Kevin Byrne Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Kevin Byrne By Published on July 2, 2013 Download Article as PDF As a black blackface entertainer and influential international star, Bert Williams has held a continuous fascination for theatre historians, in large part because Williams signifies the contradictions of blackface as much as he lived the history of African American minstrelsy. His work with George Walker starting in the 1890s, groundbreaking musicals of the 1900s, and career with Ziegfeld’s Follies in the 1910s have been detailed in numerous [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700023 key=key-27ewixcpatnsnjsq4a3n mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 Ewa – The Last Lesson by Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Ewa – The Last Lesson Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:30 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Italy, Poland Language Italian, Polish Running Time 67 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. With Ewa Benesz Directed by Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Produced by Chiara Andrich, Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Cinematography Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto, Chiara Andrich Editing Jacopo Quadri, Nicolò Tettamanti Sound engineer Camilla Iannetti Camera operator Camilla Iannetti Sound design and Music Francesco De Marco Color correction Giada Di Fonzo About The Artist(s) Andrea Mura Italian director and producer with a background in Philosophy and a diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. His documentary work, with works such as “Nodas” (2015) and “Transumanze” (2021), explores the dialogue between memory, popular traditions and contemporaneity. His films have gained recognition at numerous international festivals, including RAI Film Festival (Bristol), Primed (Marseille), See You Sound (Turin), Visioni Italiane (Bologna) and DocuMed (Tunis). As a producer, he has collaborated on Ginko Film projects, including François Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto's “Toxicily” (France-Italy, 2023) and Giulia Camba's “Oplà” (Italy, 2024). Since 2014, he has shared the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival in Palermo with Chiara Andrich. Federico Savonitto Documentary director. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he has long held the position of teaching tutor at the CSC - Sede Sicilia, taught filmmaking, and made several documentaries such as La fine che non ho fatto (2011), La città sconosciuta (2013), Pellegrino (2017), In un futuro aprile (2019), Not Available - It's about Yann Keller (2022), An Invisible Enemy (2022) The Secret Plan (2024) that participated and won awards at several international festivals, such as Biografilm Festival, Giornate degli Autori, DOK Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival, Listapad, DOC- Cévennes, Festival dei Popoli, Trieste Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Ortigia Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@ginkofilm.it and follow them on social media https://www.ginkofilm.it/en/film/the-last-lesson/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Peak Hour in the House by Blue Ka Wing at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China). The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Peak Hour in the House At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Blue Ka Wing 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 program) 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 United Kingdom Language No Dialogue Running Time 7:19 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) About The Artist(s) https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Gegq0SmwG6MQfWj7imX2CZ5cSxTaZsU/edit Get in touch with the artist(s) bluekawing＠hotmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/bluekawing/, https://www.instagram.com/bluekawing/, https://www.youtube.com/@danzrainbow 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

Encounter | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro |'s work Mixed Use in Staten Island, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation, Staten Island. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Mixed Use | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro | Poetry, Music Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 3pm Tappen Park, Staten Island Tappen Park is located at the intersection of Canal, Water, and Bay streets Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation, Staten Island 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 Staten Island Artists explore their relationship to Tappen Park (named after WWI veteran James Tappen) among the oldest public parks on Staten Island, and a former village center that predates the borough’s annexation by the City of New York, and the effects of climate change on their beloved island. | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro | Various artists based in and around the Statten Island borough will come together for this event. These include: Hailing from the concrete jungle of Staten Island, New York, Manners and Respect is a rap-reggae fusion duo that's been bringing the vibes since the early days of the millennium. Formed by brothers Imanuel I-AM-I Stennett and Jahfree Jah Jah Beats Stennett, their sound is a melting pot of their experiences growing up on the East Coast, heavily influenced by the golden age of hip-hop and the infectious rhythms of reggae blasting from local Caribbean shops. Thomas Fucaloro is the winner of numerous grants from the Staten Island Council of the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes and NYC Commission of Human Rights to name a few He has been on six national slam teams, holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a co-founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is also an adjunct professor at Wagner College and BMCC where he teaches various poetry and literature courses, and the co-founder of Poetry in the Park, WORDPLAY, Creating Space, Poetry in Motion and Creativity Meets Geek. Thomas has released 2 full lengths: It Starts From the Belly and Blooms and Inheriting Craziness is a Soft Halo of Light by Three Rooms Press. He also has 4 chapbooks: Mistakes Disguised as Stars (Tired Hearts Press), Depression Cupcakes (Yes, Poetry), There is Always Tomorrow (Mad Gleam Press) and The Only Gardening I Do is When I Give Up by Finishing Line Press. Cynthia Rodriguez is a multi-talented artist who expresses herself through words and paint, often using both hands ambidextrously in her creations. Driven by a desire to inspire others, she seeks to encourage individuals to share their stories and embrace their authenticity, living life fully in their truth. You can see what Cyn is currently up to by visiting her Instagram @Cyn.is.Cyn and clicking on the link tree in her bio. M.A. Dennis contains multitudes. He is a National Black Writers Conference Emerging Poet, lover of free refreshments, and a survivor of homelessness. Johns Hopkins University Press Blog describes him as “a hilarious but also heartbreaking performance poet.” M.A.’s work has been published in many anthologies and a few public bathroom stalls. Dennis lives in Shaolin Island, NY with his four pet rocks (Chris, Fraggle, Gibraltar & Plymouth). IG: m_a_dennis575 Matt Figgz is an educator who loves reading, anime, and cold leftovers. He is also the co-founder of "Poetry in the Park" (@official_poetryinthepark), a free outdoor open mic series that started in response to the weight of Covid. Matt Figgz has a poetry collection, "Adolescence", that is available on Amazon. Visit Artist Website Location Tappen Park is located at the intersection of Canal, Water, and Bay streets Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation, Staten Island Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation Inc (RANCF) is dedicated to educating, empowering and inspiring the community in the areas of health, the arts, and culture. About five years ago Founder and President, Dorcas Meyers, had a vision to connect the neighboring 5 boroughs through "edu-taining" events; exposing the diverse culture of Staten Island's Northshore and sharing the talents of creatives that make up the uniqueness of New York’s residents. Ms. Meyers is a native Staten Islander, a businesswoman and cultural advocate. Under her leadership Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation has partnered with a number of nonprofits, entrepreneurs, creatives, and public and private agencies to bring great talent and epic events to the Northshore, branding it as a tourist destination. Launching in 2018, here are some of the cultural programs RANCF has sponsored and hosted that have drawn crowds of over 700 to 1,000 people from various boroughs to the Northshore. 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023: the JCC Beacon Program at I.S. 49 in collaboration with Alkebulan Consciousness Rising and Jason Price Celebrating Unsung Community Leaders Making A Difference, A Black History Month Black History Through Time and Sound Kwanzaa Celebration 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022: “Taking It To The Streets: Free Friday Night Films” Series in collaboration with Secta 5 Productions, First Central Baptist, Maker Park Radio, National Lighthouse Museum, Empire Outlets, National Jazz Museum in Harlem Taking It To The Streets: F-A-M-I-L-Y Day at Tappen Park, October 14, 2023 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024: Juneteenth Celebrations, Re-enactment & Parade in collaboration with First Central Baptist Church, Jubilee Collectives, Friends Who Think Pink, Shaolin Ryders, Universal Temple of the Arts, National Lighthouse Museum and Jeannine Otis 2022, 2023: Kwanzaa Celebration in collaboration with Alkebulan Consciousness Rising, Central Family Life Center, Janet G. Robinson aka "The Kwanzaa Lady" 2022: Black Lighthouse Keepers and Life Saving Service members in collaboration with the National Lighthouse Museum and Staten Island Black Heritage 2024: The Freedom Ball in collaboration with Friends Who Think Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Organization, Shaolin Ryders and Jason Price 2024: TappenTeers at Work Park Clean-up & Horticulture with Partnerships for Parks 2024: Art In The Parks in collaboration with NYC Green Fund, May 11, 2024 Visit Partner Website

Henry Bial 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 Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Henry Bial By Published on May 30, 2014 Download Article as PDF The value of interdisciplinary inquiry in the study of American drama and theatre has been persuasively established, so much so that it is virtually a commonplace. Scholars working in the field today routinely draw on work from the humanities, from the social sciences, from ecobiology and cognitive science and any number of other disciplines. Yet just as globalization has not eliminated the nation state, the disciplines themselves persist. For all that scholars work to position our projects and ourselves “at the intersection between,” disciplinary assumptions linger, ghostly revenants haunting our curricula, our journals, our professional societies. Most surprisingly, perhaps, the disciplinary boundaries seem most impermeable between two fields that would seem to have the most common ground: theatre/performance studies and film/media studies. Consider inter alia the American Theatre and Drama Society, whose website lists 125 member publications since 2009, of which fewer than 10% give serious consideration to film and/or digital media.1 Over the same period, Theatre Journal has published 101 articles, 15 of which address film or television (5 in a single special issue on digital media), while the journal you are reading now, JADT, has published 51 articles with none crossing that disciplinary boundary.2 Conversely, since 2009, Cinema Journal, the publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, has published no articles that address the live stage.3 Hence, a disconnect: despite our overt recognition that the story of American drama in history, theory, and practice is a story of theatre and film—not to mention radio, television, and, increasingly, videogames and the internet—we generally ignore this recognition in shaping our research projects. This essay argues that the study of American drama and theatre not only allows, but also often requires the scholar to research and write across the disciplinary divide between theatre and film (as well as other related arts: radio, television, music, new media). Readers are forewarned that the overall tone is less scholarly than polemical, reflecting the sense of urgency that I feel is needed at this moment in the history of both disciplines: theatre and performance studies on the one hand, and film/media studies on the other. The title “Hot Pursuit” is drawn from the legal doctrine that allows law enforcement personnel to cross municipal, state, and (subject to certain treaty obligations) national boundaries if failing to do so would allow a suspect to escape apprehension. Too often in academia, scholars allow disciplinary boundaries to impede if not halt their pursuit of ideas. Though we claim to value interdisciplinary inquiry, we have many incentives (hiring committees, tenure and promotion, outcomes assessment, etc.) to reify disciplinary norms. Though we may desire to know everything about everything, we have to draw fences around our arguments or the book never gets finished. Hence the project that begins as “ethnicity in performance” may eventually become “Jewish memory on the US stage, 1989-1997.” The use of “principles of exclusion” such as identity, nation, genre and period is an accepted fact of academic life. It doesn’t make us bad people, or even bad scholars. Yet if we are to go after the big ideas, the ones that speak to the circulation of meaning and power within the global culture, we must work to overcome our reluctance to intrude on someone else’s turf. Constructions of identity and nation, for example, don’t just exist in the theatre. They don’t just come from the television screen. If we want to prevent such constructs from eluding our grasp, we must cast a broad net. More importantly, we must be willing to follow our subjects wherever they may lead. Toward that end, this essay considers five “myths” that must be overcome in order to facilitate such boundary-crossing scholarship. By myth, I mean an idea once held as sacred truth but now considered fictional. Though they are generally recognized as false-to-fact, myths nevertheless continue to exert influence on contemporary thought. The first three of the myths I consider have their genealogy in European modernist ideas about art; therefore resistance to these myths may be understood as a way to embrace an understanding of American drama that is “more American” (more populist, more postmodern, more problematic). The last two myths are ones that I see as more pervasive in American scholarship and popular discourse; thus pushing back against them is of particular urgency to scholars of American drama. Myth #1: Theatre is High Culture. Film is Low Culture We know, of course, that theatre has never been the exclusive province of the wealthy, nor has film ever been confined to the lower class. Yet the notion that theatre is culturally superior to film continues to permeate theatre and performance studies in any number of ways, even if the terms “high” and “low” remain unvoiced. We see it in theatre people’s characterization of film and television as sites of “selling out.” Village Voice theatre critic Michael Feingold epitomizes this point of view: “a disheartening number of theater folk share the tourist audience's preoccupation with mass culture, to the point where I sometimes feel like the hero of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, watching his friends turn into stampeding animals. But I'm not capitulating, even if the popularity of a show like Glee proves that an impulse from the theater can sometimes stir up TV's currents.”4 We see it in the patronizing tone of surprise that theatre critics use to praise a Hollywood star who performs well in a live theatre role, as well as the gleeful malice with which those same critics eviscerate the film star who acts poorly on stage. As Patrick Healy writes, “Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it.”5 We also see it, interestingly enough, in performance studies’ valorization of the live as superior to the mediated, epitomized by Peggy Phelan’s oft-quoted formulation, “performance’s only life is in the present.”6 It is all very well to celebrate performance as that which disappears, to highlight theatre’s capacity to surprise, to point to a tradition that stretches (in the West) back to Thespis. Yet in so doing, do we not also implicitly and explicitly devalue those theatrical innovations and interventions that seem to smack too much of film? Why, as Jessica Sternfeld writes, do “theater scholars develop an arrogant, even disgusted tone when mentioning the megamusical, if they mention it at all”?7 Why, when we have rejected—or at least challenged—the (neo-)Aristotelian approach to drama in so many other quarters, does Spectacle remain the most abject element of theatre studies? For the same reason, perhaps, that Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov still abound on U.S. stages, despite a quarter century or more of attempts to de-canonize Dead White Guys: European modernism, with its attendant anti-theatricality, still lurks as the American art world’s unindicted co-conspirator.8 Film studies is haunted by the high-low myth in a different way. Concerned with establishing its legitimacy as a discipline, cinema studies for many years adopted many of the aesthetic prejudices of theatre, considering only certain types of film to be worthy of serious scholarly investigation. Films that proved too popular with the masses were suspect as art, unless and until they achieved canonical status. Most especially, film studies has tended, like theatre, to eschew sentiment, lavishing greater praise and attention on films marked by reflexive irony or existential dread, another sign of European influence.9 Hence film and media studies finds itself with a catch-22: having argued for disciplinary legitimacy (and even superiority) on the grounds that their object of study reaches more spectators than any other art form, the field for many years focused on those objects more likely to be enjoyed by a self-selected few. Only in the last twenty years has the scholarly study of popular film and television become widespread. Lee Grievson notes that the 2003 renaming of the Society of Cinema Studies’s as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies “marked a newly expansionist sense of what the discipline would cover.”10 So where are we? Theatre scholars, rapidly losing ground to film in the academy (as measured in majors, facilities, and teaching lines), gravitate toward performances that demonstrate theatre is a “higher” art form than film. Film scholars, battling to win ground from theatre (and literature), have until recently aimed their sights at work that establishes film as a “higher” art form than the general public might think. What falls out of this equation are the popular performances, including those most likely to span both disciplines: the filmic adaptations of Broadway hits, the musicals based on movies, the televised plays, the live-to-movie-theatre broadcast, and so on. The most likely site for discussions of such “crossover” performances is popular culture studies, which since the 1990s has begun to immigrate into nearly all academic domains. But popular culture studies in general, whether concerned with the live, the mediated, or the material, is further bounded by a generalized distrust of the so-called Culture Industry, a view that rests on the Marxian assumption that artworks generated for profit are (by definition) exploitative of the masses who consume them. While such a view has value as a diagnostic, challenging us to think critically about the entertainment we consume, it is ultimately self-negating. Combined with assumptions of high and low culture, such critique leads us to the absurd conclusion that the audience (the People) are always right, except for the many times that they are wrong, hoodwinked by hegemonic capitalist (and later neoliberal) structures of power. To cross this boundary, to properly apprehend the subjects of popular entertainment, we need to move past the high-low distinction, to “Americanize” the study of American drama. This is not to say that concepts such as class and taste are no longer relevant, but rather to admit that studying cultural aspects of performance need not entail rejection of all aesthetic criteria. Conversely, the study of aesthetics cannot be fully extricated from cultural considerations. Blur this border, and the theatre/film border will become significantly more permeable. Myth #2: In both theatre and film, the discrete work of art should be the primary object of study Traditional scholarship in both theatre and film (as well as most other arts) is an object-driven discipline. Or to put it another way, both theatre studies and film studies are tautologically defined by their objects of study. A theatre scholar studies plays and other theatrical events; a film scholar studies films, and perhaps other “screen” media such as television shows or websites. A work that does not fit within the boundaries of the scholar’s genre is considered at best terra incognita, at worst Out Of Bounds. Such object-driven disciplinary formations echo nineteenth century definitions of the nation-state, which has always existed more as an ideal than as a reality. They hang on a concept of the work of art that all parties recognize to be limited, if not actually false. For it is not simply the genre of study that we regard as a fixed object, but also the site. The theatre scholar routinely speaks of a play or production as if it could be contained within two hours traffic upon the stage. The film scholar speaks or writes of a film as if it were a unitary object, beginning at the opening credits and ending when the lights come back on. Yet our own experiences of both media demonstrate that, in the words of the 1935 stage production, 1959 film, 1983 radio broadcast, 1993 television broadcast, and 2002 live-to-movie theatre telecast opera Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” A theatrical production changes nightly. A long-running play changes casts, venues, and (frequently) dialogue. Cabaret with Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles is not the same performance with Michelle Williams in the role (nor is either the same as a production whose performers are not recognizable from film and television). A film is comparatively more stable, but may include multiple cuts for different markets, as well as second-order viewing opportunities on television, DVD, airplanes, computers, and iPads. Moreover, as both disciplines place greater emphasis on cultural (rather than purely aesthetic) considerations, on audience reception, and on the post-performance circulation of meaning, the myth of the discretely bounded unitary artwork becomes increasingly unsustainable.11 This problem multiplies exponentially when, taking a page from performance studies, we begin to look not just at the artistic product but also at the process. What is the ontological status, for example, of a film script, of a rehearsal on a film set, of “deleted scenes?” What can theatre learn from studying auditions, replacement casts, or out of town tryouts? In practice, theatre and film scholars tend to consider process opportunistically. This is to say that we consider it only when a) access to such material is possible, and b) such material is sufficiently provocative as to enhance or illuminate our assessment of the final product. Perhaps it must be this way. Mustn’t all scholars balance the impossibility of knowing everything against the need to know something? And yet, if we expand our definition of the artwork, we might begin to blur the genre boundaries in productive ways. Should a revival of a play, for example, be treated differently from a remake of a film? What conditions determine whether a work of art is considered de novo or as a reiteration of a prior work? Can theories of adaptation applied to studies of what John Tibbetts and James Welsh call “stage plays into film”12 be readily applied to films adapted for the stage? Why has hardly any discipline taken notice of (much less theorized) the phenomenon of live television or movie-theatre broadcasts of stage performances?13 When we can properly articulate such ontological distinctions, we may begin to better understand the challenges ahead. Myth #3: Theatre is a Writer’s Medium. Film is a Director’s Medium. Among the consequences of our focus on the discrete artistic product is the attempt to attribute authorship of that product to the playwright (in theatre) or the director (in film). The assertion that the primary creator of a theatrical work is the playwright is not simply a convenient fiction nor a reflection of professional norms. Rather, we attribute authorship to the playwright because it is primarily as texts that theatrical creations circulate through time and space. Productions of, say, Oedipus separated by hundreds or thousands of years and/or hundreds or thousands of miles are nevertheless recognized as The Same Play on the basis of a shared written text. This despite the fact that the text may have been translated, emended, or otherwise transformed in the journey. We validate the playtext through its attribution to its “original creator,” the playwright. This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew. Yet the logic is circular, because the playwright is defined by the creation of the text. I believe that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare are actually the work of another Englishman, coincidentally also named William Shakespeare. This emphasis on the text/playwright dyad persists despite the fact that biographical criticism (the so-called “intentional fallacy”) has been deeply destabilized by New Criticism, poststructuralism, and reader-response theory. Driven perhaps by an imperative to “represent,” we routinely talk about our scholarship, our syllabi, and our production seasons as if the text were the play, and the playwright its only creator. The instability of the text, like the multiplicity of creative partners (actors, designers, stage managers, directors) and other vagaries of the artistic process, is treated as an occasionally illuminating curiosity. In other words, even though we know that the playscript is not the end product of the theatrical enterprise, we often behave as if it were. By contrast, the film script most often comes before the artistic process reaches fruition, and rarely circulates with the promiscuity of a theatre script. The objet d’art that is distributed, studied, and archived is the film itself. Because of this, it is the director’s contribution to the process that is most readily visible to scholars and cineastes. Hence the frisson of finality that emanates from the phrase “Director’s Cut.” It is a marketing term, of course, but an instructive one for a number of reasons. First, it reveals the desire to cling to the popular and scholarly notion of the auteur director. Second, the phrase “Director’s Cut” nearly always refers to a re-release and/or DVD “special edition,” tying it to the multiple media (film, broadcast television, video recording, online or on-demand video, etc.) through which this apparently unitary artwork is distributed. Third, the very necessity of the term “Director’s Cut” belies its own claim: if the director were truly the Author of the film, the so-called “Director’s Cut” would require no special labeling. Moreover, to the degree that film as a medium tends to emphasize (in comparison to theatre) the visual over dialogue, we can easily forget that theatre is not radio, that film is no longer silent. Yet the impossibility of archiving live performance and the seductive visuality of film are not likely to be overcome. What then, is the trans-genre scholar to do? Some significant interventions have been made through attention to filmic adaptations of plays and mixed media performances, as well as through experiments in multidimensional archiving of theatre events. Nevertheless, unless and until we move beyond the need to study a bounded Artistic Product, we will continue to be haunted by the need to identify a singular Artistic Producer. We will continue with scholarship that tacitly ignores the essentially collaborative nature of both art forms. Hot pursuit, then, means directing greater attention to process, both before and after the performance. When we consider the training, pre-production, rehearsal and rewrite processes, we see that theatre and film are fluid and multiple creations, arising from the joint inspiration and efforts of many artists, not just the one to whom authorship is formally and imperfectly attributed. When we consider the role of the audience in constructing the meaning of the artwork—let us stipulate for the moment that the audience does play such a role—we see as well that the concern with authorship is something of an academic fiction. Scholars and critics tend to consider the Artist retrospectively, not unlike juries consider a criminal defendant. What did this person do? The audience, for the most part, considers the Artist subjunctively, as police consider a fleeing suspect. Of what acts might this person be capable? Are they acting alone or in conspiracy with others? What can be learned about this person from studying the scene of the crime? Myth #4: East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet For scholars of American drama and theatre, “New York” is a synecdoche for live performance and “Hollywood” a metonym for the film industry. Perhaps because of the continent that separates these metropoles, U.S. scholars rarely focus on the fact that many playwrights work as screenwriters (and vice versa), that many film directors also work on the stage, and that actors and designers often cross the theatre/film boundary routinely. One reason, of course, is the aforementioned emphasis on the finished work of art, and the definition of that art as the product of a playwright or director’s imagination. An artist-driven approach to scholarship would go a long way toward remedying this problem. One lamentable consequence of the influence of critical theory on both theatre and film studies is that we have, for the most part, stopped writing artist biographies. Out of approximately 300 studies listed in Theatre Journal’s “Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts” from 2009-2013, there are fewer than 10 biographical projects, and fewer than 30 single-artist studies.14 The comparable list from 1966 alone has 12 biography projects and 30 single-artist studies out of 104 titles.15 While scholars still undertake the occasional reassessment of the impact of a major figure (e.g. Linda Ben-Zvi’s Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times) or a thematic analysis focused on a single author (e.g. Harry Elam’s The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson), we have generally ceded the field of artists’ life stories to journalists, amateurs, and the artists themselves. When, if at all, scholars read these biographies, it is generally with an eye toward extracting information in support of an object-driven analysis of the artist’s work. While the life of the artist should not, of course, be the determining factor in the interpretation of her artistic work, it is dangerous to lose sight of the human stories that lay within our field of study. Such stories are vital partly because they are human--the human being does not fit neatly into categories of medium or genre—but mostly because they are Stories. Narratives have a remarkable ability to cross disciplinary and generic boundaries. As Michel De Certeau reminds us, “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”16 A strong narrative, we know, can compel our involvement in film and theatre, story and song. More importantly, these particular narratives, these “tales from Hollywood” and “Broadway memories” and “my life as a famous person” books often tell us more about the real circulation of artists and ideas across multiple media than we can glean from peer-reviewed “Major Works” studies. When we shift the focus from the object to the artist, we recognize the limits of genre/media-based boundaries. A study of the film work of, for example, Katharine Hepburn, would be obviously, tragically incomplete without a consideration of her stage career. In Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (2013), Christopher Bigsby lists several prominent American playwrights who also write (or have written) extensively for television, including David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Adam Rapp, and Theresa Rebeck.17 Bigsby also identifies many respected television writers who began their careers writing for the stage, most notably Aaron Sorkin.18 Yet just as crimes committed in Mexico may be considered inadmissible in a Texas trial, scholars often make the conscious choice to exclude such extraterritorial evidence in our consideration of an artist’s oeuvre. For example, many if not most readers of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre know that Eric Overmyer wrote On the Verge (1987). How many know that he also wrote five episodes of St. Elsewhere (1986-87) and two episodes of The Wire (2006), amidst a long career in television? How many consider this when teaching or producing On the Verge? Conversely, how many film critics and historians consider the stage beyond their purview? Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, notes in his introduction to Discovering Orson Welles that most scholars in “Welles studies” ignore Welles’s stage work, suggesting that “they’re more parochial than Welles himself was.”19 The theatre/film boundary is persistent. To demonstrate its permeability, we must be willing to cross it in hot pursuit of those artists whose careers we examine.20 Audience-driven research similarly offers unexploited potential for boundary crossing intervention into the mythical opposition between New York and Hollywood. How many theatre audiences since the 20th century are ignorant of film? How many film audiences are truly innocent vis-à-vis theatre? True, some filmgoers (and television watchers) obviously have limited exposure to professional theatre; nevertheless, amateur, community-based and educational theatres are widely accessible.21 Certainly audiences recognize differences between media, and may indeed be more receptive to one or another form of communication. Yet all media provide cultural input, so to speak, and to ignore this threatens the utility of our research. Hot pursuit, then, means not just following the artist across the theatre/film border, but following the audience as well. This will not be easy. The audience is frustratingly diverse, and our means of accessing their response to any artwork are sketchy and incomplete. Perhaps this is why, despite the valuable theorizations of spectatorship provided by Susan Bennett, Marvin Carlson, and others, so many scholars find it far simpler to concentrate on what the Artist Intended rather than to hypothesize what the Audience Received. But the dichotomy is a false one. Recall that the unitary Artistic Producer is a fiction, no less so than the unitary Audience. If we cannot analyze either with certainty, perhaps we can—like quantum physicists, political pollsters, and bookmakers—learn to express our conclusions in terms of probability. There is (you should excuse the pun) a good chance this would help. MYTH #5: Theatre is the Past. Film is the Present. Digital Media is the Future The argument that theatre is a discipline rooted in the past while film and media studies are contemporary and forward-looking serves the need of film and media studies to separate itself from its “parent field,” rebutting those who would argue that film is merely Theatre By Other Means. In so doing, it replaces one fallacy—post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)—with another—post hoc ergo excellens ut is (after this, therefore superior to this). The latter form of reasoning is, not coincidentally, a critical pillar supporting the concept of Manifest Destiny as it applies to US domestic and foreign policy, and so we might read it as a particularly (though not exclusively) American phenomenon. This myth draws support from a mistaken, if understandable, confusion between the study of theatre or film and the industry of entertainment. There is no doubt that film and media have displaced theatre as primary sources of mass entertainment in western culture. This says nothing, however, about the vitality of either medium as an art form or a site of scholarship. Pace Benjamin, a century and a half of photography has eviscerated neither art nor art history. Moreover, the integration of film and video into live performance is potentially a great step forward for the theatre and studies thereof. In fact, a performance studies approach might lead us to reverse the terms in this formulation. The play, after all, belongs to the repertoire, a shifting repository of cultural memory that continues to grow and change in response to local conditions. The film belongs to the archive, remaining fixed into eternity. The Hairy Ape is continually reinvented; Citizen Kane stays the same.22 In order to overcome the false premise of a backward-looking theatre and a forward-looking digital age, scholars must relentlessly historicize our sites of inquiry. We must strive to imagine ourselves into the Now that animated past performances, and we cannot take for granted that we fully grasp the Present. Whatever phenomenon we hope to illuminate, we must range broadly forward and backward across history, avoiding the pitfalls of Grand Narratives while embracing the boundary-crossing potential of detailed local narratives. We must also recognize that our own arguments are bound by time and place. If they are to remain relevant into the future they must continually be re-made. What is to be done? Calls for greater interdisciplinarity at the institutional level are by now commonplace. To the degree that consolidation of academic departments, public scholarship, and “strategic clusters” serve the neoliberal agenda in higher education, one might even argue that interdisciplinarity is the New Normal. Yet just as increased global migration has led many people in many countries to insist on tighter border controls, so too has the trend toward interdisciplinary scholarship caused a kind of backlash amongst scholars who fear the dumbing down of traditional disciplines (or, more cynically, the loss of their own discipline’s power in the intellectual marketplace). As this backlash is most common amongst those with the most to lose (department chairs, journal editors, senior faculty), the disciplinary pressures on emerging scholars remain strong. Hence at the level of the individual scholar, or even the individual work of scholarship, disciplinary borders remain difficult and dangerous to cross. To counter this, scholars of American drama and theater must embrace the doctrine of hot pursuit. We need not and should not give up our recognition of what is distinct about live performance, but we cannot and must not allow our subject to escape across the theatre-film border. Our scholarship must maintain its performativity in both senses of the word: it must remain liminal, processual, and multi-vocal; and it must establish—by its very articulation—that there is more to cultural analysis than can be contained within disciplinary or generic frames. It is no longer a question of being interdisciplinary, but of being post-disciplinary. We must even dare, at times, to be undisciplined. -------- Henry Bial is Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas where he holds a joint appointment in American Studies and Theatre. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005), the editor of The Performance Studies Reader (2004; Second Edition, 2007), and the co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (with Scott Magelssen, 2010) and Brecht Sourcebook (with Carol Martin, 2000). He currently serves as President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). --------- Endnote: [1] See: http://www.atds.org/publications/year/ —numerical calculations based on the list as retrieved 25 January 2014. [2] Theatre Journal, volumes 61-65; Journal of American Drama and Theatre, volumes 22-25. [3] Cinema Journal, volumes 49-52. [4] Michael Feingold, “The Response to the Tony Awards Shows That Show Business Is No Longer Business As Usual,” 2010 blog post at VillageVoice.com, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-06-22/theater/response-to-tony-awards-shows-business-is-not-business-as-usual/ Retrieved 1 March 2014. [5] Patrick Healy, “Broadway’s New Kid.” New York Times (24 February 2013), AR1. [6] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993),146. [7] Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 5. It should be noted that Sternfeld’s book, along with recent work by Stacy Wolf, David Savran, Elizabeth Wollman and others have begun to counter this phenomenon. [8] See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). [9] For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Lee Grievson, “Discipline and Publish: The Birth of Cinematology,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 168-176. [10] Ibid., 175. [11] This is not to dismiss the widespread use of intertextual reading strategies, but to point out that even these strategies tend to focus on a singular discrete work to be interpreted in light of other singular works. [12] John Tibbets and James Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film (New York: Facts on File, 2001). [13] Cf. Brian Herrera and Henry Bial, eds. “As Seen on TV,” a special section of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 91-168. [14] See Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (May 2009): 359-362; 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 329-332; 63, no. 2 (May 2011): 305-309; 64, no. 2 (May 2012): 317-322; 65, no. 2 (May 2013): 315-319. Numbers are approximate because several projects appear in more than one year. [15] See Educational Theatre Journal 18, no.2 (May 1966): 122-125. [16] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 181. [17] Christopher Bigsby. Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), x-xi. [18] Ibid. [19] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. [20] Notable examples of artist-driven studies include Leslie Kane’s Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet (Palgrave, 2001), Christopher Bigsby’s Arthur Miller (Harvard University Press, 2010), and David Luhrssen’s Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). [21] Though studies by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that less than 20% of the U.S. population regularly attends live theater, their polling methodology explicitly excludes amateur performances such as elementary and high school plays. SeeNEA brochure, All America’s A Stage: Growth and Challenges in Nonprofit Theater (2008). http://arts.gov/publications/all-americas-stage-0 (accessed 1 March 2014). [22] Such a reformulation, however, takes us back to the limits of object-driven analyses. 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.

Raimondo Genna Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Raimondo Genna By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness . By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Written in 2014, Performance, Identity, and Immigration is a timely addition to the intersecting discourses of performance studies and immigration identity formations, particularly given the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential race in the United States. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, launched his presidential campaign by claiming that immigrants from Mexico (as well as Central and South America, and the Middle East) were drug smugglers, rapists, and generic criminals. While Trump’s speech was criticized by many across the political spectrum, he was able to secure the Republican nomination—in part—by reiterating the long-dominant narrative that promotes the criminality of “illegal aliens.” Gad Guterman’s work serves as a valuable intervention against such rhetoric through his critical analysis of the interwoven fields of performance studies and immigration law, and his introduction of “undocumentedness.” For Guterman, “undocumentedness” moves the discourse away from the dehumanizing and highly contentious term of “illegal alien,” which serves as a performative descriptive, and focuses on the structural circumstances under which undocumented immigrants must live (2). But Guterman continues to strategically rely on terms such as “illegal” and “alien” to “remind us that law constructs categories that contribute to the building of identities” (3). This serves as his thesis as he studies the intersection of performance, immigration law, and identity. Through this critical lens, Guterman examines the performances and plays of Culture Clash, Carlo Albán, Genny Lim, Josefina López, Lisa Loomer, Milcha Sánchez-Scott, Guillermo Reyes, Janet Noble, Ntare Mwine, and Yussef El Guindi, among others, and explores how the power of the law shapes identity and “the practice of belonging” as “undocumentedness forges ways of being, seeing, and existing” (9). The plays discussed and Guterman’s analyses offer inroads to examining our own legal consciousness by positioning us to examine our understanding and use of the law in our everyday lives. Guterman organizes his analysis following the framework of the Immigration and Nationality Act in an attempt to better reflect the ways the US immigration laws operate to “define and constrain both individual and collective identity” (10). Chapter 1, which serves as his introduction, is entitled Act § 237 (a)(1)(B)—Present in Violation of the Law” and focuses on the impossible subject and the performative act of self-erasure by the undocumented as a strategy for inclusion and invisibility. In chapter 2, entitled “Act § 275(a)—Improper Entry by Alien,” Guterman examines what he terms “border scenarios” (after Diana Taylor) as embodied asymmetrical power exchanges between the entrant and border monitor that perform and construct the very borders being policed. Chapter 3, “Act § 274A—Unlawful Employment of Aliens,” interrogates the inseparable dyad of the undocumented domestic worker and the privileged employer while examining legal nonexistence’s impact on exploitation and worker rights. In chapter 4’s “Act §212(a)(9)(B)(iii)(III)—Family Unity,” Guterman explores the legal construction of the family unit through heteronormative paradigms that simultaneously patrol “counterhegemonic lifestyles” (101). Guterman investigates the heightened criminality of undocumentedness (and also documentedness of color) in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act in chapter 5, labeled, “Act § 331—Alien Enemies.” In his final chapter, entitled “Act § 505—Appeals,” Guterman challenges his own assessment concerning how US law shapes individual and communal identities through self-erasure and redirects the flow of how “illegal” identities contribute to the shaping of the US through the hyper-visible performances of the Disney- and Sesame Street-inspired characters in Times Square. In each chapter, Guterman uses dramatic works and performances to assist in his analysis of the various statutes and laws, submitting that these performances —and performative practices represented within the theatre pieces—demonstrate how immigration laws shape individual and communal identities. Each chapter offers cogent and clear examinations of the theatre pieces and the various laws the plays are in communication with (whether consciously or not). For Guterman, theatre offers opportunities to shape and change the perceptions of undocumentedness by making visible what is often rendered invisible. In doing so, it helps to reshape the legal consciousness of the nation towards the undocumented. Although celebratory in the promise that theatre can serve as a space for constructive and meaningful change, Guterman challenges theatre companies who inadvertently practice invisibility even as they perform visibility. Guterman draws attention to the fact that plays such as Sánchez-Scott’s Latina , Loomer’s Living Out , and Solis’s Lydia highlight the plight of the domestic workers and their lack of rights, but are played to dominantly white, privileged audiences. Dubbing it “undocumentedface,” theatre practitioners participate in the continuing exclusion and rendering invisible the very people that are represented on stage by not reaching out and making theatre available to them. Dehumanization is not simply an attribute that works on the surface, but rather is internalized by the undocumented through the external forces of law and power. Having undocumentedness made visible for general audiences allows for empathetic connections, but for the undocumented it allows for a sense of empowerment and humanization. Guterman recognizes that it is not feasible or practical for the undocumented, who rely on invisibility to escape incarceration and deportation, to perform their stories on stage themselves, but to see their narratives performed before them works towards those forced to live in the shadows to recognize themselves—and their humanity—under the lights. Gad Guterman’s Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness is a valuable contribution to the field of performance studies and legal practices on identity formation. Examinations of performance and the law have long informed sexual and race identity discourses, but Guterman’s project delves into the under-examined area of the undocumented. While many of the examples within Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law focus on Latina/o theatre, it is by no means the only section of the undocumentedness explored in the book. Although the impact of the law on bodies differs in various communities based on race and gender, Guterman effectively demonstrates how the law dehumanizes and criminalizes immigrants, turning them into impossible subjects. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAIMONDO GENNA University of South Dakota Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Bila Burba by Duiren Wagua at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The Gunadule, the original inhabitants of northern Panama, reenact their successful uprising in 1925 against the repressive Panamanian government every year. Keeping this past alive is crucial for the preservation of collective identity.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Bila Burba At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Duiren Wagua Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 12pm. 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 Panama Language Spanish, Dulegaya Running Time 70 minutes Year of Release 2023 About The Film The Gunadule, the original inhabitants of northern Panama, reenact their successful uprising in 1925 against the repressive Panamanian government every year. Keeping this past alive is crucial for the preservation of collective identity. About The Artist(s) Duiren Wagua is a director, cinematographer and indigenous audiovisual producer from the Gunadule nation of Panama. With 9 years of experience in Panamanian cinematography, throughout his career he has collaborated for national and international film and television productions that have been shot in the Gunayala territory, Panama City and other locations such as: Spain, France, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway. He is Co-Founder of Wagua Films S.A., an audiovisual company that offers production services and consultancy to production companies that seek to film in the indigenous people of Panama's territories. Get in touch with the artist(s) festival@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media https://www.utopiadocs.net/, renato@utopiadocs.net 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

Olga Sanchez Saltveit Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation Olga Sanchez Saltveit By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Black Latinx community represents a significant portion of the Latinx [1] population, particularly in regions of the US where many Latinx reside. In New York, 23%, in California, 15%, and in Florida, 12% of the Latinx community identify as “Afro-Latinx.” [2] These regions also encompass the most established centers of Latinx theatre making in the country, so it is surprising that Afro-descendant Latinx experiences have not been well represented in Latinx dramaturgy except in the appreciative nods toward AfroLatinx cultural heritage found in music, dance, and spirituality. The legacy of hierarchical colonial racism which infiltrates and informs Latinx anti-Blackness has also been omitted from dramatic discourse. “Racial discrimination is a skeleton in the closet of the Latin@ community,” [3] writes Carlos Flores. The absence of the Black Latinx experience in Latinx dramaturgy is simultaneously an act of anti-Blackness and a denial that anti-Blackness in Latinidad exists. However, as Daphnie Sicre [4] notes, the early twenty-first century has ushered in an era in which “Afro-Latinx are no longer non-existent or invisible in theatre,” and the rise of work authored by AfroLatinx on numerous themes calls for “a reconfiguration of the canon: Afro-Latinx theatre is crucial for the survival of Black theatre and its intersectionalities between Latinx and African Americans.” [5] Here, I focus on the work of playwright Guadalís Del Carmen who shines a light on the anti-Blackness found within the Latinx community of the US and Latin America, that is, anti-Blackness targeted toward people who might also identify as Latinx, or, AfroLatinx. UnidosUS defines an “Afro-Latino” as “an individual of African descent from Latin America or an individual who has one parent of African descent and another of Latino descent.” According to Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, “the term Afro-Latin@ has surfaced a way to signal racial, cultural, and socioeconomic contradictions within the overly vague idea of ‘ Latin@. ’ In addition to reinforcing those ever-active transnational ties, the Afro-Latin@ concept calls attention to the anti-Black racism within the Latin@ communities themselves.” [6] The ideology of mestizaje attempted to homogenize the Latinx identity as one of racial mixture that blended myriad cultures and backgrounds, formed by syncretism, juxtaposition, fusion, and resistance. However, many racial and phenotypical identities exist within Latinidad that continue to be subjected to the legacy of European, primarily Spanish, colonization strategies including the formation of racialized hierarchies. Colorism and phenotypical discrimination pervade Latinx culture to this day, evident in the overwhelming presence of lighter-skinned Latinx in positions of power and influence, including popular media. “It is rare to see Latin@s of African descent on Spanish-speaking television or in movies. It is equally rare to see them advertising products in national Latin@ magazines.” [7][8] This privilege surfaces in the private sphere as well, within families and among friends, where one might hope for respite from racism. Thus, the term AfroLatinx, a non-binary update, intentionally complicates Latinx identity to embrace and celebrate African descent and illuminate the racism that persists in public and private. Latinx theatre since the mid-twentieth century has dedicated itself to challenging misrepresentations and harmful stereotypes of the mainstream by creating dramas that humanize Latinx and Latin Americans in the gaze of the mainstream White Unitedstatesian audience and the “American” theatre. In myriad plays revolving around issues of social justice, the marginalized Latinx can be seen struggling against the dominant White culture. [9] In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, Latinx feminist and queer voices disrupted this dynamic, arguing that their discrimination within the Latinx community also needed to be addressed on stage. [10] In the ‘90s and early aughts, the Latinx experience of anti-Black racism from the larger White mainstream was powerfully documented by Latinx playwrights such as Josefina Baéz, Carmen Rivera, and Candido Tirado. However, the experiences of discrimination faced by Black Latinx from within the Latinx community remains less visible on Latinx stages. I have previously argued that Black Latinx are more likely to be seen on stage in Latinx roles than to be written about in Latinx plays. [11] Yet that argument is complicated by the reality that Black Latinx actors such as Del Carmen and Crystal Román, who is also cited in the article, are too often overlooked for casting in projects that should include them. Latinx anti-Blackness is so embedded in the culture and so often inflicted presumably without intended malice (as for example, in families that encourage their children not to stay out in the sun too long so as not to darken their skin tone further) that injustice and harm appear to be accepted as inevitable interpersonal insensitivity, not worth public scrutiny. That invisibility is assuredly changing, as Sicre details in her 2018 chapter on “Afro-Latinx Themes in Theatre Today.” As Sicre notes, playwright Guadalís Del Carmen was highlighted in the 2018 Latinx Theatre Commons Carnaval of New Latinx Work, held at DePaul University in Chicago. She also performed in the 2015 Latina/o Theatre Commons Carnaval as an actor. However, as a Black Latina she more often found herself in the frustrating situation, too often echoed by others, of being “too Black to be cast as a Latina, and too Latina to be cast as Black.” A journalist by training, Del Carmen turned to playwriting to create roles for herself in the Chicago area where she grew up. Soon, she began writing roles for other Latinx actors who, like her, did not see themselves represented within Latinx theatre. Del Carmen’s work could not be more timely. In 2020, with the increased activism in support of #BlackLivesMatter , and the calling out/calling in from #WeSeeYouWAT , Latinx around the nation, including those of us in theatre, have been forced to acknowledge and address our community’s implicit anti-Blackness and how it shows up on our stages. Latinx theatre making has been so focused on Latinx oppression, that it has seemingly ignored its toxicity toward AfroLatinx. Del Carmen’s transformative works spotlight AfroLatinx experiences of Latinx racism, in ways that reflect its widespread and corrosive presence within the microcosm of family dynamics as well as in the larger political sphere. Below I focus briefly on two of her plays, My Father’s Keeper and Daughters of the Rebellion, and the strategies she employs to presence Blackness and anti-Blackness in Latinx storytelling. My Father’s Keeper centers on a Dominican immigrant family living in Chicago. Del Carmen employs a telling strategy even before the play begins, making it clear through the descriptions of the dramatis personae that most of the characters are Black. The presence of an intentionally identified AfroLatinx family as the focal point of a Latinx drama was unique in 2013, when the play was first written, and remains rare. Many plays that could have been cast with Black Latinx actors, particularly those that centered on people who hail from regions with significant Afrodescendant populations such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, are by default of anti-Blackness cast with mestizo or White Latinx. As Luckett and Shaffer note, “White supremacy often controls and dictates what representations are allowed visibility, and because of this phenomenon ‘Black’ actors are often pigeon-holed within a limited barometer of what is perceived to be Blackness.” [12] Del Carmen corrects this error by stipulating the casting of Black actors, demanding the visibility of the Black who is also Latinx and the Latinx who is also Black. It is an Anzaldúan move [13] that dissolves powerful yet fictional borders between identities that in reality overlap. Next, Del Carmen addresses Latinx colorism by calling for actors of different skin tones in specific roles. The titular father, Tirsio Gonzalez and son, Armando are both identified as “Dominican” and “Black Latino.” Juana Gonzalez, Tirsio’s wife and Mondo’s mother, is also identified as Dominican, and “Lighter in complexion than the rest of the family,” which would include Sofia, Mondo’s sister who is described as Dominican. From the outset, these character descriptions alone make it clear that skin tones are important details that will influence not only casting but potentially engage the embodied experience of the actor and influence audiences’ reception. Later on, Tirsio confirms this when he shares that in his home country, “if you don’t have rich name, or have the light skin, or a friend in the right place, you not go far in your career.” [14] Colorism is of course a familiar dynamic in US African American history, provoked by nineteenth century white supremacy, according to bell hooks who recounts that “racist white folks often treated lighter-skinned black folks better than their darker counterparts, and … this pattern was mirrored in black social relations.” [15] Del Carmen demonstrates the shared hierarchy at work in Latinx and Latin American culture. Mondo has married Anne, a White woman, and they have a son. Juana praises her young grandson, saying “Mi chichí will be a great man. Con those eyelaches, and his bello curly rubio head. Se parece a un angel.” [16] To which her daughter Sofía replies, “A blond baby… just what you always wanted.” [17] Del Carmen then investigates some of the shared and different experiences of anti-Black racism in the US by introducing the character of Daniel, who is identified as “African American” and who self-identifies in the script as Black. Daniel is Tirsio’s lover and confidante, and in their clandestine meetings they share their experiences as gay men who grew up in violently homophobic homes. Tirsio will never come out to his family as his experiences in the Dominican Republic have taught him that there is no place in his culture for homosexuality. Despite this, Tirsio and Daniel have a decades-long love affair. While Daniel seeks to align with Tirsio racially as well as sexually, Tirsio distances himself on the technicality that because he is Dominican, he is not Black. “The obviously Black baseball star of the Chicago Cubs, Sammy Sosa, for instance, becomes an indio (Indian) rather than a Black, since according to this national myth and tradition Dominicans ‘cannot be Black.’” [18] Haitians, argues Tirsio, are Black, while he and his son are, like Sosa, Indios. Tirsio’s internalized anti-Blackness is self-justified under the guise of nationalism. Del Carmen identifies this as a Latin American strategy. “In Latin America, nationalism takes over race. Because anti-miscegenation was not a part of Latin America, racism is seen as a US thing. I’m not Black. I’m not White. I’m Cuban, I’m Colombian, I’m Dominican.” [19] However, Daniel is not convinced, “The only difference between me, you and any Haitian,” he says, “is the boat stops of our ancestors.” [20] Del Carmen is also of Dominican heritage, born and raised in Chicago where she met few Dominicans besides her large family. “When I stepped out of my house to go to school, to go to work, there really wasn’t a lot of people around me that looked like me or sounded like me. I did grow up around a lot of macro-aggression. I’ve actually gotten into the habit of no longer saying micro because the micro affects us on a macro level.” [21] Yet, Del Carmen’s work is inspired not just by her own personal experiences but by what she sees happening globally. “One of the things I wanted to do was drop the pen on anti-Blackness in Latin America.” [22] For Del Carmen, Latinx plays about Latin American revolutions omitted important conversations about the ways in which anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and capitalism were integral parts of their dynamics. This awareness fueled her next play, Daughters of the Rebellion (previously titled, Tolstoy’s Daughters ), which is set in an “unspecified Latin American country.” With this gesture, Del Carmen expands her statement on anti-Blackness in the Latinx community beyond the horizon of the US to include Latin America and to implicate the globe. This is an intentionally political act that illuminates the historic legacy of racialized and gendered hierarchies in Latin America which has yielded pervasive inequity. “Afro-Latinos comprise some 150 million of [Latin America]’s 540 million total population, and, along with women and indigenous populations, are among the poorest, most marginalized groups in the region.” [23] Del Carmen indicts Eurocentric White male supremacist ideology for the continued marginalization of those who are not White males. The titular “daughters” are half-sisters Katya Libertad Córdova (Bates) and Fanya María Córdova, both in their early 20s, raised in the same rich and aristocratic home. However, Katya and Fanya’s experiences are worlds apart, and Del Carmen makes it clear that this is due to their appearance. As with My Father’s Keeper , Del Carmen describes the characters’ physical attributes in the Cast of Characters. Katya, the daughter of a revolutionary, is described as having “strong, dark features, Afro-Latina.” Her mother, Ester, her sister Fanya and her stepfather Daniel all have “light features,” as do Presidente Burgos and his son Ramón. Franco Montés is a revolutionary who “can be indigenous or black” and Angela, Franco’s accomplice, is “Afro-Latina.” [24] When the play begins, Fanya’s father, Katya’s stepfather, Daniel is a recently elected senator who becomes fast friends with the new President of the country. However, the President has initiated policies that are highly detrimental to the Black and Indigenous people of the country. His White supremacy becomes evident in his encounters with the Córdovas, when he makes it clear he neither trusts not expects much from Katya. In a telling early scene in which the newly elected President visits their home, he alludes to the girl, then nine years old, as a “mistake” and later, years into his Presidency, one “not to be trusted” among “Those people [who] can never be trusted.” [25] As with My Father’s Keeper, in which racism intersected homophobia, Del Carmen complicates the oppressions experienced in Daughters of the Rebellion. In addition to overt anti-Blackness, the Indigenous people of this fictional nation are also under attack, forbidden to wear their traditional clothing in the capital (a negation of their public cultural identity), and are being removed from their land and executed. The play is further intersected with feminist concerns as Katya and Fanya realize that as women living in a blatantly patriarchal society, they will never be taken seriously. Even from her privileged position Fanya knows that “People still don’t believe a woman is capable of anything more than having babies.” [26] This coalitional alliance among Afrodescendants, the Indigenous, and women points to Del Carmen’s shared critique of male-dominated White supremacist ideology. In response, Del Carmen’s fictional nation is in the midst of revolution, as Blacks, Indigenous, and feminists create underground movements and divergent plans which echo the strategies of civil rights movements of the twentieth century. The two half-sisters align themselves with different approaches. Fanya is working with the President’s son to bring charges against the President and his administration in an International Court. Katya’s approach is more militant, destroying government and financial buildings. Eventually Katya and Fanya’s two paths to liberation cross and contradict each other with fatal results. The play is violent, but certainly no more than real life. The true revolution in Daughters of Rebellion as in My Father’s Keeper is the de-centering of Latinx oppression in Del Carmen’s dramaturgy. Unlike much of Latinx theatre, in neither play are the characters’ Latinx or Latin American identities the basis of their experiences of oppression. The Gonzalez family is Dominican and living in the US but the issues at the heart of My Father’s Keeper are Tirsio’s hidden sexual orientation and the self-denial of his Blackness. In Daughters of the Rebellion, Del Carmen removes the potential for anti-Latinx discrimination by situating the play within a Latin American country. If everyone is Latin American, then there is no discrimination on that basis. Del Carmen ironically twists the strategy employed by mestizaje ideology which falsely neutralized race into one raza cósmica and negated the existence of diverse racialized experiences. In Del Carmen’s works, Latinidad is neutralized. Further, the absence of distinct identification implies that this could be any Latin American country where Whiteness rules. It could also be the US. Indeed, Daughters of the Rebellion emerged from a powerfully angry moment for Del Carmen as she witnessed yet more instances of anti-Black violence in the US. I was pissed when I wrote this play. I watched a video of a neighbor taking footage of Michael Brown being killed, and that same day on C-span, I watched a documentary where Shola Lynch, a documentarian, was talking about her film, Free Angela Davis and all Political Prisoners . Fanya’s name was actually inspired by it; Angela Davis’ sister’s name is Fanya. I was watching this documentary and I literally sat there thinking to myself, ‘so nothing has changed.’ The first scene that I wrote was where Katya is about to be electrocuted, and the rest came from there… It was a response to the feeling, so Black people are not wanted anywhere , and the reality of being a Black person who’s a child of immigrants, and the realization that this is global, Black people are not wanted anywhere.[27] Del Carmen was motivated by her identification with Black people, and then recognized the same struggles existed for her as a person of Latin American heritage. In the face of anti-Blackness, nationalism would not protect her, as it does not protect Tirsio nor Katya. Del Carmen writes to create change. She writes for a broad audience with “the hope that something resonates with them and the conversation can happen.” [28] And when her voice as a playwright was silenced by the theatre closures of spring 2020, she turned to more direct action. Del Carmen’s 2020 off-Broadway debut was delayed by the COVID outbreak, so she joined the activism for Black liberation as an advocate for transformation in the field of Latinx theatre-making. Working with the Latinx Playwrights Circle (a project she co-founded) and The Sol Project (the producers of her COVID-interrupted show, Bees and Honey), Del Carmen invited fifty influential Latinx theatre makers around the country to a workshop on “Anti-Blackness in the Latinx Community” led by Radio Caña Negra. Facilitators Dash Harris Machado, Evelyn Alvarez, and Janvieve Williams Comrie provided rich content that delved into the history of Africans and Afrodescendants in Latin America, the continued racism there, and the ways in which contemporary Latinx cultures in the US have inherited and reinforced this legacy of anti-Blackness, even while simultaneously articulating a marginalized position. Latinx have certainly been subjected to injustices, including misrepresentation and harmful stereotypes. But in the US as in Latin America, despite the presence of accomplished AfroLatinx in all areas of the arts and other fields, White supremacy has helped generate an image of Latinx identity that excludes Blackness. As Del Carmen says, “I experienced a lot of anti-Blackness from what’s supposed to be my community, really feeling like I never was a full part of the Latinx community because I didn’t look like what a Latina is supposed to look like. I don’t look Italian. That’s what Latinos are supposed to look like.” [29] Recalling the feeling of unwantedness that angered her to write, she notes how it has helped her to home in on “How I use my art as a form of resistance to that feeling and what I pour back into the world which is a love of Black people and a love of being Black.” [30] Del Carmen creates works that challenge the Latinx community to confront its anti-Blackness. In addition to writing dialogue that pulls no punches, her strategies include intentionally identifying her characters as Black, complicating casting by including skin tones in the descriptions, intersecting anti-Blackness with other forms of oppression including anti-indigeneity, homophobia, and sexism, and de-centering or removing Latinx oppression from the power dynamics in her settings. Del Carmen writes for AfroLatinx liberation, knowing this focus supports a larger cause: global Black liberation. Through dramaturgy and embodiment, Del Carmen roots out and reveals the racism embedded in Latinx culture and places it center stage so that it may be destroyed. References [1] “Latinx” is an inclusive, non-gender binary term that began to replace the earlier, more familiar term, “Latina/o” and its variations which privilege binary gender identification. Because the term Latinx came into use more recently, the terms Latina, Latino, Latina/o, Latin@, and their plurals, are used in this article when they are appropriate to their era and authorship. [2] UnidosUSblog, “Afro Latinos Archives,” UnidosUS Blog, 26 February 2019, https://blog.unidosus.org/tag/afro-latinos/ (accessed 27 April 2021). [3] Carlos Flores, “Desde El Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latin@ Community,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 323. [4] See “Afro-Latinx themes in Theatre Today” by Daphnie Sicre, for an extensive survey of theatre by AfroLatinx playwrights and performers since 1999. [5] Daphnie Sicre, “Afro-Latinx Themes in Theatre Today,” The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Alexander Renee Craft, and Thomas DeFrantz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 272-277. [6] Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román, “Introduction,” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. [7] See The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States , a brilliant anthology edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, for a vastly more profound discussion of the diversity of Afro-Latino history through scholarly essays as well as poetry, drama, and testimonio. [8] Carlos Flores, 323. [9] A few examples of this dramaturgical dynamic include Zoot Suit (1979) by Luis Valdez, Real Women Have Curves (1990) by Josefina Lopez, and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992). [10] Examples include Blade to the Heat (1994) by Oliver Mayer, Clean (1995) by Edwin Sanchez, and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: Mexican Medea (1997) . [11] Olga Sanchez Saltveit, “(Afro)Latinx Theatre: Embodiment and Articulation,” Label Me Latina/o , special issue: Afro-Latina/o Literature and Performance (2017): 1–20. [12] Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Affirmation,” Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 5. [13] “Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Anzaldúa 20). “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Anzaldúa 25). For Gloria Anzaldúa, political boundaries such as the one between the US and Mexico were artificial and inadequate, failing to capture the complexity of the inhabitants who reside in adjacent lands. One was not simply on one side or the other but in a place that included both. [14] Guadalís Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper (2018), 18. [15] bell hooks, “Back to Black: Ending Internalized Racism,” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (London: Routledge, 2015), 174. [16] His beautiful curly blond head. He looks like an angel. [17] Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper, 13. [18] Mark Sawyer, “Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latin@ Identities and Coalitions,” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 532. [19] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [20] Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper, 46. [21] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [22] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [23] “Afro-Latinos in Latin America and Considerations for U.S. Policy,” EveryCRSReport.com , Congressional Research Service, 22 January 2009. http://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL32713.html (accessed on 27 April 2021). [24] Guadalís Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion (2019). [25] Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion , 30. [26] Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion , 74. [27] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [28] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [29] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [30] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. Footnotes About The Author(s) OLGA SANCHEZ SALTVEIT Assistant Professor of Theatre at Middlebury College, is Artistic Director Emerita of Milagro, the Pacific NW’s premier Latina/o/x arts & culture organization. A director/devisor, scholar, and arts activist, her directorial work has been seen in Portland, Seattle, NYC, DC, Martha’s Vineyard, Peru, Venezuela, and Honduras. Olga served as co-artistic director of the People’s Playhouse in New York City and co-founding artistic director of Seattle Teatro Latino. She is a founding member of the Portland-based Latinx writers’ group Los Porteños; served on the Executive Committee and the Diversity Task Force of TCG’s board of directors, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. She is a contributing scholar to the anthology of Latinx plays, Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theatre, published by Northwestern University Press 2019. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey BernerCo-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

By Cory Tamler | An experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. < Back More Information & Order Details Publication date: December 2022 Hardcover, 179 pages, 5.25 x 8.3 inches ISBN: 9781953892072 Design by Rafal Kosakowski Retail price: $25 Published by special arrangement with the Laboratory for Social Choreography To order this book, click here (https://forms.gle/HXqK4N87HDCNbbJE6) or email corytamler@gmail.com . Available for in-person purchase: Unnameable Books and Quimby’s (Brooklyn), b_books (Berlin). A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography Cory Tamler Download PDF A work of social choreography. A training ground for the imagination. A psychedelic experience without substances. A technology for cleaning social relations. A proposal for embodied civic duty. A journey into the realer real that gives back to the real—as if it were possible to bring an object from the dream world into waking life. A lifeboat. Over the past decade, at least a thousand people (among them philosophers, office workers, professional dancers, scientists, students, artists, and the author-editor of this book) have participated in Parliament sessions from Athens to NYC. For all its potency, Parliament resists being written about, starting from any attempt to describe what it is. It resists authorship too. Choreographer and artist Michael Kliën prefers to say he discovered it, or wished for it, from within “a felt urgency that things are just not sustainable.” In this book, Parliament writes out of itself. Artist and writer Cory Tamler holds the container, editing together her memories of her own experiences as a participant, excerpts from conversations with Kliën and from his personal archive, theoretical propositions for the way Parliament could go to work in the world, and reflections from other participants in Parliament over the years. An annotated bibliography makes visible the framework of ideas—from art and choreography to systems theory and political theory—within which Parliament sits. This text is an experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. It is meant for readers who, whether familiar or unfamiliar with Parliament, are interested in how the social is formed and in bodies as key agents in its formation. Contributors: Michael Kliën with Catherine Cabeen, Mallory Catlett, Blythe Davis, Barbara Dickinson, Jeffrey Gormly, Floor Grootenhuis, Frank Hentschker, Vitoria Kotsalou, Steve Valk, Shuntaro Yoshida. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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

By Hugo Claus, David Willinger, Luk Truyts, Luc Deneulin. | A collection of dramatic texts from the Flemish writer and playwright Hugo Claus. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Four Works for the Theatre Hugo Claus, David Willinger, Luk Truyts, Luc Deneulin. Download PDF Edited with an introduction by David Willinger Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to his liason with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times. Translated by David Willinger, Luk Truyts and Luc Deneulin. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Gabrielle Randle Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Gabrielle Randle By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. A crucial contribution to the historiography of the Black Arts Movement, La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement makes the original argument that black women dramatists played an invaluable role in the movement (1965-76). Forsgren employs a black feminist historiography with a ferocity that is both innovative and rigorous in an effort to revive a history that has been overlooked, misconstrued, and at worst erased. Each of the four chapters focuses on a single dramatist: Barbara Ann Teer, Martie Evans-Charles, Sonia Sanchez, and J.e. Franklin. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is primarily a recuperative undertaking. As such, Forsgren’s methodology “foregrounds the sociopolitical factors that have led to the marginalization of black women’s culture and literary tradition” (3). In an effort to shed light on how and why black women dramatists were systematically excluded from the archives of the movement, Forsgren conducted oral histories to supplement the scant archives of her subjects. Her argument is made as much in the absences and gaps in memory and material as it is in the presence of tangible artifacts. In the first chapter, Forsgren claims Barbara Ann Teer as an unrecognized theorist of the Black Arts Movement. Forsgren focuses on Teer’s ritual performance theories, critical essays, ritualistic revival performance techniques, and the early work of the National Black Theatre (NBT), which Teer founded in 1968. In a departure from a typical literature review, Forsgren models a critique of historical and critical erasure that she continues in each subsequent chapter. In addition to highlighting existing literature on Barbara Ann Teer (there is one book-length biography on her life and work), Forsgren illuminates epistemological gaps. Forsgren suggests that Teer’s work is undervalued and as a result unpublished and in turn undervalued—a self-contained system of historical erasure. For the most part, the chapter is concerned with historicizing Teer as a theorist of the Black Arts Movement and concretizing her legacy as a pioneer in black theatre. Forsgren finds Teer’s theoretical origins in her theory of acting, “Five Cycles of Evolution.” Since Teer died in 2006, Forsgren conducted interviews with Barbara “Sade” Lythcott, Teer’s daughter and the current president of the NBT. Lythcott’s contextualization of her mother’s work serves to historicize Teer’s lasting impact on black performance beyond the Black Arts Movement. In chapter two, “‘We Black Women’: Martie Evans-Charles and the Spirits of Black Womanhood,” Forsgren argues that Evans-Charles and her deep commitment to portraying black women as “emblems of black history and culture” (37) were crucial to the success of the historic New Layette Theatre. Unlike Teer, whose work was not widely circulated, Evans-Charles was popular with critics and audiences of her time but largely forgotten after the Black Arts Movement. Forsgren is particularly interested in the subjecthood of black women in Evans-Charles’s dramas including Where We At , Black Cycle , Job Security , Jamimma , Asante , and Friends . Forsgren, in a methodological move that is both an orientation toward historical events and an ethical imperative, relies on Evans-Charles’s own critical writings, unpublished program notes, archival interviews, and interviews with her daughter and peers to rewrite Evans-Charles back into her rightful place in the narrative of the Black Arts Movement. If In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is a text about recovery, recuperation, and reclamation, then Sonia Sanchez, who is one of the few women often associated with the Black Arts Movement, is an unlikely candidate of study for the next chapter. Sanchez’s prolific work as a poet is typically connected to the movement, but as Forsgren expertly lays out, Sanchez’s plays also deserve to be revisited and explored. In this chapter, the author finds an easy stride. Perhaps because Forsgren was able to spend much time with Sanchez—and with her relatively complete archive of work—this chapter feels more like a traditional theatre history project. Though the extensive and exhaustive close readings of Sanchez’s plays are an impressive contribution to the field, there is less urgency in the underlying argument here. Forsgren is shoring up a place in history for an already iconic figure. In contrast, for Teer, Evans-Charles, and Franklin, I had the sense as a reader that she was fighting on their behalf against the forces of oblivion. Forsgren concludes the body text with perhaps her most important and timely intervention: chapter four, “‘Bring Your Wounded Hearts’: J.e. Franklin and the Art of Liberation,” explores the life and continuing work of the most prolific and successful black woman dramatist of the Black Arts Movement and also its most overlooked and understudied. Franklin’s place in the history of American theatre is invaluable, and Forsgren’s contribution succeeds on two levels. First, as the author attempts with all four subjects, she claims Franklin as part of an intellectual tradition. Departing from the other three chapters, Forsgren draws a direct line from Franklin to the origins of black feminist drama by highlighting the feminist stance in much of Franklin’s Black Power-oriented work. In doing so, she begins to map a genealogy of thought and influence that moves beyond the Black Arts Movement. Second, Forsgren highlights the divergences from the politics of the Black Arts Movement that previously ensured Franklin’s erasure from “neat” histories of an apparently monolithic movement. While black male playwrights of the movement often focused on ideas of “Revolution,” Forsgren argues that Franklin’s work centers “black women’s experiential knowledge and use[s] catharsis to foster liberation and community” (108). In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is a vital addition to the field of American theatre history. The loss of Ntozake Shange last year reminds us that the toll of life for our warrior mothers is taxing and that we must honor their legacies by gleaning their indispensable knowledge while we can. With that in mind, Forsgren’s methodological commitment to oral history and archival accountability feels bigger than a historiographical impulse; it feels like a war cry. References Footnotes About The Author(s) GABRIELLE RANDLE Northwestern University Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky 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: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Making of The Money Opera by Amitesh Grover at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Making of The Money Opera At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Amitesh Grover Theater 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 India Language English, Hindi Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2023 The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. Produced by Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. Directed by Vaibhav Raj Shah About The Artist(s) Amitesh Grover (born 1980) is an award-winning theatre director and artist. His body of work includes more than 20 productions, which range from global performances connecting performers and spectators across continents to the most intimate pieces. His creations have been commissioned, co-produced, and presented internationally by renowned festivals and theatres. His work is driven by the desire to understand the workings of power in societies controlled by the logic of techno-capital and increasingly authoritarian political forces. He is based in New Delhi, India. Get in touch with the artist(s) amiteshgrover@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://amiteshgrover.com , https://www.facebook.com/amitesh.grover?mibextid=LQQJ4d, https://www.instagram.com/amitesh.grover?igsh=MWpmaDZubHprNDR2cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr 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

Stacy Wolf Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Musical Theatre Studies, whose presence as a viable academic field is not much more than a decade old, is spreading out in all directions of chronology, geography, approach, and methods. Scholars trained in theatre studies, dance studies, and musicology and ethnomusicology are becoming more comfortable with each other’s intellectual tendencies and conventions, sharing our analytical languages and epistemological assumptions. A quick, ad-hoc survey of some colleagues turned up an inspiring and formidable range of recent and current projects. Some books expand the field in valuable ways. These include, for example, Elizabeth Wollman’s Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City , which takes seriously sexually explicit shows and their conversation with the city, with feminism, with gay culture, and with mainstream musicals. Carol Oja’s Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War looks at the work of Leonard Bernstein from a new angle, focusing on his collaborations with artists of color, including actors, conductors, and dancers. Liza Gennaro’s Making Broadway Dance , a much-needed study of Broadway choreographers, is also in process. I’m working on Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S. , which argues that nonprofessional artists at high schools, summer camps, and community theatres sustain and are the lifeblood of the form. Other scholars re-locate what’s been called the most American of entertainment genres in a global context. Both David Savran and Laura MacDonald, for example, are working on international projects: David’s explores the branding of Broadway and its significance across the globe, and Laura studies Korea and China-based productions of Broadway musicals. Some current projects put musical theatre in conversation with other fields, such as urban geography and architecture—Dominic Symonds’ performance cartography of Broadway’s music—and Jessica Sternfeld’s work in disability studies. In Raymond Knapp’s recently completed book on Haydn, German Idealism, and American popular music, he discusses the important role of musical theatre and its sensibilities to the development of American popular music. In an effort to bolster the undergraduate curriculum, which for generations consisted of knowledgeable professors—typically longtime fans of musicals and collectors of trivia who listed facts and dates and told stories (many of them fascinating and crucial to understanding how musicals are made but with no critical framework)—several textbooks have been published recently. James Leve’s American Musical Theater and Larry Stempel’s Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater offer historical context and critical tools to help students learn the repertoire and develop analytical skills. Several other anthologies geared towards undergraduates and graduate students are in process: The Disney Musical: Stage, Screen and Beyond , edited by George Rodosthenous, and Childhood and the Child in Musical Theatre , edited by James Leve and Donelle Ruwe. Elizabeth Wollman is editing The Methuen Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical , which shifts away from the typical production-based study to a culture- and industry-based overview of the American commercial theater. She and Jessica Sternfeld are editing the large Routledge Handbook , which examines musicals of the last fifty years from many angles and will be the first collection to focus on recent repertoire. In addition, Dominic Symonds notes that musical theatre studies’ methods and critical ideas, such as “musicality, collaboration and interdisciplinarity” are increasingly being taken up in other disciplines. This moment in scholarship and pedagogy is, I think, marked by two other issues, which ironically (or not?) seem to pull in opposite directions of access and popularity. The first is the ubiquitous challenge of accessing visual archives to be able to teach musical theatre. Some students are lucky enough to see a New York or regional production of a show, and others can take advantage of local community theatres or high schools, which are both fantastic and underused resources for teaching college students about musicals. But some instructors are limited to what they can find on YouTube, whether clips produced by Playbill or BroadwayWorld, or, more commonly, illegally taped and posted to the web. It’s impossible to teach students the complexity of the genre of musical theatre without a dynamic visual and aural archive. If we want students to understand not only the text-based elements of musicals (script and score) but also casting, staging, and design (to name only a few), we need access to productions for them to see, even in video’s imperfect form. Sondheim’s professionally taped and commercially distributed musicals, including John Doyle’s production of Company , Hal Prince’s Sweeney Todd , and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George , for example, are invaluable teaching tools. Legal restrictions on taping hamper our ability to teach a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of performance. Second, the fans of Broadway musicals have gone mainstream, at once resonant of the 1940s and 50s when musical theatre was a part of popular culture, and with a new, intensely social media orientation. In 1996, Rent broke open a new place for young, politically-progressive musical theatre fans. Now, Hamilton has connected with a diverse audience unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The fanatical (and I mean that as the highest compliment) passion of “Rentheads” in the mid-to-late 1990s has been bettered by the Hamilton frenzy, which I witnessed firsthand when I attended and gave a talk at the first BroadwayCon in January. Many of the fans I met at that gathering of mostly women, mostly under 30 grew up on Disney musicals and the film versions of Sweeney Todd , Chicago , Les Miz , Phantom , and Into the Woods . Though they (and all of my students) can sing the entire cast album of Hamilton , they also know and love Broadway musicals more generally, and they express their fandom of Fun Home , Fiddler on the Roof , and The King and I on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Social media enables the consolidation of widespread fan communities, whose engagement with a musical might be by way of the cast album, artists’ tweets, YouTube clips, or the musical itself. But these new modes of communication and connection don’t alter the fact that the object of affection and desire is the live performance event of a Broadway musical. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stacy Wolf is Professor of Theater and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical . She is currently working on a book about amateur musical theatre in the US. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Renata Eastlick, Carman Lacivita, and Anne Scurria in Hartford Stage's Pride and Prejudice Photo: T. Charles Erickson. Pride and Prejudice Kate Hamill, adapted from the novel by Jane Austen (12 Oct. – 5 Nov.) A Christmas Carol : A Ghost Story of Christmas Charles Dickens, adapted by Michael Wilson (24 Nov. – 24 Dec.) Simona’s Search Martin Zimmerman (18 Jan. – 11 Feb.) The Hot Wing King Katori Hall (29 Feb. – 24 Mar.) All My Sons Arthur Miller (11 Apr. – 5 May) 2.5 Minute Ride Lisa Kron (30 May – 23 Jun.) Hartford Stage’s 2023-24 season opened with a delightful production of Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beautifully directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo with whimsical costumes by Haydee Zeldeth and elegant scenic design by Sara Brown, complete with revolving stage. This wonderful, witty, whirlwind of a production kept audiences laughing while still managing to tug at their heartstrings when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy finally pledged their love. Fun was the name of the game in this production with clever musical moments composed by Daniel Baker & Co. and choreographed by Shura Baryshnikov. Hartford audiences were graced with the presence of Anne Scurria, a longtime favorite company member of Providence’s Trinity Repertory Theatre, who gave a crowd-pleasing performance as both Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Bennet in this gender-bent production. It was unfortunate to learn that ticket sales for this enjoyable season-opener fell short of projections. For the past two seasons, Hartford Stage has presented Joe Landry’s pared-down It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play as its holiday offering, but last year that production undersold, and this year the theatre took a cue from its audience, bringing back former Artistic Director Michael Wilson to direct his adaptation of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol . Audiences were clearly hankering for this holiday tradition, and they came out in droves to see this lively, spectacular production that involves many families from the area with its inclusion of dozens of children and local actors. In addition to many returning performers, Allen Gilmore joined the cast as Scrooge for the first time and brought new depth to this familiar character. Alejo Vietti and Zack Brown were responsible for the fabulous costumes, with impressive wigs designed by Brittany Hartman. In January, Hartford Stage began the year with a world-premiere production of Martin Zimmerman’s Simonia’s Search . The story centered on the concept of intergenerational trauma, the idea that trauma experienced by one person may be passed to subsequent generations of a family. Weighty material by any means, though this production managed some lighter moments, with actor Christopher Bannow donning tentacles to play a sea creature in one of the more absurd twists in the non-linear plotline. Every scenic design this season (excepting A Christmas Carol ) blocked off the tricky upstage area of Hartford Stage’s large thrust theatre space, which had the dual effect of shrinking the playing area while bringing the action closer to the audience. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play The Hot Wing King was no exception, with an elaborate two-story set designed by Emmie Finckel. The playing space included a detailed living area and kitchen, an upstairs bedroom, and a side yard complete with basketball hoop. The cast skillfully delivered performances that contrasted broad comedic turns with more heartfelt moments. Israel Erron Ford, who appeared in Yale Repertory Theatre’s delightful 2019 production of Twelfth Night , gave an outstanding performance as the character Isom. This lively production was directed by Christopher Betts, rounding out his tenure as the theatre’s inaugural Willis Fellow. In 2020, Hartford Stage joined many of the nation’s cultural institutions in a realignment toward diversity, equity, and inclusion as a response to the abhorrent murder of George Floyd Jr. As part of this intentional work to create a culture of belonging and inclusion, Hartford Stage designed the Joyce C. Willis Fellowship to engage black artists in a two-year residency. Marsha Mason starred as Kate Keller in the April production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and the powerful name recognition of both leading lady and playwright proved to be a big draw for regional Hartford audiences. Riw Rakkulchon designed the impressive set for the backyard of the Keller home, complete with a back porch of a two-story 1950s suburban house and grass-filled yard. Marsha Mason did not disappoint, and the strong ensemble gave compelling performances in Miller’s play about duty and betrayal. Lena Kaminsky gave a tour-de-force performance in 2.5 Minute Ride, Lisa Kron’s one-woman show, to round out the season in June. The simple set of cardboard boxes by Judy Gailen and effective lighting by Daisy Long deftly guided the audience through the sprawling storyline which included international travel and leaps through time spanning most of the last century. Hartford Stage has settled into a new normal post-pandemic that must be less frenzied and is certainly more economical. Prior to the pandemic,the theatre consistently presented six or sometimes seven productions in a season over and above the dutifully presented annual holiday show A Christmas Carol, which they previously treated as a separate entity and did not ever include in their season lineups. Since reopening post-pandemic, Hartford Stage has presented six shows, including A Christmas Carol . This reduction of one to two productions per year includes a shift in scheduling that puts one production in the fall before the holiday show instead of two, and four plays spanning the months of January to June. Given the theatre industry’s current trend for equitable, safe workplaces with reasonable schedules, this new normal may be a much-needed shift to a manageable workload. It should be noted however, that these reduced seasons are accompanied by a reduction in staff and sources of funding. A comparison of program notes from this season and one from the 2017-2018 season shows a reduction in artistic and administrative staff by a number ranging between one to five people across most departments, with the abolishment of staffing for apprentices and writers under commission. It is also made clear by this comparison that the number of institutional and individual donors is down from pre-pandemic levels. Although Hartford Stage has a strong history of new play development, it seems that next year there will be a pause to that tradition as well. Next season includes the classics Romeo and Juliet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the holiday extravaganza A Christmas Carol, along with more contemporary works: Two Trains Running, Laughs in Spanish, and Hurricane Diane. This reviewer hopes Hartford Stage will continue to build back post-pandemic and succeed in its efforts to consistently bring audiences back to the theatre. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jan Mason has directed theatre in Boston, Connecticut, and New York City, and she has directed opera in Connecticut and Italy. In New York City she developed new plays with Ensemble Studio Theatre (Theatre Lab Member); The Women’s Project (Director’s Forum Member); Rattlestick (Artistic Associate); and New Georges (Affiliated Artist and Roaring Girl). She teaches and directs at several Connecticut colleges and universities. In 2023 her play Lost & Found was produced in a festival of new work in Vermont, and her play Jack & Jill was published in Mini Plays Magazine and Literature Today . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz 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 Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF On a chilly day in early April 2018, a group of sixteen people and one lovable dog met at a coffee house in St Louis, Missouri, in anticipation of the “Toxic Mound Tour.” Online, the tour was advertised as a performance art piece and an “educational field trip” to “see the realities of the landfill and other contaminated places west of the city.” [1] When our tour guide, performance artist Allana Ross, arrived, she was easy to spot in her khaki colored park ranger clothing, even without the “Toxic Mound Tours” sign she held. As we gathered around, she quickly introduced herself, then introduced her assistant and their dog, both of whom were outfitted in matching green jackets for the occasion. Before the tour began, the performer passed out tour brochures and white face masks to the group gathered around her. Most of us in the audience looked at each other with slightly worried expressions before she admitted that we did not need to wear masks for our safety, as our stay in each of the five locations would be brief. Even still, they served as a constant reminder of where we were going and the gravity of the area’s toxic legacy. As the contaminated areas we planned to visit were spread out across the greater St. Louis area, we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to one another and carpool. And just like that, we traveled to the first destination on our toxic tour. In her book, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , Jan Cohen-Cruz states, “A community-based production is usually a response to a collectively significant issue or circumstance. It is a collaboration between an artist or ensemble and a ‘community’.” [2] The source is not the artist, but the community that surrounds the artist. [3] For Ross, community is defined in two ways: the people and the environment. In part, the community is defined by the suburban areas south and west of St. Louis and the residents who lived or live in/around the areas affected by contamination. Ross’s community-based work is “less about homogeneous communities and more about different participants exploring a common concern together,” [4] the common concern being the past, current, and future impacts of the toxic sites on the people who reside nearby. However, Ross’s performance not only elevated the significance of place/environment but also stressed the importance of being in each space—to explore it and experience it—as central to her approach. In her artist statement, she writes: I am questioning our relationship to nature itself—the culture of nature that we teach to each other through museum diorama, through titillating landscape calendars and all-expense-paid eco-adventures. A public tour of the mounds is a method of activating the viewer outside of the gallery setting as a participant in the re-invention of the culture of nature. [5] Ross grounded her performance in place, reaffirming Cohen-Cruz’s definition of community-based performance as “a local act in two senses: a social doing in one’s particular corner of the world and an artistic framing of that doing for others to appreciate.” [6] Ross privileged the environment itself and the lasting effect(s) that humans have had on the ecosystem(s) of the area. Her piece worked within the realm of environmental activism, which brought attention to the human consumption of nature and its subsequent contamination. [7] Additionally, she questioned notions of the “individual” in communities, as the environment affected people in different ways. Seemingly separate individuals become connected through location and the sense of belonging in a community. To explore toxic places, we are asked to think about the surrounding community and to consider what it must be like living there. In this essay, we explore how Ross’s performance uses place and environment, as well as a historical understanding of the sites, to illuminate the lasting impacts of environmental contamination and the very real effects it has had on local communities through the five sites on her Toxic Mound Tour. Since the 1960s, performance scholars including Richard Schechner, Una Chaudhuri, Elinor Fuchs, Wendy Arons, Stephen Bottoms, Ric Knowles, and Theresa May, among others, have theorized the practice of performance known as environmental theatre and site-specific performance, as one rooted in the place, and perhaps even the community, in which the performance occurs. [8] Tim Cresswell describes place as: constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways. [9] Furthermore, as Nick Kaye writes, site-specific art is the “exchange between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined.” [10] “Key to this,” as Baz Kershaw states, “becomes understanding how performance is an integral part of global ecology and eco-systems.” [11] Looking at the scholarship of Nicola Shaughnessy and Laura Levin as lenses through which to examine toxic tours allows us to further contextualize the importance of each tour site as both the set and setting. Shaughnessy looks at the possibility of “place as an event” through which the “[s]ite and place are also integral to visual and live arts practices which have moved beyond the quiet curbs of gallery spaces, to question who art is for, where it can be staged and to explore the experience of spectatorship.” [12] Ross’s attempt to “[activate] the viewer outside of the gallery setting” [13] is thus attempting to “contribute to the process of making space meaningful through practices which explore (and challenge) how we experience the environment we inhabit.” [14] Ross’s work can be also interpreted through Laura Levin’s concepts of “environmental unconsciousness” and her discussions of camouflage. Levin’s discussion of place-based, environmental performance engages with the idea that environment becomes a part of the performance that cannot be overlooked: “recognizing the independence of the non-human is not simply a philosophical project but also a political one … This framing of site-specificity provides access to … ‘environmental unconscious,’ rendering perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [15] As such, Ross’s tour invited us into these spaces that are overlooked, whether because they have been remediated into consumable spaces or because they were so unassuming that no one realizes their significance. In recent years, there has been greater public interest in ecoadventure and ecotourism, which seek to counteract or eliminate the wastefulness of traveling by combining experiences with environmentally friendly and/or sustainable practices. [16] From a performance perspective, Scott Magelssen’s scholarship highlights recent trends in the tourism industry that “[implement] attractions that privilege explicitly performative participation by immersing tourists in living, fictive scenarios.” [17] This move towards more “authentic” experiences of tourism includes participants taking on a character and getting into the action, a move away from the passive tourism experiences that ask visitors to see and observe and then to depart without much interaction with the location. [18] For a group of strangers to take a toxic tour, we had to be willing to confront and interrogate our own ideas of health and safety, and take on, even for a few hours, the environmental risk that others are asked to undertake every day. Here, the place is central, and rather than being given a part to play, people on toxic tours are not in simulated environments; they are asked to navigate action as it comes. Contaminated places are most often found in low income and minority communities, existing away from and outside of the dominant culture, and as such, they have been referred to as sacrifice zones where both people and waste are pushed to the margins and seen as dirty, undesirable, contaminated, and/or not valuable. [19] Phaedra Pezzullo argues toxic tours typically “are noncommercial expeditions into areas that are polluted by toxins,” and are often led by community members, many of which may be sick, in hopes that doing so will raise awareness and lead to social change. [20] By willingly entering places that may be harmful, toxic tours not only challenge traditional notions of tours and/or being a tourist, which is most often associated with travel, beauty, pleasure, but they also blur the lines between “nature” and “culture,” acknowledging the ways in which each influence one another. [21] To take Ross’s toxic tour, then, is to use performance to subvert existing ideas of toxic tours as well as place and location. First, Ross did not take on the persona of someone who was sick, but instead took on the role of an authoritative outsider. She took on the dress and authority of a park ranger or nature guide, a figure generally understood as one tasked with expertise, but also one with knowledge of historical significance of place and the importance of the connection between humans and the land that sustains them. Assuming the role of expert was a particularly meaningful move in part because of our culture’s reliance on experts to help define what is safe/unsafe. Her character acted as our guide not only in traveling to each location, but also in guiding the audience through the experience: where to walk, where to look, the important features worth noting, and the site’s historical background, as it was often difficult to determine the significance of each place without her expert eye. Her character was, in fact, the only “artificial” part of the performance; the audience and the locations we visited were very much real. Second, the tour took us to sites in various stages of remediation; in some cases, the very notion of toxicity and contamination remained contested, as there were widespread disagreements about the safety of the sites, but in other cases a former contaminated site had been transformed into a park for public enjoyment. At each location she interwove local history into her performance, gathered from both official government documents and the stories of residents. Finally, rather than being in marginalized communities and spaces, the tour stops were in predominately white and/or working-class neighborhoods. This is notable because unlike typical cases of environmental uncertainty, these sites have gained greater attention simply because these communities are thought about as safe, clean, and respectable places. Almost all in attendance were from the greater St. Louis area and most lived in communities relatively close to a specific site and attended the tour because they had not actually physically visited the sites. Everyone learned about the tour through an advertisement in a local Facebook group that discusses issues of community, toxicity, health, and safety, so attendees brought with them varying degrees of knowledge. The stops on the tour are public and can be visited independently, but Ross provided the background and historical significance of place which is so often hidden. Additionally, her performance as an expert, which was informative as much as it was paternalistic, provided a feeling of protectiveness, as the group explored these largely unknown to them sites. OUR GUIDE Unlike the audience members who wore basic, contemporary clothing, bundled in coats and scarves for the chilly, rainy day, Ross donned a wide-brimmed hat and an olive-khaki button-up shirt tucked into khaki pants. A wide brown belt and hiking boots completed her ensemble. While not exact in its replica, it was culturally recognizable as a costume reminiscent of those worn by park rangers in a US context. However, Ross called herself an “urban ranger” because it was not the vast wilderness or sprawling desert she guided us through; it was the suburban space around us. Instead of the park insignia or flags that adorn the uniforms of federal park workers, Ross’s “uniform” had only two embroidered patches: a colorful taco in front of a variation of the nuclear atom symbol and a skull with a ranger’s hat similar to the one worn by Ross herself. Given the hazardous and dangerous history that surrounded the sites on the tour ahead, the patches spoke not only to the macabre reality of touring such locations, even if for the purpose of raising environmental awareness, but also to Ross’s personality. As a ranger is tasked with the protection and preservation of lands for public use, Ross tasked herself with raising local awareness “[b]y inviting the audience to consider the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats—to peruse a brochure, to grab a postcard, to plan a visit.” [22] In doing so, she asked that we “reconsider [our] consumption of nature,” both in terms of the way these sites were contaminated by human interference and now, as nature had reclaimed, albeit artificially, the land for parks and recreation. [23] As there was considerable distance between sites, Ross created a Spotify playlist for the drive, entitled “Atomic Musical Collection.” The playlist, which played in the background, served as an intermission of sorts where the audience could reflect on the tour as it progressed. [24] Like a true guide, Ross provided a map with the “attractions” clearly marked, and we started an approximately five-hour tour organized in a caravan, all following Ross’s white SUV with a large sign on each side emblazoned with “Toxic Mound Tours” and the signature atomic star that adorned all of her materials. STOPS ALONG THE WAY Like many industrial cities in the U.S., the greater St. Louis area has a long and contested history of sites contaminated from a wide breadth of industrial activities. Four out of the five sites on the tour corresponded to St. Louis’ involvement with WWII and Cold War weapons production. Site #1 : Times Beach, MO The first stop on our tour was Route 66 State Park, formerly Times Beach, MO, a small resort town about thirty miles outside of St. Louis. In the early 1970s, the entire town became contaminated when its twenty-three miles of roads were sprayed with dioxin-contaminated waste oil, and it later became one of the nation’s first Superfund sites. [25] In the early 1980s, Congress passed “The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act” (CERLA), most commonly referred to as the “Superfund,” which created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industry. [26] The money generated by this tax was then used to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites across the nation. In 1982, Times Beach was evacuated and residents were permanently relocated due to the high-level of contamination. Just a few short years later, the city was deemed uninhabitable and disincorporated by the state. As remediation was underway, all houses and buildings in the town were demolished and buried under a large mound at the park. Now, all that is left of this once thriving community is a large grassy mound, the faint outline of streets and roads hardly visible in parts of the park, and the last remaining building which now serves as the park’s visitor’s center. [27] The Superfund program has been met with widespread criticism since its inception from both industries and communities. As a result, in 1995, the tax was not renewed and “significant limits were put on EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] ability to perform cleanup work itself, and an increasing percentage of cleanups [were] being performed by PRPs [Potentially Responsible Parties]. EPA focused activity during this period and onward on ensuring that PRPs perform most of the cleanups, thus, saving dwindling public funding for government oversight of private actions.” [28] The former Times Beach town is now Route 66 State Park, and visitors use it as a recreational space for biking, walking, and running, among other activities. Save for a few informative signs at the entrance of the park, the history of this location and community has mostly been erased. Upon arrival, we laughed nervously in the safety of the parking lot, struggling to reconcile the location versus our safety: it did not look harmful. From where we stood, we could see a bathroom building near the park entrance and a wooden sign with site information, including guidelines for dogs on leashes and a map of the “Inner Loop Trail.” Ross gathered us around to give an overview of the site before we officially visited the mound. The mound was to our left as we entered, but Ross had to point it out to the tour. It was an unassuming hill covered in the shoots of early-spring grass, not as we expected. It could be easily ignored by visitors who were unaware that the contents of a town were buried underneath. Our guide instructed the group to walk to the top of the small hill, which turned out to be deceptively long. We gathered there as Ross provided information on how the dioxin-contaminated waste was introduced into the area and the amount of waste that was under our feet. On the far end, Ross pointed out a small fenced-in area with various pipes coming out of the ground, which many of us missed and/or did not know what it was. Ross explained that it was a gas extraction well for the buried waste at the site. Here, Ross’s performance speaks to Levin’s idea of the “environmental unconscious,” which “[renders] perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [29] It was easy to overlook our environment and the significance of a location like Times Beach, as it was the oldest site and had been nearly completely erased into its new form: a park. The mound that contains the Dixon-contaminated town is just a hill. Thus, Ross’s performance, retelling of the history, and authoritative approach as “urban ranger” reconstructed the town for her audience, so that we engaged with the location as more than its park exterior. She brought our environmental unconsciousness to the fore in order to restore the site, in our imaginations, and challenge our initial perceptions of the space. The site is open to visitors daily from dawn to dusk, and many visitors take advantage of the trails, many of which are parts of the old roadways, the same ones that were once sprayed with dioxin. Many may not recognize that the uninhabitable nature of this area for day-to-day community life resulted in its transformation into a park which poses little risk for temporary visitors. Instead, we were faced with nature as it has been remade, as Ross said, as all evidence of the contamination was buried, out of sight, in the mound. [30] What was once a place where people lived is now a place for visitors to walk their dogs, gawk at the history of the town if they happened to stop by one of the parks signs, and then leave, almost without a trace. As such, we had to be taught to see the park for both what it once was and what it is today. Site #2 : Coldwater Creek The second stop on the tour was a combination of several sites with ties to Cold War era weapons production. Radioactive material made its way to the St. Louis area during the 1940s when Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a downtown company, was commissioned to be a part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. [31] The project’s ultimate aim was to create the world’s first atomic weapon, and Mallinckrodt was tasked with purifying uranium. The project was unlike any task undertaken by the State, and to complete the work quickly and away from prying eyes, it had a top-secret security clearance which circumvented typical democratic decision making mechanisms by merely removing the project from public scrutiny. [32] Many of the workers themselves were unaware of the material they were working with and many would later develop cancer and other related diseases. [33] As the project was underway, a great deal of radioactive and/or hazardous materials were used, and much waste was generated. With limited space to store the materials and waste downtown, a property west of the city was used. [34] The property, referred to today as the St. Louis Airport Site (SLAPS), was a twenty-one acre tract of land near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport. [35] The western edge of the property bordered Coldwater Creek, a fifteen-mile creek that snakes through the backyards of various neighborhoods, before emptying into the Missouri River. [36] The site stored “mountains” of radioactive and hazardous waste in open air conditions for almost two decades. [37] As a result, radioactive waste made its way into the creek before it was later sold to a company from Colorado, which dumped whatever materials were deemed not valuable enough to transport into the local West Lake Landfill. [38] Our second tour location was near the airport and the creek. However, on the way, Ross brought us to the building housed by government officials of Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). In 1974, the federal government created FUSRAP, which was tasked “to identify, investigate and clean up or control sites throughout the United States that became contaminated as a result of the Nation’s early atomic energy program during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.” [39] In addition to the creek, landfill, and Weldon Springs location, there are over 100 identified contaminated sites around the St. Louis Area recognized by the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. [40] While the EPA and Army Corps have remediated many of the sites, there are still some that either still need remediation and/or are contested. Regardless, the EPA maintains that these sites are safe, [41] including the landfill, but many residents believe they are experiencing negative health impacts and have created a Facebook group to share information and contest expert claims of health and safety. It was in this Facebook group that our “toxic tour” was advertised. Once arrived, we parked our caravan of cars along the side of the road, which was lined mostly by warehouse buildings in proximity to the St. Louis Airport. Here, Ross spoke about the significance of FUSRAP in the area and provided details on what became of the creek’s cleanup operation. While there, a Hazelwood police officer approached in a car. The arrival of a law enforcement officer made the audience members nervous; this was an unplanned portion of the tour. Keeping with her character, Ross introduced herself as an urban ranger to the officer, who was curious why a group such as ours was in the area. The officer seemed interested, told us to be safe, and left the scene without causing a disruption to the audience. Here, the location of the FURSAP building is reminiscent of Cresswell’s concept of place, where we can “think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways.” [42] The location of the FURSAP building is indeed a place made and remade by history and perception. With the creek remediation considered complete, the weathered steel building that houses FUSRAP seemed to blend into the warehouse buildings surrounding it. Our perception was altered, remade, by Ross’s expert navigation of the site, however the building’s history had not been erased as with the previous site, and thus it was easy for our group to see and understand the significance as Ross directed our attention and shared the history of the location. The meaning of the place is, as Cresswell argues, “performed and practiced” [43] through our interaction with the guide outside of the chain-link fence that surrounds it. As such, without being on the tour with us, the Hazelwood officer had a different concept of the place’s significance than those of us who listened intently to Ross’s guidance, even though we were just down the road from the mouth of the infamous Coldwater Creek. However, the presence of authority outside of the FUSRAP location felt significant, as it was a reminder that the place we inhabited during the performance is also a part of the larger ecosystem of the area. Figure 1. FUSRAP site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Soon after this interruption, the audience members were back in their cars, as we traveled—briefly this time—to our next location: Coldwater Creek. Like the FUSRAP location, this site had not been reimagined and fully transformed into a park or something else. This space was not inviting; there were no sidewalks, no facilities, and nowhere to park, and the mouth of the creek was unassuming and littered with garbage. We would not have known it was a location of significance without our guide to inform us of such, but it was easy to imagine it as a contaminated space. As with the FUSRAP building, the meaning of place is “constantly struggled over and remained.” [44] Those living along the creek have a clear perception of place while those simply driving may not upload that same definition of place. However, the performance at this location is pushed further when applying Shaughnessy’s lens of location-based performance. Shaughnessy argues that approaches such as Ross’s tour, “engage in the making of place and spatiality … Thus in site responsive work, where space is made meaningful as place through encounters between performers and spectators/participants, there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment.” [45] Ross’s interactions with the audience at this site—encouragement to explore accompanied by careful warnings of caution that pointed out debris and her now established convention of beginning with the historical significance of the site—assisted in solidifying the meaningful nature of the site for the group gathered around. Thus, Coldwater Creek was indeed transformed into a place made meaningful through Ross’s responsive performance. Large cement barriers, like those used to direct traffic on highways during construction, guarded the creek, prohibiting us from getting too close. There was a sense of nervousness among participants while approaching the creek. We were all aware of the historical contamination of the area, but did not expect to come into contact with the discarded things of today, like broken glass, scraps of paper, and discarded plastic bags. We peered into the murky water, knowing that it had been decontaminated, but the lasting uneasiness was still there for the audience members. Some climbed over the barriers, but not for long, before coming back over to the side that felt “safe.” Once gathered around, our guide talked about how it looked like a place to avoid, though it borders many people’s backyards and was once a place where children played. Before people knew it was contaminated with radioactive waste, the creek, which was prone to flooding, was thought of as a nuisance when rising water entered basements and yards. Now both former and current residents worry, and in some cases believe, that they were exposed to harmful contaminates which have negatively impacted their health. Under FUSRAP, the creek underwent, and continues to undergo, remediation, but cleanup was not extended beyond the creek into the private properties along the creek’s edge. While seemingly unremarkable, the location exudes a negative atmosphere, so much so that this was the only stop on the tour that audience members whispered to each other and refrained from openly talking at the site. While the town of Times Beach was given renewed purpose after the cleanup project was completed—an opportunity for renewed recreation—the same could not be done for the miles of this creek that remained mistreated and contaminated, at least in this area, hidden from sight unless you know where to look or were/are affected by it. Site #3 : Carrollton The next stop on our tour was the former Carrollton subdivision in Bridgeton, MO. Once one of the largest subdivisions in the area, the community was bought out in the 1990s to make room for a new runway at the airport. [46] However, the airport expansion fell through and the community was demolished anyway. Former residents now question if there were other explanations as to why their homes were destroyed, as it is now known that the subdivision was located between a radioactive creek and a radioactive landfill. Entering the area that used to be Carrollton was surreal. The tree-lined streets of the community were inhabited not long ago, and the remnants of human consumption of the land were everywhere. The roads that moved through the area were complete with turnoffs, driveways, and sidewalks, as if the homes were lifted from the earth without a trace. The area was also littered with trash, mattresses, furniture, and beer cans, showing that people had been there recently and/or used Carrollton as a dumping ground. After driving deep into the once-vibrant community, we parked just on the other side of a steel gate, complete with a sign that read, “Road Closed. No Trespassing. Property of the City of St. Louis.” Once we stepped out of our cars, the evidence of human intervention was even more present. We were careful not to step too near an open, uncovered sewer. Telephone poles and electric wires still stood along the street. Ross led us on foot to a clearing, which once was a yard, where the group took a break to talk and to decompress after the first half of the tour. Here, we gathered around a blanket for snacks of cookies, clementines, and hot tea that she prepared. We spent the time talking with the other audience members and walking around the general area; we were especially struck by the non-native plants clearly planted as landscaping, including a wall of bamboo, yucca plants that decorated the ends of what used to be driveways, and carefully placed evergreens that had outgrown their hedge-like purpose. By this point in the tour, we had developed a level of comfort with Ross and the rest of the audience members present. We had existed in “dangerous” spaces together and embodied a shared experience with each other and with our host, reflecting Shaughnessy’s idea that environmental theatre’s exchange between performer and audience allows for “a transfer of bodily sensations … which affects the participants, creating a felt exchange, an embodied experience.” [47] We had shared the experience up to this point, and that experience lead to trust, not simply assumed authority, in our guide. Figure 2. Picnic at the Carrollton Subdivision site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) After a bit, Ross stood up and talked to the group about Carrollton, which included a discussion of some of the rumors as to why the subdivision was evacuated. The space transformed for us, as we imagined the homes that once stood on this land, not too long ago. After all, “in site responsive work … there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment,” [48] as this too was a location that needed a bit of reconstruction through Ross’s guidance. While the driveways and sidewalks still existed, the outlines of residences that once were, Ross’s expert perspective helped us to reimage a space that was once a bustling community not that long ago. Our perspective shifted from viewing the area as a dumping ground to recognizing the lives that once centered on the suburban streets of the Carrollton subdivision. Unlike the historical distance between ourselves and the residents of Times Beach, it was easy to imagine the homes, the gardens, and the cars in the driveways. Thus, the meaning of this location was much easier to grasp than some of the others. Perhaps most ominous was a solitary light pole, long disconnected from its electric source. Ironically, Ross pointed out a current public park, built directly adjacent, that could be seen from our resting place. No fence or structure divided the park from the property where we sat, save some overgrown bushes. There was nothing to keep us in, or out, or to delineate the danger, real or fabricated, of the area of Carrollton from the recreational space next to it. Site #4 : West Lake Landfill The second to last stop on the tour was by all accounts the most well-known site on the itinerary: the West Lake Landfill. In 2010, the West Lake Landfill became the focus of national attention when it was discovered that a portion of the site was experiencing what experts called a “subsurface smoldering event,” referred to locally as an “underground fire.” [49] To make matters worse, the landfill was already known to contain illegally dumped radioactive waste. In 1973, a local company mixed 8,700 tons of radioactive waste, containing seven tons of uranium, with 3.5 times as much soil, and illegally dumped it into a local, unlined landfill. [50] In the 1990s, the landfill became a Superfund site and was added to the National Priorities List, and anti-nuclear activists had been fighting for the complete remediation of the site since the early 1970s. [51] Today, the landfill contains both radioactive waste and an underground fire. While the EPA maintains that the site is safe, residents believe they have been experiencing a variety of different health problems. [52] While much is known about this site, many residents, even those who live relatively close and those curious, have not physically gone to it. For many of the residents in the surrounding communities, the first indication that something was amiss and that they even lived near a landfill, was the presence of a chemical-like odor in the air. [53] The landfill’s existence likely went unnoticed by residents, in part by design, as landfills and industrial sites are strategically placed away from typical routes and neighborhoods. [54] But in this case, the waste was illegally dumped in a landfill in a densely populated area, and unlike many cases of toxic dumping, [55] the landfill is surrounded by predominantly white, working class neighborhoods. With greater access to resources, residents have in many ways garnered more media attention than other sites of toxicity. We felt great anticipation as we drove our car to a stop along a road that ran parallel to the edge of the landfill. Right away, we were met with a warning: “Posted. No trespassing. Keep out.,” informing us to remain on our side of the chain-link and barbed wire fence that ran the perimeter of the site. There were cameras along the fence offering constant surveillance of the area, which alerted the site’s security that our group of tourists was in the area. As we stood gazing across the expanse of the landfill, a pick-up truck pulled up just on the other side of the fence and while it never stopped, it crept slowly by us; clearly, we were being watched. Unlike Pezzullo’s definition of toxic tours that invite people into these spaces to educate the public, the operators at the landfill wanted us to keep out. [56] Here, we did not struggle with Levin’s environmental unconscious of the more unassuming sites, as the location was current and alive: we actually experienced it firsthand. This was the only point in the trip where we felt wearing the cheap, white masks may actually be necessary. While the smell was not apparent at first, it soon wafted our direction. Group members remarked on the smell and asked if it was safe to breathe the air. Our guide led the audience along the fence, providing the history of the mound we were here to explore. Not many people would go there given its status as an active landfill, even without the smoldering event that has attracted public attention. From a performance perspective, Levin argues: In environmental performance, the perspectivalism of the proscenium stage ostensibly falls away, the action no longer enframed within the confines of a single scenic picture; the staging takes place throughout a found or transformed environment. While the traditional spectator is positioned outside of the stage’s pictorial field, s/he is now placed inside of the theatrical picture. [57] Being there, we were inserted into the location and could grasp what it would be like to live at the border of the landfill, gaining an understanding of the community’s plight. Ross positioned the tour attendees in the frame of the performance by carefully “staging” the place through dictating where to stand and directing the audience’s attention through the added element of past and present knowledge, thus allowing the audience to engage fully in the setting of her performance. We felt safer in this place under her guidance and because of the authority of the character she curated. We were all fascinated by the visceral experience of standing next to the landfill. The mound seemed to breathe as if it was a living organism, given the pipes and mechanisms that allowed for the release of gasses from beneath its surface. It was hard not to be distracted by the seemingly living mound next to us, and we commented to one another that we were almost waiting for it to move. At this the fourth stop on Ross’s tour the impact of human consumption was palpable. This location is still “alive;” it has not yet faced the remediation efforts of the U.S. government and other forces. It was hard to believe that this site exists in the middle of suburbia, with residences on all sides. Figure 3. Allana Ross Overlooking the Landfill Site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Before we left, Ross led the audience back up the road, past our cars, to a higher point in elevation that overlooked the landfill. Here, even though we could not see the landfill in its entirety, Our tour guide pointed out different features at the site to help us more fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Ross talked more specifically about the smoldering event, pointing to an area in the landfill where the “fire” is believed to be. We stood looking over the vast expanse of the mound, the green tarp and grass covered areas, and a seemingly endless system of pipes running in and across the surface. As Ross pointed out, it may be jarring to think of this site as alive, but that is part of the issue: the earth is alive, we just do not always treat it as such. Site #5 : Weldon Springs Most of our group left the tour after the landfill, leaving only about a third of the original participants. Pulling into a largely empty parking lot, save for only one other car, we had the final stop mostly to ourselves. While the West Lake Landfill gave the impression that every inch of the place was being closely observed and managed, the Weldon Springs site had the effect of being a world set apart, desolate, and otherworldly. Unlike the other sites of the day, which largely blended into their local environments and felt mundane, this site was intended to be a spectacle. Rising out of the largely flat terrain sat what can only be described as a mountain, covered in white-grey boulders. This mound is also a burial site of sorts, but in this case, it contains hazardous and radioactive waste. After WWII, the U.S. expanded its nuclear weapons programs. In St. Louis, production was moved to a 220-acre facility thirty miles from downtown. [58] The plant was in operation from 1957-1966, and in that time, it too generated an expansive amount of radioactive and hazardous waste, which was often stored in pits and quarries on the 17,000-acre property. The site was later remediated by the Department of Energy, and like Route 66 State Park, it was deemed uninhabitable but safe for recreational visitors. [59] For our tour group, the mound was immediately visible, rising high out of the earth. Today, the forty-five acre and seventy-five foot high mound is a tourist attraction that contains roughly “1.48 million cubic yards of PCBs, mercury, asbestos, TNT, radioactive uranium and radium, and contaminated sludge and rubble.” [60] The site includes a single story metal building which houses the “Weldon Springs Interpretive Center,” a museum and “exhibition hall preserving the legacy of the site, cleanup activities, and natural environment.” [61] Additionally, the site includes the “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail,” which consists of a path leading to steps to climb the mound. The mention of nuclear waste is the only major connection to its past. Visitors to the mound are invited to explore, to climb to the peak and oversee their surroundings. Weldon Spring has become a local attraction, and it is now the highest peak in St. Charles County. Unlike the West Lake Landfill from where we had just come, this location invited visitors. Even though it was getting late in the day and the cold was starting to settle in past our coats, we noticed one other person in the park biking along the nature trail that wound its way around the large mound at the park’s center. In this act of bringing environment into the fore, Levin argues that the concept of camouflage of the environment engages “the spatial process by which we engage with and adapt to our material surroundings.” [62] Performance that engages the environment in which it is taking place uses camouflage to “[highlight] the non-human site as itself a performing entity, reminding us that the communication between self and setting is rarely unidirectional.” [63] Here, at Weldon Springs, the mound became the central character of the performance. It was quite a hike up a long staircase built into the side of what seemed like an endless mound of boulders. Just when we thought we were at the top, the path kept going to a central area. Ross encouraged us to walk the strange terrain, and we spent some time traversing the boulders, looking out over the edge, before heading to the highest peak. At the top, there was an area with benches and metal plaques describing the location, the history, and the cleanup of the area. There was also a diagram of the mound and details as to how it was constructed, including its dimensions. Again, this park is located within a highly populated, residential area with a local high school visible in the distance, closer than one would hope. Yet, with expanses of trees on all sides interrupted only briefly by buildings, it felt like the mound was secluded in nature. This unnatural place houses such potential danger, and yet we consumed it, temporarily, by being there. Figure 4. The surface of the Weldon Springs mound, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Both Shaughnessy and Levin highlight an important distinction in Ross’s performance: Ross does not engage her audience with a traditionally staged and scripted performance in these chosen spaces. On the tour, she evoked the sites of contamination, but still framed her performance as a tour of these locations, which could change based on the day, time, and audience present in creating her community. Thus, it is important to revisit Magelssen’s discussion of tourism when considering Ross’s performance. He observes that immersive tourism experiences “are tapping into the potential energies offered by inviting the audience to step through the fourth wall.” [64] Magelssen’s exploration of tourism and second-person interpretation [65] explores the ways spectators inherently become a part of the performance for the purpose of partaking in an immersive experience outside of their own lived experience. With Ross, however, we did not become a character in her performance through the means of Magelssen’s second-person interpretation. Rather, we became a part of the community built through performance and empowered by a renewed commitment to the environment/community, as we were not, in fact, complete outsiders to begin with. We said goodbye to our guide, and kept the knowledge of our experience at the forefront of our minds during the almost two-hour drive home. For a little more than five hours, a group of strangers gathered for Ross’s performance as she challenged our perception of these sites as they were consumed, and then reified, after human impact had contaminated the land. Through her tour, Ross asked us to engage with parts of our community that are outside of our everyday experiences, to know “the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats,” the unassuming danger that sits silently in the open among the housing developments, quiet streets, schools, and strip malls of suburban St. Louis. [66] Ross encouraged us to confront these lands: I think that it is important to repurpose the land because we depend on it and are connected to it. There is a limited amount of land and we can’t just trash it and abandon it … if we abandon these places we don’t feel the consequences, we don’t see that this is a repetitive pattern of behavior that comes from thinking we are separate from the land…so I think reckoning with the disastrous, contaminated, places that we have created is ultimately more beneficial than abandoning them for short term safety. [67] Part of our tour, then, was to confront the historical legacies of place and to see how some of these properties are now being used. Ross’s performance connected her audience to places within our community but that are still distant to many residents. Her performance brought attention to the issue of contaminated sites in the areas west of the city. Ross still hosts tours, advertised on local St. Louis-area Facebook groups, that focus on the landfill, Coldwater Creek, and current cleanup efforts. While she carried a brochure and notes containing historical facts and details on each location, Ross did not have a set script. Thus, the performance can change based on the community members present for the experience, guided by where they are able to go, how long they want to stay, and even the weather. The impact of the tour is lasting, as the sensory experience encourages participants to hold onto the images, smells, and sounds of each of the five sites, allowing Ross to achieve her goal of bringing awareness to the contamination of land in the place she too calls “home.” References [1] Allana Ross. 2017. “West Lake Landfill Facebook Page.” Facebook , March 26, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/groups/508327822519437/. [2] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. [3] Ibid., 2. [4] Ibid., 3. [5] Allana Ross, “Artist Statement—Allana Ross,” Allana Ross, 2017, https://allanaross.com/Statement-1. [6] Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 13. [7] Ibid., 5. [8] Richard Schechner, “6 axioms for environmental theatre.” ( The Drama Review: TDR 1968): 41-64.; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater . (Hal Leonard Corporation, 1994).; Una Chaudhuri, Staging place: The Geography of Modern Drama . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).; Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/scape/theater . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002).; Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds., Readings in Performance and Ecology . (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).; Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish, eds., Small acts of repair: Performance, ecology and Goat Island . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).; Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning . (Montreal, CA: ECW Press, 1999). [9] Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction , 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: J. Wiley & Sons, 2015), 39. [10] Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 65. [11] Baz Kershaw, Theatre ecology: Environments and performance events . (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. [12] Nicola Shaughnessy, Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114; 102. [13] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [14] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [15] Laura Levin. Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105-6. [16] David A Fennell and Ross Dowling, Ecotourism Policy and Planning , 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 1; 4. [17] Scott Magelssen. “Tourist Performance in the Twenty-first Century.” In Enacting History , edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 174.; Scott Magelssen. Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance . (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). [18] Magelssen, “Tourist Performance,” 177. [19] Robert Bullard, ed, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots . (Boston MA: South End Press, 1993).; Steven Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure . (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). [20] Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 5. [21] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England . (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2003). [22] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [23] Ibid. [24] Allana Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours, interview by author, May 17, 2018. [25] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “TIMES BEACH Site Profile,” EPA’s Superfund Site Information for TIMES BEACH, n.d., https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0701237. [26] OLEM US EPA, “Superfund: CERCLA Overview,” Overviews and Factsheets, US EPA, 9 September 2015, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-cercla-overview. [27] Jennifer Sieg, “General Information: Down the ‘Mother Road’ Route 66 State Park,” Text, 6 February 2011, https://mostateparks.com/page/54997/general-information. [28] Thomas Voltaggio and John Adams, “Superfund: A Half-Century of Progress” (EPA Alumni Association, 1 March 2016), 6, https://www.epaalumni.org/hcp/superfund.pdf. [29] Levin. Performing Ground , 105-6. [30] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [31] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967,” 30 September 1967, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1967-09-30-mallinckrodt-fuel-atomic-age-report-st-louis-area-uranium-processing-operations/. [32] Seantel Anais and Kevin Walby, “Secrecy, Publicity, and the Bomb: Nuclear Publics and Objects of the Nevada Test Site, 1951-1992,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 6 (2016): 949–68. [33] Cheryl Wittenauer, “Woman Crusades for Ailing Nuclear Workers, Families,” Los Angeles Times , 29 February 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-29-adna-daughter29-story.html. [34] U.S Atomic Energy Commission, “1959-04-11 – AEC – Manhattan Project – History of the St Louis Airport Site” (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 11 April 1959), Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1959-04-11-aec-manhattan-project-history-of-the-st-louis-airport-site/. [35] Ibid. [36] Ray Hartmann, “The Poisoned Children of Coldwater Creek Finally Get a Break,” St. Louis Magazine , 3 August 2018, https://www.stlmag.com/api/content/3f24000c-975f-11e8-b5a5-12408cbff2b0/. [37] Robert Alvarez, “West Lake Story: An Underground Fire, Radioactive Waste, and Governmental Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11 February 2016, http://thebulletin.org/west-lake-story-underground-fire-radioactive-waste-and-governmental-failure9160.; Keith Schneider, “Mountain of Nuclear Waste Splits St. Louis and Suburbs,” New York Times , 24 March 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/us/mountain-of-nuclear-waste-splits-st-louis-and-suburbs-888.html?pagewanted=all. [38] James Allen, “1974-05-16-AEC- Investigation of Cotter Corporation Illegal Dumping at Latty Avenue,” 17 May 1974, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1974-05-16-aec-investigation-of-cotter-corporation-illegal-dumping-at-latty-avenue/.; Mary Freivogel, “Confusion Over Dumping of Radioactive Waste in County,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 May 1976; Mary Freivogel, “Radioactive Materials Checks Called Faulty,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 1 June 1976. [39] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “FUSRAP,” n.d., 1, https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Environmental/FUSRAP/ [40] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “St. Louis District > Missions > Centers of Expertise > Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program,” FUSRAP, n.d., https://www.mvs.usace.army.mil/Missions/Centers-of-Expertise/Formerly-Utilized-Sites-Remedial-Action-Program/. [41] Karl Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill,” Stltoday.Com , 20 February 2014, http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/epa-is-working-toward-a-remedy-at-west-lake-landfill/article_ff60744d-2c35-5439-b857-111705da97d5.html. [42] Cresswell, Place, 39. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [46] Carolyn Tuft, “Carrollton Was Once a Quiet Subdivision but Now It’s a Noisy Community in Limbo,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 7 July 1995. [47] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [48] Ibid. [49] Véronique LaCapra, “There’s A Burning Problem at The Bridgeton Landfill – It Stinks but Is It Unsafe?,” St. Louis Public Radio, 29 March 2013, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/theres-burning-problem-bridgeton-landfill-it-stinks-it-unsafe. [50] Carolyn Bowers, Louis Rose, and Theresa Tighe, “A Miracle with A Price,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 12 February 1989. [51] Inc. Republic Services, “Bridgeton Landfill Timeline,” Website, 2014, http://www.bridgetonlandfill.com/bridgeton-landfill-timeline. [52] Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill.”; Veronique LaCapra, “Confused about the Bridgeton and West Lake Landfills? Here’s What You Should Know,” St. Louis Public Radio , 2 March 2014, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/confused-about-bridgeton-and-west-lake-landfills-heres-what-you-should-know. [53] Jeffrey Tomich, “Hot Spot and Fumes Prompt Concern at Bridgeton Landfill,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 October 2012. [54] Andrew Hurley, “From Factory Town to Metropolitan Junkyard: Postindustrial Transitions on the Urban Periphery,” Environmental History 21, (2016): 3–29. [55] Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality , 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2000).; Melissa Checker, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005). [56] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 5. [57] Levin, Performing Ground, 68. [58] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967.” [59] Susan Davis and Puro, Steven, “Patterns of Intergovernmental Relations in Environmental Cleanup at Federal Facilities,” In Publius 29, no. 4 (1999), 33–53. [60] Doug Kirby, Ken Smith, and Mike Wilkins, “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail, Weldon Spring, Missouri,” Roadside America, 1, accessed 25 October 2019, https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14614. [61] DOE – Office of Legacy Management, “Weldon Spring Site Interpretive Center and Educational Opportunities,” Energy.gov, August 2019, 1, https://www.lm.doe.gov/Weldon/Interpretive_Center/. [62] Levin, Performing Ground, 97. [63] Ibid. [64] Magelssen. “Tourist Performance,” 174. [65] Ibid., 175. [66] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [67] Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours. 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 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.

Sean F. Edgecomb Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage MáM Sean F. Edgecomb By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF The company of MáM in performance at Fairfield University (Photo: David Gray) MáM By Teac Damsa Choreographed and Directed by Michael Keegan-Dolan The Quick Center for the Performing Arts Fairfield University Fairfield, Connecticut November 17, 2023 Reviewed by Sean F. Edgecomb In November 2023, Michael Keegan-Dolan and his contemporary dance troupe, Teac Damsa (established in 2016), completed a residence at Fairfield University’s Quick Center, culminating in the American premiere of MáM. An Irish word that may be best understood as a mountain pass that simultaneously separates and connects the villages of Ireland’s craggy west, MáM (rhymes with yam) , was an explosive, choreographic exploration of queerness as the in-between: between villages, between the Continent, Ireland and the United States, between innocence and experience, and perhaps most dramatically, between life and death. In fact, the company website describes MáM as “a meeting place between soloist and ensemble, classical and traditional, the local and universal.” This notion of the in-between was further highlighted by the selected font for the show title, two uppercase M ’s representing mountains surrounding the lowercase “a” with the fada, standing symbolically for the geographic pass. Keegan-Dolan rose to fame as director of Fabulous Beasts Dance Theatre (1997-2015), where he developed an eclectic, signature style that combines ballet and contemporary, improvisational dance from a variety of global traditions. Keegan-Dolan’s work often explores humanity through a folkloric lens, navigating the sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, and often magical and historically rooted identity of Ireland, between Irish people and the Irish diaspora, though disseminated with an intercultural intent. In fact, I first encountered a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring re-envisioned by Fabulous Beasts in Brisbane, Australia in 2013, and I was blown away by Keegan-Dolan’s distinct and vibrant aesthetic (sexually convulsing dancers sporting hare masks and a flurry of cross-dressing). In 2019, I attended Teac Damsa’s adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ( Loch na hEala ) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). This production liberally transformed the nineteenth century ballet into a sleek, contemporary takedown of child abuse in Ireland’s Roman Catholic diocese mixed with the Irish myth, “The Children of Lir,” which sees children doomed to transform into swans between sunrise and sunset. Keegan-Dolan’s commitment to exploring the in-between of these canonical works, contemporary adaptations, and forms and genres only heightened my reading of this work as queer. Already a fan of Keegan-Dolan, you can imagine my delight when I learned that Teac Damsa would present the American premiere of MáM at Fairfield University, where I joined the faculty just a month earlier. As part of Fairfield’s Quick Center Artist-in-Residence program, Keegan-Dolan generously agreed to engage with our undergraduate students, including my Performance Histories class. To say that Keegan-Dolan is charismatic is a wild understatement, and admittedly I was less than measured in hiding my deep admiration for his vision. When I mentioned my queer interpretation of his work, Keegan-Dolan was delighted. While admittedly he is not gay, and is partnered with company dancer Rachel Poirier, he related that his experience growing up as a dancer had always rendered him as queer, caught between the masculine expectations embedded in Irish class culture and his desire to become a performing artist. He reflected that it was this nuanced feeling of ambivalence that led to his visionary work as a director/choreographer. MáM reads as queer from its opening tableau: a young girl in a white dress (Mille Lang), lays on a worn, wooden table in an incense filled auditorium, as a goat-masked performer (Cormac Begley), pumps the bellows of a bass concertina, without sound. The instrument inhales and exhales, as the girl rises. As the goat-headed performer (a fertility symbol in Pagan Ireland) removes his mask and transforms into human form, one side of a curtain rod falls (brilliantly designed by Sabine Dargent), and the large black curtain that has backed the performers is dramatically pulled by gravity into a heap at the stage right corner of the proscenium—physically embodying the notion of queer as off-kilter. From behind the heavy drape a cast of twelve dancers are revealed, dressed in black, layered costumes (envisioned by Hyemi Shin) reminiscent of James Joyce’s characters attending a funeral, but in papery, black, faceless masks that intend to haunt if not terrify. As the performance unfolds, first to Gaelic rhythms and eventually the addition of more global sounds (provided by s t a r g a z e, an orchestral collective made up of musicians from around the world whose branded title also plays with the space between letters), another curtain slides off a second pole to reveal the band. Downstage, the dancers blend a variety of styles and movements, embodying moments of love and hate, kinship and tribalism, grief, insanity, profound sadness, silliness, and joy. Over the course of an hour, the dancers slowly lose their masks and then black clothing, revealing mostly white undergarments that cling to the lithe bodies, transparent with sweat. The show’s queerness is grounded in its multivalent and often amorphous story-telling, meandering like a path through the wilds of the Western Irish countryside where Keegan-Dolan lives and Teac Damsa works. This metamorphic structure allows the audience to build different and even simultaneous understandings of the narrative that bridges the transient space between the performers and the audience. Throughout this choreographed choose-your-own adventure, the young girl remains at the center, mostly as observer and occasionally as participant. At the conclusion of the performance, the notion of queer in-betweenness is both dramaturgically and physically actualized. As the orchestra and dancers reach a symbiotic and harmonious climax and the stage fills with smoke, a third curtain drops (the number three is a sacred symbol relevant to both Irish paganism and Christianity), revealing a wall of light and huge fans. As the young girl is lifted into a silhouette of blinding light, the fans engage with great force pushing the smoke into the auditorium, creating a jaw-dropping illusion to make the audience feel as if they are passing through MáM , the between space of the symbolic mountain pass. As with many queer works, the impact of MáM is driven by affective and individual audience interpretations of a narrative that remains intentionally ambiguous. Is the young girl dead as we follow her journey through Purgatory and eventually her entrance into the afterlife? Is she the Angel of Death? Is she the embodied zeitgeist of a particular people, place and space? Is this a story of salvation, resurrection, or the existential? All these interpretations and more circle through and beyond the performance as Keegan-Dolan’s queer staging that delivers limitless possibility, celebrating the nuanced space of the in-between rather relying on the certain. Singular and/or monolithic understandings of culture, whether local, regional, or national often lead to an impasse, where different ideas are feared and even villainized as the Other. In MáM , Keegan-Dolan and Teac Damsa present a transient performance, grounded in Irish folk culture, that invites the audience to consider how our humanity surpasses the notion of boundaries—whether geographic, political, or identity-driven—where the queer in-between space is presented not only as a site for passage, but also a site of intersection, potentiality, and empathy. Images: The company of MáM in performance at Fairfield University. (Photo: David Gray) This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Sean F. Edgecomb (PhD) is Associate Professor and Director of the Arts Institute at Fairfield University. His work intersects cultural studies, theatre history and queer theory including, The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2023. In addition to his scholarly work, he also paints under the pseudonym, Peter Kunt, and curates the Gallery for Ghosts, in a 17th century attic in rural Connecticut. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Alex Ferrone By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Ugo Chukwu, Will Dagger, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Karen Lugo in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. For longtime frequenters of the downtown New York theatre scene, Carmelita Tropicana is a household name. In her decades-long career as a performance artist, actor, author, and teacher, she has built a body of work that alloys raucous humor and fantastical role play—with the help of a roster of memorable personas and characters—to interrogate the entanglements of queerness, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As she toured her work across the country, collecting a raft of honors and awards along the way, she reached a wider audience still when her work was profiled by José Esteban Muñoz, whose book Disidentifications regularly introduces Tropicana to generations of theatre and performance scholars who might not otherwise experience the joy of seeing her perform live. At the end of 2024, her show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! opened at Soho Rep, a collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whom Tropicana taught and mentored while he was a graduate student at NYU. The play is, at once, a fantastical odyssey into the canon of one of our most beloved performance artists and a nostalgic love letter to the avant-garde performance ecology in which she continues to figure so prominently. The central conceit is as provocative as it is simple: Tropicana (playing herself) contemplates retiring her iconic persona, so Jacobs-Jenkins (played by Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy her. But such a persona can hardly be contained by so bald a commercial transaction. As Carmelita transfers from body to body, the stage gives way to a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Tropicana’s alter-egos, mentors, and heroes—until Carmelita finally comes home to roost, gloriously embodied by Tropicana again at last, in a direct-address coda that changes with each performance. Tropicana invited me to talk about the play with her at the Park Avenue Armory, where she and Jacobs-Jenkins share a studio as artists in residence. This interview was conducted on April 25, 2025. It has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Ferrone: I want to talk about Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! , of course, which I loved, but I thought we might start at the end. Carmelita Tropicana: The end! AF: ( Laughs ) Yes, because I was so moved by the ending of the show. I saw it the day after Nikki Giovanni passed away, and you ended the show by reading her poem “Nikki-Rosa.” There was something special about remembering her that way and inviting the audience into this collective mourning—and celebration too. I wondered why that poem specifically, why this invocation of Black love as Black wealth. CT: Well, it’s such a beautiful poem. She’s really known for it. It just states things in such an uplifting way. Like, this is what it is, and they don’t understand. They’re trying to speak for us, but they can’t possibly know. If you’re white, I’m not sure you can know what it really is to be Black in America. So, here’s somebody who was really important as a queer artist—and it was really beautiful, that poem, and what it meant—so, you know, I felt she needed to be remembered in a really good way. AF: You did that. CT: I wanted the show to end with a coda from Carmelita, because all throughout the play, I’m not Carmelita. Other people are Carmelita. But at the very end, I am fully in my body as Carmelita, and I can address the audience. And the coda is always different. It changes. Whatever happens during that day or that week, I point it out. I will remember. There was another director who died, David Schweizer, who had directed one of my pieces, the Cucaracha piece [ With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con que culo se sienta la cucaracha? ], and he also directed me and Marga Gomez in Single Wet Female . He saw the show maybe three weeks before he passed away, and he was just beaming. And that’s the image I have of David. Like this. ( She beams ) He was queer from the very beginning, you know? All his animal prints—he was always in animal prints. Always. And he was beaming. Sometimes people can be kind of jealous when others do well, but there was none of that. There was just generosity. There was just happiness at having seen the show. In fact, he told Marga that she had to come see the show. She had to come to New York. And that’s the image I have of David. So, I also mentioned him in one of my codas . It was like a memorial for him. To me, that’s important: to remember people as we’re going along. AF: This ties into something I hoped to talk about, which is the importance of queer genealogies and mentorship. It’s such a big part of the show. I mean, the fact that there’s a picture of Branden right there on the table! ( Points to the framed photograph of Jacobs-Jenkins on the opposite end of the table. ) I think the concept of mentorship means something particular among queer people, those kinds of intergenerational queer connections or mentor–mentee relationships. While I was watching the show, I thought a lot about my own mentor, Darren Gobert, who lived and worked in New York in the late nineties and early aughts, who was so enmeshed in that performance culture. I knew the show would land for him in such a special way, since he’d spent so much time in that space—Soho Rep specifically and just downtown New York theatre in general. And now here I was sitting in that space too, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it. CT: That’s important. You have to pass things on. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: There are multiple generations of queer mentorship within the play. You were a student of María Irene Fornés, and she appears as a character. Branden was a student of yours, and he appears as a character—in addition to co-creating the show with you. What was it like working on this with a former student, now no longer as mentor and mentee but as collaborators? CT: ( In unison ) Collaborators. It’s very different. The world changes, you know. He was no longer the student that I met in 2007. He can’t be, and neither am I, so it’s very different. It’s more like colleagues coming together and trying to figure it out. We said we were going to work on something in 2015. Now, from 2015 to 2024, that’s a lot of years in between, and we were busy with other things. He was busy with his work, I was busy with mine, and then COVID happened too. There were a lot of intervening years, you know, where things happened, so we both grow. You know, you change, and we are no longer who we were before. His feet are also in the Broadway world now. 1 We really started working on the play in 2016 because that’s when we got a grant. When you get a grant, it’s sort of like, okay, you gotta do it. 2 We began by looking at the film My Dinner with Andre . That was where we started: it was going to be much more of a conversation, that sort of script. And then it went through different iterations. First, there was going to be a BJJ character, but it was going to be him on stage with me. It was going to be a conversation, the two of us. But he was not interested in performing at all. At all . I mean, eight shows a week, no. And he’s right. He had a lot of other commissions, and in the interim period he became a father—there were a lot of different things. So we began one way, and then the show went a very different way. But I became much more involved with Soho Rep. We’re both board members at Soho Rep, which is where he did An Octoroon . AF: Yes, of course. CT: That was really wonderful. That’s what really catapulted his career, so in a way it’s been his home for a long time. I came to Soho Rep because I saw a play in 2008, directed by Sarah Benson, and it was like, oh my god . It was so amazing and so weird and so not anything that I would do. AF: Was it [Sarah Kane’s] Blasted ? CT: Yes! AF: I’ve only seen a recording. Such an excellent, iconic production. CT: Not the type of work I do at all, but it was really important, and I thought, well, I’ve got to come to this theatre again. And I was very happy I did. Not that I love everything , but everything is done in a certain theatrical way that’s thoughtful. So even if I see something and don’t necessarily like it, there’s always something there that makes it worth it. AF: There’s a real meditation in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! on the future of downtown, experimental theatre culture. I mean, we all knew this was the last ever Soho Rep show in that space. 3 CT: Exactly. AF: That must have felt really meaningful. CT: Oh yeah, it was. When they told us that we were going to close the space, it was like, whoa, we’re going to close this . You know, it was very—( She gestures )—for everybody working there, because it wasn’t just our show. Mimi Lien, who had done sets for Soho Rep, people who were working there from before that have a history, that are attached, that have a real feeling for the space and what it was like. It was this dumpy place where magic happened. Such magic. Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Karen Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, and Will Dagger in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: The play asks, at a certain point, what does downtown New York theatre mean now? It’s a shift I imagine you’ve observed firsthand over the last few decades. How do you feel about the culture of downtown experimental theatre, whether now or looking toward the future? CT: I think there’s still “downtown” theatre. Back when I was starting out, it was “experimental”—there are still shows that are very experimental. What has happened is that, geographically, they used to be just downtown. The space of downtown, from 14th Street all the way to Tribeca: that was it. But now it’s expanded to different boroughs because—what’s affordable? Where can people live? Where can theatres be that’s cheaper? Where does the young population go that will come see the shows? So all of that is taken into account. I just saw Rheology by [Shayok] Misha Chowdhury, who actually just had a show at Soho Rep called Public Obscenities , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Rheology was wonderful. It still has the sensibility of downtown, but he’s doing it at Bushwick Starr, all the way in Brooklyn. AF: ( Laughs ) Ah yes, all the way . CT: All the way , you know! It’s a beautiful play, and it’s him and his mother. It’s really very touching, and again it has that sensibility. That’s Misha. 4 But then you have people like Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, who did a show at Soho Rep called Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken [ Present It’s That Time of the Month ] , where you have to go through a vagina to get to your seat. It was wonderful and almost a nod to the eighties, sort of a talk show format interacting with the audience, and they had people coming up that were guest stars. I was one of the guest stars. AF: Oh, that’s amazing. CT: And I loved it. I really didn’t answer any of the questions, so Becca went like this. ( Mimes throwing cue cards over her shoulder ) I hadn’t performed in so long, and I just really wanted to talk about certain things—like, you know, a sexual workshop I had attended with Betty Dodson, the masturbation guru, and my research on hyenas, which are a matriarchal species that I find fascinating. I mixed it up. I even had a costume. And Becca was like, well, let’s do it. They were really very generous. They were great. And at the end of the show, Becca closed with a stand-up routine that was beautiful, touching, dark, hysterically funny—and that’s still very much, in my opinion, downtown-ish experimental-type theatre. AF: So, you see this sensibility still, but it’s not limited to this or that place the way we sometimes talk about it. CT: Club culture is like this. There’s still club culture—in Brooklyn, all over the place, kids doing drag. You know, I’m less likely to go to a rave or go to a club at 10 or 11—I used to, but it’s less me now—so I haven’t seen what kids are doing, but there’s all kinds of stuff. AF: Well, there were a lot of young people in the audience at Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! CT: Which is great. I love it. That’s the audience I want. I know I can get the others, but I want that one. AF: And it was a vocal young audience. They were responding really enthusiastically to the show. I was fascinated by the pop that José Muñoz got every time he was mentioned. You know, in my case, I first encountered your work through Muñoz, through theory. And I wonder if that’s also true for a lot of young people, college students. CT: José is having quite a renaissance, let me tell you. And he has been there throughout it all because, in the academy, he’s a queer icon. What’s really great is that we were friends for a long time. We were friends from the moment we met. It was like, oh my god , because he’s funny . He was funny. No, he is . He was, he is, he was, he is. He was really funny. And he did not believe in high or low culture. He loved everything. He was brilliant. And his parties were amazing. I was at Wesleyan once and I started talking about the parties José gave, and that’s all the queer students wanted to hear about. AF: I want to hear about it! CT: José would have these salons that were just amazing, and it was all about connecting people. José is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of my life. Because a lot of the people that I know come through José. In the eighties, I met a lot of my friends through WOW [Café Theater]. Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Maureen Angelos of the Five Lesbian Brothers, Split Britches—Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Deb Margolin—all those people that I met through WOW, they’re still my friends. But in the nineties and into the aughts, it was through José. José was the connector. AF: I’m interested in the relationship between theory and performance when you have an audience that is so plugged into theory, which I wouldn’t say is the case for most audiences. The average theatregoer isn’t necessarily up on performance studies. But your audiences are , which I suspect gives you a different kind of grist to work with. CT: You know, I never started with theory. In fact, I didn’t read a lot of stuff that José wrote because I’m superstitious. Like, if I read it, then I’m just going to do that . But over time that changed. At some points, I would be stuck, and I would go, let me see what José wrote about me , because you can mine that stuff. So, the theory is there. I’m not a theorist. I’m not going to talk theory. That’s not where I come from. But I like that it exists in the world, that people are looking at it, because it’s about ideas. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana and Ugo Chukwu in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: A lot of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! takes place in what the show calls “phantasmagoria”—this dreamscape, which is also kind of an archive, a repository of images, and it explodes onto the stage. Talk me through how you ultimately chose that space —or infinite space, in a way—to work through the ideas of the play. CT: Well, I’m a persona. I mean, I have a persona. ( Laughs ) I have a persona. I started from the point of view of what it means to have a persona, why we have them, why we take them on. I was trying to figure out this world of personas—they’re characters but they are also real—and I was thinking of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author , characters who maybe don’t want to be in your show, who are fighting for agency. That’s where it started for me. AF: I found those sequences so exciting because of the accumulation of all these traces of performances—characters you’ve played, objects we’ve encountered but that crop up again, but now they mean something new. That kind of resignification feels very queer to me. CT: Which one are you thinking of? I’m curious. AF: In terms of objects, the plunger is one of those iconic images. CT: Yes, and that comes from Jack Smith, so it has that lineage. It’s like Duchamp and the urinal, taking an ordinary object and just elevating it. Jack Smith did that to me. I’ll never see a plunger the same way again. Caleb [Hammons], one of the producers, actually made for me little plunger earrings—so then it becomes something else again. I love the visuals of a work. Like, if I don’t have an outfit… ( Laughs ) I know it’s vapid, but Carmelita has to have an outfit. And once I have an outfit, it’s like, yes , I’m dressed for the party. My sister [Ella Troyano] made a film called Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen . In the very beginning, I’m wearing a rainbow-colored dress that Uzi Parnes designed that has fruited boas—he did the production design and the costumes for the film. When I come out in Phantasmagoria , I’m wearing a belt with bananas on it—which are not just Carmen Miranda but also Josephine Baker. Things that reference people who are important to Carmelita’s persona. AF: Again, it’s those genealogies, right? CT: I had to explain the bananas to somebody the other day. They were young and they weren’t familiar with it. AF: I think a lot of young queer people right now will probably associate bananas with a drag queen called Nymphia Wind. CT: Oh my god, I love Nymphia! AF: The bananas live on. CT: I love her. She’s “downtown” weird. And so absurd and playful. AF: Playfulness is underrated, isn’t it? It’s not taken as seriously as it should be. CT: Exactly. Humor is serious, just couched in a different way. AF: There’s also a lot in the play that’s actually really poignant. I’m thinking of [the character] Branden’s speech at the end of the show, which is kind of a mournful reflection on youth. On being at a point in your life when you’re looking backwards and forwards at the same time, filled with uncertainty. CT: Branden’s monologue is very moving. I had no idea that this play could make people cry. AF: ( Raises hand ) It did. CT: When you’re doing something, you’re hoping to move people, but you don’t know what effect you’re going to have. AF: Part of that final speech, too, is thinking about what young theatre makers are doing today, which is where the play ends before Carmelita closes the show with the coda. Are you excited about what young queer theatre makers are doing now and the kinds of things they’re experimenting with? CT: Oh yeah, absolutely. There was another play at Soho Rep called Wolf Play [by Hansol Jung], and it really got to me. It was from a very different perspective, told with a puppet, and it really worked. I saw it twice. It worked and it was very moving. I haven’t been as involved in plays that have puppets, but this really worked for me. So, I am excited. There’s a new generation that’s coming up and doing great work. AF: I want to pick up on something we discussed at the top, which is the importance of solidarity. You referred to the line in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me,” which I think says there’s a limit to how much you can understand the experiences of another person or another community that’s not your own. CT: I think that’s a kind of a dialectic that’s going to go back and forth. So, no, you can’t. But maybe at some point, yes, you can. And it really depends on being sensitive about how you speak. The world changes and you evolve. I changed a word in Milk of Amnesia when I learned more about the history. Now, is that censorship? Am I censoring myself? No, I don’t think so. I’m being careful about certain words. Words are important. AF: The discourse is evolving all the time, so we’re constantly going to be making those kinds of adjustments. CT: Which is not a bad thing. And sometimes maybe we do too much, sure, so then there’s the self-correcting, but, you know, we’re figuring it out. AF: That’s productive, though. I think that gesture is so meaningful. Like, we’re working on it. As a community—or as a community of communities—we can work together and try to figure it out. We need that coalition-building more than ever, that kind of collaboration and solidarity. CT: Yes, I totally agree. There are ways that we’re going to be different from another person, and there are ways that we are similar. Sometimes the stakes are different. But your stakes are important to me, and my stakes are important to you. And then we have a lot of stakes in common as well. There’s something really hopeful in that. References [1] At the time of our interview, Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest play, Purpose , had just opened on Broadway at the Hayes Theater—the same venue in which his play Appropriate was revived a year earlier, earning him the Tony for Best Revival. Purpose would go on to earn him the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2025. [2] In addition to becoming resident artists at the Armory, Tropicana and Jacobs-Jenkins received a Creative Capital Award and a MacDowell Fellowship to support their then-unnamed collaboration. [3] In the summer of 2024, Soho Rep announced it would be leaving its home at 46 Walker Street due to rising rent costs. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was the last show in its longtime downtown space. It has since been sharing space with Playwrights Horizons. [4] A few months after our interview, Playwrights Horizons announced Rheology as part of its 2025–26 season, scheduled to open in April 2026. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEX FERRONE is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and has published articles in Modern Drama , Theatre Survey , and Comparative Drama . His current book project, Tacky , examines class's performative conflations with race, ethnicity, and queerness, and he is also working on a project on the unpublished plays of Louis Peterson. He is the current Book Reviews Editor of Theatre Journal . 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage By Raeda Ghazaleh Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF INTRODUCTION Banned in many Middle Eastern countries after its publication due to the provocative nature of the text, Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra explores the life of Zahra, which spans multiple decades and continents. In 2019, I co-adapted the final chapter of the book with Matthew Spangler, which focuses on Zahra’s life during the Lebanese Civil War. This article examines the invigorating and boundary-pushing process of adapting and directing this challenging text at the Palestinian National Theatre El-Hakawati in 2020. While often mischaracterized as a Western import, Middle Eastern feminism, as practiced in my artistic work, emerges from local socio-political realities and cultural contexts. It is not a replica of Western feminist frameworks, but rather a situated and evolving praxis that responds to the lived experiences of women. In adapting The Story of Zahra , we drew upon feminist theory and Brecht’s alienation effect to create a critical distance that invited audiences to reflect on structures of gendered and political oppression. In this context, feminist theory foregrounds women's voices and insists on their centrality in cultural narratives and social transformation. Similarly, Brechtian theatre seeks to expose systems of power and challenge theatrical conventions. To this end, we employed three levels of narration that aimed to bring all these elements to the stage. Together, these approaches enabled a form of political theatre that confronts injustice and imagines possibilities for feminist expression in the Arab world. BACKGROUND INFORMATION The play The Story of Zahra premiered in Jerusalem at the Palestinian National Theatre El Hakawati in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown. It later toured Palestine in October 2021 and was performed at the Journées Théâtrales de Carthage in Tunisia in December of the same year. I first met Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh in 2000 while in London directing staged readings at the Royal Court Theatre. Katherine Viner of The Guardian , who interviewed me at the time, introduced us, sensing a shared sensibility. From that meeting, a long-standing friendship developed. I began reading al-Shaykh’s novels and discussing her early life in Beirut, including her decision to leave Lebanon at the outbreak of the civil war. Born in 1944 into a Shiite family in Beirut, al-Shaykh experienced a turbulent childhood marked by her mother’s departure and subsequent years in boarding school. At sixteen, she began writing for An-Nahar newspaper and later pursued her studies in literature at the American College for Girls in Cairo. After a brief return to Lebanon, she resumed work in journalism, but the onset of civil war in 1975 compelled her to flee to London with her two children. Her novel The Story of Zahra (1980) was a turning point in her career. Written in Arabic and met with widespread censorship across the Arab world, the novel was deemed controversial due to its unflinching depiction of sexuality, war, and patriarchal violence. The narrative centers on Zahra, a young woman whose experiences of abuse, political instability, and familial trauma expose the psychological toll of life within a patriarchal community. The novel’s raw critique of patriarchal structures led Arab publishers to reject it, prompting al-Shaykh to publish it independently. Since its English translation in 1986, The Story of Zahra has become a canonical work in Arab literature and is frequently taught in university courses across Europe and North America (Spangler, 3, 10). Al-Shaykh’s literary voice is marked by emotional honesty and feminist conviction rooted in her cultural and political context. As Edward Said remarked, she is “the premier woman writer in Arabic who has done more than any other to explore the misperception of Arab women's lives” (AUB). Her feminism, while distinct from Western frameworks, is deeply committed to giving voice to silenced and fractured female subjectivities. My connection to The Story of Zahra was immediate. After first reading it in 2000, I envisioned its potential as a stage adaptation. Nearly two decades later, I encountered playwright Matthew Spangler, known for his adaptation of The Kite Runner , and found in him a collaborator who shared my sensibility. When I proposed the adaptation to al-Shaykh, she expressed concern about how such a complex and interior novel could be staged. I assured her that the theatrical form I envisioned would honor the novel’s intensity and fragmentation. With that trust, she permitted us to begin the adaptation process. THE NOVEL The Story of Zahra Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra is structurally divided into two distinct books, each reflecting Zahra’s changing psychological state. The first book, comprising the majority of the novel, is primarily narrated from Zahra’s perspective. It recounts her traumatic childhood, marked by her mother’s instrumentalization of her in an extramarital affair and her fear of her abusive father. Seeking escape, Zahra travels to Africa to stay with her uncle, but instead of finding liberation, she is further subjected to sexual harassment and retraumatized by memories of earlier abuse, which included two abortions (Larson, 1991). Her experiences also include an emotionally hollow marriage to her uncle’s friend Majed and repeated returns between Africa and Beirut, underscoring her psychological dissociation and inability to find safety or belonging. Al-Shaykh complicates the narrative voice by including chapters from the perspectives of the uncle and Majed, men who are also portrayed as wounded figures, before returning to Zahra’s fragmented inner world. Through these shifting perspectives and nonlinear chronology, the novel resists classical narrative form. As Sirhan (2024) argues, al-Shaykh “breaks the time continuity” and constructs a plot composed of interwoven threads, reflecting Zahra’s psychological dislocation and aligning the novel with Brechtian techniques of fragmentation and estrangement (2024, 121–126). The second book, set during the Lebanese Civil War, marks a shift in Zahra’s agency. No longer isolated, she begins to engage with the world around her, questioning her past and present: “I am no longer Zahra. In short, my questions and inquiries do not stop” (al-Shaykh 1989, 153). The war serves as a catalyst, prompting Zahra to break free from patriarchal constraints (Sirhan 2024, 112). Her complex and morally ambiguous relationship with a sniper, at once violent, erotic, and psychologically charged, becomes a pivotal point of self-assertion. For the first time, Zahra chooses a relationship, believing she is both reconnecting with her body and preventing further violence. However, her pregnancy and fantasy of family are shattered when she is ultimately killed. As Sirhan notes, her death signifies the delusion of safety in wartime and encapsulates the cumulative violence she has endured (2024, 113). It was this second book that I chose to adapt for the stage, drawn to Zahra’s growing awareness and active engagement with her surroundings. I was particularly interested in how the war acts as a metaphorical rupture that propels Zahra toward self-reflection and confrontation with her trauma. Her wondering about the sniper in the neighbourhood leads her to have a sexual relationship with him. She fears the sniper, but she keeps going to him as she starts to connect with her body again. Zahra’s “relationship with the sniper [is an] embodiment of her deteriorating psychological state” (2024, 112). She realizes that her relationship with the sniper is the first time she is making her own choices. She rationalizes it by telling herself that, by being with the sniper, she is stopping him from killing people (al-Shaykh 1989, 189). However, she soon ends up dead. As Sirhan puts it, “Her death in the end is evidence that feeling safe in war is a delusion” (Sirhan 2024, 113). Zahra’s demise is a culmination of all kinds of violence that she experiences and witnesses. I aimed to create a performance that would allow the audience to hear Zahra’s voice without judgment, to understand her actions within a broader context of gendered violence and political collapse. Zahra’s story functions as a feminist critique of war and patriarchal society in Lebanon (2024, 125). Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra. Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. BRECHTIAN AND FEMINIST THEORIES IN ADAPTATION Feminist theory critiques patriarchy as a system in which women are historically oppressed, marginalized, and socially constructed to serve male interests. It interrogates how culture, especially literature and performance, has represented women through male fantasies rather than female realities. As Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” a statement Judith Butler expands on to show how gender is produced through repeated social behaviors rather than biological destiny. Gender can be understood as a patriarchal social given that is determined by the repetition of specific actions over time, “embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities...” (188) rather than leaving the existence of natural and instinctive actions that determine a person’s identity. This opens the door to exploring the possibility of a different kind of repetition, perhaps in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style that indicates to us the gender that is renewed in its identity (2007, 188). Women face many challenges in liberating their bodies from this patriarchal oppression. Still, they must also liberate themselves from their personal perspective, feelings, and opinions acquired through their experiences and backgrounds, which have shaped how they see themselves and their relationship with the world around them. As female subjectivity in general has been shaped within the patriarchal male vision, to be able to become free of it, there is a need for women “to escape the confines of the subjectivity patriarchy sets up for them” (Fortier 2002, 111). Judith Fetterley’s theory of the “resistance reader” was paramount to me throughout this process. Women throughout history adapted the vision of the dominant patriarchal culture. Even when women were allowed to participate in culture, they carried within themselves the male perspective; they wrote from a male point of view. Therefore, in order for women to liberate themselves from that, they must read against what they read, to be able to understand, realize, and criticize how literature has been written from a male perspective, even if women wrote it. Through this act of resistance reading, women can be liberated from patriarchal authoritarianism (Fortier 2002, 108). Theatre has long played a role in reproducing patriarchal narratives, but feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous insist on a woman-centered language and form that emerges from women’s embodied experience. The Story of Zahra employs feminist language techniques because it is a language whose characteristics are the opposite of those found in classical male language. It is free from all the rules of language or the rules of conventional theatre. Its content and form are based on female body characteristics. Just as the “phallocentric” male language takes its components from the male body from which it grows and expresses itself. Similarly, female language draws its components from the characteristics of the female body and sexuality. Just as the male body has created a theatrical form that serves the thinking of men, and this form is the one that is accepted in society, the linear and unidirectional. Feminist writing contrasts with this, the woman’s body is connected to forms that are “circular, cyclical, polyphonic, associative, repetitive, abstract, soft, and constantly changing” (2013, 139). The connection between the body and language is not only metaphorical, but it applies to both men and women, and Cixous explores this idea in depth. Cixous points out that the feminine metaphor that creates the form and manner of expression has a direct and literal connection to the woman's body as a source of creation, inspired by the characteristics and sexuality of women, and this, of course, affects the form of expression in female writing and productions. Through feminist writing, we come to understand that women must rewrite themselves; they must begin expressing themselves from their bodies and their rhythms, from their relationship with motherhood, and their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development as females. They need to establish their history and rediscover their identity and voice. This differs significantly from the straight male line with a conventional plot. This feminist aesthetics opens up space for dramaturgies that reject the classical, male-oriented structure in favor of more fluid, experiential ones. Cixous’s call for women to “write themselves” has profoundly influenced contemporary feminist theatre, particularly as it intersects with Brecht’s epic theatre. While Brecht did not focus on gender, feminist practitioners appropriated his alienation techniques to critique gender as a constructed sign system. Materialist feminism, in particular, found in Brechtian theory a valuable toolkit for exposing systems of oppression, economic, social, and gendered, through performance. As Aston and Diamond argue, feminist-Brechtian theatre not only aims to represent women differently but to expose and dismantle the patriarchal mechanisms that shape representation itself. Brecht's technique helps to present women in a different way towards revolutionary and social change. As Brecht said: “The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” (Willett 1964, 71). Brecht himself did not focus on gender, but rather his work was about a political theatre based on the call for class liberation and a revolution for the oppressed working class. In this way, Brecht failed to recognize that gender discrimination is a crucial component of the working class's struggle. Therefore, the possibilities that could be applied through his theatre theory for the benefit of the materialist women’s movement originated from the feminist movement itself and were utilized to advance feminist projects. Brecht’s theory and his alienation effect technique for the performers “demonstrate systems of social oppression through the medium of performance” (Aston 1999, 13). Spangler and I focused on form: the novel’s nonlinear structure, psychological depth, and estranged timeline, working to align them with epic feminist strategies. Although, two major feminist performance strategies include “reading against the text” to subvert patriarchal narratives and “re-dressing,” which reframes characters to highlight and complicate gender constructions (Sue-Ellen Case; Alisa Solomon), we didn’t need to “read against” the original text because the feminist voice was already there. Nor did we re-dress the characters.The play centers on Zahra as the narrator of her own story, recounting the war in Beirut and the instability of her relationships, especially with her brother Ahmad, who joins a militia, and with the sniper. Initially, the play followed a linear narrative structure, with Zahra as storyteller and expanded roles for Ahmad and the sniper. Yet something essential was missing. We realized the audience lacked access to Zahra’s interiority and the reasons behind her actions. In response, we incorporated three monologues that draw on material from the first book of the novel. These monologues function as Zahra’s inner voice, offering insight into her trauma and charting a trajectory toward self-awareness and strength. We mirrored the novel’s temporal fragmentation, echoing its shifts between past and present. As al-Shaykh “removes the boundaries between times ... inside the character” (2024, 126), the novel’s structure becomes a map of Zahra’s fractured psyche. We followed suit onstage, echoing this disjointed timeline to reflect the character’s trauma and inner life. In the novel, as in our performance, memory and the present interweave. This dramaturgical approach resonated with what Aronson-Lehavi describes as “the interpretive process” of adapting a text for the stage (2013, 120). We developed the script through workshops with actors in May 2019 and a subsequent gathering with readers of the novel. These engagements made clear the importance of contextualizing Zahra’s actions for the audience, particularly in light of ongoing debates around gender-based violence and so-called “honour killings” in Palestinian society. The adaptation resonated deeply with Palestinian women, who recognized Zahra’s pain as reflective of their own experiences. As Spangler initially questioned the relevance of a Lebanese narrative to Palestinian audiences, I argued, and was later affirmed by the response, that Zahra’s story transcends national borders through its feminist lens on oppression, silence, and survival (Spangler, 7). Ultimately, adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage enabled us to amplify a silenced voice, offering a form of feminist resistance that challenges both patriarchy and war. The project not only brought Zahra’s journey into the public realm but also fostered dialogue with audiences about the entanglement of personal trauma and collective history. The stage adaptation traces the psychological and political journey of a young woman navigating a lifetime of patriarchal violence amid the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. As Zahra gains momentary freedom from familial control, she seeks autonomy and meaning, only to confront forms of exploitation. The production, as noted in the programme, “explores how women are particularly brutalized in times of violence and oppression.” The performance unfolds across four dramaturgical stages, charting Zahra’s evolving consciousness and ultimate demise. Stage One introduces Zahra in wartime Beirut, recounting the fear she experienced in her childhood. Through direct address and domestic scenes, she speaks of the structural oppression she endured, particularly from her father. She provides glimpses into her complex relationship with war, trauma, and desire. In a moment of confronting all of this, a memory of her mother using Zahra as a child to cover up an extramarital affair, taking Zahra with her when meeting her lover, resurfaces in her mind. Her fear and the violence she experiences are what prompt her to leave, looking for a fresh start. Stage Two presents Zahra living independently for the first time. In an abandoned apartment, she initiates a hesitant relationship with the sniper, initially driven by fear, curiosity, and a longing for connection. The arrival of her brother Ahmed, a civil war combatant, reveals further layers of patriarchal aggression and ideological disillusionment. Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (left) and Mohammad Basha as Ahmad (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. Stage Three delves into Zahra’s past, particularly her abuse in Africa by a relative and a failed marriage that compounded her trauma. The deepening of her relationship with the sniper appears, to Zahra, as an act of volition, “the first thing she has chosen in her life.” Yet, as she challenges him about his past and observes her brother's further descent into brutality, the limits of her autonomy become increasingly visible. Stage Four sees Zahra confront the most harrowing episodes of her youth: sexual exploitation, forced abortion, and psychiatric abuse. These memories culminate in Zahra's pregnancy by the sniper. Her fantasy of a future rooted in choice and love unravels and, in the story’s final moments, Zahra walks through the streets only to be shot. The ambiguity of the final act underscores the impossibility of liberation within a society shaped by war and patriarchy. Her desire for a new life ends in silence, possibly at the hands of the very man she thought had offered her freedom. Milad Knebe as Sniper (left) and Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. This adaptation stages Zahra’s narrative not simply as a personal tragedy, but as a broader critique of the intersecting violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our approach drew upon Brechtian techniques to reject psychological realism in favor of critical distance. Zahra’s monologues, direct address, and the disrupted timeline invited audiences to reflect on structural violence rather than become absorbed in a singular character’s tragedy. By fragmenting time and foregrounding Zahra’s consciousness, we disrupted narrative closure, instead emphasizing the broader critique embedded in her story. By staging The Story of Zahra , we offered a feminist form of resistance, confronting the entangled violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our staging emphasized Zahra’s social entrapment not as her private trauma alone, but as a shared, political condition. I resisted Spangler’s initial idea of staging it as a monodrama, knowing that isolating Zahra would risk individualizing her struggle. The play stems from Zahra’s logic, and if we isolate her on stage with all her conflicts, the risk is that the audience will interpret her struggle as purely internal, absolving the public and political context of responsibility. However, if we surround her with other key characters, we can more clearly see the effects they have on her. This multiplicity aligns with Brechtian dramaturgy, where individual psychology is always presented in relation to historical and material conditions. Instead, I built an environment around her, soundscape, spatial design, and supporting characters, that demonstrated how society actively constructs her reality. Even the choice to use the Lebanese dialect, rather than the Palestinian one, created an intentional estrangement effect for local audiences, prompting them to analyze rather than empathize uncritically. The Story of Zahra on stage becomes an example of feminist epic theatre—disrupting traditional narratives, centering women’s experience, and provoking critical engagement with gendered violence as a structural, not merely personal, problem. THREE LEVELS OF NARRATION In the script, there are three levels of narration: storytelling, Zahra’s interactions with other characters, and her memory monologues. Zahra’s storytelling guides the audience toward what the character herself wants us to see and know. This level of narration spans the entire stage space. While this section addresses the levels of narration from a scriptwriting perspective, I find it impossible to separate the text from its theatrical realization. Accordingly, I interweave elements of the production into the discussion of each narrative level. The first drafts of the script were written in English, after which I began translating the text into Arabic, initially using the Palestinian dialect. I later decided to shift to the Lebanese dialect, finalizing the script in collaboration with al-Shaykh during a trip to London. This process contributed to the script’s alienation from Palestinian audiences from the outset. In Brechtian terms, this linguistic shift functioned as a distancing device, interrupting the potential for immediate identification with the character or setting. Rather than fostering emotional immersion, the language aimed to provoke critical observation. As previously mentioned, the novel posed significant challenges to patriarchal norms and was banned across much of the Arab world. My objective in adapting the novel for the stage was to add a critical dimension: to allow the audience not only to track Zahra’s actions but also to hear her internal commentary. It was essential that the audience listen to the play’s ideas, though this had to be handled with care. As Ayat Yaghmour observed in her review: “The play included many hints that were sometimes used to avoid the explicitness of the action and not to disturb the audience, and at other times the hints were used to attract the audience, awaken their imagination and provoke their intelligence” (2020). Her comments pertain to the performance, but also highlight the way the script strategically withholds emotional resolution to encourage reflection. Rather than passively judging Zahra, viewers are encouraged to consider the social structures that surround her. In this, the production pursues transformation through critical spectatorship rather than passive empathy. The second level of narration consists of Zahra’s interactions with other characters, situated in spaces such as the family home and the sniper’s rooftop. This layer introduces dialogic tension and reveals embedded social hierarchies. It aligns with Brecht’s principle that characters should not merely express psychological interiority, but instead represent broader social forces. From this perspective, Zahra is framed as a woman attempting to escape the constraints imposed upon her, even as she remains ensnared by the violence of war and patriarchal expectations. Spatial design played a central role in supporting this tension. At first, characters moved freely across the stage, which represented the family home. After the family departs Beirut and Zahra remains behind, the stage is divided, and the city’s streets and neighborhoods begin to emerge between these spaces. This spatial reconfiguration follows Zahra’s journey as she begins to step outside the home, yet remains trapped between the male authorities in her life, her brother and the sniper, and the larger social structures represented by the community. The non-naturalistic scenography and choreographed spatial divisions invite the audience to consider their own relationship to what unfolds before them. Rather than being lulled into empathetic identification, spectators are encouraged to question. Zahra’s direct address to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, serves as another Brechtian device that foregrounds theatricality and resists illusion. The third level of narration takes the form of Zahra’s memory monologues, which shift into a distinct aesthetic register. These moments occur at the front center of the stage, within a focused circle of light, where the character confronts herself and delivers unfiltered reflections that disrupt narrative continuity. In developing the soundscape for these scenes, I collaborated with musician John Handal. Rather than conventional music, we sought an ambient, environmental texture, something that would avoid manipulating emotions and instead cultivate a space for thought. Music appears only during these memory monologues, consisting of a single, recurring note: minimal and insistent. In these instances, as Zahra faces her past in order to move forward, the sound design compels concentrated attention. The final scene collapses all three levels of narration into a single dramatic moment. Zahra is shot, and as she falls, she reveals her thoughts in her dying breath: “I close my eyes. Eyes that were never truly open. I feel the rain” (Spangler and Ghazaleh, 56). Her past and present converge. The rain, descending from above, suggests a gesture of purification. Yet rather than allowing the audience to sink into sentimentality, the production exposes the theatrical mechanism, showing how the rain effect is produced on stage. There is no catharsis. Instead, the moment is designed to agitate, directing the audience’s attention toward the structural violence and patriarchal control that have governed Zahra’s life. Tahseen Yaqeen notes this effect in his review: “Here, we will find ourselves, as we watch this creative play, wondering about the historical moment, not of the civil war, which seems not to have ended yet, but about the place here and the time, Palestine 2020?” (2020). The epic theatre techniques employed in the production, disruption of illusion, direct address, stylized scenography, and fragmentation of narrative structure, were deployed in pursuit of the alienation effect, toward the broader goal of constructing an epic feminist theatre. Iman Aoun as Fatmé (left) and Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. CONCLUSION This experience marked an important moment of reflection for me as a Palestinian woman and theatre artist. It offered the space to reconsider the creative journey behind The Story of Zahra and to re-examine the Brechtian and feminist theoretical frameworks that have long shaped my artistic practice, whether consciously or not. Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect has always spoken to me; his insistence on breaking theatrical conventions to expose injustice aligns with my desire to make theatre a space for social critique and transformation. At the same time, feminist theory, though I did not always name it as such, has coexisted with me throughout my life. My rebellion against patriarchal structures was never about claiming rights for women alone, but about demanding the freedom for everyone, including men in my society, to live without oppressive expectations. In adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage, I found these two theoretical lineages converging. The performance not only retold Zahra’s personal tragedy but also offered a broader feminist critique of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Using Brechtian techniques, we rejected psychological realism in favor of critical distance, inviting the audience to reflect rather than simply empathize. The process of bringing this controversial and groundbreaking novel to the stage was full of challenges, but ultimately created a space where Zahra could be heard, not judged. In retrospect, this work affirmed for me that feminist epic theatre is not only possible, but necessary: a form that disrupts dominant narratives, centers women’s voices, and invites audiences into active, critical engagement with structural violence. It is through this kind of theatre, rebellious, reflective, and deeply human, that we can begin to imagine possibilities for liberation. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Al-Shaykh, Hanan, The Story of Zahra , London: Pan Books, 1987. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre . Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2013. Larson, Charles R., “The fiction of Hanan Al-Shaykh, reluctant feminist,” World Literature Today , Jan 01. 65:1 (1991); 14-17. Butler, Judith, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, in The Performance Studies Reader , second edition, Ed. Henry Bial. New York: Routledge, 2007;187-199. Diamond, Elin, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” in Unmaking Mimeses . New York: Routledge, 1996; 43-55. Fortier, Mark, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction , second edition, London: Routledge, 2002. Ghazaleh, Raeda, and Matthew Spangler, The Story of Zahra, unpublished script. Jerusalem: Palestinian National Theatre, 2020. Sirhan, Rabab, “The Feminist Narrative in the Lebanese War Novel: Hikayat Zahra and Bareed Beirut as a Model”, Al-Majma: Studies in Arabic language, literature and thought 19 (2024); 103-128. Spangler, Matthew. “Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra at the Palestinian National Theatre”, unpublished essay. Willett, John, ed. & trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, London: Methuen, 1964. American University of Beirut, Hanan al-Shaykh, aub.edu.lb , 2019 https://www.aub.edu.lb/doctorates/recipients/Pages/Hanan-al-Shaykh.aspx The Story of Zahra programme, Palestinian National Theatre, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4654476531253574 يقين، تحسين. "مسرحية حكاية زهرة لرائدة غزالة: البحث عن المعنى عبر جماليات تعبيرية"، أمد للإعلام ١٤-٠٣-٢٠٢٠ https://www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/news/2020/03/14/1321900.html يغمور، آيات. "حكاية زهرة في الحرب الأهلية.. من بيروت إلى مسرح العاصمة المقدسية"، الحدث ٢٦-٠٢-٢٠٢٠ https://www.alhadath.ps/article/115485/حكاية-زهرة-في-الحرب-الأهلية-من-بيروت-إلى-مسرح-العاصمة-المقدسية References About The Author(s) Raeda Ghazaleh is a theatre director and actress, co-founder of Inad Theatre and Al-Harah Theatre in Beit Jala, where she served as artistic director until 2016. She directed and acted in many plays in Palestine, Europe, and America. Her recent productions include acting in Artificial Heart , Bethlehem Calling at the Celtic Connection music festival in Glasgow as a co-director; the Palestinian National Theatre production of The Story of Zahra , a theatrical work she adapted with the American writer Matthew Spangler from Hanan Al-Shaykh’s novel; and Jihan's Smile with Al-Harah Theatre, where she also directed Confinement; Making Senses; Do You Still Love Me?; and Hanin Al Bahar. Her theatrical acting credits include David Hare’s Stuff Happens at the Royal National Theatre in London, and most recently Other Places with Khashabi Theatre. She directed the television series Joking Seriously in 2005 and acted in television and film productions. Ghazaleh received her MA in Theatre Directing from the Central School of Speech & Drama in London where she also worked with the Royal Court Theatre, with whom she had established a playwriting connection with Palestine. Ghazaleh recently established Masahati, an independent creative space offering a refuge for like-minded artists to express themselves freely without external interventions limiting creativity and art. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. 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