Devika Ranjan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress. Elizabeth Son. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 267. Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings focuses on activism by and around “comfort women” in disparate settings in South Korea and internationally. Through four case study chapters, Son’s empathetic ethnography depicts how reparations need not be institutionalized but can thrive in the hands of everyday people—namely, the survivors of military sexual violence and their supporters. The first study of the embodied practices of “comfort women,” Son’s award-winning book demonstrates the power of performance to enact presence, protest, and acts of care as a means of social healing. Son’s interdisciplinary perspective draws on cultural studies, performance theory, and intersectional feminist analysis to create a powerful, multifaceted portrait of restitution. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military enslaved about 200,000 girls and young women; the majority were between 14 and 19 years old. The girls and women were trafficked to rape camps to serve the Japanese military, where they were sexually abused by between 10 to 40 men daily. Even after the war, survivors faced shame, ostracization, chronic injury, and lifelong trauma. Son holistically analyzes the redress movement in Korea and survivors’ complex post-war identities as “victim, survivor, living witness, halmeoni, history teacher, and peace protestor” (17). Many “comfort women”—Son uses this term in quotes to indicate its euphemistic and problematic nature—advocate for the “Japanese government’s acknowledgement of Japanese military sexual slavery, an official apology, and reparations” (xviii). The survivors’ demand for apology goes beyond monetary reparations; they have committed to donating any money to international survivors of sexual violence (18). Rather, their advocacy works to resolve “han, the Korean concept for the knotted feelings of resentment, sorrow, indignation, and injustice that built over years of hardship and oppression” (11). Son argues that activist-survivors’ “redressive acts,” or embodied practices, center their self-narratives within public space for multiple audiences, restoring their social status and commemorating their history. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth ethnography of the Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, the “longest running political demonstration in South Korea and one of the longest ongoing protests in the world” (28). The Wednesday Demonstrations, which take place in front of the Japanese Embassy, enact a weekly protest to uplift the survivors and their demands for apology from the Japanese government. Although there has not been official redress since the protests started in 1992, Son argues that the Wednesday Demonstrations meaningfully allow survivors an “opportunity to express their visceral feelings of han and to join others in calling for justice (29)”; they also counteract societal shame around “comfort women” by providing a visible platform for recognizing the victims of sexual slavery in intergenerational settings. Through sonic and physical disruption, the Wednesday Demonstrations provide “redressive acts,” staging protest, education, release, rejuvenation, critique, and international solidarity. In Chapter 2, Son discusses the Women’s Tribunal, a “symbolic international human rights tribunal” (71) created by feminist and human rights organizations. Held in Tokyo in 2000, the Women’s Tribunal aimed to restore survivors’ political and social status and dignity by giving them a legitimized day in court. Centering the testimonies of 33 survivors from North and South Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and East Timor, international judges created a “legal case against Japan and produced a more complete history of Japanese military sexual slavery” (68). During the Tribunal, survivors challenged existing and limited legal frameworks through their embodied reactions such as fainting, revelations of scars, demonstrations of physical pain, and tears; their vulnerability and embodied practices prompted the court to consider “how to honor victims and their needs while judging guilt via traditional court processes that are not always friendly to victims” (68). The Women’s Tribunal attracted thousands of attendees who bore witness to the stories of the survivors, presenting redressive measures outside of normal state jurisdiction in legitimizing survivors’ experiences. It also created a model for a culture of public accountability for sexual violence during armed conflict, directly inspiring the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala (1960-96). In Chapter 3, Son compares three theatrical productions that focus on “comfort women” around the world. In Comfort Women / Nabi / Hanako (the name depends on the place and time of production), a grandmother must confront her repressed memories of being a “comfort woman” when her granddaughter introduces her to two survivors in New York. The play encourages transnational identification, indicates the ongoing nature of shame around “comfort women,” and suggests multiple survivors: some who hide their history from their own families, some who are public advocates. Trojan Women, a play by Bosnian-born director Aida Karic, brings Euripides’ tragedy in conversation with the “modern history of sexual violence against women and girls by the military of Imperial Japan” (121). The play used pansori, survivor testimony, movement, Euripides’ classic text, and ritualistic elements to invite European audiences to identify patterns of sexual violence throughout history. Finally, Bongseonhwa directly critiques Korean society for its silence, shame, and abuse of “comfort women” through its intergenerational story. Each performance emphasizes different aspects and cultural contexts of survivors’ experiences, yet all invite audiences to witness, reflect, and connect to how sexual violence against women recurs in wars and ripples across society. Chapter 4 analyzes international memorials to the survivors of military sexual slavery. The Bronze Girl, a statue that sits in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul highlights the age and vulnerability of the survivors who were abused in “comfort stations.” It also commemorates survivors’ years of activism for the Wednesday Demonstrations. The Bronze Girl is cared for by visitors who dress the statue for the weather, leave her gifts like shoes, flowers, and food, and touch her in reassurance. Son describes similar acts of care at memorials in the United States, including the Bronze Girl in California and a memorial in New Jersey, where visitors leave bouquets, tidy the lawns, or water shrubbery. These acts of care demonstrate international support, carrying on the protests against sexual slavery after the survivors pass away. While official apology from the Japanese government may never come to fruition, Son’s Embodied Reckonings demonstrates how redress can extend beyond state or institutional acts. This book’s transpacific lens considers how activism and performance, education, memory and community-building can teach subsequent generations about sexual violence, restore survivors’ dignity, and reimagine reparations, more broadly. In a world in which international politics often offers symbolic gestures in response to systemic and personal injustices, I am inspired by the embodied actions of “comfort women” to advocate, educate, and heal locally and internationally. 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 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch next...II (Mali/Island) by Janne Gregor at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents next...II (Mali/Island) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Janne Gregor Dance, Documentary, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Island, Mali, Germany Language English, French, Bambara Running Time 50 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? Credits Artistic Direction: Janne Gregor, Artist Bamako: Kettly Noël, Artist Iceland: Charmene Pang, Camera Bamako: Salimata Tapily, Camera Iceland: Omra Harding, Music: Moritz Thorbeckebased on the song „Vex“ by Sigrún including Ngomi tracks played by Yacouba Sissoko and voice tracks by Sigrún, Editor + Advice: Lutz Gregor, Production: Sina Kießling, Iceland location scout: Dísa Hulda Árnadóttir, Revision Subtitles: Anke Nehrig, Nora Amin Thanks to Thomas Schaupp, Arnbjörg María Danielsen, Nah Kamaké, Erna Ómarsdóttir, Oumou Diarra, Nassiga Coulibaly dit Coumba, Kolo Traoré dit Tènin, Mariam M. Traoré, Mariam K. Traoré, Fatoumata Traoré, Maminata Traoré, Yaya Traoré, Boubacar Gakou, Djelika dit Mama Traoré, Amberscript, Anti Logic Mastering. Research Phase 2021/ 22: Created in the context of GOETHE MORPH* ICELAND, with the support of the Goethe-Institut. Project Realisation 2022: Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Minister of State for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance. About The Artist(s) Janne Gregor born in Berlin, is a choreographer, performer and was a team member of the steering group of the dance mediation centre Berlin. She studied physical theatre and completed her MA Choreography at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin – HZT in 2017. Her intergenerational and interdisciplinary works have been shown at various theatres since 2006: e.g. Nordic House Reykjavík/Iceland, Radialsystem, TD Berlin, Donko Seko Bamako/Mali, Houseclub des Hebbel am Ufer – HAU Berlin, LOFFT Leipzig, Junges Staatstheater Braunschweig…, Junges DT/Deutsches Theater, Schwankhalle Bremen, Fringe Festival/Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Orangerie Köln, Tanzfabrik, Tanzkomplizen, Theater o.N., Uferstudios Berlin. As a performer she has worked with, among others: Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Micha Purucker, Willi Dorner, Kiriakos Hadjiioannou, Michael Vogel (Familie Flöz), Theater Duisburg, Theater Strahl Berlin, Consol Theater Gelsenkirchen, Jule Gruner (Schauspiel Dortmund). Get in touch with the artist(s) mail@jannegregor.de and follow them on social media www.jannegregor.de Facebook: Janne Gregor Instagram: Janne Gregor Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Jesus and The Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Jesus and The Sea At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Ricarda Alvarenga Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film showcase) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. 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 Brazil Language non-verbal Running Time 4 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture. About The Artist(s) They are a professor in the Dance undergraduate program at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais; a Ph.D. candidate in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and hold a master's degree from the Dance Graduate Program at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) in Salvador, Bahia. Their work mobilizes actions and compositions in performance, contemporary dance, photography, video, installations, and writing — inferring and interfering with life as a work of art. Get in touch with the artist(s) provisoriocorpo@gmail.com and follow them on social media @ricardalvarenga 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

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Cover Photo provided by DARUM Ranging from restagings of historical dance pieces to AI driven work as well as completely new works and interpretations of classical works by top level world directors, the 62nd Annual Berliner Theatertreffen presented productions that displayed the incredible variety of the contemporary German stage. The “Ten Remarkable Productions” considered several levels of reality; three productions considered artificial intelligence, many could have been considered musical works, several others were driven by language, and all were defined by strong, clear directorial styles. As has been the case during the recent history of the festival, top level world directors and highly developed, company-driven works contribute to the success of the Theatertreffen; the 2025 version provided exceptional insight into the solid artistic environment that dominates the landscape of the current German and especially Berlin stage. Despite the numerous cuts to funding and occasional pessimism expressed, the German Stage has once again responded with historically significant work and the future of the Theatertreffen only looks to be more positive. Unfortunately, given the nature of production scheduling in 2025 it was nearly impossible to see all ten productions live. Thankfully, at least three were available to watch on German Television (3SAT) for much of the Summer, and the number of performances and availability of theatre spaces had diminished somewhat. Most of the productions featured in the 2025 Theatertreffen have been considered in this review, however it may be that one or more will be featured in a later article due to viewing difficulties. Sancta Susanna was banned at its 1921 planned premiere at Stuttgart Opera due to its insinuation of lewd subject matter according to historical archives. Paul Hindemith’s 1920 opera considers the sexual awakening of a nun; the original libretto includes a scene that calls for the nun to take off her habit and stand naked in front of the collective in order to display her need and desire for sexual engagement. Fast forward 100 years to Mecklenburg, Germany, where Sancta had its 21st Century premiere. Directed by Florentina Holzinger, an artist known for her productions displaying naked female bodies, the work featured an entire stage full of naked women for the bulk of the performance and provided incredible commentary on the historical issues dealt with in the text as well as the state of the contemporary church, religion and the world in general for that matter. Sancta , staging by Florentina Holzinger. Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak. Holzinger’s work was incredibly well conceived and executed; it served as an incredible landmark for the German stage in the boldness of the creation of an original aesthetic – the reverence of the naked female form. While it was conceived at the Mecklenburgish’s Straatstheater, the legacy of Holzinger, an Austrian dancer/choreographer, has been at the Berliner Volksbühne and her work, better than any other contemporary director at the festival, seemed to embody that tradition of Frank Castorf and the incredible aesthetic and unparalleled “edginess” that was characteristic of Castorf at the Volksbühne. Because the work played in the theatre, there was an amazing fit between the challenges of the SANCTA, the elements of production previously realized on the Volksbühne stage, the nature of the way that the material was presented and the use of onstage as well as offstage and pre-taped video sequences. The single set included numerous challenging areas; basically, a stage “obstacle course,” because, in addition to the multimedia elements such as a multiple screens as well as actors holding cameras and recording onstage action, the elements of both a climbing wall as well as a competitive ramped skating velodrome were included into the stage design. All of those elements were complemented by a singularly unique device that is currently apparently unnamed. I have reached out to numerous sources and no one can provide a name to the amazing piece of machinery that consisted of an approximately twelve foot high solid base obelisk shaped figure that had a single working arm capable of lifting and displaying both very heavy as well as very light objects with incredible clarity and dexterity. Something of a robot-figure, the device was used throughout the production, lifting humans, small objects and numerous elements required by Holzinger’s telling of this miraculous story. The video elements were outstanding and included live time, onstage taping of numerous elements in addition to pretaped and historical video sequences. Characteristic of many previous Castorf works, the element of an arriving figure into the theatre via a video stream was utilized; however in this case the character of Jesus was realized as arriving late to the performance. Captured in a live time video sequence the scene was played by the incredible German actress Annina Machaz and after her arrival onstage she engaged in an elaborate onstage discussion with the audience, driven by the delivery of a comical sequence of events that resulted in a number of hilarious, comic scenes that also involved many of the naked women already onstage. The work also directed its attention to numerous actual stories of physical abuse and sexual activity (rape, physical groping, adultery) within the church. These were presented as “confessionals” utilizing the multimedia environment and several previously taped scenes were also included. Sancta , staging by Florentina Holzinger. Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak. The work included so many incredible scenes it would be a difficult task to list them all. However, during one sequence an actress “stood in” for the role of Jesus each evening of the three TT performances and an actual small scale operation took place. Apparently, during each performance a surgical procedure took place with each of the three actresses having a very small portion of their skin surgically removed and the entire process revealed on camera. The small, circular portion of skin was then actually fried live on stage in a small pan with the same video process recounting that as well. Later, the small fried piece of flesh was used to demonstrate the biblical phrase “this is my flesh..” More than any work I have seen at the Volksbühne in over 20 years, the work managed to forward the amazing aesthetic developed by Castorf and to really push the limits of theatrical production. The result was an amazing work that, in the spirit of Artaud, shook audience members to the very core of their being. Sancta established Holzinger as one of Europe’s most sought after directors. Unser Deutschlandmärchen was a Theatertreffen selection to celebrate the substantial Turkish community and the story of their long history in Germany. Based on the novel by Dinçer Güçyeter with dramaturgy and direction by Hakan Savas Mican the work had been produced by Gorki Theater as part of the 2023-2024 season. The setting of the piece was in Cologne, and involved the lifetime of a family from Turkey that had relocated to Germany and it involved a period of time through the 1980s and 1990s that involved the family’s life in Germany. Their view of Germany came from the standpoint of being immigrants to the country, and was central to the story yet the style of the work, somewhat Brechtian in form. Several musical numbers, most of which did not really advance the plot, were included in the show and the onstage band of five musicians played an important part in the production. The flow of the action and the telling of the story of the Turkish immigrants was the key element of the production and the goal was quite obviously to utilize a very audience friendly manner in which to make it happen. Many musical numbers in a somewhat concert style were included. The work utilized a Brechtian/concert style format and slides emphasized key chronological times during the family’s life in Germany. At the point when the story landed in 1999, having begun in the early 1980s, a musical number entitled “I Want More Hard Rock” was sung by the the work really highlighted the family struggles of immigrants and the difficulties that so many Turkish migrants to Germany had endured. The work should be considered a musical, and utilized many original as well as popular interpolated Turkish songs into the story. The work was a rock music revue and featured numerous individual performers and musical scenes that developed the story of the Turkish family and their struggles while living in Germany. The work begins and ends with letters from Dinçer to his mother and ends in the same format. The supporting elements of the Gorki Theatre made sure that the performance was given the strongest theatrical system. The production was extremely well realized and easily figured into the “Ten Remarkable Productions” as a representative production. Sesede Terziyan in Unser Deutschlandmärchen . Photo by Ute Langkafel Another nominated work that came from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (an incredibly rare occurrence) included Bernarda Alba’s Haus directed by Katie Mitchell. The Lorca original included numerous scenes of tension and implied violence as the dominating matriarch of the established Spanish family was intent on preserving the “honor” of her deceased father and the legacy that he had established. Mitchell’s world for the play recounted the 2002 case of the Tuchol family in Riverside, California, where the father and mother managed to quarantine a family of four girls until many were in their mid-late 30’s and had never had any meaningful contact with the outside world. Mitchell’s world as created for Bernarda Alba was unrelenting; the four daughters were allowed no contact with the outside world; groceries were delivered to the house to prevent them from leaving the house and the girls spent much of their time in a group sewing room where they made all of their own clothing. The guider of the oppression, played by Julia Wieninger was unrelenting in her portrayal of the controlling and incredibly violent matriarch that held her daughters captive for many of their formative years. Mitchell’s directorial style naturally pushed the world to its extreme and the world became a complete prison. The stage design, beautifully realized by Alex Eales allowed both the stage (and eventual) film audience to realize the individual scenes of distress and horror that were part of the house that had been created by Bernarda Alba. Mitchell’s reimagination of the text included a world of several male characters who lurked outside attempting to interact with the four beautiful daughters of Alba. This element was made possible due to the Eale’s “doll house” design that allowed the audience to see characters in multiple spaces simultaneously. It was particularly effective near the end when numerous violent actions took place in separate rooms; as Adele, Linn Reuse’s spectacular suicide scene was then countered by a group mass suicide as all of the daughters, with the exception of Amanda who managed to escape, were forced to take a deadly dosage of Fentanyl. The horrific ending to the story was “classic Katie Mitchell” and, as is typical of her work, managed to clearly define the Lorca classic into the contemporary world. Simultaneous scenes in Bernarda Alba’s Haus , as staged by Katie Mitchell. Photos by Thomas Aurin. Double Serpent is Sam Max’s fantasy play that presents a male dominated world devoid of any female influence and explores the reality of that oppressive environment in something of a video game style. Directed by established German director Ersan Mondtag and commissioned by the Hessisches Stadtsheater Wiesbaden who realized the work of the newly emerged New York based artist, the staging was guided by a movement style driven by a specific soundtrack so that many of the character’s movements were underscored by carefully timed sound or musical details, such as a walking steps or other repeated movements. The storyline centered around Connor, a young man and Felix, an established movie producer. However, so many other issues emerge as time is fractured in the work and Felix returns to his past where a game called “Double Serpent” was played for a short time on computers prior to it’s being banned. It was there that he played the game with his imaginary friend “Eric,” but a much larger issue emerged later in the work as it was revealed that at some point Felix drugged him and harvested his organs for use for some undisclosed reason. Clearly the work was realized in a highly surreal manner and seemed to come from the standpoint of a dream where many events occurred but often the events were unrelated and did not often make sense in a concrete manner. There was one scene where Felix asked Connor to stand mid stage and a chorus of four naked men facing upstage stood in front of him around a “hot tub” – the intent was a group sex act directed toward Connor to be watched by Felix but the scene was not played out to fruition. Double Serpent dealt with numerous issues related to nightclub and party culture. The use of K (short for Ketamin, a popular party drug) was referenced throughout the play. According to the writer Max the story is based in the world of teens who consistently engage in the world of online gaming and interaction. Also the ideas of masculinity were explored - Max correctly noted that typically male driven stories leaned into the world of thriller or even horror stories. This work explored a highly controlled world where the politics and ruling authority was gauged in another manner. The staging of Max’s imaginary world presented the many combined elements of a (perhaps) toxic male driven society, and the results were an emotionless, physically driven world that exhibited pure male power and control. Sam Max’s Double Serpent . Photo by Thomas Aurin. End of Life was a performance installation created by DARUM (Vienna, Austria) and written, conceived and directed by Victoria Halper and Kai Kröschoe. Engagement with this virtual production was both a difficult and emotionally demanding challenge. Given a specific time by the Festspielhaus staff, audience members were instructed to arrive early and to prepare for a virtual experience of approximately two hours. Once taken into space, each audience member was given a headset that basically removed them from their physical world and placed them into an environment that engaged them visually with a virtual world where they would occasionally be required to move, bend down and occasionally lean, but mostly just required to be present in a standing position. The nature of the story that developed led into a discussion about many elements: the future of humanity, our concern for the sanctity of life, and the nature of how we view the prolonging of life. Audience engagement in End of Life . Photo taken (with permission) by author. Central to that discussion was the case of a young woman named Lisa with whom each audience member was taken on a journey with. There were many stops along the way and choices were given to each audience participant in order to craft an individualized journey. The virtual world created by the production team was incredibly well realized, thus the nomination as one of the best performance experiences in the German world for 2024-2025. Produced in Vienna the work provided those who were able to experience the work with a once in a lifetime experience. As an audience member you were engaged with some difficult situations, encountered some scary characters and were taken on an amazing journey that is very unique and, in the end, quite beautiful. One’s journey with Lisa was genuinely personal, and the conversations seemed uniquely authentic. On many occasions the participant was alone with Lisa and her conversations and reactions were stunningly realistic. The production truly revealed the both wonderful but also horrifying realities afforded by the virtual world. Participants were forewarned about the physical demands of the production and there were drinks and food items available as participants finished the performance due to the potential physical reactions involved. End of Life, by Vienna-based DARUM. Audience members engaged. Photo provided by DARUM. Frau Carrar’s Rifles , produced by Residenztheater München was presented in the Probebühne, the smaller, more intimate space of the Berliner Festspielehaus. Directed by Luise Voight, Brecht’s play deals with a group of immigrants living in a war zone during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The work is generally considered to be an adaptation of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and in Brecht’s script focuses on Teresa Carrar who is seeking to protect her children during the difficult war times. The production aesthetic emulated a black and white 1930s movie, as the characters utilized dark costumes and white face makeup and the setting consisted of a single whitewashed room that included black and white furniture. The overall sense of the work was that of old cinema; however, the work primarily focused on the delivery of the text. In the case of this work it suffered from a reliance on the Brecht text to speak to a contemporary audience. The work was played in a very direct and filmic style and fell extremely flat on the night I saw it. Sadly, the work did not reveal a great deal of action so the static nature of the dialogue along with the lack of consistent movement and action made the work feel tedious. The visual style was an impressive element and the performers of the Residenztheater are always among the best of the German speaking stage. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg’s Die Machine Oder: Über Allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (sometimes translated as Time Machine) was conceived by French playwright/novelist George Perec and utilized Goethe’s famous poem “Wanderers Nachtlied” as the central focus of an AI driven experiment that revealed on the stage the working process behind a computer’s interpretation of a classic literary work and the many processes that differentiate the human analysis of words and semantic sequences to the analysis of those same sequences by a non-human AI based group of sources. Featuring five actors who emulated the nature of computer-like reactions and analysis of the poem, the performers, led by a supreme guiding force, were all involved in the consistent analysis, interpretation and (sometimes) negotiation of the meaning and relevance of particular words. The staging of the work, brilliantly arranged by director Anita Vulesica ultimately realized an incredible “machine-like” work and the actors movement’s, delivery and focus were all driven by their place in the machine. Discussions consisted of the analysis of grammar, the usage of certain words as well as an even further analysis of the usage of the number of vowels in a sequence of words. The main purpose was comedic but did reveal some very pertinent ideas about inconsistencies in written language (the work was directed towards both German and English) but the real comedic moments were revealed in both the spoken German text and the projected English subtitles. It was clear that the comedy was actually present in both languages, which is not always true. The real strength of this work lay in the precise timing and physical movement of the actors who truly engaged with the machine-like concept of the work, which looked back to the world of Expressionism and works like From Morn to Midnight and Machinal . Expressionist staging in Die Machine . Photo by Eike Walkenhorst Sadly, Ja, Nichts ist OK would be the final work of director Rene Pollesche at the Volksbühne Am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. Pollesche had just taken over at Berlin’s great public stage as Indendant following the turbulent years after the ousting of Frank Castorf, the longtime leader of one of Berlin and Germany’s great historic theatre companies. Pollesche died just after the mounting of the work, which was apparently somewhat autobiographical and revealed some of the many issues the theatre director, devisor, and writer had been dealing with during his many decades career on the German stage. The work was primarily a one man show that featured long-time collaborator Fabian Henrich’s, in a work that featured discussions and arguments among a number non present flatmates – questions that defined human existence such as Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech that was quoted. The text was a stream of consciousness work that was often directed at the audience with the assistance of a hand-held microphone. As the sole performer, Henrich often took moments to speak directly to the audience about his personal and life issues and to engage in live comic banter with the audience; a few smaller and supernumerary characters eventually appeared as the performance concluded with numerous figures from his past joining him on stage. In the spirit of the Volksbühne it was clear that these individuals were not trained performers but random individuals brought onstage for the work’s short ending each evening. The most striking element of the production was the setting. A classic Volksbühne setting with a revolve, the onstage house included a small swimming pool and could be rotated in 360 degree format to reveal the home interior as well. With the addition of a rock band (typical at the Volksbühne) the underscoring of the physical action of the piece, which was much more prominent than the use of language in the work, was a unifying element of production of this primarily movement based work. The work included an onstage pool (common in Volksbühne productions) and in several scenes Henrich took very violent falls into the pool to indicate various moments in his life and story. Photo provided by the author. One of the most anticipated and best received works was Pina Bausch’s masterpiece Kontakthof: Reflections of 1978 , restaged by her longtime assistant Meryl Tankard and utilizing numerous company members from her many decades career as a choreographer. Numerous individuals stood outside with signs requesting an opportunity to witness the work live as all three Theatertreffen performances were totally sold out. However, it was possible to see the work in an upstairs overflow environment at the Festspielhaus. Having seen it the night before, I was so hypnotized and attracted by the work that I was willing to pay for an overflow ticket to see it a second time. There was not a comparable work that I have seen at the Theatertreffen to match the incredible aesthetic and nostalgic feel that this work was able to produce. The work was performed in a classic Bausch setting – an open space that looked like a cross between a classroom dance space and a space where people who lived in a retirement community might meet and gather. It was an open space with a number of chairs lined up around the walls of the space but it also had a small, curtained stage directly upstage center, which made it appear to be something of a community performance space. Utilizing both frontal and rear screens for projection of video and images, the performers, incredibly seasoned European and American professional dancers aged from 62 – 80, physically recreated the scenes staged by Bausch in 1978, Thankfully, the staging was not unusually technically challenging from a professional dancer’s standpoint, and the scenes all took place in a community setting among young people attending a general social gathering. Simplicity, pedestrian style and repetition were defining elements of the work, and numerous key repeated gestures really drove the style; in a singular sequence these consisted of a smile to the audience, rotation of the hands in the front of the body, and then hands placed on either side of the head. This was done in a repeated fashion for at least 15 minutes during one sequence and the nature of repetition and the matching of the live performers with video sequences was mesmerizing. The real beauty of the work was the story told of the past experience and the incredible nostalgia of the moments shared among the individuals who lived the experiences of the time. The time was portrayed as one of a beautiful world when people were happy and life was grand; however, it was a clearly male dominated world and Bausch’s original staging reveals many of the unpleasant elements like the incredible loneliness of the female characters and times when they were treated with disrespect or even groped by the male figures. The music was unparalleled; classic music from the 1920’s in Germany revealed a time of great hope and prosperity, and featured traditional songs from Berlin swing era composers like Ralph Bernatzky and Leo Monossen whose “Im Rosengarten von der Plata” and other classic Berlin tango-like musical numbers were used. The connection between the younger characters in black and white video on the numerous screens contrasted with the much older live dancers who matched or complemented the visual dance scenes and the result was a high degree of artistry. The fact that these seasoned dance individuals revisited this world and presented it to a contemporary audience made the work something of a masterpiece to be seen once in a lifetime, and, amazingly, it met that challenge. Just before the intermission of each production, the actors came and sat before the audience, each delivering a short speech about themselves and their career, focusing on some trivial aspect of life such as Lutz Förster who stated “each day my wife gets up and makes me breakfast and I wash the dishes.” Kontakthof: Echoes of 1978 was a defining work of the 2025 Theatertreffen as it sought to explore multiple times and places utilizing a variety of means to transport audiences into both past and future spaces of reality. Cast of Kontakthof: Echoes of 1978 . Photo by Ursula Kaufmann. The 2025 Theatertreffen was both a festival of the exploration of new means of production as well as one that included and reimagined the past. Diverse and innovative voices were realized throughout the festival, and the work of numerous directors, performers, designers, other artistic figures, and theatre companies once again brought forth many ideas and theatrical forms that expanded the possibilities of the world stage. Numerous individuals were recognized at the Festival’s completion: Carmen Steinart was given the Alfred-Kerr-Acting-Award for her performance in BLUTBUCH (not reviewed here), Christopher Rüping received the Theatre-Award-Berlin and the 3sat Award was given to Anita Vulesica. Consistently, the German stage drives world theatre in terms of content/ literary material as well as its display of technical innovation through many mediated sources. The Theatertreffen remains a treasure that presents the most prolific theatre production that the German speaking world has to offer. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . 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 The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

SKELETON ARCHITECTURE presents Skeleton Architecture at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Skeleton Architecture SKELETON ARCHITECTURE 6:30-7:20 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Skeleton Architecture is a vessel of Black womyn and gender non-conforming artists rooted in the rigor and power of the collective. In practice, Skeleton Architecture engages in embodied research towards the vital building of our Black collective. The body, the practice, and the corporeal and cognitive legacies in the room will inspire a diverse range of group activities and offerings to the public wherein we seek to define our work together further. As Black improvisers, we are eager to share our ongoing "research with the body." Presenting at PRELUDE: Davalois Fearon, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Angie Pittman, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, and Tara Aisha Willis. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). The Skeleton Architecture collective was formed from the Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found in a singular, Bessie Award-winning evening called “the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds,” curated by guest curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa. The performance included: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Edisa Weeks, Ni’Ja Whitson, and Tara Aisha Willis. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

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.

NIALL N JONES presents - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - NIALL N JONES 5-5:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP A recitation on turbulence and beauty and heartbreak. Much more and less a postlude than a prelude, or simply an inter... a refraction of performance's troublesome ghosts. Much more and less than a flamboyant flash, something other than vast material weight even though I can't catch no man Hangin' out at a discotheque But I believe in the boogie Oh, but the boogie don't believe in me ! ! ! ! He wanders around, as if to finish setting up .. “You ready?” AN OUTCAST TO BE CAST OUT They might be talking to himself. Acts as if he were alone, moving equipment, listening to his music. MUSE ICK CUT But he also calls out light and sound cues to suit shifting moods. REPEAT*NOISES/ Occasionally, he dances. He drags, it sounds heavy. crashes.symbols jackhammer chatter clanging He slips, and he bumps “...as if I’d lost my center of gravity.” (Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes) They smile ... < : • |\ LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall works within a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices that move across dance, performance, sound, text, photography and video. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to the sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement, and in/completeness. Recent performance works by Niall include: Sis Minor , in Fall (2018) at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; Fantasies in Low Fade (2019) at the Chocolate Factory, New York, NY; A Work for Others (2021) at The Kitchen @ Queenslab, New York, NY; Open Studio (2021) at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; In the Efforts of Time (2022) at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, DE; dark de luxe: a mess for body, shadow, and other rogue im/materials (2022) at Jack Art Center, Brooklyn, NY; a n u n r e a l (2022) at The Shed, New York, NY; C O M P R E S S I O N (2022) at Performance Space New York, NY; Hahaha (2023) as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3, in Philadelphia; and JohnsonJaxxxonJefferson (2024) at Danspace Project, New York, NY. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Bruce McConachie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF The term “Anthropocene” entered general scientific discourse in 2002, when chemist-geologist Paul Crutzen published an article in Nature advocating that his colleagues adopt this name for the current geological epoch to emphasize the central role of humankind in shaping the earth’s biosphere and geology. Crutzen’s Nature article, which argued that the previous Holocene epoch had effectively ended at the industrial revolution, was widely read and cited; “the Anthropocene” began to appear in numerous articles and books. Many scientists agreed with Crutzen on the name for the present epoch, which derives from the Greek and means, roughly, “the human era.” They recognized that our activities as a species are now becoming the single most important cause of planetary change – from punishing weather patterns, to vanishing coastlines, the killing-off of thousands of species, and the threatened deaths of millions of human beings. Several scientists, however, emphasized different evidence than Crutzen and chose other starting points for the epoch. At this writing, the members of the International Union of Geological Sciences have yet to determine the beginning of the Anthropocene, but many geologists now favor a date after WWII, which accords with the “great acceleration” of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and radioactive Plutonium fallout around the world from the testing of thermonuclear bombs. Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy is right to note, however, that determining the start of the Anthropocene “is not a statement of fact as much as a way of organizing facts to highlight a certain importance that they carry.” [1] For authors Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, writing in the introduction to their anthology, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis (2015), this new geologic epoch organizes facts around two compelling claims. First, state the authors, the Anthropocene “claims that humans have become a telluric force, changing the functioning of the Earth as much as volcanism, tectonics, the cyclic fluctuations of solar activity, or changes in the Earth’s orbital movements around the sun.” As a result, natural history and human history are now thoroughly interwoven. They add: “Modern humanities and social sciences have pictured society as if they were above material and energy cycles. . . . Now they must come back down to earth.” [2] “The second claim is that the human inhabitants of our planet will face, in a time lapse of just a few decades, global environmental shifts of an unprecedented scale and speed, not [seen] since the emergence of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. . . . It means inhabiting an impoverished and artificialised biosphere in a hotter world increasingly characterized by catastrophic events and new risks. . . . Reinventing a life of dignity for all humans in a finite and disrupted Earth has become the master issue of our time.” [3] With these realities in mind, I crafted a CFP that invited submissions from scholars to consider the past, present, and future of American theatre and performance through the lens of the Anthropocene. Working with Cheryl Black, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, I also selected an editorial board for this Special Issue of JADT that I knew could help those scholars adventurous enough to investigate the intersection of a particular North or South American performance with an aspect of this new geological epoch. My thanks to all of those who helped me and the authors to put together this extraordinary group of essays. I am pleased that our Special Issue begins with an essay by Theresa J. May, who coined the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010 and has been a tireless advocate for its practice ever since. In “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy and the AnthropoScene,” May examines two plays, Harvest Moon (1994) and Burning Vision (2003), and the continuities and changes regarding ecological concerns and possible solutions advocated by each play. As you will read, Harvest Moon affirms the sustainable values of family and community as a viable source for progressive resistance to ecological disruption, whereas such sustainability is no longer possible in the broken, post-nuclear world of Burning Vision . May joins the somewhat divergent ideas of scholars Donna Haraway and Jeremy Davies to argue that American theatre and performance must “stay with the trouble” of the Anthropocene’s increasingly impoverished biosphere if we are ever to realize social and ecological justice. Have you tasted the pollutants in smog? Performance artists at The Center for Genomic Gastronomy have offered smog meringues to international customers flavored with soot, sulfur, and hydrocarbons to capture the content of smog in Bangalore, Beijing, and Mexico City as a means of calling attention to one of the invisible consequences of industrial food production. Their meringues taste terrible. Shelby Brewster writes about Smog Tasting and two other “speculative” performances, The De-extinction Deli and Planetary Supper Club, that the Center has been producing since 2010 in her essay, “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene.” As Brewster relates, The Center is attempting to realize Bruno Latour’s vision for a progressive common world in the Anthropocene, available to all, including a biosphere in which human food production, preparation, and eating are ecologically responsible. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta has authored the first of the next two articles that feature performances in Latin America. As her title suggests, “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” examines the entrance of a seventeenth-century Viceroy through two decorated arches that depict the watery surroundings and lake-bed foundation upon which Mexico City was built. Taking up historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine our species as both historical and geological agents during the Anthropocene, Jackson-Schebetta deploys geologist Mark Anderson’s contemporary work on Mexico City to emphasize the Spaniard’s and, before them, the Nahua’s struggle to drain the basin of central Mexico so that its former lake-bed could provide habitable land for agriculture and city life. This allows her to reconfigure the 1680 viceregal entry as yet one more vain attempt in a string of performances that continues to the present day to overcome the ecology of Mexico City’s lacustrine limitations. In “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti’s Marrathon , Milton Loayza finds significant parallels between the situation of the marathon dancers in Monti’s Argentinian drama and Americans from both continents caught up in the historical myths of the Anthropocene. To understand the meta-theatrical levels of the play in production, Loayza turns to Marxist historian Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015). Attentive as well to Monti’s scenographic and dramaturgical layering, Loayza reads Marrathon through the lens of architect Kenneth Frampton’s concept of tectonics. The result is a keen analysis of the five myths that focus the action of Marrathon – conquest, independence, pastoralism, industrialism, and fascism. Our final essay by Clara Jean Wilch proposes a website that can help progressives animated by the problems of the Anthropocene to communicate their performances with translocal, global audiences. Her “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity” draws on the insights of cognitive science to discuss the importance of avoiding groupish responses and inciting empathy and altruistic action with climate change videos. Although appreciative of several short videos produced by Oxfam and 350.org, she recognizes that sharing such performances on YouTube or Facebook poses inherent difficulties and risks. This leads her to advocate the creation of a new platform that would encourage participants to share their personal stories and local experiences of climate change with others for the purpose of building collaborative communities across the globe. We hope you enjoy this Special Issue of JADT. Bruce McConachie, Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor References [1] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard), 2015: 2. [2] Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis : Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (New York: Routledge), 2015:3, 4. [3] Ibid, 4-5. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRUCE MCCONACHIE Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor Editorial Board for Special Issue Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker 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 American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Jessica L. Peña Torres  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 México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres By Published on May 8, 2023 Download Article as PDF Zapateado, burlesque dancing, and a mix of mariachi, son jarocho, and electronic music combine to create the world for MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED), a bilingual dance-theater piece that surveys three regions of México (Jalisco, Sonora, Veracruz) through a dramatization of the origins of ballet folklórico. With songs such as “Son de la Negra,” “La Bruja,” and “La Bamba,” the dancers of Coctel Explosivo present Mexico’s folkloric diaspora while inviting the audience to reflect upon a heritage that has been as appropriated as Carolina Herrera’s latest collection. MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED) unearths the politics and history of ballet folklórico, which has been presented as authentic Mexican culture for decades and puts it under the microscope for the audience to decide: should we keep these dances in the repertoire, or should we re-choreograph them to reflect their complicated histories? My Desilusión with Ballet Folklórico I saw the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández live onstage for the first time at the Strathmore Theatre in North Bethesda, MD in 2015. Even though it was a reach, I dreamed about dancing for Hernández’s company. That night in Bethesda, I became enamorada of the colors, the technique, and the professionalism of the most famous dance company in Mexico. The female dancers, all tall, very thin, and, significantly, light-skinned, looked like Barbie dolls to me. For days, I daydreamed of their high battements in “Guerrero,” the lightness of their faldeo in “Jalisco,” and their pas de vals in “Revolución.” A few months later, I moved to Mexico City to audition for the company, but a quick visit to their website shattered my hopes in seconds. The section “Auditions” listed under “requirements”: “Estatura minima: mujeres 1.68 m” (Minimum height: women 5’5’’) [i] . I was four inches too short. I thought about the dancers I had seen perform and could not help but compare my short height to their statuesque bodies. A month or so later, I was dancing with the Ballet Folclórico Nacional de México de Silvia Lozano, a sixty-year-old-company founded by a former dancer of Hernández’s, Maestra Silvia Lozano. In rehearsals, it did not take long for me to start hearing chisme (gossip) about what it was like to work for other major folklórico companies in the city. I heard rumors that teachers and administrators in Hernández’s company bullied dancers if they had darker skin or were “overweight.” More interesting, however, was criticism about how Hernández’s works were not “authentic” or “traditional,” but, rather, highly stylized. All of this chisme reminded me of the dances I had witnessed in Bethesda. The cuadros (dance suites) were very beautifully executed, yes, but the technique, including the port de bras , the battements , the forward-carrying of the upper body, the lightness of the feet, the emphasis on turnout, and the precision of the turns, resembled that of classical ballet companies. The press deemed Hernández “La Emperatriz del Tesoro Mexicano del Folklor” (the Empress of the Mexican Treasure of Folklore) who brought to the world stage the “incomparable culture of Mexico” [ii] . How does Hernández’s use of Western, classical dance factor into these achievements? Moreover, how does Hernandez’s company sell the image of Mexico to the rest of the world? How does this legacy shape Mexican understandings of what it means to be Mexican? If her dances are not particularly “authentic,” then what claims to indigeneity, if any, does she have? And how did she acquire the indigenous dance material she has adapted to the stage? These and more questions started to pull apart a tapestry in my head, one I had constructed in my time as a ballet folklórico dancer with the images I believed to be a true representation of mexicanidad . Because I had performed with ballet folklórico companies in both Mexico and the United States, I thought of Hernández’s choreographic work as the footprint for folklórico dancers everywhere; her legacy extended across borders and with it, the way audiences perceived Mexican identity. This tapestry, however, was unraveling and to replace it, I was weaving together many ethical issues that this dance form brought up. As an artist-scholar, I began to question myself: how could I even begin to address these problem as a ballet folklórico dancer? Authoethnography México (expropriated) [iii] –– in Spanish, México (expropiado) ––is the result of an auto-ethnographic project that I began in 2019. [iv] An original evening-long piece of dance theatre, this work—which premiered as a web project in 2020, during the pandemic, and on stage in Mexico City in April 2022—is my attempt to rechoreograph the ballet folklórico form as established by Hernández through Practice as Research methodology (PaR) as delineated by Robin Nelson (2013) and Vida Midgelow (2018) [v] . Utilizing cabaret, contemporary dance, folklórico, zapateado (footwork) , flamenco, burlesque, and text, México (expropriated) seeks to re-appropriate ballet folklórico’s problematic images and characters of three different cuadros:“ Jalisco,” “La Danza del Venado,” and “Veracruz.” In this article, I will discuss the (re)creation of one of the characters featured in “Jalisco:” la china poblana . Following José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification as described in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [vi] , I aim to complicate the politics of my mestizo body through my artistic work. Reflecting upon Muñoz’s theory on how identity has been “formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny ––cultural logics that . . . work to undergrid state power,” [vii] I argue that these same notions have been thrust upon Mexican identity. Inspired by Muñoz’s theory, I explore the social imaginary of what it means to be Mexican and actively use choreographic and theatrical tools to disidentify from these hegemonic notions, specifically as they influenced the creation of the ballet folklórico form. Since disidentification is a “strategy that works on and against dominant ideology,” [viii] I use it to challenge the traditional elements of mexicanidad [ix] . By disidentifying from the ballet folklórico form, I am “working on and against” [x] the cultural structures that I learned from a discipline that trained my body and shaped my artistic practices during my time as a professional ballet folklórico dancer in Mexico and the United States. Throughout the process of creating México (expropriated) , my cast and I considered “what is it to dance Mexican?” [xi] By exploring tropes and characters of Mexican folklore such as la china poblana , el charro , el Venado , el Negrito , and la Mulata , we investigated what it means to perform authenticity and who, in reality, were the characters that contributed to the nationalist project of the postrevolutionary period, specifically as Amalia Hernández featured them in her world-famous repertory. Lastly, I sought to reclaim agency as a former ballet folklórico professional dancer by offering an alternative interpretation of these characters, one that would provide audiences with a playful yet cutting critique of the way we perform ballet folklórico within and outside of Mexico. Because ballet folklórico was created to consolidate a national identity, it serves to reinforce hegemonic notions of mexicanidad. México (expropriated) subverts stereotypes associated with Mexican identity, performatively unveils the unethical and inauthentic practices of ballet folklórico, and actively rejects heterosexist, racist, and homophobic gender roles embedded in both traditions. This article describes and analyzes the recreation of the character of la china poblana , while also reflecting on the changes the piece underwent in several versions of the project. Originally, I planned to present the work on stage in Austin, Texas in spring 2020, with a cast of Latinx performers. (See figure 1) . However the pandemic forced me to reconfigure the work as an interactive website. In 2022, I was able to stage the work (with a Mexican cast) at Teatro Benito Juárez in Mexico City as part of the City’s Department of Culture annual programming. (See figure 2) . Over the course of its production history, the piece transformed by way of medium, cast, audience, geographical location, language (English/Spanish to Spanish-only), and time [xii] . Left: Poster for Mexico (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble. Photos by Juan Leyva. Design by Khristian Méndez Aguirre. March 2020. Right: Poster for Mexico (expropriado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Mona E. Avalos. April 2022 Synopsis It’s 1955 in Mexico City and Petra, a talented and well-connected dancer and choreographer, is starting a company to show the dances of Mexico as never seen before. In order to create her repertoire, she will need to teach the dancers of her company how to embody the characters that represent each of the different regions in Mexico. Jalisco Jalisco, a state in the Pacific coast, is the home of tequila, mariachis, and colonial histories. Besides being the “whitest” region of central Mexico, Jalisco’s folkloric dances have become the epitome of Mexican dance traditions. “El Jarabe Tapatío,” for instance, is one of the most frequently performed pieces in the repertoire of any ballet folklórico, from professional companies to amateur groups. Although these dances are certainly emblematic of Mexican identity, they perpetuate heteronormative gender roles through the characters of la china poblana and el charro. In this scene, we take these traditions and re-examine them through song and dance. Mexico City 2022 live performance script excerpt: PETRA David ¿Cuántas veces te tengo que repetir esto? ¿Qué es esto? Petra imita a David con movimientos burdos. PETRA Qué vergüenza contigo. Me hiciste pasar un momento muy difícil. El charro es macho. Con el pecho arriba. Firme. Seguro de su hombría. No con movimientos afeminados. Y Mary… ¿Sabes que estoy pensando? No. Claro que no lo sabes. Tantos años en un cabaret me hacen pensar que nunca podré sacar lo corriente de ti. La China Poblana es elegante, femenina… No me estés haciendo repetir las cosas. Ustedes saben muy bien lo que quiero. Quiero un baile bien ejecutado. No vulgaridades ¿No les da pena que los venga a ver un productor y ustedes bailen como amateurs de carpa? PETRA David, how many times do I have to repeat this to you? What is this? Petra imitates David with crude movements. PETRA How embarrassing of you. You put me through a very difficult time. El charro is macho. With his chest up. Firm. Sure of his manhood. Not with effeminate movements. And Mary… You know what I’m thinking? No. Of course you don’t. So many years in a cabaret make me think that I will never be able to get the ordinary out of you. La China Poblana is elegant, feminine… Don’t make me repeat myself. You know very well what I want. I want a well-executed dance. Not… vulgarities. Don’t you feel ashamed when a producer comes to see you and you dance like amateurs from a carpa? The choreography of folkloric dances in Mexico dates back to postrevolutionary times, specifically to the 1920s and 1930s. “Jarabe Tapatío,” known outside of Mexico as “Mexican Hat Dance” became Mexico’s national dance, with la china poblan a wearing tri-color hair bows (referencing the Mexican flag) and a colorful skirt embroidered with sequins depicting a national symbol (such as the eagle), and el charro in his mariachi hat. Most, if not all, professional and collegiate ballet folklórico companies have a version of the “Jarabe Tapatío” in their repertoire. The word “jarabe” means syrup, and “tapatío,” which comes from the Nahuátl word “Thapatiotl,” [xiii] is used to name people from the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital city. The dance originated from the “Guajolote,” a dance of the Huichol community where the male bird courts the female bird [xiv] . Similar to the “Guajolote,” in “Jarabe Tapatío” el charro , played by a male dancer, pursues la china poblana , played by a female dancer [xv] . “Jarabe Tapatío” is one of the works in ballet folklórico repertoires that perpetuates hegemonic gender roles in Mexican society. Maria del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón (2000) notes that la china poblana , as a symbol of Mexican identity, represented the “grace and virtue of the Mexican woman,” who served as the object of heterosexual male desire by balancing a dichotomy between wife or prostitute [xvi] . This character also appeared frequently in the writing of 19th-century authors who described her as a mestizo woman who did not conform to society standards but rather enjoyed the freedom of her love encounters. Similar to how la china poblana became a romanticized version of the Mexican woman, el charro became “the symbol of the ideal Mexican man” [xvii] . During the conquest, the Spanish brought horses to Mexico. Those who owned and knew how to ride these majestic animals were regarded as the upper class given their European ancestry. The hacendados (landowners) often knew how to break wild horses, ride them, and perform all sorts of tricks, a feat that reflected their male prowess and social standing. The patriarchal system of 19th century Mexico put men, regardless of class, in charge of women and children in the absence of the hacendado . As such, the vaqueros (horsemen) often learned how to execute these acts in spite of their socioeconomic class. This mixing of the upper, middle and lower classes in the charrería culture led to the formation of a male identity that denoted unity, an unbreakable code of ethics, and an unyielding bravery to defend the family and the hacienda [xviii] . After the revolution ended in 1920, a nationalistic discourse called for the romanticized construction of a specific image of el charro as a strong, skilled, hard-working man to represent male vigor. In ballet folklórico, this character came to represent masculine traits that were favored by the proponents of lo mexicano . As such, el charro often appeared “pursuing and ultimately capturing the woman” he partnered in the dance [xix] . To create material for my own iteration of the cuadro of “Jalisco,” specifically “Jarabe Tapatío,” the ensemble and I played with devised work. We created scenes that reflected the expectations that the social imaginary holds for Mexican women, especially as embodied by the character of la china poblana . The rehearsals led us into big and important discussions about the female body, as it relates to shape, size, and the color of the skin. For example, our work together inspired two of the 2020 cast members, Marina DeYoe-Pedraza and Erica Saucedo, to write a poem titled “Si yo fuera la china poblana” (If I was la china poblana ). Below is a short excerpt. MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would… Go Wherever I want kill and eat whatever I find. Grow into una montaña alta y vasta Too dangerous to climb ERICA If you took all of our bones, Our bodies together … bones piled on bones. Bodies bodies cuerpos Bodies that …are not ours Que no han sido nuestros cuerpos for hundreds of years… (Breath) it’s been a long time since these brown bodies could walk down the street Soft supple MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would be Un Escorpión. Defend myself by puncturing and poisoning those who try to smother me. Through vivid imagery, Marina and Erica explore the possibility of escaping stereotypes and reclaiming agency by becoming either a scorpion, a horse, or even a mountain, all too dangerous for men to dominate. Marina, for example, imagines her china poblana able to defend herself from all predators that mean to subdue her. Through this poem, the dancers overtly expresses their desire to be “whatever [they] wanted.” Embodying Marina and Erica’s words, the three women of the cast (who also included Venese Alcantar) dance solos that combine contemporary technique, footwork and tender yet assertive movement. They manipulate their skirts and play with the contrast of softness and coarseness through varied movements such as jumps and turns and small and big gestures. In the word “puncturing,” for example, the dancers put their foot down and squash one of la china poblana ’s metaphorical enemies. For the filmed version, we recorded the dancers’ voices reciting the poem and paired them with James Parker’s original music and filmed them dancing one at a time. We, then, played with video images of the three dancers (dancing as soloists), either one video of one dancer alone or sometimes two or three video/dancers superimposed. Since they often moved to the same choreography, the change from body to body, at times created the image of a palimpsest of the three women, generating the illusion that even though there were all different women, they shared common histories of oppression and a desire for freedom, and at times, revenge. (See figure 3). Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, Erica Saucedo and Venese Alcantar in México (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble Photo still from video by Michael Bruner. The Vortex, Austin, TX. October 2020. For the 2022 staged version, I wanted to incorporate the new cast’s experiences around female agency. In rehearsal, we talked about their desires to be “whatever they wanted,” and everyone wrote what that prompt meant for them. I gathered their responses and sent them to a friend and poet, Mercy Medina Gonzalez, who wrote a new Spanish-language poem for the dancers to perform. Similar to the 2020 version, the dancers recorded their voices reciting the poem. For the live performances, the dancers moved to their own voices and words, poetically arranged by Mercy but embodied by them. It was their words, their voice, their bodies that we saw onstage. Below is an excerpt of the poem: TODAS Mujer. La Mujer Mexicana que ama y crea. Yo soy La China Poblana. La que entre las cortinas de sus temblores, busca el viento para alimentar sus alas. MARY Toma el suspiro del mundo por los cuernos, y conoce cómo llevarlo hasta las raíces del alma, a todas las esquinas que nos hacen hermosas. Si yo fuera ella, me enterraría bajo la tierra para crecer como mazorca blanda y aprender el nombre de los truenos. Sería curandera y bruja, el esperpento hecho verbo. Esa mujer canta conmigo. Yo soy La China Poblana ERICA La que escarba para hallar el murmullo de la tierra blanda y consume el ardor de los que se rindieron. No le teme ni a la sangre ni a los muertos y busca el aroma de las montañas más altas las cumbres del cielo que no toca; araña. Porque el mundo le debe plenitud y contento. LOLA La que es cuerpo mío y ajeno cuerpos de cuantas nos hemos caído la que nace de huesos y de ríos yo soy La China Poblana la serpiente que deja el cuello al pico de las águilas y el veneno de la araña cuando ataca un caballo que no se monta, un cuervo que arranca los ojos de quienes nos violentan. TODAS La que conoce la amargura de la luna y carga con la sombra de los ciclos. Con su cuerpo mustio es el canal del eterno ir y venir de los vivos. No se aguanta, se transforma en la fuerza de todas las cruces enterradas en carreteras y montes. ALL THE WOMEN Woman. The Mexican Woman that loves and creates. I am La China Poblana. The one that between the curtains of her tremors, seeks the wind to feed her wings. MARY She takes the sigh of the world by the horns, and knows how to take it to the roots of the soul, to all the corners that make us beautiful. If I were her, I would bury myself under the ground to grow as soft cob and learn the name of thunder. I would be a healer and a witch, the grotesque made verb. That woman sings with me. I am La China Poblana ERICA The one who digs to find the murmur of the soft earth and consume the ardor of those who surrendered. She is not afraid of blood or the dead and seeks the scent of the highest mountains, the peaks of heaven that she does not touch; scratches. Because the world owes her fullness and contentment. LOLA The one that is my body and someone else’s bodies of how many we have fallen. The one that is born of bones and rivers I am La China Poblana the serpent that leaves the neck of the eagles beak and the venom of the spider when it attacks a horse that does not ride, a crow that plucks out the eyes of those who violate us. ALL THE WOMEN The one who knows the bitterness of the moon and carries the shadow of the cycles. With her withered body, it is the channel of the eternal coming and going of the living. She doesn’t endure, she becomes the force of all the crosses buried in roads and mountains. (See figure 4). Andrea Rubí Santillán, Samantha Romero Peña, Miriam Garma, and Ileana Díaz Manzur in México (expropiado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Ricardo Antonio Ramos. Teatro Benito Juárez, Mexico City. April 2022 In both the 2020 and the 2022 version, our recreation of the character of la china poblana aims to provoke the audience’s affect by simultaneously reproducing visual and aural performances of female agency. Through the evocative descriptions pronounced by the women of the cast through their bodies and voices, we hoped to touch the audience’s sensibilities and make them wonder what it would be like if women could, in fact, be whatever they wanted. Utilizing text and contemporary dance, I sought to to dis-identify from folklórico dance traditions, specifically those inscribed in performances of the character of la china poblana. Conclusion Colorful lights, elegant costumes, presentational smiles and headpieces that not even Lady Gaga could dream of… ballet folklórico offers its audience a taste of Mexico’s regional and cultural diversity. Through my auto-ethnographical project that explores, among other themes, the politics of my mestizo body, I conclude that ballet folklórico desperately needs to be re-choreographed to reflect its colonial history of cultural appropriation and exoticization . I believe that professional, collegiate, and amateur companies of the form should revisit the way they incorporate the pieces of the canon into their repertory if they wish to stop perpetuating racist, heterosexist, classist, and unethical images of the diverse regions of Mexico. When audiences think about Mexico, they often think of the distinct mariachi music, the strong charros , the beautiful china poblana , and many other images that were conceived as components of mexicanidad in postrevolutionary Mexico. These images, however, continue to paint a romanticized vision of Mexico that has never existed. As a millennial coming of age in Reynosa, Tamaulipas ––known for making the headlines of major newspapers as an incubator for cartel violence and drugs–– I think of an alternative image of Mexico to the one painted through a full-length concert of ballet folklórico. Just in 2020, for instance, the number of femicides in my home country increased to an alarming 10 per day. Ballet folklórico does not present this reality, nor the one lived by the many marginalized communities in Mexico; there’s no room for the bad and the ugly in this form. Through Mexico (expropriated) , I aimed to re-choreograph three pieces in the folklórico canon and complicate hegemonic images of mexicanidad. By deconstructing stereotypes of the nation as they relate to gender, race, and class, I aimed to dis-identify from the ballet folklórico form to complicate the discussion of what it means to be Mexican in the 21 st century. Borrowing from contemporary dance, flamenco, jazz, hip hop, and burlesque, I reclaim the agency of my own body to re-choreograph cuadros such as “Jalisco ” and recreate characters such as la china poblana. References [i] “Audiciones,” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. [ii] TheCharlieRoll, “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992,” YouTube, October 26, 2017, video, http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y [iii] My master’s thesis “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation, and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico,” which I authored in the Spring 2020 to graduate from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, explored the ballet folklórico dance form in imagining lo mexicano by focusing on Ballet Folklórico de México, Mexico’s leading and most influential company. I argued that BFM has helped the state and the social elite shape an exoticized Mexico for the consumption of foreigners and tourists, and has, within Mexico, offered a problematic embodiment of mexicanidad that reflects racial, nationalistic, class, and gender biases. In addition, I considered Hernández flawed ethnographic methodology which included appropriating and stylizing folk dances through the infusion of ballet and modern dance techniques. The company presents these dances as “authentic” to its paying audiences, and does not offer any reciprocity, support, or acknowledgment to the communities from which Hernández “borrowed” these dances. In addition, her legacy has and continues to permeate many dance companies who imitate BFM’s dances, inadvertently reproducing a colonialist model of exoticization and cultural theft. [iv] Very much inspired by Astrid Hadad’s 2019 performance of Hecha in Mexico , I developed México (expropriated) to satirize stereotypical notions of mexicanidad as imagined by Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. Like Hadad, I aim to make a feminist intervention in national discourses of mexicanidad as developed in the postrevolutionary period . [v] As Nelson explains, in PaR methodology the doing becomes the knowing . In other words, by dancing, choreographing, writing, and performing México (expropriated) , I am both researching and providing evidence of my research inquiry. As Midgelow suggests, a PaR approach allows artist/scholars to explore the process of creating work as just as significant as the performance of that work before a live audience. [vi] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [vii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 5. [viii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [ix] In Chapter 5 “La Moda Mexicana: Exotic Women,” of Imagining la Chica Moderna : Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 (2008) Joanne Hershfield explores the concept of mexicanidad , the state’s attempt to construct a national identity at the beginning of the 20th century. Exploiting the richness of indigenous cultures, she argues that intellectuals and politicians forged an “authentic” image of Mexico, the “domestic exotic,” rooted in stereotypes of indigenous communities, which the nation then used for capitalist consumption. [x] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [xi] I am influenced by my advisor and Professor Rebecca Rossen, whose book, Dancing Jewish (2014), includes three sections that describe an auto-ethnographic dance project for which she asked two of her subjects to make her a “Jewish” dance. Similarly, in México (expropriated) , I explore notions of mexicanidad, as I actively think over the question “what is it to dance Mexican?” Moreover, in Dancing Jewish , Rossen argues that Jewish choreographers negotiate ethnicity and gender in tandem, while challenging “traditional models for femininity (or masculinity); advance social and political agendas; and imagine radical new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews.” Similarly, I argue that mexicanidad is a construction of hegemonic images that contain complex syntheses of gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class. Through the process of creating and performing this work, we have been able to imagine new possibilities to stage mexicanidad . [xii] An important change from the filmed to the staged version is that we increased the number of roles from six to eight. For the filmed version, there were six performers including Venese Alcantar (“Veni”), David Cruz (“David”), Marina DeYoe-Pedraza (“Mari”), Jesus Valles (“EMCEE”), Erica Saucedo (“Eri”), and myself (“Pari”). For the staged version, we created three new characters, which featured Mexico City-based performers: José David Carrera Piñón (“Sebastian”), Miriam Garma (“Lola”), Daniel Losoya (”Narrador”), Ileana Manzur (“Veni” became “Vanessa”), Roberto Mosqueda (“David”), Samantha Romero (“Erica”), Andrea Rubí (“Mary”), and myself (“Pari” became “Petra”). Lastly, for the Mexico City live performance I was able to expand the creative team, which included costume designer Edurne Fernández, technical director Pedro Pazarán, and scenic designer Gisselle Gómez Rivera. Composer James Parker created the score for both versions. Another big change from film to stage was the narrative structure of the piece. The filmed version consisted of five separate viñetas (vignettes) following an episodic narrative form. Although the characters appeared through the different scenes, there was no unifying narrative between each separate viñeta. For the Spanish-only/staged adaptation, I worked with filmmaker and screenwriter Nina Chávez Góngora to re-develop the script for the staged version, which read more like a play with numerous dance pieces, often interrupted by the EMCEE, “Narrador.” Adapting the piece to include a unifying narrative throughout gave audiences a stronger chance to connect with the characters, which in turn led to a more effective way to communicate our critique. [xiii] Cashion, quoted in Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 55. [xiv] Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 58. [xv] Sydney Hutchinson, “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 209. [xvi] , María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 124. [xvii] Gabriela Mendoza-García, “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 319. [xviii] Olga Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro, ” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1994): 4. [xix] Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism,” 7. Bibliography “Audiciones.” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández. Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. Hershfield, Joanne. Imagining La Chica Moderna Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Hutchinson, Sydney. “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance.” In Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, edited by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Mendoza.García, Gabriela. “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 319-343 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Midgelow, Vida. Practice-as-Research. United Kingdom: 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nájera Ramírez, Olga. “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro .” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1, (1994): 1-14. Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts : Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances / Written and Edited by Robin Nelson, Director of Research, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Peña Torres, Jessica. “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation and Re- Choreography of Ballet Folklórico.” Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2020. Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. TheCharlieRoll. “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992.” YouTube. October 26, 2017. Video. http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y. Trujillo, Lawrence Alan. The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. Denver: Dart Publications, 1974. Vázquez Mantecón, María del Carmen. “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77, (2000): 123-150. Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA L. PEÑA TORRES (she/her) is a dance/theatre artist and emerging scholar focused on Mexican identity and performance. She graduated from The University of Texas—Pan American with a B.A. in Dance and Theatre and from the University of Texas at Austin with an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice, where she is now pursuing a Ph.D. At UT Austin, Peña Torres continues to study the intersection between nationalism and the performing arts in postrevolutionary Mexico. With her company, Coctel Explosivo, Peña Torres produces dance-theatre works that explore this intersection. 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.

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 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Philippa Wehle Image Credits: Article From Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, artists from some fifteen Arabic speaking countries offered visions of their world in keeping with Avignon artistic director Tiago Rodrigues’ decision to invite Arabic as this year’s guest language: Arabic, the fifth most spoken language in the world and second most in France. Accordingly, the 79 th edition of the festival offered examples of Arabic and Arab culture in many different forms and expressions from Islamic poetry to rai , from original maqams and chaabi and from Sufi music to Arab-Andalusian melodies. The Arab world was present in many of this year’s offerings, both musical, visual, and spoken. The works ranged from a superb 3- hour concert featuring some 24 celebrated Arab-speaking artists performed for just one evening to a short piece held indoors, in a meeting room, for only an hour. Radouan Mriziga: Magec/The Desert . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. In general, this year’s festival tended to feature dance, poetry and song more than written word theater. In fact, one third of the festival’s official shows were dedicated to dance and music. Radouan Mriziga (from Morocco and Belgium), for example, offered Magec/the Desert, a glorious evening of dance exploring the desert’s relationship with time, nature, and the cultures that inhabit it using rhythms, gestures, masks and stories. Evoking wild spaces that cannot be tamed, the show’s outstanding dancers led the audience through encounters with our relationship with nature. La Voix des femmes ( Women’s Voices ) on the Honor Court stage in the Pope’s Palace and Nour , was a poetic celebration of the Arab language at the Cour du Lycée Saint-Joseph. Although each was given only one performance each, they provided outstanding examples of concerts of music, song, poetry and movement from the Arab world. On the evening of July 14 th , fifty years after the passing of Oum Kalthoum, the legendary Egyptian singer and songwriter known as the Star of the East, La Voix des femmes , under the musical direction of Lebanese producer Zeid Hamdan, presented a monumental two-hour concert composed of a variety of love songs delivered by seven artists invited to pay tribute to this great singer. They were accompanied by six superb musicians (among them Zeid Hamdan in the percussion section) and a violinist as well as more traditional instruments such as a qanun (a sort of oriental harp or lute). La Voix des femmes: Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Nour : Artistic Director: Julien Colardelle, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Nour ( “light”in Arabic) , a much larger piece, involved numerous artists from the Arab world in an evening of concerts, performances, readings, and screenings at the Cour du Lycée St Joseph. Twenty-four major personalities, musicians, actors, poets, and dancers performed ancestral texts along with contemporary poets. The evening’s offerings were structured around foundational themes such as love, spirituality, nature, and resistance. Hala Mohammad, Syrian Protest Poet in exile. Maryam Saleh, Egyptian singer and songwriter, Mohammed Al-Qudza, a Palestinian poet writer from Gaza City, were just a few of the artists featured in this event. Nour : Artistic Director: Julien Colardelle, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage One’s own Room Inside Kabul : Directed by Sumaia Sediqi, Caroline Gillet & Kubra Khademi. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Held inside in one of the meeting rooms in the Cloître St. Louis, home of the Festival offices, the play One’s own room Inside Kabul by Caroline Gillet, Kubra Khademi and Sumaia Sedi was presented. Spoken in both English and French, the work was a fascinating introduction to the life of Raha, a 21-year-old Afghan woman isolated from the outside world after the Taliban had taken over her country. Entering a makeshift living room, the audience takes their seats on red velvet cushions lined up against the walls facing each other. Between them, a white tablecloth set with 40 carefully arranged ceramic plates, beautiful teapots and vases of flowers. On each plate there are a few words telling the stories of other Afghan women who, like Raha, were forced to lead a confined existence. Raha spoke to us of her secluded life by way of an immersive video/audio installation. The audience was able to follow her thoughts through voice messages and spatialized sound design. Clearly her determination to remain “in her own room” inside Kabul was a brave act of resistance, but a stirring testimony to her and others like her. La Distance : Directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage There were numerous more traditional works of theatre. La Distance , a fascinating new play by Festival director Tiago Rodrigues, was a futuristic drama in which a father living on earth and his daughter who had left earth to live on the planet Mars in the year 2077 attempted to communicate. With over 139,805,518 miles between them, they play posed the question “how could they”? The father, powerfully portrayed by Adama Diop, tried desperately to stay connected to his daughter through voice messages and long-distance calls. But these took at least five months to be deliv ered. The daughter (lovely Alison Dechamps) now a member of a newly formed colony on Mars, had been given the gift of forgetting thanks to programmed amnesia. As a result, her memory of earth and her father was being erased. Time became of the essence for her father to communicate with her one last time. This drama of separation took place on a unique stage design composed of two platforms in rotation that came close together at times and then drifted apart at others. Accompanied by music, light and color designs, they move around each other in perpetual motion, accelerating, decelerating and rare moments of standing still. On the stage, father and daughter were visually separated from each other by a barren landscape composed of an imposing rock formation next to a surrealistic display of a tree trunk with imposing bare branches reaching out into the void. Father and daughter never really saw each other although at times she seemed to be right next to or behind him. Other times, she was hanging over him from the top of the rock, even though they are miles apart. La Distance : Written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage The distance between father and daughter was both generational as well as real; the daughter had chosen to leave earth to invent a new life, and she was happy to be free from the past. Still living in the past, the father was unable to let go of her. The Distance concluded with the father’s final moments with his daughter, moments that only the audience could hear and appreciate. As the play neared its end, the father sent his daughter birthday greetings. He put on a record to wish her a “happy birthday” as he placed family photos on the ground. Though on separate planets, they shared a laugh together. “You left because you wanted to have hope,” he told her, “hope and forgetfulness.” She had achieved her goal of inventing a new life on Mars as the father, on earth, was left with the tragic loss of his daughter and unable to accept it. The powerful ending was devastating. Israel & Mohamed : Created by Israel Galván & Mohamed El Khatib, Photo by: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Israel & Mohamed was a documentary dance performance created and performed by two well-known contemporary artists, noted Spanish contemporary flamenco dancer and choreographer Israel Galván and well-known author and documentary theater maker Mohamed El Khatib. Inspired by both their similarities and differences, they created a captivating biographical piece inspired by their family histories and their choices to pursue their own careers beyond what their fathers expected of them. Early in the show, Mohamed and Israel sat in the orange chairs and watched videos of their fathers talking about what they had hoped for their sons and their disappointment that their sons had chosen careers in theater and dance, Evidently, both artists came from deeply traditional families with high expectations; Israel’s father had hoped that his son would continue the family tradition of classical flamenco dance while Mohamed’s cannot understand why his son did not pursue a path as a professional academic. Israel & Mohamed played out across the full length of the Cloître des Carmes stage. At either end Mohamed and Israel had make-shift tables facing across the stage from each other. These movable tables became “altars” set with mementoes and reminders from their past. In the middle of the stage, sat two bright orange chairs on which they watched videos of their fathers. On Mohamed’s table, were the “babouches” (Moroccan slippers) his father used to teach him a lesson whenever he would forget a line from the Koran. Above him was the head of a stag and beneath him was a portrait of his father. Israel’s altar featured a mechanical parrot that sang along with a large pile of medals and prizes he had won. throughout his career. Among these archives of his life was also a portrait of his father. Israel & Mohamed : Created and directed by Israel Galvân & Mohamed El Khatib, Photo by: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Seated on the uncomfortable chairs, their backs to the audience, they silently watched videos of their fathers talking about their expectations their sons lives and careers and their ultimate disappointment. Israel, celebrated for his avant-garde flamenco performances ( La Curva , in particular) had been raised in traditional flamenco, Mohamed chose theater despite his academic background. While Israel’s father voiced his disappointment that his son did not follow in his family’s traditional flamenco style. Mohamed’s father who left Morocco to work in a factory in France to support his family, had hoped that his son’s educational degrees would lead to professional success rather a career making documentary theater. In the evening’s memorable finale, the two artists, collaborators and friends created an original dance number. Their pas de deux represented their happy yet emotional response to their fathers’ collective disappointment. BREL, Conceived and directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Solal Mariotte, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage BREL , was another collaboration, this time between legendary Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Solal Mariotte, a young French breakdancer and a member of De Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance company. A new creation set to the iconic songs of the great Belgian singer and songwriter, Jacques Brel and was presented in the Carrière Boulbon, an immense quarry outside of Avignon. Conceived, choreographed and danced by the two, their work was inspired by a selection of 26 Brel songs. Just to listen to these glorious songs in such a magical space would have been enough but watching De Keersmaeker and Mariotte respond to them was an enchantment. BREL was performed on a simple bare platform set up against the quarry walls on which larger than life projections accompanied a number of scenes. The special play of shadow and light against the walls added to the mystery of the evening during which the dancers often played in silhouette. A gigantic image of Brel hung over the early scenes, and his aura became an important part of the performance. The opening number was a solo by Anne Teresa, ( Le Diable ça va or The Devil, everything’s okay ) dramatized the devil’s visit to the earth where he is delighted to find that men are still having fun playing the dangerous game of war and putting bombs on railroad tracks. Each line of the song ends with “ça va.” “All’s well!” In case the audience missed the irony of Brel’s words, CA VA was projected in giant letters on the quarry wall some 130 feet above the playing space. Appearing alone out of the shadows and wearing a grey tailored pants suit, De Keersmaeker with her back turned to the audience. As she turns around, she smiled as if to suggest that BREL was going to be something quite different from what we might have expected. She waltzed with great twisting and turning movements, clearly enjoying Brel’s social commentary. As she finished the opening, Mariotte joined her and became her partner for the evening. Together they explored 26 of Brel’s classic songs, not so much interpreting them as testing out possible contemporary responses to Brel’s world as compared to our own with waltzes and love songs and tangos, duets and solos. There were a number of Brel’s love songs “ Quand on n’a que l’amour ” (“ When Love is All we have ”) and “ Ne me Quitte pas ” (“ Don’t Leave me ”), but especially “ Marieke ,” about a lost love from long ago, performed by Mariotte, whose choreography brought out not just the sadness of Brel’s plea to the young woman he once loved, but more importantly, perhaps, he seemed to emphasize Brel’s longing for his Flemish homeland, the Flemish sky that wept with him, the flat land that was his and the endless mist. Solal’s familiarity with the back spins, freezes and footwork of the breakdance tradition added a note of urgency to Brel’s song. Toward the end of his solo, De Keersmaeker joined him lying on the floor, reaching out to him as if to comfort him, they rolled across the stage together. Solal’s breakdance background was even more visible in his solo interpretation of “ Une valse à mille tem ps” (“ A Thousandth-time waltz ). He clearly welcomed this song which began with a slow waltz ( Une valse à trois temps) and built to dizzying moments of twirling, spinning and frenzy. BREL: Conceived and Directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Solal Mariotte, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Their very different styles, their backgrounds, their difference in age, (Solal is 26, De Keersmaeker in her 60s) and their very different choreographic approaches, allowed numerous possibilities for movement: playful at times, mocking at others, all displayed by somewhat tongue-in-cheek choreography. Their collaboration melded together very different styles into a unified collaborative work. MAMI: Directed by Banushi, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lag With MAMI , Mario Banushi, Albanian born artist, 26 years old, offered audiences an exciting new voice. His stunning “visual poem,” dedicated to different women, different “maternal” figures from his life, was a wordless landscape of memories that paid tribute to his early years and featured many women, young, sweet, angry, and old from different moments in his lifetime. I mages ranging from mothers giving their breasts to their babies to a son feeding his elderly mother are just a few of the fascinating moments in MAMI. A wordless mixture of theater and dance, the work presented the mysterious relationship between mother and child. Banush noted “My work mixes theater and dance, my shows are a mixture of sensations, feelings, colors, odors… there is no text per se but they are telling a story. It’s like an epiphany.” His pieces are landscapes composed of shapes, sensations, colors and fragrances and filled with performers of all ages. Young and old, actors, actresses, dancers and singers, many of whom were non-professionals were involved and many cultures were mixed and juxtaposed. Le Procès Pelicot : Directed by Milo Rau, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage A large sign hung outside of the Théâtre des Carm that read Le Procès Pelicot ( The Pelicot Trial ) representing the words spoken by Gisèle Pelicot at the trial “Pour que la honte change de camp! “Shame must change sides.” Le Procès Pelicot , written by Servane Dècle and directed by Milo Rau, was advertised as a night of readings inspired by the landmark trial that took place in a court in Avignon, from September 2 to December 4, 2024. On trial were Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, who over a period of nine years, had repeatedly drugged and raped her and recruited dozens of men contacted through an on-line website, to join him. Fifty men in all, from ages 27 to 74, responded to the invitation. All of these men were found guilty and were convicted. To create what Rau called “le théâtre du réel,” (reality theater or theater of the real), the authors used real testimony from the case as well as interrogations, pleas, lawyers’ summations and other commentaries to create a reenactment of the trial, a distillation into four hours accentuating and condensing the most powerful moments. Gisèle Pelicot’s words from the actual trial were delivered by three different actresses. The evening was divided into 40 segments with a prologue and an epilogue. On the stage, a minimal version of the courtroom, two women sat behind a desk in the center, the judges. On either side, rows of wooden benches, filled by French actors and actresses with transcripts in hand. As the play proceeded, the presenters took turns reading at the two lecterns located stage front. Three different actresses delivered the words that Gisèle Pelicot had spoken in court. One of the case’s expert psychiatrist’s Laurent Layet, read the diagnoses of the defendants that he had delivered in court. For four hours, the fifty some readers watch, listened and remained present. It was a stunning achievement and a devastating performance. Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Cristophe Raynaud de Lage Le Sommet, a comedy by Swiss theater director and musician Christophe Marthaler, was one of the great moments in this year’s festival. Six characters from different nationalities, three men and three women, were gathered in a chalet atop a mountain for a high-level summit. The actions of the political world leaders verged on the burlesque and absurd. To complicate matters, they did not even speak the same language. The early scenes take place in the interior of the chalet - a small, uncomfortable room where they wait for the important meeting to begin. Their surroundings are anything but luxurious. A small table in a corner, uncomfortable chairs, and one double decker bed. A strange rock formation in the room created a challenging obstacle course and, with no doors, the only access to the space was via a dumb waiter. Since they do not understand each other’s languages, they invent a number of activities to keep busy or to entertain themselves. Fortunately, one of them plays the accordion. They dance, they sing, they hum, they even yodel. And they all seem to know the words to “Edelweiss,” the famous song from The Sound of Music. They also chime in on “En haut de la Montagne … un beau chalet,” a traditional French mountain song. To top it off, they improvise a dance number using ski poles. Before long, numerous seemingly important documents arrive via the dumb waiter, that require their review and signatures. The group hastily signs them – unread. As the work progresses an impended battle seems imminent and they are delivered some forty plastic fire extinguishers for safety by a helicopter. A separate battle about what to do with the extinguishers begin to take place Where can they hide if indeed there is a war? Behind their clothes hanging over the bench? With no windows to the outside world and little ventilation, they soon complain of suffocating in their small, enclosed space. Their panic leads them to remove their clothes and improvise a hilarious sauna scene. Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Later in the work they begin to get dressed an elegant dinner; the women change into fancy evening gowns while the men put on tuxedoes. While they admire themselves in their new attire, we hear sounds of bombs bursting somewhere and helicopters flying overhead, hints of an attack of some kind outside of their safe haven. They listen in vain to the walls and the floors and climb up to the top bed, trying to escape what might be an attack, but there is no way out of their confined quarters. Now the news comes that the roads are blocked and they clearly are stuck in their chalet for an indefinite period of time – perhaps as long as 15-18 years. The work ends with their future in complete disarray with no clarity as to how they might survive in the tiny confined environment. Le Soulier de Satin : La Comédie-Française. Directed by Eric Ruf, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Eric Ruf’s magnificent staging of Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin ( The Satin Slipper ) in the Honor Court, with opulent costumes by Christian LaCroix and masterful performances by twenty Comédie-Française actors playing some sixty different roles, was a glorious moment of theater. Claudel’s epic masterpiece (1919-1934) has rarely been performed. Antoine Vitez ‘s memorable version in the Cour d’honneur in 1987 has been the reference until now. Claudel’s verse drama is a love story that takes place over a period of twenty years. Set in the Spanish Empire during the 16 th century at the time of the Conquistadors. The central couple Don Rodrigue, a Conquistador and Doña Prouhèze, wife of Governor Don Pélage, struggle not to give into their passion. They believe that there’s a divine mission to achieve the Grace of God. The work was divided into four days that covered over fifty years. The major event, over eight hours long was performed on an unadorned stage with props, costumes, lighting, and music, all of which served to suggest the many locations and jumps in time. The on stage orchestra played throughout the entire evening. Eric Ruf’s Soulier de Satin is a glorious adventure story, filled with suspense and unforgettable images . Le Soulier de Satin , La Comédie-Française, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage The Comédie-Française Soulier de Satin was truly a major festival event. A marathon welcomed by an enthusiastic audience who mostly stayed until the end. Director Ruf’s had chosen to include the audience in on the story telling, which was especially refreshing given the length and the seriousness of Claudel’s epic verse drama. The work was expansive and utilized every available space including the aisles of the theater, the windows as well as the stage itself. It is rare to see shows in the Honor Court taking advantage of the entire house. The 2000 member Cour d’honneur audience became an integral part of Le Soulier de Satin as the actors moved among and interacted with the audience. References References About the author(s) Philippa Wehle is Professor Emerita of French Language and Culture and Drama Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. She writes widely on contemporary theater and performance and is the author of Le Théâtre populaire selon Jean Vilar, Actes Sud,1981(revised editions in 1991 and 2016), Drama Contemporary: France and Act French:Contemporary Plays from France (PAJ Publications). She is a well-known translator of contemporary French and American plays. Her book Eclairer la Cour d’honneur , interviews with a selection of lighting designers who created the lighting for important shows in the Honor Court of the Pope’s Palace in Avignon, from 1969 to 2025, due to be published in May 2026 by Actes-Sud Papiers. Dr. Wehle is a Chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. 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 Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeanne Klein 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 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Jeanne Klein By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre . Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn has accomplished a significant feat. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre marks the first book-length study that examines the emergent history of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) from its earliest Indigenous origins, as well as its burgeoning dramatic literature and scholarship over the past three decades. Having grown up in New Mexico and west Texas, Aragόn writes passionately from her lived childhood experiences as a Chicana/India. Her family engaged in rasquache teatro in their backyard, performed in biennial pastorela and pasiόn plays at their church, traveled in a van to perform, work, protest, and march for Chicana/o rights, and assisted border-crossing Mexican families. Facing both Anglo and Mexican prejudices, she came to recognize the double consciousness of her borderlands identity. Based on her personal, coming-of-age experiences, Aragόn argues her theory of “performing mestizaje” in which she defines bicultural and hybrid body-mind concepts that (a) exhibit an Indigenous identity in Chicana/o Latina/o cultures through language and body practices, (b) enable a transformation that helps explain mestiza/o and Indigenous consciousness, spirituality, and healing, (c) participate in promoting Indigenous rituals and celebrations through the use of mythology and symbolism, and (d) enact cultural production that contests, resists, and interrogates the impacts of imperialism and colonial systems. (3) In these ways, she gives voice to Chicana/o and Mexican-American young people whose dramatized stories remain disparaged among professional theatre companies and all too many university theatre programs today. The first three out of five chapters (half the book) comprise a meticulous literature review with requisite due diligence. In the first chapter, Aragόn’s overview of US children’s theatre is based on somewhat inaccurate narratives propounded by the Theatre for Youth and Community program at Arizona State University in Tempe, the site of her heretofore unpublished dissertation. Contrary to canonical constructions that US professional theatre and dramatic literature for children began in the 1880s, prominent child actors actually began performing plays in professional theatre companies for young spectators in the 1790s, as well as Shakespeare’s works and pantomimes since the 1750s. More importantly, she addresses the nascent study of LTYA with critical texts and play anthologies that began to appear in the 1990s. In regard to shifting cultural constructions of childhood, her heavy reliance on classic Piagetian stages of child development reflects an unfortunate yet understandable lack of awareness of this field’s complex advancements in social-cognitive and neuroscientific realms. Chapter two builds upon the crucial foundations of other scholars by reviewing the Indigenous roots of child performances in Mesoamerican rituals through Spanish colonial pastorales. After Mexico’s independence from Spain, theatrical Mexican families toured southwestern US territories and their children, the first generation of native-born Mexican-American actors, starred in Spanish-language theatre companies through the 1950s. Photographs of child performers, including stars María Luisa Villalongín and Leonardo “Lalo” G. Astol, enliven their costumed performances. From there, the pivotal Chicana/o movement begun in the 1960s gave rise to multiple youth teatros that sparked today’s generation of major LTYA playwrights. To underscore the cultural, political, economic, social, and psychological specificity of young Chicana/o identities, Aragόn delineates border theory and Chicana feminism in connection with theatre scholarship in chapter three. She also explicates Jean Phinney’s three-stage psycho-social model of ethnic identity development (1989-90). In chapter four, Aragόn applies all theoretical frameworks by analyzing representations of children and adolescents in six pivotal plays: Alicia in Wonder Tierra (or I Can’t Eat Goat Head) by Silvia Gonzalez S., Farolitos of Christmas by Rudolfo Anaya, The Highest Heaven by José Cruz González, No saco nada de la escuela by Luis Miguel Valdez, Simply María or The American Dream by Josefina Lόpez, and The Drop Out by Carlos Morton. Her succinct comparative summation of these coming-of-age plays reveals how extraordinary child and adolescent protagonists successfully negotiate familial, social, political, and psychological border crossings by age, gender, class, and ethnic identities through physical journeys, metaphorical dreams, or in school settings. Playwrights’ biographies, featured with their child and adult photographs, also serve to justify how and why these foundational works created borderlands children’s theatre. The final most provocative chapter adds Aragόn’s illuminating interviews with each playwright in which they recount their most memorable theatrical and school experiences and their artistic connections with the empowering Chicana/o movement. Notably, many highlighted their frustrating challenges trying to get their plays produced by mainstream professional companies. Paradoxically, once El Teatro Campesino achieved its mainstream status, youth teatros declined until university-bred artist-scholars revived and advanced LTYA for young audiences, albeit with too few child and adolescent actors, while various community organizations expanded theatre with Latina/o young people. Yet even today, as Aragόn makes clear, childism remains firmly entrenched far behind all other contested cultural movements (e.g., December 2016 issue of American Theatre). Despite the formation of Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012, LTYA festivals still vie for national recognition among mediated adaptations of children’s literature and other popularized trends. Even so, Aragόn’s optimistic outlook for the future of LTYA inspires hope and bodes well for the next generation of theatre artist-scholars. From my perspective, this slim but somewhat overwritten book tends to reproduce its major points unnecessarily throughout each chapter. Moreover, the requisite postmodern need to use and repeat Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, or Latinx terminology may or may not bog down the flow of readers’ experiences. However, my foremost concern has to do with Routledge, a major theatre publisher that has failed this author by ignoring its copy-editing responsibilities. Regardless of these reservations, Aragón ultimately offers more than a cursory glimpse of historical legacies and trending representations of children and young people in LTYA. As the population of Latina/o and biracial children soars, Borderlands Children’s Theatre calls us all to take immediate actions by ensuring that young voices are not only heard but respected and celebrated for present and future generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JEANNE KLEIN Lawrence, Kansas 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.

Encounter Tea, Arts & Culture's work Community Poetry and Tea in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Interactive Ceremony, Poetry Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 2pm Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event * This ceremony is 2pm - 4pm Through the Odes to Common Things, we will share tea and explore poetry from Pablo Neruda and Keorapetse Kgositsile, uncovering our deep bond with nature and the interconnectedness between ourselves. Tuning into nature’s myriad stories could offer us profound insights into navigating our collective journey on our shared planet. Tea, Arts & Culture Tea, Arts & Culture began as a gathering of friends and tea lovers to enjoy nature and tea in the park starting in 2019. Compelled to respond to the rapidly shifting world during the start of the pandemic, they are committed to using tea arts and culture to nurture community and belonging in the face of isolation and to cultivate mindfulness and inspiration in the face of our daily challenges by establishing themselves as a non-profit organization. They believe that they can support communities in need through fostering an appreciation of tea, arts, nature, oneself, and one another. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan East Side Outside Community Garden (EO) was established as a GreenThumb community garden in 2016. The name of the garden was determined by the students at ESCHS which is next to the garden Before EO became a GreenThumb community garden, from about 2010, the garden was mainly used by ESCHS with other organizations and volunteers, including Earth Matter NY which did composting projects with the high school students (with coordination of the biology/science teachers). The composting projects were not only a general teaching component for the whole class, but also some of the students used the project as part of their PBAT (Performance Based Assessment Tasks)—students at this high school uses the PBAT, at the conclusion of which they would do a powerpoint presentation in front of teacher and guest judges, instead of having to take the Regents Exams. From about 2014, a composting operation called Reclaimed Organics, a program of Common Ground Compost, began collecting and composting food waste at the garden. They use cargo bikes, instead of motor vehicles, to pick up food waste from various locations. Eventually, the garden became an official public drop-off site, through DSNY (Sanitation), for the community to bring their food scraps, 24-7, for composting. Before becoming the East Side Outside Community Garden, the garden was also known as LES Park (Lower East Side Park). Visit Partner Website

Watch I AM NOT OK by Gabrielle Lansner at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A mother and son respond to the unending killings of Black Americans amidst the backdrop of the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Dance and archival photographs are woven together to evoke fear, outrage, and anger and the need for communities to come together and find solutions. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents I AM NOT OK At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Gabrielle Lansner Dance, Documentary, Film This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2022 A mother and son respond to the unending killings of Black Americans amidst the backdrop of the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Dance and archival photographs are woven together to evoke fear, outrage, and anger and the need for communities to come together and find solutions. Directed & Edited by Gabrielle Lansner Narration Written & Spoken by Tiffiney Davis Starring Pat Hall & Dahsir Hausif Executive Producer, Dean Taucher, Produced by Ben Glickstein, Gabrielle Lansner, Director of Photography, Barbie Leung, Music by Philip Hamilton, A.T.N. Stadjwijk, Journalistic Photography by Erica Lansner, On Set Photography by Arina Voronova, Assistant Editor, Jordan Campbell, Editorial Assistance, Marilys Ernst, Sound by Jeff Seelye About The Artist(s) Gabrielle Lansner is an award winning filmmaker, choreographer, and producer whose work is influenced by her background in choreography and performing. Her films have screened at dozens of festivals worldwide and garnered multiple awards. Her latest short film, I AM NOT OK is an experimental dance film inspired by the words of Tiffiney Davis, the Executive Director of the Red Hook Art Project, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The film has screened extensively at film festivals worldwide and won Best Experimental Film at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora FF in NYC and Best Cinedance at the Minneapolis St. Paul Int'l FF. For over 30 years, Lansner has explored artistic disciplines moving from pure dance works, to dance/theater, to film. She has always been interested in story and character: creating emotionally complex and layered works that delve into the heart and psyche. Her film, the birch grove, 2015, had a successful festival run, screening at the Newport Beach Festival, the Cannes Short Film Corner, and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, to name a few. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Experimental Film at the Underexposed Film Festival in Rock Hill, S.C. and composer, Joel Pickard, won Best Original Score from the International Fine Arts Film Festival in Santa Barbara. Lansner's, THE STRONGER, 2012, premiered at the Cannes Short Film Corner and screened at over two dozen festivals, including Interfilm Berlin, Festival International du Film sur L’Art Montreal, and the Female Eye in Toronto, to name a few. Garnering awards worldwide, the film received Best Artistic Director Award from the Lady Filmmakers Festival in LA, the Award of Distinction from the Open Stage Festival in Poland, and was nominated for Best Experimental Film at the Female Eye Festival and Best Cinematography at the VisionFest Festival in NYC. Get in touch with the artist(s) gabriellelansnercompany@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.gabriellelansner.com/films/2022/06/I-AM-NOT-OK/, https://www.facebook.com/gabrielle.lansner, https://www.instagram.com/gabrielle_lansner/?hl=en Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

By Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu | Capturing 10 years of the contemporary performances and conversations of the Segal Center's PRELUDE festival. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the link: http://www.tcg.org/Store/ProductDetail/6110895 To view this publication online for free, visit the link: https://www.scribd.com/doc/283453685/Ten-Years-PRELUDE Ten Years PRELUDE Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu Download PDF Edited by Frank Hentschker Designed and Design Concept by Yu Chien Liu For over 10 years the annual Prelude Festival, held at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, has been a force in New York theatre and performance – a free, three-day festival that celebrates artistic and academic exchange in the heart of the city. This book represents ten years (2003-2013) of unlimited creativity, discourse and exchange within an academic setting. The artists of Prelude – pioneers in their field – demonstrate that theatre and performance continue to matter – and that New York City is still at the forefront of the form. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Summer 2025 in London, England Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Amy Hamel Image Credits: Article While the primary goal of being in London this past summer was professional development - participating in quality acting classes for both stage and screen and taking a plethora of dance classes of various styles and levels – another goal was to pack in as much live theatre as possible. The shows on the agenda before arrival were Hamlet and Hail to the Thief (a mash-up with Radiohead), and whatever was playing in the West End theatres or at the Globe Theatre. Anything that could be seen in the United States was not on the list of desired theatre attendance. The programs, exquisite theatres, and their fascinating architecture, as well as the impeccable service and ushering, were just some of the notable differences that made the experience unique. Within three weeks, we saw 11 plays and one Mod Ballet. The following is a reflection on a few of the productions witnessed, with the first two being featured for their amazing stories, soundtracks, choreography, and technical specialties. Photo Credit: Johann Persson Hamlet Hail to the Thief, by the Royal Shakespeare Company in co-production with Factory International, was adapted by Christine Jones with Steve Hoggett, music by Radiohead, and additional orchestrations by Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead). When I was in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2006, I saw Romeo and Juliet by this company with tap dancing as the fight scenes, and it was evident that the actors were uncomfortable and not as skilled in that style of movement as they were with the spoken text. Nearly twenty years later, this current production completely redeemed my skepticism in movement or choreography in Shakespeare, and I will never be able to see any other production of this iconic play without thinking of this one! Oddly enough, it was just about that time, twenty years ago, when this particular Hamlet project began. The music, lights, imagery, projections, fight choreography, and ensemble performance blended Shakespeare’s text with Yorke’s orchestrations of Radiohead’s album Hail to the Thief to near perfection. The stage environment included amplifiers and speakers used as scenic elements along with blocks and pedestals, all synced together to create this epic, rock concert-infused, one-of-a-kind interpretation of the tale of the Danish prince. Photo: Johann Persson When first walking in, the dimly lit, fog-covered stage was filled with long trench coats hanging suspended all over the stage, floating as though you could see old ghosts in a cemetery. King Hamlet’s ghost appeared in the projections on the upstage wall, and then the coats disappeared into the fly space. The set of the thrust stage was primarily bare, featuring a two-story platform along the upstage wall where people could climb one of two ladders to sit or stand above. Additionally, two singers appeared in bookending doorways on the top floor space when it was time for them to sing. There were three separate plexiglass booths on the bottom floor for the band, with the drummer in the center booth. The choreography, by Jess Williams, featured several unique dances, physical gesture work, and distinct movement vocabularies, like the dance where the players portray the royals, upon Hamlet’s insistence, told through a contemporary style ballet. In Act Two, Scene Two, when Hamlet and his school buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in dialogue, they are also in a series of leaning movement sequences, showing that just when they think Hamlet’s thoughts are moving one way or another, then they will lean in opposition or lean towards him to gain his trust. Then the childlike, adventurous dancing to some of Yorke’s music established a deeper relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia than is seen or heard in the text, representing the length and depth of their friendship, consequently making Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia all the more heartbreakingly powerful. Examples of clever fight choreography and staging by fight director Kev McCurdy were seen when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her own bedroom, and Hamlet kills Polonius in the supposed wardrobe; there was no furniture, but through movement, it provided clarity to the storytelling. The final fight between Hamlet and Laertes was also well-choreographed and contained a variety of fighting styles, including wrestling, which required perfectly timed dance-like partnering. There were moments when it was somewhat unclear as to what was happening due to the addition of strobe lights, but one moment of clarity in the fight was Gertrude’s grotesque reaction to the poison she drinks as she violently spewed blood everywhere, especially onto the combatants, making for an extremely gory stage picture. As the fight concludes, death falls upon most of the stage. Horatio, touchingly portrayed by Alby Baldwin, cradles Hamlet’s body on the floor and delivers his final speech. The long trench coats from the top of the play, as the cemetery, began to lower down into their original suspended state, and as the final word was spoken, an audible latch was released, and all of the coats dropped to the floor. Blackout, followed by an audience-wide gasp. A moment that is now forever connected in my memory to this play. Samuel Blenkin’s embodiment and delivery of the young prince, Hamlet, contained just the right balance of fire and finesse, teen angst and grief-driven, dutiful son seeking vengeance. It is a role that can easily be portrayed as very whiny, snobby, or the actor “milks the cow” for sympathy and becomes annoying. That was not the case here. His engagement with the audience made it feel as though we were the only ones whom he could trust, and even though most knew the ending of the story, he made us have hope that it would end differently. His singing of Yorke’s music and text was effortless, and his voice floated as though his thoughts were flowing through the space. It helped that actors Paul Hilton as Claudius and Claudia Harrison as Gertrude did their jobs exceedingly well, being so disgustingly evil, giving us more reasons to root for and like Hamlet. What made this production even more memorable was the treatment and portrayal of the role of Ophelia, hauntingly performed by Ami Tredrea. Before reading more of the director’s insight regarding this tortured character, it was evident that she was receiving some extra attention. Through her movement, physical gestures (her arms were almost always lifted as if she was always in a state of surrender), her singing in her madness, and her repetition of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech, connecting their grief with the same conflict of life, the performance was stunning. Lights for Ophelia have four clear lines creating a box around her, with the box sizes differing depending on who she is speaking to, or who is verbally putting her in a box. The projections on the back wall during her descent into madness showed flowing water, and the sound of rain and water, and as she finished repeating Hamlet’s speech, the box of light became a rectangle and established an opening in the stage with water appearing to cascade into it. Ophelia lay down beside it and simply rolled into the space and disappeared. This is one of the only productions that I have experienced where Ophelia’s death is shown on stage, and it has left another lasting impression. Romaya Weaver as Player Queen and James Cooney as Player King in Hamlet Hail to the Thief . Photo: Johann Persson Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet with orchestral score, based on the album and movie of the same name, was presented by Sadler’s Wells, Extended Play, and Universal Music UK. Written by Pete Townshend. Directed by Rob Ashford. Choreographed by Paul Roberts. Music Direction and Orchestration by Rachel Fuller, with Orchestrator Martin Batchelar. Set Designer, Christopher Oram. Costume Designer, Paul Smith. Video Designer, Yeastculture.org . All of the above are important to mention, as each of those components coming together so spectacularly is what made this piece special. I was familiar with the story due to personal connections with one of the actors in the 1979 film, and I had heard that Pete Townshend was talking about this potential project, where the story would be brought to life again through dance. So, when I saw the poster for this show around London, that the show had come to fruition, and that it was with Sadler’s Wells (another artistic viewing bucket list), it went straight to the top of the must-see list. It did not disappoint! The company of Quadrophenia in Act One’s closing scene in a London Basement Club . Photo: Johann Persson Set in 1960s London and Brighton, Quadrophenia follows Jimmy, a young man navigating life and love, unhappy in his factory line job and determined to become more. In his search for his identity, he finds release in music, dancing, going to clubs, and doing drugs. He becomes a Mod, a subculture of the time and place characterized by tailored suits, their love for modern jazz music, and riding scooters, specifically Lambrettas. The rivalry with another subculture called the Rockers, known for their love of rock music and motorcycles, serves as the backdrop for his story. The super short version of the plot is that a childhood friend of Jimmy’s becomes a Rocker, some Rockers hurt one of Jimmy’s Mod friends, and the childhood friend becomes the target of the Mod’s retaliation. All while Jimmy chases after his dream girl who belongs to another Mod with no clear chance of having her. This sends Jimmy further into a personality crisis, and the rival groups into historic riots on the beaches of Brighton. Lead dancer, Paris Fitzpatrick as Jimmy, is joined by four other male dancers who represent different facets of Jimmy’s personality: the TOUGH GUY, the ROMANTIC, the LUNATIC, and the HYPOCRITE. At the top of the show, we see all 5 men standing on the Brighton Beach rock, doing a series of lifts, and actually showing the portrayal of the end of the show, where a vital decision is about to be made. Then the set transitions to a psychiatrist’s office, and the audience is transported to a week earlier in the story, when the character first learns of the multiple facets. Stuart Neal as the FATHER and Kate Tydman as the MOTHER/Dance Captain in Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson As Jimmy’s journey progressed, many characters would dance with him, depending on the environment or the situation. For example, in scenes at the club when he was infatuated with the main Mod Girl that everyone wanted to be with, then the ROMANTIC would be incorporated into the dance, or at the end, when Jimmy sees one of the top Mods working as a bellhop, then the HYPOCRITE danced with them. There were times at the beginning when the other facets dancing along were confusing. It took a couple of scenes to realize this theatrical convention and understand the distinction of when Jimmy was dancing with another character, one of his fantasies, one of his facets, or all of those. It was a pioneering and dynamic approach with a compelling and lasting effect, especially once it became clearer, and the stellar performances of Fitzpatrick and this ENSEMBLE cast contributed to Jimmy’s story being so effectively told. Along with Rachel Fuller’s amazing orchestration, with select instruments used to interpret the original rock score, and captivating choreography, this production relies on intricate technical aspects to enhance the storytelling. From projections and fly work that transport Jimmy on a drug-induced train ride that leaves the audience feeling like they too are tripping, to sets with trap doors where dancers can disappear into a booth in a diner, and Jimmy can dance with his reflection outside of the diner. From a large rotating rock that represents Brighton Beach, to a bed that looks like only one person is in it when magically two more emerge, all the sets provided unique dance canvases, heightened the movement theatrically, and provided insight into Jimmy’s thoughts. Glimpses of Jimmy’s home life are shown through dances between his MOTHER and FATHER that express their marriage and working-class struggles, and one imposing militaristic style of movement and formations of men in a memory dance of his father’s time in WWII. The same rock used for Brighton is also used in the Father’s War memory dance, and some of the men are depicted fighting up a hill or marching off the edge. Company of Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson Jimmy and his childhood friend (turned Rocker) and their friendly bench dance in Act One, stood in stark contrast to the later Brighton Beach Riot where the teen angst driven choreography, much like the similar rivalry of the Shark and Jets, was reminiscent of West Side Story , and included vivid stage pictures to exhibit the violence of the fight. The father’s war memory, the diner dance with escape booth where Jimmy fantasizes about the Mod girl and her dreams and dances with the ROMANTIC too, the 5 guys on rock at top of show representing Jimmy and his personalities, the train ride while tripping, 2 couples dancing on the beach in time period swimwear with partnering that closely resembled the movement of classical ballet, and the club scenes with its specifically stylized, 1960s dance vocabulary, complete with the most fabulous time appropriate costumes and LaDuca shoes! As Townshend’s notable, and the production’s final song “Love Reign O’er Me” is played, the final scene too is played out with Jimmy on the giant rock where the show began. The continued use of projections filled the stage with images of the moving sea and waves crashing on the rock. Jimmy is left alone in his emotional turmoil and faced with the final decision as to which facet he will let have control, determining his next movements. He jumps and the audience is led to believe that he has taken his life, but as the score triumphantly crescendos, Jimmy triumphantly climbs back up atop the rock, choosing to not allow his story to end in tragedy, and leaving the audience with a glimmer of hope for the young character and with an awesome soundtrack replaying in our heads. The following three plays were selected for their topics, themes, and messages that linger and continue to raise questions, as quality theatre can do. Themes of these plays demonstrated cultural and societal relevance to today’s situations, addressing race, gender, social, and economic issues, and the numerous perspectives they hold. The standouts featured next were the Playwrights, Directors, and Actors' performances Retrograde was written by Ryan Calais Cameron, directed by Amit Sharma, and played at the astonishingly gorgeous Apollo Theatre. Closing performance, June 14, 2025. This production was so thoroughly enjoyed that I purchased the script afterward, conducted further research on acting legend Sidney Poitier and the topics of the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I rewatched his 2002 Honorary Oscar acceptance speech, which brought another level of appreciation for the man and his part in history in the arts, especially in America. The set was that of a 1950s office of a New York City NBC network television lawyer. The small cast of three includes Sydney Poitier, a screenwriter, Bobby, and the network lawyer, Mr. Parks. Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier in Retrograde . Photo Credit Johann Persson This ninety-minute play encompasses some personal history of Poitier, his humble beginnings, how he got his break on Broadway, and covers information on his (then) current life, wife, and family for which he was responsible for feeding and providing. Bobby had brought Poitier to the lawyer’s office under the pretext that Poitier would be signing a contract for a new television show he was writing and just needed him to meet with the lawyer for proper protocol. Both Bobby and Poitier were shocked to discover his true intentions as he began to ask the rising star about his American allegiance and his political affiliations, bearing in mind that this was a time of communist threat to the American way of life and the rise of the civil rights movement to which Poitier was known to have had connections. The lawyer’s objective was to get Poitier to sign not just a loyalty oath, but a document that would disavow his political associations and specifically denounce his friend and hero, Paul Robeson, creating a moral and ethical dilemma that could hold great consequences with either final decision. All three actors gave compelling performances and easily held the audience captive for the duration of the production. Ivanno Jeremiah’s embodiment of Poitier was breathtaking. Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron is quoted to say of his performance, “People who knew Poitier told me that Ivanno Jeremiah was almost possessed by his spirit”, and with this play, Cameron tackled the topic of race and politics in the 1950s with the same grace and respectful manner as Poitier himself. Oliver Johnstone as Bobby and Stanley Townsend as Mr. Parks in Retrograde. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant , was written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The cover of the program has a picture of the lead actor, John Lithgow, and displays the one-word title, with a tear or rift in the letter “a” in the graphics, along with the name of the theatre, Harold Pinter Theatre, previously known as the Royal Comedy Theatre. We attended an invitation-only, full-dress rehearsal featuring the understudies of the six-character cast. Instead of being taken in by the celebrity of the immensely talented Lithgow, this experience allowed me to truly see the play for what it is and the message it brings. It also allowed a glimpse into the life of an understudy in the West End. As one who began her career and Broadway experience as a swing, I have the utmost respect for those who are waiting in the wings or the dressing rooms, staying ready for the unknown, hanging on to every possibility. Much was learned about understudy life as a working actor on the West End and how it differs from that of Broadway and American Actors' Equity rules. The play left me seeking more information about Roald Dahl, his “complex legacy” (Rosenblatt), and pondering the question the play asks: “at what point does one stop being the victim and start becoming the aggressor?” It demonstrates how one’s life experiences can shape one’s opinions, beliefs, and perspectives on another’s culture, and it even had me questioning some of my own beliefs concerning this topic. John Lithgow in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant is set in the summer of 1983, in Roald Dahl’s family home, which is under construction. Dahl’s UK publisher, along with his mistress of eleven years, now fiancée, is discussing an upcoming book release, illustrations, and anticipating the arrival of his NY publisher. The NY publisher has sent a young female assistant, Jessica Stone, to try and connect with the writer in hopes of persuading him to make a public apology for what some believed to be an antisemitic book review he had recently written. Dahl and Stone bond over their own children and the fact that both of their young ones suffered from debilitating illnesses (Dahl losing his child to that illness); however, it does not take long for Dahl to pick up on the clues that Miss Stone’s original name was Stein and that she herself is Jewish. Ultimately, the arguments are built with powerful monologues revealing their own truths and bringing up convincing points that one can’t help but weigh both sides and sympathize with them, and yet also be offended by both as well. John Lithgow as Roald Dahl and Aya Cash as Jessica Stone in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson After the main blow-up at the end of Act One, Act Two consisted of Dahl talking to his houseworkers: a male groundskeeper and a female cook. It appears at first as though he is trying to get others’ views, but in reality, he is trying to get them to back him up. In the conversation with the cook, the audience discovers that she, too, is Jewish. Dahl stubbornly continues his soapbox rant, he offends her, she exits the stage, and at the end of the play, when he calls for the cook again, she does not return; it is discovered that she has left the house. After which Dahl is alone and sneaks to his phone to make a call. The audience is led to think that maybe he has seen the others’ side and felt the non-verbal statement of the cook’s departure; instead, he doubles down on his original statement, leaving us in thoughtful shock in this final moment of the play. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, was written by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Dominic Cooke, and played at the Garrick Theatre , s tarring Imelda Staunton and her real-life daughter Bessie Carter. This ninety-minute, no intermission, controversial “problem play” and its history have much to offer in the way of discussion on the topic alone. The commentary is mostly on the artistic choices in the casting, the set, the visual imagery, and how those creative decisions impact the message of the play. In this case , celebrity was important in contributing to the dramatic impact of this show. As Bessie Carter herself puts it in an interview in the program, “Our relationship is adding a subconscious kinetic level”, and indeed it did, as they brought this dramatic classic to life. Vivie, the daughter and recent Honors Mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge, first appears barefoot, free, and fun. The estranged mother, Mrs. Kitty Warren, arrives well-dressed and classy, and the tension is immediately felt. The four male characters are Rev. Samuel Gardner, his son Frank, who is involved romantically with Vivie but also flirts with her mother, Mrs. Warren’s business partner Sir George Croft, who is also attracted to Vivie, and Mr. Praed, an architect, friend of Mrs. Warren, and potential suitor for Vivie. There is an ensemble of silent women, of different sizes and ethnicities, all dressed in white undergarments, who, through their physicality in acting, appear to age or grow with the daughter character. They do not engage with Vivie, but rather observe, and it is not quite clear who these women are or their significance at the top of the play. The ethereal set had a low-hanging ceiling, over a circular rotating platform with a grassy knoll, garden flowers, and a white bench. The silent ensemble shows up in between scenes and changes the set by first moving the flower arrangements and bench while the stage rotates to become another garden, then changing after the next scene to take away all flowers to create an open field between the characters’ homes. Eventually, the ensemble of women even rolls up the grass to create a blank, open, bare stage, making room for the final scene’s staging, where a back wall, shaped in a semi-circle with a solo door, was lowered down onto the stage, two desks and chairs, and a waste basket were added to create Vivie’s office. Bessie Carter and Imelda Staunton in Mrs. Warren’s Profession . Photo Credit: Johann Persson As the play’s physical environment gradually wasted away, it exposed more and more truths of Mrs. Warren’s past, the decisions she made that were vital to her survival (which also provided funds for her daughter’s education), scandals like the discovery that Frank may have been Vivie’s half-brother, and other situations that reveal the relational dilemma Vivie is faced with in the decision to embrace her mother and her profession. At one point, it seemed as though Vivie understood her mother’s reasons for her life decisions and even praises her resilience, but in the end, once she learns that her mother is still running the “business” even though she doesn’t need to, Vivie not only rejects her mother but also disowns her. The final scene, which took place in Vivie’s office, offered Mrs. Warren’s last desperate plea to be in each other’s lives. Mrs. Warren was closer to “her girls” and has been more of a mother figure to them than to her own daughter. This, coupled with the casting of real-life mother/daughter dynamics, made the scene even more poignant. Vive’s education came from the work of the girls, and although she has been proposed to by her mother’s much older business partner, she is resolute in her determination to do her own work in an office and not take the easy or privileged route. This was made more obvious with the director’s decision to have the silent ensemble of women enter the office and stand on the other side of the desk after Mrs. Warren’s dramatic departure, reminiscent of Ibsen’s “door slam heard round the world”, and with that final powerful image, it is abundantly clear who these women were and that they had been supporting Mrs. Warren by providing for Vivie throughout the play and their collective lives. That imagery gives life to the unseen yet crucial characters in this story, adding another level of depth to the play’s significance. The brilliance that is Ismelda Staunton and Bessie Carter and their gripping, heart-wrenching performances, especially in the final scene, is a master class in listening and being truly present. This, partnered with Dominic Cooke’s direction of the literary classic, easily qualified this as one of the strongest shows of the summer. In conclusion, the range of theatrical experiences I encountered over the summer in London—comprising physically based pieces, new plays, and contemporary adaptations of classics—was truly extraordinary. From the innovative reimagining of Hamlet Hail to the Thief to the diverse performances across venues like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sadler’s Wells, each production offered a unique perspective on storytelling and artistry. The combination of compelling narratives, powerful soundtracks, and mesmerizing choreography demonstrated the richness of live theatre and its power to connect with audiences on multiple levels. Whether through classic adaptations, fresh interpretations, or pioneering biographical pieces, the brilliant performances in every production highlighted London’s vibrant theatre scene, emphasized the importance of live art in fostering creativity and inspiration, and provided audiences much to talk about. This journey through England's theatrical landscape undoubtedly enriched my experience, offering invaluable insights and lasting memories that will continue to influence my personal and professional growth in the performing arts. References References About the author(s) Amy Hamel, (AEA, MFA Acting from University of North Carolina Greensboro, BA Theatre Arts from Palm Beach Atlantic University) is a performing artist, director, choreographer, and educator, currently serving as Visiting Lecturer of Theatre at Palm Beach Atlantic University, in West Palm Beach, Florida, teaching courses in both the Theatre and Dance departments. Her performance credits extend from regional theatres across the United States, and cruise ships around the world, to the lights of Broadway as a member of the historic closing company of the original production of CATS, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. 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 Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab | Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit this link: https://www.tcg.org/Store/ProductDetail/6110849 Four Arab Hamlet Plays Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson & Magaret Litvin with Joy Arab Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. This volume samples that tradition with works by Moroccan Nabyl Lahlou (1968), Syrian Mamduh Adwan (1976), Jordanian Nader Omran (1984), Iraqi Jawad al-Assadi (1994), plus an autobiographical sketch by Egyptian Mahmoud Aboudoma (2006). Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

John Bray Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl John Bray By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl. Amy Muse. London: Methuen Drama Critical Companion Series, 2018; Pp. 215 + xv. Amy Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl offers an insightful reading of the works of one of the U.S.’s most prolific contemporary playwrights. Since the premiere of Passion Play at Trinity Rep in 1997, Ruhl has won a number of accolades demonstrating her significance, including the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award (2003), the Fourth Freedom Forum Award from the Kennedy Center (2004), and a MacArthur Genius Award (2005). She has also twice been named a Pulitzer Finalist ( Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2005) and In the Next Room or the vibrator play (2009)). Ruhl began writing plays in Paula Vogel’s dramatic writing course at Brown in which she wrote Dog Play, where she was able to unpack her grief at having lost her father while making the focalizer of her play the family dog (“played by a person wearing a dog mask and an apron”) (xi). Thus, Muse situates Ruhl with the “artist-thinkers” that William Demastes labels the “new alchemists,” in Muse’s words, the “artists and scientists who are re-enchanting the world through a grounding in the world” (xiii). For Muse, Ruhl’s gift of re-enchantment lies in her ability to weave works that blend the empirical and the spiritual. While not the first critical book on Ruhl (that honor belongs to James Al-Shamma’s Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays , published by McFarland & Co. in 2011), The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl presents an important addition to critical examinations of Ruhl’s plays, even if her analysis could sometimes go further. In the Preface, Muse discusses why she structures the book not chronologically, but according to Ruhl’s “artistic and ethical concerns” (xv). Ruhl’s works, Muse argues, “call for a more phenomenological than ideological mode of analysis,” thus situating Muse as a guide through the ways in which Ruhl creates modes of feeling and transcendence by inviting audiences into conversations with the stage, rather than looking at the stage as a place for detached analysis (xiv). The next four chapters are each super-titled with a quote from Ruhl, reinforcing this sense of conversation. Muse’s first chapter deals with Ruhl’s influences, as well as her adaptations of Chekhov and Woolf, in order to demonstrate how Ruhl is more interested in writing about “Moments of Being” rather than presenting realistic representations for the stage (23). In chapter two, Muse considers four of Ruhl’s plays – Eurydice , Demeter in the City , Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince . She reads each work to activate an interplay with “the actual and magical” resulting in plays that on the surface feel “whimsical,” but are rather “philosophical comedies that plumb the depths with a light touch” (61). Chapter three deals more directly with Sarah Ruhl’s approach to dramatic structure; here Muse demonstrates that Ruhl, much like Maria Irene Fornes, is less interested in creating characters driven by psychological objectives and more in bringing characters into a room together where their reckonings are rich with pre-Freudian defined desire. In Chapter Four, Muse situates Passion Play, The Oldest Boy, To Peter Pan on Her 70 TH Birthday, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage with medieval Mystery Plays and plays born out of rituals. As with the Mystery Plays, Muse argues, these works of Ruhl’s have less to do with preaching morality and serve better as invitations to experiences that are holy and invisible. Each of these four chapters ends with a “Coda,” rather than a conclusion, evoking the musicality of Ruhl’s plays. For Chapter Five, Muse departs from the layout of previous chapters and interviews two artists who are well acquainted with Ruhl’s works: Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn. Rasmussen is the Artistic Director of the Jungle Theatre in Minneapolis and served as assistant director for the Broadway production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play . Finn is the Associate Artistic Director of the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis and a former classmate of Ruhl’s. She directed the first workshop production of Eurydice (129, 131). One resonant moment arises when Rasmussen describes how her childhood play impacted her views of directing: “I was entranced by how a small, made up story can sound out larger truths in our lives” (qtd. 135). Rasmussen’s notions of childhood make-believe feeds well into the sense of wonder, myth, and staging of the invisible truths that guide Ruhl’s plays. Chapter Six features three critical essays: “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Medieval Performance” by Jill Stevenson; “From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl” by Thomas Butler; and “Arrested Dev-elopement: Myth-Understanding Father-Daughter Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice” by Christina Dokou. Each essay demonstrates different paradigms for nuanced, in-depth discussion of Ruhl’s plays. Muse closes with an Afterword, “I Had Hoped to Give Them Pleasure,” in which she considers how writing this book may be a little premature; after all, Ruhl is a midcareer writer who will likely continue having a rich and lustrous career. In the final paragraph, Muse avers that Ruhl’s plays “are not so much about love, intimacy, communion, and transcendence as they are vehicles which the audience and the theater makers experience these pleasurable states” (177). Following the Afterword, the book includes a Chronology of major milestones in Ruhl’s personal and professional life. Muse’s writing is infectious. It is much like listening to a die-hard fan unpack their thoughts and feelings and getting swept up in their unabashed love. The only drawback is that, at times, Muse ignores possibilities for further inquiry by foregrounding summaries of Ruhl’s plays rather than her own analysis. For example, Muse makes passing mention of criticisms of Ruhl being not political enough in her writing, and yet, Ruhl has written political plays. Indeed, as authors such as Lauren Gunderson have argued, simply writing a play can be seen as a political act given our historical moment. Nonetheless, Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl will prove to be necessary and exciting reading for our next generation of dramatic critics and dramaturgs alike. References Footnotes About The Author(s) John Bray University of Georgia 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JULIA JARCHO presents Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism JULIA JARCHO 3-3:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Celebrated poet and critic Michael Robbins (Walkman , Alien vs. Predator ) will join Jarcho to read and discuss her new book and how to be a pervert in writing. Throw Yourself Away proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing—and that THEATER has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar. She puts on her plays with the NYC company Minor Theater. They include Marie It's Time , Pathetic, The Terrifying, Dreamless Land, Every Angel Is Brutal , and Grimly Handsome . Other books: Minor Theater: Three Plays (53rd State Press) and Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press). She is the head of MFA playwriting at Brown. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

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 Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Gergana Traikova Image Credits: Article In the course of the last decade, the tandem of Veselka Kuncheva, director, and Marieta Golomehova, set designer, managed to develop their special creative process and make a name as theatre-makers with a distinctive style characterized by deep symbolism, visual richness, and a combination of puppets, live actors, multimedia elements and music. Other features of their works are a dark aesthetics and experimental approach, where text seems to lose its primary importance and give way to the visual. In 2019 Kuncheva said in an interview “...I realized at some point that we start serving the text, and there is much more to theatre than just text. That is why my way of working is almost upside down - I accept the text only as one of the instruments of theatre. For me, the main thing in theatre is what we call life." ( Kultura newspaper: Issue 9 (2982), November 2021) The tandem’s performances have invariably been receiving predominantly rave reviews . Almost every year they have been awarded the main theatre awards Ikar and Askeer , thus cementing their status as leading figures of the Bulgarian theatre. However, behind the adulation and accolades there are issues that rarely get raised publicly. Recently, the tandem’s work has begun to follow one and the same, familiar pattern: repetitive visual elements with an emphasis on darkness and smoke. In almost every performance Kuncheva develops a similar idea, placing in the center a human being who is afraid, or corrupted by society, or possessed by their own demons. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson I have been observing the tandem’s work for ten years now and, during the first three of them I was not only impressed but truly enchanted by the visuality of their theatre and the richness of stage means of expression. In the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the rehearsals of the Queen of Spades by Pushkin, at the State Puppet Theatre of Plovdiv, and I kept a diary about the work process. I remember the rapture of the rehearsal atmosphere and Kuncheva's mastery of creating a team, her ability to challenge the actors every day with new tasks for creative experiments. A year later, though, I remember the premiere of Demon Life, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons at the State Puppet Theatre of Stara Zagora, as a moment of sobering down of my enthusiasm. The performance looked like a sequel to Queen of Spades: with the same approach, similar mise-en-scène and subject matter, albeit in a new visual form. With each subsequent performance of Kuncheva, the repetitive elements became more noticeable to me. Many would call it a style, but where does a style and creative language end, and uniformity and predictability begin? The newest work of Kuncheva and Golomehova, The Little Prince at the Youth Theatre “Nikolai Binev,” represents a slight departure from their otherwise typical dark aesthetics. Although the production is aimed at a children's audience, smoke and repetitive mechanical movements again take center stage, creating a feeling of depression. The plot of Saint-Exupéry's story is nearly entirely followed, with its key moments, like the Little Prince’s encounters with the Fox, the Rose and his travels through the wondrous planets, but they seem to remain on the surface, deprived of the depth and philosophical message of the original work. Repetitive elements, such as mass dance scenes, which have no clear connection to the plot or characters but are intended to summarize the previous scenes, deepen a sense of disjointedness and a lack of original directorial ideas for presenting Saint-Exupéry’s work. The theme of the individual and society – a Kuncheva favorite – creeps in here as well, but it does not bring anything new or different from her previous performances. Loud music, dancing and smoke once again dominate the stage space, making the transitions between scenes mechanical and devoid of emotional fluidity. The cast of The Little Prince is undoubtedly trying with utmost dedication to accomplish the tasks set by the director. Especially Kuncho Kanev, in the role of the Pilot, builds up a brilliant and complete character who goes deftly from the very striving for life and the steadfastness, through childish naivety, to the touching love for the world around him. The appearance of the actress Anna-Valeria Gostanyan is very impressive too; she plays the part of the Serpent, twisting around a descending spiral. It is a truly acrobatic moment where the airiness and beauty of the movement stand out against the repetitive mass dance scenes. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson It should be noted that Kuncheva and Polina Hristova, the authors of the dramatization, have managed to introduce some humor through several comic scenes that illustrate the absurdity of the world we live in. For example, the scene with the stargazers who count stars on an exaggeratedly large abacus in order to own, sell and earn money for more stars; or the geographer, who strongly resembles a bureaucrat from a government office refusing assistance because of a missing document. Although these moments capture the meaninglessness of the modern world, they also highlight the main problem in Kuncheva's work : lack of a clearly identified central idea that would unify the scenes and result in an overall integrity of the production. The visually appealing sets created by Marieta Golomehova manage to take the viewer briefly into the magical world of the story, transporting them through the stars and universes and introducing them to the whimsical characters. Golomehova incorporates spirals and rounded elements throughout the set design: from the descending spirals around which the planets are located, to a massive spiral platform in the center of the stage around which all the journeys of the Little Prince take place. Ultimately, though, despite the visually impressiveness of the production, it remains empty in terms of content. There is something of this combination in the previous production of the tandem: The Portrait of Dorian Gray at the Racho Stoyanov Theatre in Gabrovo. There, the fragmentary nature of the structure is taken to an extreme: the scenes often end upbruptly, as if literally cut off . This is sometimes rather confusing and makes it difficult to follow the overall storyline. The production follows the main thread of the novel, where Dorian Gray, obsessed with his beauty, sells his soul to preserve his youth while his portrait ages. Although the atmosphere of mysticism and decadence around the character are conveyed, the emphasis again falls mainly on the visual side and mass scenes. The idea of a tableau-vivant in which Basil (Dimo Dimov) models the actors' bodies in front of a translucent fabric, creating works of art, is impressive. A visually strong moment is also the coming to life of the portrait that finally swallows Dorian. Unfortunately, though, Blagovest Mitsev, in the role of Dorian Gray, fails to achieve anything memorable, playing as if one note almost through the entire performance. This contrasts strongly with Tsveti Peniashki, who demonstrates impressive vocal and acting skills in the part of Sir Henry Wotton. Penyashki manages to create a multi-layered character, while Mitsev seems to fail to capture the complexity of his character, and his achievements remain only on the level of plasticity. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray there again are dance scenes and mass scenes, in which the actors repeat movements and lines that have no essential meaning to the plot, except to re-emphasize the theme of aimlessness of existence. As in other recent productions of the tandem there is a combination of costumes inspired by a concrete era and rather neutral materials, such as elastics, nets, nylon and fabric. So the production has impressive plastic scenes, yet features the familiar flaws: excessive focus on the visual side at the expense of content. In 2016 the theatre critic Veneta Doycheva wrote in her review of Kuncheva’s Escapes performance, "If there is something that could be desired, it is towards the purely dramatic side of the performance. Individual etudes quickly exhaust their internal charge and do not trespass into a more generalized level of meaning. Many of the scenes get stuck in repetition and fail to develop the literal saturation of gesture or movement in a new plane. The metaphorical key is laid bare, and instead of poetry, the image acquires only technical dimensions." (HOMO LUDENS 19/2016) No doubt, the productions of Kuncheva and Golomehova represent a well-balanced hybridity between elements of dramatic theatre, puppetry, musical theatre and acrobatics. However, a major problem remains the very telling of a story. Attempts at creating a poetical atmosphere often turn into a maelstrom of repetitions which bring about stasis and cyclicity in the dialogue. What Doycheva underlined in 2016 has, alas, worsened now, and the repetition unfolds on two levels: first, in the repetition of scenes within one and the same production and, second, in their transfer from one production to another. An example of this can be seen in the repetitive lines and mechanical movements of the nobles in Dorian Gray , the nobles in The Queen of Spades , the controlled figures in The Last Man (2019) and the collective images of society in Momo (2014), Don Quixote (2022) and The Little Prince . Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson Actually, the repeated mise-en-scène, themes and means of expression in Kuncheva's work began after her production I, Sisyphus (2013), which is still running. In it, the main artistic element is the multiplication of the actor's face by means of puppets made from a plaster cast of his face. It is nearly in the same way that the collective image of the Gray people in Momo is built up. In Fear (2014), another production of Kuncheva (co-authored with Ina Bozhidarova), the same technique is used to present the fears of the main character. In The Queen of Spades , the repetition comes in the form of a dress made of multiple baby dolls, and in The Last Man , based on Orwell's 1984 (2019), there are busts again with plaster casts of the face of one of the actors in order to stress the lack of individuality. While the multiplication of faces gradually receded in the tandem's collaborative work, the "dancing woman," or an ensemble of "dancing women." remains a constant element in their performances. This motif appears in various forms: from the ballerina in Fear , through the Countess and Lisa in The Queen of Spades , Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation (2017), the Dulcineas in Don Quixote (2022), Sybil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (2024) to Roses in The Little Prince (2024). Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson In light of these observations, a question arises: does Kuncheva's focus on visual elements, at the expense of dramaturgy and analysis, contribute to the repetitiveness in her performances? In her interview at the Kultura newspaper, she reportss that she bases her approach on the personal experiences, skills, and perspectives of the actors. From my observations during the rehearsal process of Queen of Spades , I can add that she provides actors with the freedom and time to express themselves through a series of tasks related to the materials to be used in the performance (such as wire mesh, rubber bands, foam, etc.) and the themes and subthemes of the literary works. However, the freedom offered in the laboratory process seems not to have a significant impact on the final result, as it is often suppressed by already established visual images. This leads to a disconnection between content and form, resulting in performances that resemble scattered thoughts, devoid of a unifying overarching idea. The distinctive artistic approach of Kuncheva’s tandem with Golomehova is undoubtedly an important part of the contemporary Bulgarian theatre, but perhaps the time has come for a change: for an escape from the familiar dark narrative, for researching new themes, for challenging themselves. After all, the biggest challenge for an established artist is not to stay in the comfort zone, but to find new ways to inspire and be inspired. The human beings’ biggest battle is with themselves, as Kuncheva herself emphasizes in almost every work of hers. References References About the author(s) Gergana Traykova is completing her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Theatre Studies, NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov" in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her writings have been published in national theatre journals in Bulgaria, including KuklArt, Artizanin , and Stranitsa . She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management at NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov", followed by a Master’s in Puppet Theatre Directing. In 2021, she directed her thesis production, an original dramatization of Margarit Minkov's tale Merry Tickling Laughter at the State Puppet Theatre "Georgi Mitev" in Yambol, Bulgaria. Currently she is the dramaturg of the Drama and Puppet Theatre – Vratsa, Bulgaria. 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 The Hamlet Syndrome by Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Hamlet Syndrome At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Theater, Documentary, Film This film will be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Poland / Germany Language Ukrainian Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 2022 A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives. https://www.hamletsyndrome.com About The Artist(s) Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski are acclaimed polish germany filmmakers. Get in touch with the artist(s) magdalenakaminska@me.com and follow them on social media https://www.hamletsyndrome.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou