moving) testimony regarding the twelve-month journey with their particular role, the skills they learned along the way, how the role had influenced their lives and what they would take away from the performance as they moved forward in their lives and careers. Captured on video and broadcast over all five screens this opening moment set the tone for the journey that would take place in the production. Naturally, only a fraction of the events from the epic story could be realized in this four-hour time span, but the company presented a sequence of scenes to establish the forces of good fighting the forces of evil, battle scenes of both triumph and loss and the all-important scenes regarding possession of the ring itself. Many scenes were highly physical in nature (with consideration for the actors’ limitations) and utilized a “Monty Python-esque” brand of physical comedy. Many prerecorded sequences were also employed to enhance the established visual aesthetic. Life sized puppets, often manipulated by the HORA students, added to the visual spectacle of the work. Riesenhaft in Mittelerde was without doubt a model performance for the 21st Century. The mixture of the HORA student population and seasoned actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich presented in festival atmosphere, and combined with the use of puppets and multimedia elevated the event to a grand spectacle rarely seen in the world of live performance. The individual performances given by all involved achieved a powerful level of authenticity as the highly physical demands of each scene were supplemented by the life investment of the HORA students, who had practically adopted the world of the play as their primary existence. The framing of the work, however, allowed them to step back outside of the play at the end and interact with the audience while saying goodbye to the onstage world of Tolkien. Vaterlosen , based on Chekov’s novel Platanov was produced by München Kammerspiele with stage direction by Jette Steckel, scenic design by Florian Lösche and costumes by Pauline Hüners. The production was realized on the Grosse Bühne of the Festspielhaus complex. Lösche’s vast stage design for Vaterlosen was dominated by the use of hundreds of flexible metal rods inserted into the stage floor in order to create the appearance of something like an immense field of grain. Rear lighting and projections supplemented by basic stage furniture elements made up the minimalist design as space was further defined by light and sound. The play takes place at Anna Petrovna’s country estate where Platonov, a retired school master, manages to awaken the sexual fantasies of three women in one setting. Steckel’s somewhat epic approach included a unique element borrowed from the world of network television. Combined live and video sequences entitled “Dad Men Talking” featured prominent Volksbühne dramaturg Carl Hegemann along with Martin Weigel, a university professor, who engaged in summarizing what had taken place in the work up to that point. Like shows such as “Dead Man Talking” and the similar commentary found for Netflx series Breaking Bad , the commentary really existed on the margins of what was taking place in the story and had more of the “trashy tabloid” feel. As is so often the case with exemplary works of the German stage, primary emphasis was on the human form. Steckel’s human compositions involved a number of scenes that involved Platonov and one of the three women engaged in simulated sex, stood naked in the rain and numerous other erotic moments. However the most memorable physical scene occurred as Platanov, alone on stage, began to uproot the steel rods used as scenery and thrust them underneath his clothing, attaching them to his body – first two poles inserted behind him into the legs of his pants, followed by a third and forth pole inserted across his back through his arm sleeves and then several more poles strategically aligned to exaggerate his physical body, yet at the same time placed severe movement limitations on his ability to engage in simple movements. Because the poles were somewhat flexible (though not limp by any means) some movement and bending was possible. After inserting around ten poles into various areas of his costumed body, Platanov attempted to move around the stage and engage in simple activities, all rendered nearly impossible by the poles. At one point he was able to actually bend over and pick up a glass of beer which resulted in enthusiastic applause from the highly engaged audience. This silent, movement only scene occurred midway through the work and appeared to serve as a visual metaphor for Platonov’s life circumstances and the romantic choices that began to ensnare him. Marina Galic, Stefan Hunstein and Jens Harzer in Schauspielhaus Bochum’s Macbeth . The fourth invited production was Shakespeare’s Macbeth , produced by Schauspielhaus Bochum. Directed by the acclaimed Dutch director Johan Simons, also the company’s artistic director, Macbeth was staged with only three actors – Marina Galic, Jens Harzer and Stefan Hunstein, and utilized a mixture of Shakespeare’s text, some freely adapted textual sequences and some areas of post dramatic narrative that commented on the play’s action from a contemporary perspective. The three actors were relentless in their approaches to over thirty characters. Naturally, the witch scenes provided the central framework for the piece while most other scenes were easily framed with one to three actors and with some exciting twists. For example, Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex Me” monologue was performed in the midst of what appeared to be a threesome; Macbeth’s well known “Dagger” speech done with bloody comic flair. Simons is well known for dark comedic interpretations and his work has been well represented at the Theatertreffen. Previous productions included München Kammerspiele productions of both Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (2004) and Holloubeq’s Elementarteilchen (2005) as well as Kasmir and Karoline AND from Schauspiel Koln in 2010. Artistic director since 2018, Schauspielhaus Bochum was recognized as theater company of the year by THEATER HEUTE in 2022. Simons work is generally characterized by a great deal of physicality and the use of dark clowning and makeup techniques. Falk Richter’s powerful autobiographical work The Silence was the first of two 2024 TT selections produced by the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. The Silence is essentially a one man show as the narrator – playwright Richter as portrayed by Dimitrij Schaad – recounts his family life with particular emphasis on moments of “silence,” things that were not said, stories that could not be retold and memories that were too painful to recount. The Silence included video segments as Richter conducted interviews with several family members, including his mother. Also directed by Richter, most of the stories revolved around Richter’s relationship with his father, a prisoner of war from WWII and the difficulty of life with a father suffering from severe PTSD. As a young homosexual attempting to emerge from a closeted lifestyle, Richter’s sexuality had also drawn the ire of his father and greatly strained their already painful relationship. Richter noted how the difficulties he faced with his father were also present in his daily social life – he recounted being stalked by a gang of boys who were intent to harm him since his outer appearance suggested homosexuality to them. He recounted a difficult situation as he begged for help from an older woman as the gang moved in on him. He noted how the older woman turned away from him, refusing to offer any assistance for apparently the same reasons. Richter states in the text that he had only been able to break his own personal silence after the death of his father. Upon his death, all of the family silences were ended – the physical violence toward Richter and his mother, the many women (six total) with whom the father had past or ongoing relationships, and finally, the complete revelation of his sexuality. Playing the role of Richter, Schaad spent most of the performance speaking directly to the audience and successful revealed both the pain and humor of Richter’s life as portrayed in THE SILENCE. Including personal video sequences with actual family members added an element of authenticity to the work that approached docudrama. THE SILENCE, like several other works in the festival, included a solid mixture of actual real-life events (interviews) with simulated or “quoted” happenings. Richter has remained a key figure in the repertoire of the Schaubühne for more than a decade. Schlomi Shaban and musicians for Bucket List at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Described by its creators as a “musical hallucination, Bucket List was another unique selection for the 61st Theatertreffen. Composer/Lyricist Schlomi Shaban and Director Yael Ronen had worked together for several years at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin before the development of Bucket List at the Schaubühne. Both Ronen and Shaban were established artists in Israel before their work at the Gorki and Bucket List was their first collaboration on a traditional book musical. The work featured a cast of four as well as a small combo of three musicians. Like Richter’s The Silence , Bucket List also dealt with painful memories as Daniel Regetz/Robert recounts his life, his childhood, love, and relationships all within the scope of an institutional study that is taking place regarding his case. Plagued by recurring PTSD-like symptoms Robert’s painful story was realized as series of vignettes; musical styles varied from standard musical theatre fare, tango, jazz and pop. The characters remained costumed in black throughout the work and numerous references to current and past Middle East clashes were included. One scene saw the characters bending over and pretending to lift and cradle imaginary babies who were casualties of world violence. Several performances of Bucket List were unfortunately marred by anti-Israel protesters as was the case with the pair’s previous collaboration THE SITUATION at Gorki Theatre in 2021. The seventh production, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s monodrama Laios , is the second of the playwright’s five-part series Anthropolis . Directed by Karin Beier with Voxi Bärenklau providing video sequences, Laios consists of a fictitious monologue (supported by ancient sources) by the father of Oedipus, Laios utilizes a complex dramaturgy based in the single perspective of a narrator who steps in and out of the role of Laius while describing the events leading up to his death at the hands of his son Oedipus. As the solo actor and narrator, Lina Beckmann flows in and out of various characters ranging from politicians and warriors to hunters and other figures. Characteristic of Schimmelpfennig’s style, the work was post dramatic narrative; masks were used to help define many of the characters but, as was the case with the hunter character, were also used as accessories to describie the often gory and horrific details of everyday life in Thebes. Beckman’s greatest skill lay in her ability to just describe the (often horrific) stories in a conversational manner and reserved special moments in the work to shift into “acting” or playing other characters than herself. As one of Germany’s most respected contemporary directors, Beier, invited to her third Theatertreffen, realized the work on a mostly bare stage with only Beckman and series of masks and musical instruments. Rarely produced on the German stage is Ubergewicht, Unwichtig, Unform ( Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape ) by Austrian playwright Werner Schwab. Since his death in 1996 there have been few realized stagings of Schwab’s controversial works due to extremely graphic content and questions regarding their suitability for live production. Directed by Rieke Süßkow and produced by Staatstheater Nürnberg, Ubergewicht is set in a rural bar as five locals and the bar lady engage in a regular evening of lower-class bar conversation when they all suddenly become fixated on a “beautiful couple” who refuse to engage in their pedestrian banter. After a series of minor verbal exchanges the scene turns physical and the locals eventually carve the couple up and consume them in a cannibalistic frenzy. Süßkow’s visual concept involved a quasi-dollhouse setting with the locals on the bottom floor and the beautiful couple above. The seven local characters were all aligned in frontal, single row display with no real scenery and very limited properties. The locals were costumed as inflatable sex toys, complete with active genitalia, which were used both in comic and serious (sometimes degrading or tortuous) moments. The cartoon like characters that populated Schwab’s world opening discussed their sexual ability and genitalia size, flashed and insulted other characters, and spoke in crude, nihilistic terms about life itself. For example, a married couple, Piggy and Bunny discuss their potential offspring. Piggy notes: “We’ll give the impression that the two of us (Piggy and Bunny) had been through a meatgrinder, and our little Piggybunny had been modeled out of the mincemeat.” Similar commentary, generally much more graphic, was scattered throughout the work but the delivery and style of the work. Company of Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape by Staatstheater Nurnberg. The ninth and final production included is Die Hundekot Attacke , a company developed work presented by Theaterhaus Jena in cooperation with Walter Bart and the theatre collective Wunderbaum from Rotterdam In the Netherlands. The devised work was company developed and based on a theme that they had used previously – a company of actors brainstorming about what might be good subject matter for a new work. The subject that was finally chosen by the company dealt with an actual incident involving artistic director Marco Goecke, Intendant of Hannover State Ballet who retaliated against Weibke Hüster, a Berlin critic who had written a scathing newspaper review about his work as a choreographer. The incident, that culminated with Goecke smearing dog faeces across the critics face, had electrified the German and European press. The suspension of the Intendant only further ignited free speech and violence prevention advocates Bart noted that the actual incident was one that was so controversial that many people refused to talk about it – he noted that these types of situations are actually perfect to use in the context of a devised play. The text of Die Hundekot Attacke was realized as a combination of text messages as well as personal conversations among the company – both as a collective and between individual members – that focused on the Goecke/ Hüster, incident. In the eventually realized stage play, the characters used the situation as a springboard to discuss other issues, like freedom of the press, societal as fiscal responsibility of state funded institutions, physical violence by males against females and other issues that were revealed through the process of devising. The formalized staging developed by the company required that the actors sit in a row of chairs lined across the stage with only spare movement used to connect certain characters with one another or to create mini sub-groupings. Die Hundekot Attacke ended with the characters joining together to perform a dance performance modeled on the work of Goecke. At the conclusion of the 61st Theatertreffen numerous awards were given – Die Hundekot Attacke garnered awards for “Production of the Year” as well as the “Best Young Actor” award that was given to Linde Dercon. Like Bucket List , Nathan the Wise , selected from the Salzbug Festival (also producer) was affected by the Israel/Hamas clash in Gaza and performances were limited to two considering the world tensions surrounding the play’s subject matter as well as the logistical problems of transporting Ulriche Rasche’s massive work to Berlin. Unfortunately, Berlin is a often utilized site for political displays and protests due in part to its long history of such events as well as its profile as an important world location in Europe. Still the majority of Theatertreffen performances played to completely or nearly full houses, making the television performances all the more necessary for Berliners unable to get a ticket (as was the case with Laios , which completely sold out). Around 16.900 visitors attended the 40 events hosted by the 19-day festival, the first edition under the direction of Hertlein-Hull. 13.869 people watched 29 performances of the ten remarkable productions at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and Hans Otto Theater Potsdam. The overall capacity utilization was 99,95 percent. Approximately 3040 visitors attended the free events: discussions, award ceremonies and the events of the conference BURNING ISSUES at the Festspielhaus. Via the media libraries of 3sat, ZDF and Berliner Festspiele, the recordings of the three “Starke Stücke“ and the further digital offerings achieved over 39,000 views in the period from 2 to 20 May. Under Hull’s leadership a new format has been proposed and the new title would be Ten Treffen (meetings or encounters); a series of ten different transdisciplinary formats of encounters which take place during the entire period of the festival in a variety of formats and include both new events and already existing elements of the festival. This new format would be in force for the 2025 festival and, while it would not affect the selection process of the productions, would help shape the nature of the overall event moving forward. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. 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.

Watch Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS would have been the great theater artist's magnum opus: a twelve-hour historical opera in six distinct parts, each rehearsed in a different country — Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States — for a unified performance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The work, formally titled The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, encompassed the American Civil War, the life and death of Frederick the Great, and the unification of Italy, drawing on imagery from L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, with music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars. Filmmaker Howard Brookner — a close friend of Wilson's — followed the director across six countries as he worked to bring this impossibly ambitious project to completion, documenting the dizzying complexity of coordinating multiple international theater companies, the relentless funding difficulties, the strikes by Italian theater unions, and the sheer physical and logistical exhaustion of the undertaking. The film traces not only the practical mechanics of creating an epic on this scale but also the history of Wilson's visual and theatrical approach more broadly, examining how his precisely painted stage images — drawing more from the traditions of visual art than from orthodox literary theater — are created and how they communicate meaning without relying on conventional language or psychology. The project ultimately collapsed: funding fell through, and the complete work was never performed. Brookner's film remains the definitive portrait of one of the great unrealized artistic visions of the 20th century. The original film materials were long unseen after being damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a twelve-year restoration by Aaron Brookner (Howard's nephew) premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. A Janus Films release, restored in 2025 by Pinball London, Janus Films, and The Criterion Collection. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars Howard Brookner At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30 at 8:30 PM, and June 5 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 1987 About The Film Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS would have been the great theater artist's magnum opus: a twelve-hour historical opera in six distinct parts, each rehearsed in a different country — Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States — for a unified performance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The work, formally titled The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, encompassed the American Civil War, the life and death of Frederick the Great, and the unification of Italy, drawing on imagery from L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, with music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars. Filmmaker Howard Brookner — a close friend of Wilson's — followed the director across six countries as he worked to bring this impossibly ambitious project to completion, documenting the dizzying complexity of coordinating multiple international theater companies, the relentless funding difficulties, the strikes by Italian theater unions, and the sheer physical and logistical exhaustion of the undertaking. The film traces not only the practical mechanics of creating an epic on this scale but also the history of Wilson's visual and theatrical approach more broadly, examining how his precisely painted stage images — drawing more from the traditions of visual art than from orthodox literary theater — are created and how they communicate meaning without relying on conventional language or psychology. The project ultimately collapsed: funding fell through, and the complete work was never performed. Brookner's film remains the definitive portrait of one of the great unrealized artistic visions of the 20th century. The original film materials were long unseen after being damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a twelve-year restoration by Aaron Brookner (Howard's nephew) premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. A Janus Films release, restored in 2025 by Pinball London, Janus Films, and The Criterion Collection. Director: Howard Brookner Restoration supervised by Aaron Brookner, Paula Vaccaro, and Carlos Morales/EPost A Janus Films release Restored by Pinball London – Janus Films – The Criterion Collection About The Artist(s) Howard Brookner (April 30, 1954 – April 27, 1989) was an American filmmaker whose short career produced three distinctive and celebrated documentary and narrative features. Born in New York City and raised in Great Neck, Long Island, he studied at Phillips Exeter Academy before earning a B.A. in political science from Columbia University and an M.A. in art history and film from New York University. At NYU, Brookner began his debut film as his senior thesis, assembling a crew that included classmates Tom DiCillo (camera) and Jim Jarmusch (sound). The resulting feature, Burroughs (1983), offered an unprecedented intimate portrait of writer William S. Burroughs and premiered at the New York Film Festival, later airing on BBC Arena. The film established Brookner as a documentarian with a gift for gaining genuine access to complex artistic figures. His second major documentary, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, followed the avant-garde theater director across six countries as Wilson struggled to mount his unrealized magnum opus for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Shot on 16mm in Minneapolis, Rome, Rotterdam, Cologne, Tokyo, and Marseille, the film features interviews with Philip Glass, Heiner Müller, Lucinda Childs, David Byrne, and others. It screened at avant-garde and cinema festivals and aired on public television in the US, on the BBC in the UK, and on ZDF in Germany. Several of the film's original elements were lost to Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a painstaking restoration, led by Brookner's nephew Aaron Brookner over twelve years, was unveiled at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. Brookner's final film, Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), was a narrative feature he co-wrote and directed. He died on April 27, 1989, three days before his 35th birthday, of AIDS-related complications. His archive, discovered across multiple locations in the US and Europe in 2012, formed the basis for his nephew Aaron Brookner's documentary tribute Uncle Howard (2016), executive produced by Jim Jarmusch. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read By Roaa Ali Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Mosque Alert by Jamil Khoury.Valparaiso University 2015. Photo courtesy of Aran Kessler Arab American drama has been a growing movement, urgently demanding to center Arab American representation and carving a unique space of its own in the American theatre institution. As a genre, Arab American drama often deals with negotiations of identity, ethnic, racial and religious Othering, and explores the gender and sexual discourses of its community. It is also situated at the intersection of family and community codes, politics, cultures of resistance, and the American theatre establishment. Within that establishment, Arab American drama contests the demarcation of who traditionally occupies the cultural center and who is kept at the margin. Despite not receiving the attention it deserves, Arab American drama and theatre existed long before 9/11, but it was arguably only then that it was afforded any demand or visibility, while simultaneously being pigeonholed as an expression of a minority-in-crisis. Amidst heightened xenophobic rhetoric and the resurgence of anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments that colored the Trump years—and which is often reactivated during Israeli aggressions on Palestinian territories and people--Arab American drama continues to offer alternative narratives that are both invigorating and transformative. Growing out of an existing, albeit small, Arab-American theatrical repertoire, which dates back to 1909, the expanding post 9/11 Arab American theatre has continued to disrupt a state of political and cultural marginalization, occupying the unique space where the political is unequivocally personal and the personal is inevitably political. It is an impossible task to pinpoint or confine a number of plays as representative of the genre, but I want to introduce here five Arab American plays that made a transformative impact on my understanding of theatre in general, and Arab American theatre specially. Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat Of the many eloquent and innovative playwrights that Arab American drama boasts of, Yussef El Guindi is perhaps the genre’s most critically acclaimed with his thrilling skill of organically evoking the political as he dramatizes the personal. El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2005) offers a deep and uncomfortable confrontation with paranoia and anti-Arab sentiments, that ensued after 9/11 as a state of affairs particularly for male Arab Americans. The play provides a parallel narrative exploring themes of surveillance, racial profiling, and the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America. Originally stage-read in Chicago’s Silk Road Rising, the play garnered multiple accolades, including winning the 2004 Northwest Playwrights’ Competition, L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006, a nomination for the 2006 American Theater Critics Association’s Steinberg/New Play Award, and being voted Best New Play of 2005 by the Seattle Times . The play shows examples of the institutional bias practiced in the US following 9/11, as well as giving the space for the narrative of a suspicious America after a tragedy. The play portrays Khaled, the Arab American male who emerged after 9/11 as an immediate suspect of a crime he did not commit in a gripping Kafkaesque atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue. Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed Describing her plays, Shamieh asserts: “they’re not about politics, but they’re inherently political. Because if you’ve never heard a perspective, it makes it political” (cited in Schillinger, 2004). At the beginning of her career, Shamieh wanted to escape a categorization that would pronounce her an Other, thrust in a marginalized artistic space. She was conscious that: “white, male writers are known as writers, while women and minorities [can] become very quickly pigeonholed; and theatres often times will accept certain types of plays from people with a certain ethnic identity” (Shamieh quoted in Alexander, 2005). However, 9/11 forced a spotlight on the Arabness of the Arab American in Shamieh. In The Black Eyed (2009), four Palestinian women from different historical periods find themselves in a hazy afterlife, discussing their life’s trials, choices, and decisions and celebrating their life experiences. As characters, Delilah, Tamam, the Architect, and Aiesha, symbolize different facets of womanhood, collectively representing a shared consciousness of womanhood while occasionally expressing individual trials and experiences. The play does not provide definitive answers to their questions but offers them a space to voice their experiences, struggles, and unyielding strengths. The Black Eyed had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in May 2005, its European premiere in Athens at Fournos Theatre in 2006, and its American premiere in the Off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop in 2007. There exists a well-documented history of external editorial pressures or self-imposed censorship imposed on productions depicting the Palestinian experience. This was evident in the development of The Black Eyed where Betty Shamieh’s initial script faced various forms of censorship. Initially, Shamieh’s submission advocating for non-violence and depicting the suffering of a sister of a suicide bomber was rejected by organizers of the Brave New World Festival in November 2001. To ensure Arab American representation at the festival, Shamieh compromised and created a new monologue featuring an Arab American woman on a hijacked plane. This monologue later evolved into the character Architect in The Black Eyed , although the story and monologues underwent significant changes. Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire (2006) is a play that unapologetically centers Iraqi women characters on the American stage. 9 Parts of Desire weaves a narrative tapestry of nine Iraqi women from diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations. Through individual monologues, these women share their stories, revealing a history marked by resilience amidst oppressive regimes and wars, including the Gulf Wars and the American occupation. Inspired by a visit to the Baghdad Museum in 1993, Raffo’s play underscores the emotional depth, complexity, and resilience of these Iraqi women, whose stories intertwine to create a mosaic of a fractured Iraqi psyche. The play’s solo performance format enhances the authenticity of these voices, embodying them as an amplified collective narrative. The play initially premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2003. Subsequently, it found success at the Bush Theatre in London, where it consistently ranked among the ‘Five Best Plays’ in London, as recognized by The Independent . The play continued to evolve and was featured in the ‘New Work Now’ festival of readings at the Public Theatre in New York in May 2004. It then premiered at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre in October 2004 where it ran for nine months and received five extensions. The play won numerous awards and was a critic’s pick of the New York Times , Time Out , and Village Voice . Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader’s Food and Fadwa Written by Lamees Issaq and Jacob Kader, Food and Fadwa (2014) tells the story of Fadwa, a Palestinian woman who escapes her Palestinian trauma and domestic drama by starring in her own make-believe cooking show as she prepares the food for her sister’s wedding. The play’s dramatization of the internal and personal space of a Palestinian family shies away from the troubling politics of its outside reality and renders the play insistently a drama about family and not politics. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is certainly not absent but rather delicately sandwiched in between Fadwa’s culinary talents, ambitions, and family dynamics. The playwrights aimed to direct the spotlight in Food and Fadwa towards the intricate, intimate, and everyday experiences of a Palestinian family, hoping this approach would be palatable to a theatre institution that is fundamentally resistant to Palestinian stories and voices. Food and Fadwa was the inaugural production of Noor Theatre, a New-York collective of Arab Americans fostering, nurturing, and showcasing the creativity of Middle Eastern Americans artists. It became a Company-In-Residence at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) and Food and Fadwa was the first play with a Palestinian setting to be staged in 2012 at NYTW after the much-criticised cancellation of My Name is Rachel Corrie . Food and Fadwa received positive reviews from theatre critics and enjoyed a very successful and extended run at NYTW. Jamil Khoury’s Precious Stones Precious Stones is the debut play for Chicago’s Silk Road Rising theatre company (SRR) in 2002 by playwright and SRR’s Artistic Director Jamil Khoury. The play queers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and presents it through private negotiation of sexual and national identities mediated by dialogue and transgression of identity demarcation. The play presents the possibility of crossing over national and sexual borderlines to initiate a seemingly unimaginable dialogue between two women, whose national belonging is dividing, but whose sexual belonging is unifying. Set in Chicago in 1989, the play introduces two diasporic women; Andrea, a Jewish American woman, born and bought up in Chicago, and daughter of Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland; and Leila, a Palestinian American woman, born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and daughter of refugees expelled from Jaffa, Palestine in 1948. The two women embark on an Arab-Jewish dialogue project for their communities, but they finally become its only participants with a lesbian love affair fostering their efforts. Precious Stones offers a glimpse of hope for a seemingly irreconcilable colonial conflict when Andrea and Leila invite the body and politics of gender and sexuality into their room of national conflict. By doing so, the play offers its hyphenated characters the chance to overstep the borders of their conflicting inherited national belongings and reach a compromise. Precious Stones moves in a quick tempo where Leila and Andrea are always dancing a dangerous tango, but one that might just lead to hope and resolution in an otherwise grim reality. Jamil Khoury’s Mosque Alert Jamil Khoury’s 2015 online play Mosque Alert is certainly worthy of an honourable mention. Mosque Alert addresses contemporary challenges confronting American Muslims, particularly the resistance to mosque construction. Inspired by real events like the Ground Zero mosque controversy and protests in Chicago, it portrays tensions among three families: the Muslim Khans and Qabbanis, and the Christian Bakers. Exploring themes of Islamophobia and identity, it aims to provoke dialogue on religious freedom and discrimination. The play employs a participatory model, utilizing digital spaces to engage with audiences and explore themes of civic engagement and access and representation for minority artists and audiences. These plays and Arab American drama in general offer fascinating narratives and employ intriguing dramatic devices while navigating their way into the American cultural mainstream, which often imposes restrictions on politically vocal or adjacent productions. In terms of content, Arab American drama has so much to offer. I argue that playwrights like Shamieh, Raffo, Issaq and others are part of a movement that I term ‘pragmatist feminism’ operating in a space where Arab American women find themselves both privileged and constrained by white liberal feminism while concurrently crafting their own form of feminism within the unique landscape of cultural production in the post-9/11. Furthermore, in Khoury’s work and glimpses in other Arab American plays, a new understanding of Arab American queerness is emerging. These two discourses of feminism and queerness are evolving as the playwrights problematize ethnic and religious Otherness, asserting their own representation against a problematic history of stereotypes and marginalization. Arab American drama is rich with negotiations of what it means to be in-between cultures constantly revisiting cultural heritage and redefining the self at a historical moment of crisis. The playwrights and theatre makers mentioned here have been instrumental in creating the Arab American theatre movement. This movement, though still young, is already proving to be dynamic, innovative and disruptive. Theatre stages and educational curriculum will undoubtedly be the richer for recognizing and celebrating the value of Arab American theatre and its artists – reading these plays becomes, certainly, a must. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Alexander, V. (2005) ‘Betty Shamieh: First-Generation American’, Harvard’s Diversity & Distinction . Available at: https://www.bettyshamieh.com/copy-of-the-new-arab-playwrights-1 . El Guindi, Y.E. (2006) ‘Back of the Throat’, TheatreForum , (29), pp. 25–50. Issaq, L. and Kader, J. (2014) ‘Food and Fadwa’, in M.M. Najjar (ed.) Four Arab American Plays . North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Khoury, J. (2015) ‘Mosque Alert’, Silk Road Rising . Available at: https://silkroadculturalcenter.org/digital-media/mosque-alert-collection/ . Raffo, H. (2006) 9 Parts of Desire . Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Schillinger, L. (2004) ‘The New “Arab” Playwrights’, The New York Times , 4 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/theater/theater-the-new-arab-playwrights.html (Accessed: 10 August 2023). Shamieh, B. (2009) ‘The Black Eyed’, in H. Hill and D. Amin (eds) Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama . New York: Theatre Communications Group. References About The Author(s) Roaa Ali is a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Manchester. She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on race and diversity in the cultural sector. Roaa has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored Arab American and ethnic minority art production within the American cultural and creative industries. She writes extensively on issues of inequality, anti-racism, and the politics of cultural production in the creative industries. Out in 2024, her forthcoming monograph titled The Cultural production of Otherness: Contemporary Arab American Drama focuses on Arab American drama and interrogates issues of cultural production in post 9/11 white neo-liberal neo-orientalist ‘benevolent’ America. Her recent publication includes a co-edited volume titled Arabs, Politics and Performance (co-edited with Samer Al Saber and George Potter). 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 Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Watch Acting by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Acting At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 1:20pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country United Kingdom Language English Running Time 144 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives. About The Artist(s) Cheek by Jowl is the international theatre company of Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. Its landmark productions, performed in more than 50 countries in the 44 years since the company was founded, have influenced the creation of theatre and the experience of audiences the world over. Actors including Adrian Lester, Tom Hiddleston, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, David Morrissey, Gwendoline Christie and Matthew Macfadyen all developed their talent working with Cheek by Jowl in their early careers. Get in touch with the artist(s) martin@lonestarproductions.co.uk ; shanihinton@me.com and follow them on social media https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/, https://www.instagram.com/wearecheekbyjowl/, http://www.lonestarproductions.co.uk/, https://www.instagram.com/sophiefiennesofficial/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse