Watch Living Objects in Black by Jacqueline Wade at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Living Objects in Black Written and Directed by Jacqueline Wade "Living Objects in Black" is a moving spiritual documentary film about various Black puppeteers/fabricators and Black puppets who took part in the historical Living Objects: African American Puppetry exhibit at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UCONN. Watch some of the puppets come to life in this fascinating magical film that explores puppetry through a Black lens. If you are interested in screening this film, please contact Jacqueline Wade at jwade1091@gmail.com and call 917-856-1844. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Living Objects in Black At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jacqueline Wade Documentary, Performance Art, Puppetry This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 60 minutes Year of Release 2024 Living Objects in Black Written and Directed by Jacqueline Wade "Living Objects in Black" is a moving spiritual documentary film about various Black puppeteers/fabricators and Black puppets who took part in the historical Living Objects: African American Puppetry exhibit at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UCONN. Watch some of the puppets come to life in this fascinating magical film that explores puppetry through a Black lens. If you are interested in screening this film, please contact Jacqueline Wade at jwade1091@gmail.com and call 917-856-1844. Written and Directed by Jacqueline Wade and various subjects. Nehprii Amenii, Brad Brewer, Ashley Bryan, Edna Bland, Garland Farwell, Susan Fulcher, Cedwan Hooks, Akbar Imhotep, Dirk Joseph, Tarish Pipkins, Papel Machete, and Yolanda Sampson. Co-curated by Dr. Paulette Richard About The Artist(s) Jacqueline Wade, holds an MFA Degree from the City College of New York in Film. She holds a second MFA for Integrated Media Arts Program at Hunter. She worked as an adjunct professor at Hunter City University of New York in the Media and Film Department. Jacqueline’ goal is to create works of art dealing with social justice issues and history. She combines theater with documentary-film, animation and puppetry. Jacqueline has performed at regional theaters throughout the country, including Wilma Theater, LaMaMa E.T.C., Classical Theater of Harlem and Bread and Puppet. She has also written over 20 plays, Jacqueline was a recipient of the Walt Disney Pride Rock Grant. She received a Ralph Chesse Scholarship to attend the National Puppetry Conference. Jacqueline’s puppet film “Osage”, was part of DOC NYC Festival in November 2021. She recently created a 20ft Mother Earth Puppet and her 18 foot Giant puppet Mumia Abu-Jamal. Jacqueline was awarded in 2022 from New York Women in Film & Television 2022 Scholarship for exceptional work at Hunter in film. 2022-2023 Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival-Puppet- Lab where Jacqueline created, “Consuewella:Triptych in MOVE”. Consuwella Triptych in MOVE was accepted in the New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival 2024. Jacqueline was awarded the Creative Puppetry in the Classroom Grant from the Jane Henson Foundation. Get in touch with the artist(s) jwade1091@gmail.com and follow them on social media jacquelinewadesprojects.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 15 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read Roaa Ali Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Babak Rahimi MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Suzi Elnaggar Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Malek Najjar Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Bart Pitchford 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

By Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker | Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays. < 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 Szertelen Színdarabok New Yorkból (Riff Raff Plays from New York) Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker Download PDF Hungarian politicians cut funding in 2013 for international theatre productions and festivals in Budapest, quoting: “We don’t need these riffraff plays from New York.” As a reaction, the Segal Center published a Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays edited by Frank Hentschker and Attila Szabó, translated to Hungarian by Attila Szabó and Noémi Kecskés. The anthology includes: Neighbors by Branden Jackobs-Jenkins, Detroit by Lisa D'Amour, Intermeddlers by Sarah Stites based on Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, The Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven by Young Jean Lee and Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Encounter Artichoke Dance Company's work WATER RISES in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Newtown Creek Alliance and NOoSPHERE Arts. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival WATER RISES Artichoke Dance Company Dance Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 3pm Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Kingsland Ave, Brooklyn Meet at the southeast entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, across the street from 540 Kingsland Avenue Newtown Creek Alliance and NOoSPHERE Arts 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 Reflect on the nature of water and its importance as a life sustaining entity, while traversing through the Walk’s varied landscape in this dynamic performance journey through the Newtown Creek Nature Walk Artichoke Dance Company ENTERTAIN - our performances get people interested ENGAGE - our workshops get people informed EMPOWER - our events get people involved Artichoke Dance Company is known for innovative and engaging performances paired with environmental activism, education, community building and civic engagement. Previous large scale projects have addressed plastic pollution mitigation on Coney Island, single use plastic bags in New York, river revitalization in Los Angeles, and water use and rights in the desert southwest. Founded in 1995 Artichoke Dance has held twenty New York seasons and toured nationally and internationally. Artichoke was chosen as a metaphor for the layers and textures embedded into the company and our work, at the center of which is a sweet heart. We invite audiences and participants to join us in a journey of discovering and interacting with the variety of layers, and to revel in the magnificent flower an artichoke can become. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the southeast entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, across the street from 540 Kingsland Avenue Newtown Creek Alliance and NOoSPHERE Arts NOoSPHERE Arts is a 501c3 organization and cultural center led by a team of international creatives whose backgrounds blend the arts and sciences. Its freewheeling, multidisciplinary approach engages diverse audiences and builds community through a range of vibrant public events in its indoor-outdoor home in New York City's Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Mission: NOoSPHERE Arts produces and presents experimental arts programming at the nexus of art and eco-awareness. It is a welcoming platform where migrant artists connect with locals. Uniting music, dance, visual arts, theater, film, poetry & prose, our collaborative productions harness the power of art to drive action towards green living, fair play, and oneness. Vision: NOoSPHERE Arts encourages dialogue, openness to experimentation, and inclusivity. We aim to elevate the voices of historically marginalized populations. We are driven by the desire to ignite a shift in perspective from the parts to the whole. We see life as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. Our goal is to instill belief in personal agency and hope through collective action: with shared efforts towards sustainability, diversity, and equity, we can create a more united and joyful world. The Newtown Creek Alliance is a community-based organization dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalizing Newtown Creek. https://www.noosphere-arts.nyc/ =========================================================================== The Newtown Creek Alliance works to restore the Creek by securing mitigation and remediation of known environmental hazards – both in the neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek and in Newtown Creek itself – reporting ongoing sources of pollution, and preventing new pollution. To restore the ecological functions of the waterway, the Newtown Creek Alliance supports investments in green infrastructure, bioremediation, and habitat restoration. The Newtown Creek Alliance endeavors to reveal the Creek by conducting tours by foot, bike, bus, and boat that educate the public about the history of the waterway and current activity. We also work to nurture and expand open spaces along Newtown Creek to enable public access to a waterway which has few public access points and we partner with educational institutions to teach Newtown Creek-based curricula. The Newtown Creek Alliance helps revitalize watershed communities by playing a leadership role in area-wide brownfield redevelopment planning, creating programs that improve the environmental profile of industrial businesses, and engaging in workforce development to create local green jobs. Our work supports environmental, economic, and human health. Visit Partner Website

Watch Women of Theatre, New York by Juney Smith at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The extraordinary story of the beginning of the artistic life, artistic journey and careers of theatre artists that were a part of the foundation of Black Theatre in New York City. Their acting, directing and writing helped build, repute and sustain The Negro Ensemble Company, New Federal Theatre and The Billie Holiday Theatre to name a few of the Black Theatres that began in the 1960's and exist now in the 21st Century. These theaters along with other Black Theatres in New York City helped develop the majority of today's Black movie and television stars. Women of Theatre, New York powerfully speaks. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Women of Theatre, New York At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Juney Smith Documentary Online / In-Person This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 106 minutes Year of Release 2023 The extraordinary story of the beginning of the artistic life, artistic journey and careers of theatre artists that were a part of the foundation of Black Theatre in New York City. Their acting, directing and writing helped build, repute and sustain The Negro Ensemble Company, New Federal Theatre and The Billie Holiday Theatre to name a few of the Black Theatres that began in the 1960's and exist now in the 21st Century. These theaters along with other Black Theatres in New York City helped develop the majority of today's Black movie and television stars. Women of Theatre, New York powerfully speaks. Executive Producer Glynn Turman, Written and Directed by Juney Smith Starring Elizabeth Van Dyke, Petronia Pale, Joyce Sylvester, Elain Graham, Kim Weston Moran, Terria Joseph, Perri Gaffney, Linda Armstrong, Peggy Alston About The Artist(s) JUNEY SMITH BIO Juney Smith is a native New Yorker and graduate of LIU Brooklyn. He is a veteran actor, director, writer and producer of stage, screen and television. As an actor on stage he acted in classic plays and portrayed the roles of Walter Lee in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”, Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” and Solly Two Kings in August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean”. Mr. Smith’s most recent television credits include, “FBI”, “Law &Order SVU”, “Blue Bloods”, “The Breaks” and as far back as, ER, “Mash”, “Growing Pains”, “Hill Street Blues” “Highway to Heaven”, ”Matlock”, “and beginning with “The White Shadow”. On film, he Co-Starred as “Sgt. Phil McPherson” opposite Robin Williams and Forest Whitaker in the comedy classic “Good Morning Vietnam” Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as” Det. Tom Wyler” in the action classic “Lethal Weapon 2”, as “Chief” in “Friends and Romans” and as Nestor in the upcoming A24 production “A Different Man” opposite Sebastian Stan. The former Artistic Director of 4 theatre companies from 1979 to 1998 “The Renaissance Drama Company and Mattie Theatre Company, New York and “Rainbow Connection Drama Company and Rebirth Drama Company in Los Angeles where he directed over 100 plays including; “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf”, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” “Livin Fat” and “Twelve Angry Men” In 1988 he wrote the stage play “The Nation” (A story of the Nation of Islam). After completing an intensive film making program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mr. Smith transformed the stage play into his first feature film in 1992 “The Nation” In 1999 along with partners formed the movie production company “Drummond and Smith Entertainment Inc. and later renamed Rainbow Media Group, Inc. He has written, directed, and produced 37 feature films (22 Narrative films and 15 Documentaries films) where all the films are distributed on Blu Ray and DVD in the major retail stores online at Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Amazon and Streaming markets such as, Peacock, Prime Video, Tubi, Vudu and Hoopla worldwide. In 2018 he partnered with legendary actor Glynn Turman and his company Backyard Ventures, Inc in pursuit of producing documentary films about Black Performing Artists and Black Performing Arts Institutions. Log on to: juneysmithfilms.com to see the library and viewing information. Get in touch with the artist(s) juneysmith466@gmail.com and follow them on social media juneysmithfilms.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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.

Natalie Tenner 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 Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Natalie Tenner By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being . Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Although Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being serves as an introductory text, its usefulness is not in the structured and fixed definitions and equations a novice might desire, but instead in the illustration of the disagreements and instability that necessarily come with an interdisciplinary approach. The twelve essays utilize a range of methodologies as well as different writing styles that model the variety of ways cognitive science and affect theory can be applied to performance studies. The book is clearer in its use of cognitive science than in affect theory, in that the authors often explicitly state which aspects of cognitive theory they are employing while the inclusion of affect theory is subtler. This illustrates accurately the disagreements still surrounding how to define and use affect, and how affect, emotion, and feelings differ. The elements of cognitive science appear more consistently throughout the work, although not without some variation, and many of the essays provide examples of applying popular cognitive science approaches such as mirror neurons, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, and distributed cognition. In the introduction to the first section, “Dances with Science”, Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton suggest some of the difficulties of interdisciplinary work but also introduce commonly used aspects of cognitive science in the study of performance. The essays that follow outline different ways of structuring this cross-disciplinary dance. Matthew Reason and his co-authors describe an empirical study to determine a spectator’s response to watching dance. The chapter focuses mostly on the collaboration of artists and neuroscientists, highlighting the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, but also the challenges. Anna Furse also writes on dance, and though she suggests that empirical analysis is forthcoming, the essay itself focuses on a theoretical concept of historical identity located within the body. She describes her plans to retrace her steps, both figuratively and choreographically, with her partner Esther Linley, in order to determine “what happens in the act of retrieving a forgotten or atrophied learnt embodied action, that also carries with it emotional significance?” (57). In the section’s final chapter, Erin Hood discusses the difficulty of representing pain and understanding it in others. Using the performance piece Sssshh…Succour, in which the solo performer cuts herself in a methodological fashion, Hood introduces a theme that is repeated in later essays in this book, that the presence of the body onstage reminds the spectator that the body is not separate from cognition and affect, but instead they are essentially connected. The next section, introduced by Amy Cook, focuses on embodied cognition in more traditional performances. Cook provides the first extended introduction to affect theory in this section and also introduces metaphor and conceptual blending theory as a way of relating text and cognition. Affect theory is an important concept for the first essay in this section, in which Natalie Bainter considers the many blushing faces in Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Killed with Kindness. The blush helps to illustrate that affect is not simply an individual bodily response, but is relational. John Lutterbie suggests in his essay that language is a dynamic system and that gesture, instead of supporting language, helps create and shape it. Language is not, then, created simply in one’s mind, but instead is embodied. Naomi Rokonitz continues to examine this relationship between text and body by considering the dying bodies in Wit and 33 Variations. Though the protagonists in both plays cultivate their minds more than their bodies, it is their bodies that we see fall apart and suffer. Again, the body on stage provides an affective experience that leads to empathy. In the third section, “The Multimodal Actor,” Rhonda Blair provides an overview of cognitive science history and two different approaches to affect theory. These essays consider the embodied cognition of the actor. Neal Utterback considers the relationship between gesture and memory. He provides an example of an empirical study and concludes “Clearly gestures are valuable tools for actors. … Gestures have a profound effect on our ability to memorise text and construct meaning” (155). Martin Welton, like Furse, gives an early overview of a performance as experiment before it has been completed. He also makes use of affect and another recurring idea, James Gibson’s “affordances”, to discuss the relationship between cognition and the feeling of one’s feet on the ground. Gabriele Sofia finishes out this section by describing the benefit performance studies can provide to cognitive scientists. She discusses the “performative body schema” actors must create, based off of their individual body schemas, and relates this to a benefit seen in Parkinson’s disease patients who attended theatre workshops. Sofia suggests that “theatre’s peculiar strength lies in providing another reality that makes it possible to work on the ability of creating relationships” (179). In the final section, Bruce McConachie suggests that actors and spectators, like children in a sandbox, have an active relationship with each other as well as with the environment that affords them opportunities. The essays that follow in this section discuss interactive performance, which relies on the active cooperation of the spectators. The first two articles discuss the solo audience experience of the production Rotating in a Room of Images.Josephine Machon examines her experience based on the cognitive idea of synaesthesia, in which multiple senses are stimulated simultaneously from one trigger. Machon describes her experience of the immersive theatrical performance as (syn)aesthetic, as being both cerebral and corporeal. Adam Alston’s analysis of the same performance looks at it instead through the lens of risk perception, affect, and emotion, and suggests that “[w]hen considered as an affective presence, my relationship to risk was political given the influence it exerted; it controlled as much as spurred on thought and action”(227). The final essay of the collection describes the effects interactive and immersive performance had on autistic children who participated in Imaging Autism. Melissa Trimingham suggests that the children’s opportunities to touch and interact with objects, costumes, and set pieces allow them a momentary participation in a world in which “objects are steeped in meanings” which “seems to pass autistic people by” (232). Nicola Shaughnessy introduces this book by discussing the performance Schrödinger, which provides an entry point into her discussion of “intermediary spaces” (19), which is where the many disciplines in this text come together. As in the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, the essays in this book can “exist in simultaneous multiple states” (2): as studies of science and performance, as examples of cognitive and affective theories, as empirical approaches and personal journeys. The variety of approaches and topics provide multiple entry points for those interested in applying cognitive theories to their work and for those who are looking for solid examples of the relevancy of cognitive and affect theories to performance studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NATALIE TENNER University of Mary Washington 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.

David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams, Special Issue Editors This special issue turns toward censorship at a time in which both the definitions and mechanisms of censorship are changing in the United States. Theatre historian John Houchin, in Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , argues that “attempts to censor performance erupt when the dominant culture construes its laws, rituals, and traditions to be in the process of significant change . . . such behavior is indicative of a conservative society, one whose energy is used to maintain its political, moral, and social infrastructure.”(1) In such societies, the impulse to consolidate and enforce values of propriety becomes a powerful, flexible tool of cultural battle. In this issue, we consider censorship in the Americas, with an emphasis on the changing nature of censorship and discourses of censorship and censure experienced by performing artists today. Indeed, in the time between the call for this special issue and its publication, a great deal has changed in the United States. We have seen an authoritarian regime installed in the Executive Branch that is being backed up by a conservative-majority Supreme Court. The ways in which language has been censored by the government is terrifying, impacting the right to bodily autonomy, the ability to speak openly in criticism of the U.S. or Israeli governments, the ability to do science and forecast the weather, the continuation of grants for research and university work, public health, and more. Recent politics demonstrate just how much local, state, and federal governments are now willing and eager to start policing theatre content at multiple levels and with the heavy hammer of authoritarian control. While much of the focus has been on issues of drag performance and gender, these cases are also an obvious testing ground. Based on historical precedent and current actions, it is likely that censorship will continue to expand under the Trump regime. Theatre scholars in the U.S. are going to need to reexamine the ways in which the field has faced censorship in the past and from across the globe to understand the strategies and tactics needed to avoid self-censoring our art and scholarship, and to face the threats of authoritarian power and control. Quickly . However, the connotative and denotative meanings of the term “censorship” are not fixed properties. In a time of increasingly authoritarian power, it is important to interrogate how and why the term is being deployed. In 2006, Janelle Reinelt wrote of censorship in the context of the United States’ “War on Terror”: I have become increasingly uneasy in the wake of an upsurge in the rhetoric of censorship used to describe many actions by different agents, acting for different reasons and under quite different—sometimes extenuating—circumstances. ‘Censorship’ has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it. I worry about these imprecise uses of the term because today in the West we find ourselves increasingly concerned about the erosion of freedoms of expression, considered as rights. Now more than ever I think we must be alert to how we use the term and what, exactly, we mean by it. The performing arts become a flashpoint for issues of censorship once again, as they have many times in the past. For that reason, we theatre and performance scholars must think about this terminology with special care, since historically and presently it appears performatively within our discipline.(2) The “common-sense catchword” quality of the term has only expanded in the nearly two decades since Reinelt’s writing. Claims of censorship apply a specific rhetorical frame to one’s situation. Censorship is predominantly viewed as a negative force to be resisted, though circumstances in which censorship would be acceptable if not widely acclaimed could be imagined. To claim censorship is to position the value of free speech against other cultural values, which might include national security, public morality, decency, ethical treatment and education of children, and social justice. At a time when specific words, ideas, and people’s identities are being legislated against by state and federal forces, thinking about the boundaries of censorship may seem like scholarly hair-splitting. Direct, obvious censorship is an urgent problem, yet it is occurring simultaneously with other claims of censorship, which may be designed to distract from, or to gain, other goals of policy or cultural acclaim. Because the concept of censorship is deployed by many different forces and for many different reasons, unpacking its various definitions and applications is crucial. We must resist harmful censorship, but we further suggest that absolute positions, opposing censorship whenever the concept is invoked, risks rewarding bad-faith applications of the term. Mindful of the ways in which digital media and socially networked culture have changed both our methods of censorship and attempts to resist it, we built the concept of public censure into the call for this special section. Media campaigns exposing and critiquing censorship have long been a tactic of resistance, but public outcry made via the internet has profoundly shaped the US culture in sometimes dangerous and even deadly ways.(3) Internet-powered public censure—calls for boycotts, “cancellation,” doxxing, or other resistance that might lead to violence—may be a new phenomenon. What has changed are the locations and tactics of power, not the core principle that censorship is an exercise of power. Houchin’s “conservative society,” one invested in maintaining old systems of order, has enlisted new forms of censorship in its pursuit of power over culture. One of the elements we noted in building this special issue (section) was that many works defer censorship in time and/or place. This may be because the more easily apprehended versions of censorship are those that are not currently unfolding around us. Indeed, the call for this special issue participated in this definition of the concept by referring to the past. For scholars and critics, “true” censorship retains iconic examples in the past or the not-here, in the censorship of European Renaissance courts, authoritarian book burnings, and Hollywood’s Hays Code, or—as depicted in Paula Vogel’s Indecent (2016)—in the combination of producer-led and justice-backed obscenity trials dating from the early twentieth century. But these are not always the most present or pernicious forms of censorship encountered today. This issue gathers articles and reflections on the varying ways that censorship and censure have been used in theatre. Nic Barilar’s article explores the performance history of Séan O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , which premiered in Lafayette, Indiana the year after it was removed from the 1958 Dublin International Theatre Festival lineup because of religious censorship. Barilar explores the way that the Lafayette Little Theatre’s production engaged in “prosthetic memory” during their 1959 production. The history of censorship provided a timely reason for choosing to produce the play, but as Barilar shows, the memory of censorship also produced confusing political and aesthetic distortions. The theatre company sought to amplify its conservative, anti-communist, “All-American” values while differentiating itself from an old-world Ireland beset by religious traditionalism, sectarian conflict, and socialist politics. Donia Mounsef examines several case studies from the censorship of drama in Canadian theatre. By exploring several moments since the 1970s in which community groups have engaged in calls for the closure or removal of works, Mounsef explores the complexities of “community-based censorship” and argues that “self-inflicted or socially sanctioned suppression…reshapes public discourse with new imperatives.” In addition to full-length articles, we also sought out shorter pieces based on case studies; both shorter pieces included here further explore the boundaries of censorship in theatre and performance. Rowan Jalso offers a brief survey of contemporary censorship in the United States with respect to educational institutions; Patrizia Paolini compares a set of interviews she conducted after experiencing her own censorship during Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , an experimental cabaret performance in London de-programmed due to controversy over depictions of the partially nude body of an older male performer. Finally, we conclude our issue with a roundtable on censorship, featuring three ATDS members joining the editors to discuss recent experiences with censorship on campus and to theorize tactics for engaging with censorship and censure at the university level: in performance, in the classroom, and as administrators and activists. As we continue to navigate our current political turmoil, it may be a good time for us all to reflect on the ways in which censorship derives its power from fear: notably, the fear of future negative action, the loss of liberty or funding or reputation. Thus, censorship makes institutions cautious and individuals afraid to speak—perhaps especially in ways that can be recorded or published. With this issue, we invite you to consider the roles that censorship and public censure play in our lives at this pivotal time in history, and how, as scholars, artists, and teachers, we can help each other navigate and/or mitigate their impact on our work, our lives, and our pedagogy. References John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , Cambridge (2003), 1. Janelle Reinelt, “The Limits of Censorship,” Theatre Research International 32:1 (March 2007), 3; emphasis added. Indeed, it is possible that Mahmoud Khalil’s warrantless arrest by ICE for speaking about the Palestinian genocide was caused, in part, by the social media and internet calls for his arrest by two organizations: Betar US and Canary Mission: Shapiro, Eliza (March 9, 2025). “ICE Arrests Pro-Palestinian Activist at Columbia”. The New York Times . Footnotes About The Author(s) DAVID BISAHA (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Binghamton University, SUNY. He currently researches theatre design history and the more recent history of immersive and participatory performance. His book American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism was published in 2022 by Southern Illinois University Press. PRIA RUTH WILLIAMS (she/her) is an Instructional Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi and teaches for both the Department of Theatre & Film and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research has focused on the Living Theatre company's early period between 1947 and 1963, feminist critiques of theatre and film, and the work of playwright Mac Wellman through the lens of cognitive science. She also makes music as These Liminal Days and can be found on most streaming services and at https://theseliminaldays.com . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

People This is your Services Page. It's a great opportunity to provide information about the services you provide. Double click on the text box to start editing your content and make sure to add all the relevant details you want to share with site visitors. Whether you're offering multiple services, courses or programs, you can edit this space to fit your website's needs. Simply double click on this section to open the content manager and modify the content. Explain what each item entails and add photos or videos for even more engagement. Staff Members Visiting Scholars Board of Directors Volunteers Staff Members Martin E. Segal Theater Center Frank Hentschker Executive Director & Director of Programs e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu Marvin Carlson Director of Publications e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu Ann Kreitman PRELUDE 2023 Co-Producer e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Taylor Everts PRELUDE 2023 Co-Producer e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital & Web Consultant e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Andie Lerner (Co-Producer, 2021-23) Tanvi M. Shah (Co-Producer, 2021-23) Journal for American Drama & Theatre Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Journal: European Stages Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Journal: Arab Stages Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Staff Members Research Scholars Recent Visiting Research Scholars Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com See the full list of former visiting research scholars here. Board of Directors Board of Directors Advisory Board Jane Alexander Victoria Bailey Roger Berlind Louise Hirschfeld Cullman Blythe Danner Sharon Dunn John Guare Todd London Marsha Norman Antje Oegel Harold Prince Paul Segal Stephen Sondheim Paula Vogel Robin Wagner Edwin Wilson Robert Wilson Founding Members in Memoriam Cy Coleman Hume Cronyn Tony Randall Roy A. Somlyo Wendy Wasserstein Robert Whitehead August Wilson Editorial Board Marvin Carlson David Savran James Wilson IN MEMORIAM: Martin E. Segal (1916-2012) Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) Executive Director/Director of Programs Frank Hentschker Segal Board Marvin Carlson Seward and Cecelia Johnson William P. Kelly Joseph LoCicero Board of Directors Volunteers If you are interested in helping with Martin E. Segal Theatre Center events and programs, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu. Past volunteers Names go here

Shane Strawbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Shane Strawbridge By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams . Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. The book opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams: “truth is something you need to deserve,” a statement that volume editor Katherine Weiss asserts “fl[ies] in the face of the imaginary worlds so many of his characters create” (1). From this nucleus emerges A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams , analysis of four plays that attempts to reconcile the contradiction between Williams’s “truth” and his characters’ fictions. The second release in Bloomsbury’s A Student Handbook to the Plays of… series, the text aims to provide a study guide to the most studied dramas from this celebrated American playwright. In her introduction, Weiss lays the dramaturgical framework from which the rest of the volume springs. She posits that the plays from the late 1960s and after lack “the tension and the need to express topics that were considered taboos,” leaving students and scholars to focus on Williams’s early works that explore topics such as “ageing, loneliness, and time’s devastation” (7). In the chapters that follow, scholars Stephen J. Bottoms, Patricia Hearn, Michael Hooper, Philip C. Kolin, and Weiss herself offer in-depth investigations of Tennessee Williams’s most produced and critically favored plays, The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Following the introduction, the volume divides into four sections dedicated to plot, commentary, production history, and notes for each one of Williams’s major plays. The plot breakdowns vary in length from Streetcar ’s four-page summary to Glass Menagerie ’s eighteen-page dissection, divided scene by scene. The dramaturgical commentaries connect the plays to contextual history, culture, Williams’s biography, and contemporary playwrights and their works. These sections also offer insights into character arcs and specific actions in the plays’ pivotal moments. In addition, the scholars clarify their arguments by examining the dramatic structure and language of each play. Commentaries conclude with a history of significant productions and adaptations on stage and screen. The notes section for each play reads like a glossary of words and phrases that a layperson might find useful in understanding the plays, and that a theatre scholar or practitioner might use for closer study. Finally, a list of questions for further research opens up opportunities for more in-depth thinking. Stephen J. Bottoms, who specializes in contemporary theatre, probes The Glass Menagerie. Bottoms notes the usefulness of looking at Menagerie as “a series of inter-related paintings, each one of which presents a key component in a much bigger narrative, and which together build up to create an impression—but perhaps not a conclusive understanding—of that ‘whole story’” (19). As such, he breaks down each scene into multiple parts dealing with each character’s role in that scene, a specific hour, or a sub-title (such as Scene Five’s “Annunciation”), lending itself to the “impression” of the scene as a whole, a sort of pointillist view of the play. Bottoms suggests that had Menagerie not been the success that it was, Williams would never have achieved the sort of recognition that allowed study of him as one of the great American playwrights. Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper, who frequently collaborate on Williams scholarship, tackle A Streetcar Named Desire. The crux of their chapter lies in the “close connection between [Williams’s] writing and the circumstances of his own life” (89). For example, Hern and Hooper reference Williams’s need to hide from pain and sorrow while searching for contentment and happiness—no matter the cost to those around them—as a piece of Blanche DuBois’s “fall from grace” (92). Closely reading specific textual examples, they also link the works of Williams to playwrights such as Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Miller, as well as authors Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence. Author of several books about Tennessee Williams, Philip C. Kolin contributes to this volume commentary and notes on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . His synopsis contains, like the play itself, act breaks, electing not to divide each act into sub-sections for readability. Two levels of history, “the long tradition of ante- and post-bellum (Southern) customs and their literary expression and the more recent history of the 1950s in American political life” (177) form the foundation of Kolin’s analysis. After glossing these two historical periods, he discusses the structure, drafts, and language of the play, though most of his work centers on the nuances of each character and how they “reveal various sides of Williams’s own personality,” from the “melancholy Brick” to the “sexually frustrated Maggie” (190). Kolin makes character comparisons across the Williams canon: he refers to Big Daddy as an “older Stanley Kowalski” (197), parallels Maggie’s demeanor with that of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo instead of with Amanda or Blanche, and aligns Brick’s “deliberate cruelty” (192) of rejecting Skipper with the behavior of Blanche. Sweet Bird of Youth falls to Weiss. Her summation adheres more to the model of Kolin in providing a broad overview of the events of the play as opposed to running commentary. Using examples from Williams’s play and extra-theatrical writings, Weiss addresses several themes including “The Catastrophe of Success,” “Preaching Hate,” and “The Korean War.” She evaluates the play’s structure, language, and style before analyzing the characters that Williams was “never quite satisfied with” (252). In her estimation, however, Weiss contends that they are “much more complicated than Williams realised [sic]” (253). The section ends with not only a glossary and questions for further consideration but also a list of additional resources. This handbook casts a wide net to capture all definitions of students, as per the title. If only the same wide net had been cast for the definition of “plays.” By limiting the evaluation to Williams’s four best-known and commercially successful plays, the volume leaves a desire for more study, particularly into those works that do not usually receive the same level of attention. Yet Weiss can hardly be faulted for not including the entirety of Williams’s extensive canon. Practicality and familiarity trump a comprehensive study, but one can hope that this will generate more investigation into his works. Although there are other studies of these texts available, what Weiss has done here is sculpt a text that, despite its limitations, provides an in-depth primer to one of the United States’ most decorated playwrights. Ultimately, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams will be useful for students and professors who are searching for an easily navigable and digestible analysis of Williams and his early work. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SHANE STRAWBRIDGE Texas Tech University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sierra Rosetta 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 Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Sierra Rosetta By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is the book that the fields of theatre, American, Native, and historical studies have long needed. With clarity and care, Hughes braids together these disciplines to expose the theatrical mechanisms that have produced and sustained the racialized figure of the “Indian” on stage. Hughes names this racialized figure “The Stage Indian,” a term analogous to “Playing Indian,” found in Philip Deloria’s monumental book of the same name, or John Troutman’s “Indianness” from his book, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 . The term “Stage Indian,” along with her subsequent chapters that masterfully examine this topic, redefine the practice of redface as a robust communal process, one that all sides of the theatrical sphere participate in, and identifies the power of theatre as a central site of American culture. Hughes begins by stating exactly what this book does and does not do. Redface is not a comprehensive history of Indigenous performers or plays. Instead, it is a critical analysis of how Indigeneity was and is made legible through performance and how visual, affective, and narrative codes have transformed into the Stage Indian persona that continues to shape Indigenous representation today, both on and off the physical stage. After reading this book, people will be able to describe how redface is not simply about paint, feathers, or moccasins worn by non-Indigenous people. Instead, it is “a collaborative, curatorial process through which a body is made legible as an Indian” (11). This reframing is central to the book’s contribution, moving the conversation from surface to structure, which transforms the case studies Hughes provides into long-term patterns of embodied colonialism. Redface is not just about appearing Indian; it is about being recognized and named as Indian. The book examines how redface operates through acts of recognition, reinforcing not only theatrical conventions but also legal and political definitions of Indigenous identity. In an incisive argument, Hughes suggests that what audiences often subconsciously seek is not authenticity but the power to determine what is or is not an Indian. The methodological rigor of this book involves Hughes weaving together autoethnography, archival research, production analysis, and performance theory. To name a few, Hughes analyzes costume lists for Nick of the Woods (1838), production photos of Annie Get Your Gun , witness accounts of Edwin Forrest’s infamous portrayal of Metamora, and Indian princess plays that illustrate how Stage Indian conventions were absorbed into theatrical spaces. In Chapter Three, Hughes explains how physical gestures and stage movement, not just dialogue or costume, helped codify the portrayal of the Stage Indian in Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Indian chief, Metamora, in Metamora . She spotlights Forrest’s Metamora “to understand how strategies for authenticating Indianness have shifted over time and to demonstrate that authentication is inherent to redface” (119). Later chapters trace these codes through other performances, like Hughes’ analysis of the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun in Chapter 4. The structure of Redface is both innovative and an effective praxis of Hughes’s invitation for alternative modes of knowledge reception for scholars in the field doing decolonizing work. In the introduction, she asks: “How do we respond to knowledge production modes that require atypical labor?” (19). Hughes addresses this through her essay, Hinushi Inla , which means “a different path” in the Choctaw language (18). Whereas Hughes’ first four chapters trace the evolution of redface from the 1830s through the twentieth century, Hinushi Inla is braided through the book in non-linear order, providing a necessary counterpoint to the historical narratives presented in the chapters and also inviting readers to disrupt the habit of linear knowledge reception in the academy. One example is while one side of the book examines racial stereotyping in Will Rogers’ career or the blood-quantum logic embedded in casting practices, the other side explores the artistry of Native artists like DeLanna Studi, Hanay Geiogamah, Lily Gladstone, and Hughes’s own relationship to Indigeneity. It was profoundly moving for me, as both a scholar and an artist in the fields of theatre and Native studies, to see how far we have come from Metamora and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. As a reader, it was also powerful to encounter both history and futurity on the same page. The Hinushi Inla sections loosen the braid of racism to show the gaps in representation and invite even more strands of knowledge to enter the conversation. Even in the twenty-first century, the search for “authentic” Native representation on and off the stage often asks for the same visual codes developed in the 1800s. In Chapter Four, Hughes explores how cutting racist lyrics from Annie Get Your Gun in the 1999 revival may soften the language, but it leaves the representational logic intact: “The revisal reshaped the Stage Indian and connected it to centuries’ long conceptions of blood that continue to delimit Indianness in many ways” (204). Hughes intervenes that fixing redface is more than editing scripts; it demands a new practice of seeing that requires action from all of us. Hughes does not excuse the racist performances of the past, nor does she ignore the ways Indigenous performers themselves have been made to navigate redface for survival. Instead, she humanizes each historical figure the book touches on to illustrate how performers, audiences, and institutions all contribute to the curation and policing of Indianness. The result is an honest account that humanizes historical subjects without excusing harm. In the final chapter, Hughes writes, “There has always been an ‘instead’ of redface. It is up to audiences to choose a hinushi inla ” (101). This call to action is not symbolic but an invitation to participate in a new kind of embodied, relational, and transformative praxis. As a scholar, theatre practitioner, and a reader, I find myself returning to this book in my thoughts and writing for its arguments, research methods, and a demonstration of decolonizing scholarship. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is both an invitation and a critique, one that is honest, vital, and restorative toward a different path. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SIERRA ROSETTA is an enrolled citizen of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe currently completing a PhD in Theatre and Drama, with an emphasis in Native American studies, at Northwestern University. She is also a professional dramaturg, arts journalist, and playwright. Both her artistic and academic passions focus on Ojibwe storytelling, Indigenous resistance, and decolonizing dramaturgy. 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.

Kee-Yoon Nahm Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Kee-Yoon Nahm By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF Dead white males. This oft-cited phrase encapsulates the ongoing project of dismantling the privileged monopoly that white men have historically held over the formation of an artistic canon and cultural tradition. In the field of American drama, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller (despite significant differences among their work) comprise such a tradition, one that elevates the realist family drama over other forms of theatrical representation and underlines the centrality of the white male voice in both the imagined domestic settings and the actual public sphere. Through its prominence in theatre programming and education, realism continues to hold influence on how plays are written and received in the United States, evident not only in recent Pulitzer Prize winners such as Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007) and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), but also in designations such as “alternative,” “experimental,” or “avant-garde” theatre, which generally refer to aesthetics that are opposed to realism. This essay examines two recent plays that engage with this problematic tradition, albeit from an unconventional angle that probes and challenges existing representations of whiteness: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men , which were both produced in New York in 2014. [1] On the surface, these plays stand out from the established institution that realist family drama has become in that they were written by an African-American and Asian-American respectively, challenging normative assumptions about the kinds of plays that playwrights of color can or should write. But in light of Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee’s previous, critically acclaimed work on racial identity and representation, the conscious choice to adopt—or more fittingly, appropriate—this seemingly orthodox aesthetic warrants deeper analysis. As such, this essay attempts to explain how Appropriate and Straight White Men disrupt the “traditional” link between realism and whiteness: in other words, how the purposeful emulation (rather than the rejection and dismantlement) of realist dramaturgy and stagecraft can highlight issues of racial representation, even when the form has a long and problematic history of shrouding whiteness in the myth of universality. It was in the work of feminist critics that realism was first associated with the Barthesian notion of myth as an ideological institution. To theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Catherine Belsey, and Jill Dolan (among many others), realism in mainstream cinema, literature, and theatre mystified a patriarchal value system, normalizing and universalizing the male gaze and the objectification of women by masquerading as an unmediated and natural account of reality. Following the feminist model of cultural analysis, critical race studies has demonstrated how an ideology of whiteness is reinscribed through media representations—privileging identification with white characters and the gaze of white audiences, while stereotyping non-whites to a handful of recognizable roles and scenarios. Prior to its critical scrutiny by cultural theorists, whiteness maintained a mythic status; to be white means to not be seen in terms of embodied race, to be regarded only as “unmarked, unspecific, universal.” [2] Thus demystifying whiteness in dramatic realism involves asking, for example, to what extent Death of a Salesman reflects the aspirations, struggles, and tragedy of the “common man” when Miller’s professed commonality fails to extend beyond white people. Jacobs-Jenkins explains that his initial interest in emulating realist dramaturgy for Appropriate emerged from asking, “what is the gulf between [Sam Shepard’s] Buried Child and August Wilson? I went back and read every family drama I could get my hands on, and after a while I realized they are actually all about race or ethnicity or identity. They all are but they never get credited as that.” [3] While still acknowledging that whiteness functions differently from other formations of racial identity, Jacobs-Jenkins attempts in his play to mark whiteness as a race, undermining its claim to transracial universality by making it visible. Lee engages in a similar project, although the white characters in Straight White Men are strikingly different from more stylized renditions of whiteness in her earlier pieces such as Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2003) and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (2006). [4] In sum, myth is present in the American dramatic canon in two ways that are relevant to my reading of these ostensibly white plays. American realist drama since O’Neill largely preserved the mythic status of whiteness, equating “white” with “human” while excluding or marginalizing non-white experiences, subjectivities, and modes of spectatorship. At the same time, whiteness becomes myth most effectively through the form of realism. Elin Diamond writes: realism, more than any other form of theatre representation, mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world. [5] Diamond’s theoretical work on mimesis, with realism as its most rigidified version, translates Barthes’s definition of myth—“the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal”—into one that is specific to the conditions and contexts of theatrical representation. [6] The critical vocabulary developed by feminist criticism on spectatorship and identification cover some of theatre’s unique conditions. We may also include here Varun Begley’s extension of Diamond’s theory to objects on stage, in which the fully rendered living room sets and realistic props (the epithetic “kitchen-sink”) of stage realism serve as “ideological guarantors” that help reinforce the truth effect of the theatrical representation: “Conventional realism proclaims what things are, rather than exploring how they might be appropriated and used.” [7] The overbearing presence of material things in Appropriate and Straight White Men fulfill the expectations of realist stagecraft, but when whiteness is highlighted, the socio-economic dimensions of these objects (property, the inheritance of wealth and social status, relationships to labor and leisure, etc.) also stand out. These twin principles outlined by previous scholarship will be crucial to my analysis: realism mystifies both itself (by replacing theatrical representation with an “objective world”) and racial hegemony (by replacing whiteness with universality). That said, the parenthetical aside in the last clause of Diamond’s quote introduces a difficult problem to the framework of realism and (de)mystification. She concedes that realism inevitably reinscribes the dominant ideology even when the intention is to challenge it. While Diamond sought to develop an analytical method that moved beyond the compromised politics of realist dramaturgy (which she calls “gestic criticism”), other scholars have attempted to qualify myth-based critiques of realism to account for realist plays that do not, in their view, reinforce hegemony. [8] Using the example of Terry Baum and Carolyn Meyer’s play Dos Lesbos (1980), which takes the form of realist drama but advances a radical feminist/lesbian perspective, Jeanie Forte attempts to “identify a feminist writing practice that emulates realism but operates as a different discursive strategy, perhaps a pseudo-realism.” [9] Similarly, Josephine Lee argues that the critical discourse on realism and ideology must be revised when dealing with Asian-American family dramas that adhere to conventional realism. Not only do the plays of Frank Chin and David Henry Hwang “work against a sense of mastery, of total identification, for either the Asian American or non-Asian American viewer,” they also provide opportunities of spectatorship that “support rather than oppose moments of sympathetic identification.” [10] Forte and Lee believe that realist dramaturgy can engender a sense of belonging and political purpose for minority groups when placed in the right hands, contrary to Diamond’s assertion that realism can only reinforce and mystify. But it seems to me that these counterarguments rely on the assumption that such plays feature characters and audiences that both belong to the minority group in question: that the Chinese-American families depicted in Chin and Hwang’s plays speak to Chinese-Americans in the audience. Only in this setting can something as inimical as “sympathetic identification” (which plays a crucial role in how ideology is reinforced, according to earlier theorists) can be recuperated “to authenticate through public performance a vision of ethnic community hitherto erased from public view.” [11] But how, then, are we to understand the all-white casts in Appropriate and Straight White Men ? Strictly speaking, these plays couch the lives and perspectives of white characters within a mode of representation that subtly instates the stage as a reflection and extension of reality. Do these works still qualify as pseudo-realism, in other words, appropriations of realism that avoid its ideological pitfalls? I wish to make the case that they do, which requires a further revision of the critical discourse on realism and myth. Unlike earlier dramatic appropriations of realist dramaturgy, Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee are not interested in divorcing form and ideology; instead, they acknowledge and make full use of the historical affinity between whiteness and realism. That is, the conventionality of realism itself can highlight issues of race not by satirizing or parodying whiteness, but by rigorously embodying it. Indeed, what makes these plays so innovative and potentially radical as artistic interrogations of whiteness is the fact that they are not parodies. Some of the characters are unlikeable, but not necessarily because they are white. They are not caricatured vessels of dominant ideology, but rather individuals : struggling, confused, and emotionally torn. After all, if the “privilege of being white in white culture is not to be subjected to stereotyping in relation to one’s whiteness,” then reducing whiteness into a stereotype is subverting it without probing the full extent of the white culture that guarantees that privilege. [12] Instead, these plays surprisingly ask the audience for old-fashioned sympathetic identification towards their white characters, even as they draw attention to the privileged, unequal position that whiteness has and continues to occupy in American society. White supremacism, the most extreme manifestation of whiteness as ideology, literally forms the background of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , set in a derelict manor in southern Arkansas that was once a slave plantation. Following the death of the estate’s owner Ray Lafayette, his three estranged children, all middle-aged, return to their old family home to take stock of the property and auction it off to repay their father’s steep debts. The past works on the present as the family’s long and painful history emerges through expository recollections and mutual accusations of past misdeeds in typical realist style. Yet the characters are cautious and defensive when the past that they dig up touches upon the history of racism. Toni, the eldest daughter, is especially averse to admitting that the disturbing artifacts that they find in their father’s bookshelves and closets mean anything, although she repeatedly insists on remembering the past to emphasize how much she has suffered and sacrificed to keep the family from falling apart. Franz, the youngest, returns unexpectedly after running away ten years ago after he was convicted of child rape to seek emotional closure and start a new life. His fiancée, River, encourages Franz to forget the past without acknowledging the racial legacy enmiring the crumbling house: “This place is still in your bones and you need to let it go. And, tomorrow, when you see it’s gone, you’ll be free. It’ll become someone else’s problem and you’ll be able to sleep again.” [13] Before examining how these characters and their juxtaposition against the house’s history engage with issues of whiteness, it is important to note that the Lafayette siblings are fully-realized and emotionally complex (if somewhat over-expressive) people, molded from the same cast of conventional realism. Ben Brantley of the New York Times notes that Jacobs-Jenkins “has achieved the difficult feat of making them all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with,” meaning that the play does not treat these white characters as physical stand-ins for an abstract racial construction. [14] Such a concrete foundation of realist characterization is vital to how Jacobs-Jenkins then makes their whiteness salient—through their interaction with an old photograph album depicting lynchings of black men. The album’s spatial journey, discovered by accident on the living room shelf and passing through the hands of every character over the course of the play, creates a secondary plot that runs parallel to the family conflict among the Lafayette siblings; the range of responses to this document of racist violence—shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion—is as diverse as the characters’ inclinations and perspectives on more personal matters. Yet despite such individualized responses, the photographs mark all of the characters as white, as people that have never experienced the discrimination and violence that Hilton Als describes in his essay on actual lynching photographs: “Fact is, if you are even half-way colored and male in America, the dead heads hanging from the trees in these pictures, and the dead eyes or grins surrounding them, it’s not too hard to imagine how this is your life too, as it were.” [15] Whiteness becomes apparent when these characters are unable to imagine the terminated lives in the photographs. Toni refuses to believe that the photographs are even a part of her father’s life, arguing throughout the play that they could have ended up in the house by chance. Bo, the middle sibling, wants to throw them away until he discovers that there is a lucrative market for this “highly specialized collector’s item” (75). When River and Cassidy (Bo’s fourteen-year-old daughter) are caught looking at the album, River distances herself from the images by treating them as an educational tool: “Cassidy was actually very mature about them. She was asking all the right questions. She was using the internet” (53). Yet the lynching photographs do not completely upstage the main plot. In keeping the focus on the lives and emotional struggles of individual characters, whiteness shifts in and out of view, clearly visible when the photographs demand attention and fading away when the family fights take over. Jacobs-Jenkins subtly stages opportunities for these opposing registers of whiteness—visible and invisible—to bleed into one another, rather than building up to one grand gesture in which whiteness is fully exposed and demystified. In this way, Appropriate is a sophisticated and carefully crafted meditation on how whiteness functions differently from other races. Steve Garner writes: “whiteness is a position from which other identities are constructed as deviant. The invisibility of whiteness therefore stems from never having to define itself explicitly. It is seen as the human and universal position requiring no qualification.” [16] Thus whiteness is rendered invisible when Toni suffers over her divorce and sense of failure as a mother, or when Franz seeks redemption for the pain and trouble he has caused his family because the conventions of realist drama ensure that they are human first and foremost in these moments. In adhering to realism, Jacobs-Jenkins demands that the audience acknowledge and grapple with the privilege of invisibility granted to whiteness while not losing sight of race in the background. Realism’s reliance on material objects to verify the truthfulness of the representation here becomes the playwright’s principal means of keeping invisibility in check. The house itself serves this purpose well; in the end, the siblings are trying to claim a fortune accumulated through the exploitation of African-Americans. But hidden throughout the detritus cluttering the set are more explicit reminders of racist violence that intrude on the characters whenever they are about to forget the house’s racial history. For example, the important photograph album (which will resurface constantly throughout the play) makes its first appearance right after Toni and Bo’s squabble about who is more responsible for the estate’s ruin. Bo complains that the two graveyards within the property—one for the family’s ancestors, another for the slaves—make it difficult to sell the house “with all the red tape and historical ordinance crap”(21). As if the house is somehow responding to this dismissal of history, Bo’s wife Rachel discovers exactly at that moment that her eight-year-old son Ainsley had been flipping through the lynching photographs, abruptly ending both the argument and the scene. Later, Toni and Franz argue over inheritance rights and Franz’s past sex offenses when other family members enter carrying jars of desiccated body parts: “souvenirs” taken from lynchings. And in the emotional climax of the play when the pent-up anger and frustration explodes into a physical brawl involving all of the adult characters, Ainsley enters wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood he found in his grandfather’s closet. Again, this image immediately ends the fight and the scene. These shocking mementos of racism not only disrupt the dramatic structure, preventing arguments and fights from carrying on, they also mediate the audience’s perception of race in the play, turning these “people” into “white people” in the blink of an eye. The mounting evidence of their father’s racism pressures the characters themselves to navigate this difference; the siblings want to claim what is left of Ray’s material legacy but at the same time “disown” the racial legacy inscribed in his possessions. In this way, Appropriate specifically addresses the most current iteration of whiteness as ideology: the myth of the post-racial. Post-racial politics reinscribes the dominance of whiteness by claiming that American society has moved beyond race after the “success” of the Civil Rights movement (amplified by the election of President Obama). According to social critic Tim Wise, this myth insists that “economic forces, and even ingrained cultural factors within the African American community have overtaken the role of racism in explaining the conditions of life faced by black and brown folks, especially the urban poor,” denying the impact of intergenerational disadvantages caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws, as well as institutionalized racism today in the guise of colorblind public policy. [17] Not only does the notion of a post-racial society perpetuate norms and value systems that have historically privileged whites, it erects an impermeable border between whiteness before and after the eruption of race politics in the mid-twentieth century. When River accuses the entire family of racism, stressing “the evil and cruelty you’re descended from – that’s in your blood,” (84) Bo goes on a defensive rant that reflects this post-racial attitude: Nobody asked to be born, okay? And certainly nobody asked to be born into this – this –shitty history, so tell me what you want me to do. You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great grandparents? Or should I lynch myself? […] I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody! (84) Bo’s frustration and overreaction is in some ways understandable. Significantly, there is nothing in the play that suggests that he has done anything that would make him a racist in the way that his father was. But at the same time, even Bo’s appeal to his individuality is conditioned by whiteness; “I didn’t enslave anybody!” (84) can only be a meaningful statement of one’s morality to a white person. Meanwhile, the curse metaphor that River evokes is in response to Franz’s long speech about how he threw the photograph album in a lake. He describes this spontaneous act as a healing ritual for himself, which River then extends to the family’s cursed history of racist violence. But Franz struggles to find the right words to explain how he came to the decision to destroy the photographs: These things are…crazy. They are so powerful – They’re making everyone act crazy. […] They have like…an energy and, like, where did they come from? Because I never once saw them here. I never once saw Daddy with them. It’s like they came from nowhere. And I was like – maybe they emerged for a reason, you know? And I was thinking about what Rachel was saying – like these were killings – like crimes – I was like, maybe we’re actually supposed to solve this crime – maybe something is asking us to – to right what was wrong. (82) The imaginary scene of the crime and especially the bizarre fantasy that the photographs themselves want Franz “to right what was wrong” (84) turns a specific history of racist violence into an archetypal scenario. In this fantasy, the photographs depict a crime without perpetrators or victims, without origin or material substance. Thus Franz also attempts to disown the racist legacy within whiteness; his act of rendering the photographs illegible then amounts to destroying evidence. But what’s more revealing is how he describes his “epiphany” by the lake: There was a whole purpose to this journey! I didn’t just come here to heal – This wasn’t about me – this was about all of us. I came here to heal all of us – that’s what this was all about – and this feeling just took me to the edge of the water and the water seemed to be telling me, “Come on in. Come on in and cleanse yourself. Wash it all away. Take it all in with you and leave it here.” So I did. I took everything – all my pain, all Daddy’s pain, all this family’s pain, the pictures – and I left it. I washed it all away. (83) Franz’s self-healing is also healing “all of us”; individuality and universality merge into one. But in his journey of discovery, Franz traverses through the remains—the unmarked graves and the photographs—of those who cannot be sublimated into this ideal conjoining of self and world. The play reminds its audience of those that are not included in the healing ritual, that are not represented , qualifying and limiting Franz’s scope. Then again, Franz’s speech feels comically delusional even without reading the myth of whiteness into it. But that does not negate the validity of Franz’s assumedly life-changing experience; in fact, his speech comes across as ironic precisely because we believe that he believes what he says. And that principle aptly sums up how Jacobs-Jenkins uses realist characterization to great effect in this play. The family conflict is never trivialized at the expense of race politics, and even the Lafayette siblings’ desire to disassociate themselves from their ancestors’ racist legacy is a real and plausible desire, just one that does not speak to all of human experience. In the end, although all of the characters in Appropriate are white, the representation of whiteness does not envelop the entire drama. It is too limited and qualified to stake a claim in universality. If the title of Jacobs-Jenkins’s play ironically refers to notions of decorum in what we choose to represent, Lee’s title, Straight White Men , is as inappropriate a title as there can be for a realist play, wearing its ideas and politics on its sleeve rather than dissolving it in a “truthful” account of reality. Likewise, Lee’s reasoning for why she decided to write in traditional realism for the first time is highly self-conscious: “ Straight White Men was an attempt to write an identity politics play, a straight white male identity politics play. And I wanted to use what I saw as the straight white man of theatrical genres, which is the straight play.” [18] Taken at face value, this statement sets up expectations that the play may be a satire of whiteness, expectations that are supported by Lee’s caricatures of white people in earlier plays. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals , which is based on the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu , Terrence and Shelia, the white protagonists of the film, explore their inner moral qualms in the final scene of the play after killing the Oriental horde gathered to overthrow the Western world. Denying vehemently that any of her actions are racially motivated, Shelia shouts: “I’m going to show everyone that I can make it, that I can succeed without these complaints of racism bringing me down, making me feel bad about myself! I want everything to be fair and nondiscriminatory and based on logic, and fuck you! Everything I think is based on logic!” [19] Shelia shares the same post-racial perspective detectable in Bo’s self-defensive speech, but the joke here is that the racial Other has just been eradicated. (She does say she feels bad for “killing all of those Chinese people” in the final line of the play). [20] In Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , a play that also employs the technique of pitting lurid Asian stereotypes against “normal” white people, the white characters are utterly oblivious towards the Asians, refusing to acknowledge or even share the stage with them. While the Koreans and Korean-American grotesquely illustrate various stereotypes of Asian women and fight among themselves about identity politics, the white characters prefer to limit their conversations to their love relationship, their anxiety over potential alcoholism and other psychological problems, their desire to see Africa, and their dreams—all topics that mark them as individuals rather than members of a social group. Whiteness is finally recognized and problematized in one scene, but only for the duration of three lines: WHITE PERSON 2 : You know what’s awesome? WHITE PERSON 1 : What. WHITE PERSON 2 : Being white. WHITE PERSON 1 : Being white? WHITE PERSON 2 : Yes, it’s awesome. Isn’t it? WHITE PERSON 1 : I guess I never thought of it. And when I do think of it I feel like an asshole. WHITE PERSON 2 : You shouldn’t feel like an asshole. Being white is great. WHITE PERSON 1 : I guess so. [21] In both of her earlier plays, Lee stereotypes whiteness just as much as Asian-ness, presenting her white characters as shallow, self-centered, and clueless of the racialized world around them. If the Asian stereotypes strategically go “too far,” the white caricatures are inversely devoid of dramatic content, unwilling to follow through conflict and stuck repeating meaningless, vapid dialogue. Yet this “emptiness” as dramatic characters is what shields them from racial politics; as Dyer reflects on whiteness from his own position as a white scholar, “[h]aving no content, we can’t see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power. This is itself crucial to the security with which we occupy that position.” [22] Lee’s white caricatures demonstrate the sense of security that having no content provides, while also attempting to penetrate that barrier and encourage audiences to consider the connotations of whiteness in relation to the non-white stereotypes. Lee rethinks her strategies for representing whiteness in Straight White Men . When I asked the playwright about the all-white cast, she remarked: “if you’re going to have a play that’s called Straight White Men and there’s a minority or a woman in it, it’s like you know what that confrontation is going to be. […] There’s nothing that those two people could say to each other that would make me uncomfortable.” [23] Satire and caricature can easily become simplistic answers to a challenging political issue, and so in the spirit of continuing to challenge her audiences, Lee imbues the white characters in her latest play with a consciousness of identity politics that most satires of whiteness lack. Indeed, the white people in this play are able to speak eloquently not only about minority politics in general, but themselves in terms of race: for example, “No, our success is the problem, not the solution!” [24] or, “You can’t change the system without giving up the benefits you gain from that system” (70). Unlike the racially aversive Lafayette siblings, the three brothers in Straight White Men , also middle-aged, do not seem at first to rely on mythic notions of universality and humanity to mask their whiteness. Yet when faced with an unresolvable dilemma at the core of whiteness, even their eagerness to talk about the problem (how conventionally realist of them!) rings unsettlingly hollow. Matt, the eldest of the three sons, has moved in with his father Ed after first dropping out of graduate school, and then law school. The play takes place during the Christmas holidays when Ed’s other two sons, Jake and Drew visit to relax and spend time with the family; during this break from work and social life, the four men play games, joke around, sing, dance, decorate the Christmas tree, dress up as Santa Claus, and consume an exorbitant amount of food. Everything is swell. But then Matt suddenly breaks down crying in the middle of a Chinese take-out dinner, which prompts Jake and Drew to delve into Matt’s condition, questioning his puzzling lack of ambition and his self-professed contentment working as a temporary administrative assistant at a human rights organization. Drew believes depression is the cause, while Jake makes a more troubling diagnosis: a debilitating feeling of guilt over white male privilege. Although the play never sheds light on the truth of Matt’s problem, the bits of information that Lee provides on how these white men were raised gives weight to Jake’s explanation. In an early scene, Jake and Drew dig up a board game that they played as boys, a modified version of Monopoly retitled “Privilege.” A relic of late-twentieth century identity politics, the game features a pile of excuse cards that serve as lessons of tolerance and social justice. Some of them read: “What I said wasn’t sexist/racist/homophobic because I was joking.” and, rather on the nose, “I don’t have white privilege because it doesn’t exist” (63). Matt was the most dedicated of the three to radical identity politics, even establishing “Matt’s School for Young Revolutionaries” (66). The brothers look back to their home education with fond memories, but it is clear that these men are not revolutionaries, and that they benefit from a social structure that privileges whites. (Jake is a banker, and Drew is a professor and award-winning novelist.) Thus, even though these characters constantly mark themselves as white, disavowing myths of individual effort and transracial universality, it is uncertain whether making whiteness visible is enough to mitigate white privilege. Admittedly, Straight White Men asks the audience to think through a rather forced scenario: not all straight white men are as self-aware and knowledgeable as these characters. But Lee’s work raises pertinent questions regarding the profusion of identity politics in public discourse and the media, which may polarize audiences (potentially engendering post-racial backlash) or prevent deeper engagement with the politics of whiteness by providing easy textbook answers. Indeed, when Jake starts talking about Matt’s breakdown in terms of white privilege, Drew interjects: “you sound like an undergrad. Everyone already knows this stuff. It’s just masturbation” (70). In light of Lee’s ongoing dedication to creating theatre that makes herself and her audiences uncomfortable, Straight White Men demonstrates that the political vocabulary of the past is insufficient in tackling whiteness today. Hence realism. In his review for the New York Times , Charles Isherwood writes, “Believe it or not, Ms. Lee wants us to sympathize with the inexpressible anguish of her protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class straight white man named Matt who has failed to follow the codes of achievement that he’s expected to conform to.” [25] The prevailing cultural assumptions regarding whiteness make this request for sympathy difficult to believe, yet that is precisely what the conventions of realist drama solicits by focusing so heavily on one character’s interior struggle. Realism does not ensure that the audience will like Matt, but it does align them with the other characters as they try to pin down his predicament, to seek closure to Matt’s emotional arc. Before the play ends, however, Jake and Drew grow irritated by Matt’s inability to provide closure, and at the same time provide disclosure (as Barthes discusses regarding conventional realist narrative), to make himself fully known. When Matt refuses to give a straight answer about anything, Jake explodes with anger at the idea that his brother is a “loser for no reason”: in other words, an asocial individual rather than a representative of whiteness (74). Drew, who had believed until now that Matt’s breakdown was caused by a sense of failure and disappointment with his life, remarks coldly: “Nobody cares about your egotistic white male despair!” (75). Unable to sympathize with this “defective” dramatic character, the other three white men simply give up and exit the stage, leaving Matt “alone, staring out at the audience” (75). Although Matt’s unfathomable burden stems from whiteness, the final image of the play suggests that his is somehow different from the whiteness of the other characters. Throughout the play, Matt is treated as a special case, a “freak” in Jake’s words: JAKE : […] there’s nothing people like us can do in the world that isn’t problematic or evil, so we have to make ourselves invisible! ED : “People like us”? What’s that supposed to mean? JAKE : You know, privileged white dickheads. Women and minorities may get to pretend they’re doing enough to make the world a better place just by getting ahead, but a white guy’s pretty hard-pressed to explain why the world needs him to succeed. So Matt’s trying to stay out of the way. ED : Jake, you keep saying this, and I find it very hard to believe. JAKE : That’s because nobody else would ever do it! Matt’s a freak.(74) Significantly, Jake’s thorough analysis of whiteness only entails intervention in Matt’s special case; the social privileges enjoyed by the other white characters, while acknowledged, are regarded as an inevitable and unchangeable effect of the system—just the way things are in the world. By being ostensibly marked as white, Matt is paradoxically excluded from white “people like us” (74). But because he is only a half-finished character, lacking closure in the traditional sense, the whiteness that marks him remains unfamiliar, indeterminate, and not reified. Matt’s unarticulated dilemma suggests a potential fracturing of whiteness beyond its conventional image as an ideological monolith; to conceive of the possibility of sympathizing with Matt is to explore its rough and uneven surfaces, even if that means entering uncomfortable terrain. To conclude, I would like to return to Lee’s tongue-in-cheek observation that realism is the straight white man of theatrical genres. The American tradition of realist family drama has been closely associated with the monopoly of whiteness in theatrical representation; Jacobs-Jenkins’s response to “hearing people describe the great American family drama” is “‘There are no people of color on these lists.’ Who has access to this idea of family as a universal theme?” [26] But realism resembles straight white men in another sense as well. In drama and theatre scholarship, realism is often treated paradoxically as a bully and a loser at the same time, both overbearing as a vessel of dominant ideology and underachieving as an aesthetic form—not unlike how straight white men are distorted into easy, abstract targets of criticism. The critical lens crafted by Diamond and other theorists allows us to see through realism’s smooth surface and scrutinize its ideological foundations, but as a damaging side effect, this lens has also blinded us to the form’s untapped potential by presupposing that realism always operates in the same manner. Appropriate and Straight White Men demonstrate that realism can still be a refreshing and viable form to explore the politics of representation, and especially the politics of representing whiteness, which has relied on realist techniques throughout modern history. The first step towards utilizing the potential for realism to offer such new insight is to move away from the Barthesian framework of myth that has dominated discussions on realism in the past few decades. As a form that enables myth, realism was thought in the past to insist on “a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity.” [27] But Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee’s dramatic worlds are full of contradictions and hidden layers, despite being inhabited only by white characters. In place of “blissful clarity,” Appropriate and Straight White Men leave the audience with the feeling that they have not seen everything, that realism’s representative scope does not extend beyond the walls of the living room onstage. References [1] Appropriate ran at the Signature Center from February to April 2014, following productions in Louisville, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Straight White Men opened at the Public Theater in November 2014 following its world premiere at the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio and a brief international tour. [2] Richard Dyer, White (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 45. [3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins & Eliza Bent, “Feel that Thought: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Plays Are High-Wire Performances in Themselves,” Part 1, American Theatre ( May/June 2014), http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=7&indexID=44 , accessed 28 May2014. [4] I will provide a more detailed account of this trajectory in Lee’s work later in the discussion. [5] Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 4-5. [6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 142. [7] Varun Begley, “Objects of Realism: Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, and Marsha Norman,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 3 (October 2012): 339. [8] For a more recent reappraisal of dramatic realism than the examples I discuss, see also Jill Dolan, “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal , 60, no. 3 (October 2008): 433-457. [9] Jeanie Forte, “Realism,Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright – A Problem of Reception” Modern Drama 32, no.1 (March 1989): 117. [10] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) 56. [11] Ibid., 59. [12] Dyer, 11. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate , unpublished manuscript, (2014), 46. Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [14] Ben Brantley, “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark,” New York Times, 16 March 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-jenkins-subverts-tradition.html , accessed 29 November 2014. [15] Hilton Als, “GWTW” in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) 42. [16] Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2007) 39. [17] Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 63–64. [18] Young Jean Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014. [19] Young Jean Lee, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009) 173. [20] Ibid., 174. [21] Ibid., 71. [22] Dyer, 9. [23] Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014. [24] Young Jean Lee, Straight White Men , in American Theatre , unpublished manuscript, April 2015, 70. Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [25] Charles Isherwood, “My Three Sons and All Their Troubles,” The New York Times . November 18, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/theater/straight-white-men-opens-at-the-public-theater.html?_r=1 , accessed 29 November 2014. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins & Bent, “Feel that Thought.” [27] Barthes, 143. Footnotes About The Author(s) KEE-YOON NAHM is a Doctorate in Fine Arts candidate in the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Yale School of Drama. His current research examines strategies of appropriating cultural stereotypes in American drama and theatre from 1960 to today, in relation to contemporaneous political discourse on representation, subversion, and spectatorship. His writings have appeared in Theater , Theatre Journal , and the anthology Performing Objects and Theatrical Things . He also works as a translator and dramaturg. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers 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: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee 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 (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua's work Dance in Connection in Bronx, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with ID Studio Theater. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Dance in Connection ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua Dance Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 3pm Barretto Point Park, Viele Avenue, The Bronx Viele Ave. bet. Tiffany St. and Barretto St. Bronx ID Studio Theater 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 Indigenous, Afro & Contemporary dances to bring us closer to Mother Earth Performed by Pajarillo Pinta’o, presented by ID Studio Theater. Pajarillo Pinta'o Dance Company will perform traditional and contemporary dance works based on Colombian dances and their connection to Mother Earth, exploring indigenous influences in today's culture and the reconstruction of the MUISCA language—Mysk Kubun, lost for over 400 years and now being revitalized. This language originates from the Andes Mountains. Additionally, the company will showcase dances influenced by the African diaspora along Colombia's Pacific coast. ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua Daniel Fetecua Soto New York-based Colombian dancer, choreographer, educator and producer. A soloist member of the Limón Dance Company for ten years and has appeared as guest artist in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring and Tannhäuser. Mr. Fetecua is a master teacher of the Limón technique, reconstructor of Limón's repertory and Director of the Limón Professional Trainee Program. Founder and artistic director of two dance companies: Pajarillo Pinta’o, a dance company that preserves and promotes the Colombian traditional dances through dance performance, workshops and classes and D-Moves, a contemporary dance project that combines Colombian traditions, Modern Dance and German Tanz-Theater. Since 2008 Daniel has work with Native-American Choreographer DayStar/Rosalie Jones for her work "Wolf: A Transformation", from whom Daniel has the rights to the piece for the performance, preservation and promotion. Ongoing collaborations include C.A.V.E.S Project “Entre el Cuerpo y la Naturaleza” with world renown dancer Blakeley White-McGuire, Cumbia For Kids/Cumbia For All a longtime collaboration with Colombian composer and musician Pablo Mayor and Movement Migration an the international collective of seasoned dance artists directed by Kim Jones. Daniel has collaborated as a choreographer and guest teacher with REvolucionLatina and Salgado Productions both under Luis Salgado direction since 2011. Daniel is resident choreographer of ID Studio Theatre directed by German Jaramillo and Teatro SEA directed by Manuel Moran. Best choreography awards include the HOLA award for "La Gloria: A Latin Cabaret" and LATA award for “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quijote” Visit Artist Website Location Viele Ave. bet. Tiffany St. and Barretto St. Bronx ID Studio Theater ID Studio Theater The mission of ID Studio Theater is to advance the artistic and social development of immigrant communities through innovative work in the performing arts. Based in the South Bronx, ID Studio Theater is an immigrant arts organization committed to the empowerment of Latine communities through the arts. ID Studio unites artistic excellence with social justice, developing new artistic works through a deeply collaborative workshop process with diverse Latine community members. ID Studio utilizes the performing arts as a foundation for catalyzing community awareness, collective action and inter-community dialogue. In the past 20 years, IDS has developed over 25 bilingual theater and music productions within immigrant communities throughout NYC and beyond. Visit Partner Website

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 36 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti ARTICLE Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline Cheryl Black ARTICLE More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia ARTICLE The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Robert Thompson ARTICLE Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck BOOK REVIEW Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt BOOK REVIEW Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu BOOK REVIEW Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Andrew Gibb BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce ARTICLE Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally ARTICLE “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur ARTICLE Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo INTERVIEW Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Michael DeWhatley BOOK REVIEW Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles BOOK REVIEW Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret BOOK REVIEW Appropriate Alex Ferrone PERFORMANCE REVIEW Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW MáM Sean F. Edgecomb PERFORMANCE REVIEW Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie PERFORMANCE REVIEW Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Watch Die Kinder der Toten by Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Nature Theater of Oklahoma ventures the impossible: creating a film version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 666 page novel “Die Kinder der Toten”, an (as yet) untranslated German language masterpiece in which all the main characters are all undead, mute zombies… In September 2017 directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska worked on location in the Styrian mountainside town of Neuberg am der Murz with local citizens, farmers, grocers, brass bands, the fire department — even mountain rescue! — to stage some pretty awesome participatory theater, and eventually create what is sure to be a one-of-a-kind supernaturally super 8 film… The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Die Kinder der Toten At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Theater, Film This film will be screened in-person on May 20th and also be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for a period of 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2019 Nature Theater of Oklahoma ventures the impossible: creating a film version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 666 page novel “Die Kinder der Toten”, an (as yet) untranslated German language masterpiece in which all the main characters are all undead, mute zombies… In September 2017 directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska worked on location in the Styrian mountainside town of Neuberg am der Murz with local citizens, farmers, grocers, brass bands, the fire department — even mountain rescue! — to stage some pretty awesome participatory theater, and eventually create what is sure to be a one-of-a-kind supernaturally super 8 film… Produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion Vienna 2019 in collaboration with Steirischer Herbst 2017 Cast Andrea Maier, Greta Kostka, Klaus Unterrieder, Georg Beyer i. a. Written, Filmed, Directed and Edited by Kelly Copper & Pavol Liska Producer Ulrich Seidl Artistic Collaboration Claus Philipp Co-Edited by Michael Palm Supervising Sound Designer Matz Müller Re-Recording Tobias Fleig Composer Wolfgang Mitterer Line Producer Georg Aschauer, Daniela Trauner Production Managers Jakob Schwighofer, Teresa-Saija Wieser Producer USFP Claus Philipp, Georg Aschauer About The Artist(s) Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. With each new project, we attempt to set an impossible challenge for ourselves, the audience, and our collaborators — working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness, rigor, and the audience plays an essential role -- whether as spectators or - just as often - as participants in the work. Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work — Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live. Get in touch with the artist(s) naturetheater.private@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://oktheater.org/ 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

Sarah Alice Campbell 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 “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF Jan Cohen-Cruz argues in Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States that the criticism of conventional theatre is ineffective at assessing the scope, intent, and success of community-based performances. She writes, “expecting virtuosity, we miss the pleasures offered by commitment and risk. We are used to formal, distanced aesthetics and may underappreciate art driven by a personal connection to the material and a need to communicate.” [1] In this article I argue that this is precisely the phenomenon that has occurred in the criticism surrounding community-based Yucatec Maya theatre in Mexico. Evidence of such criticism can be found in the work of Carmen Castillo Rocha on theatre in the state of Yucatán. In explaining the relevance of theatre in Maya communities compared to the importance of other forms of performance within festivals and rituals in those same communities, she writes el teatro entre las comunidades mayas, en el mejor de los casos, queda como un fenómeno marginal cuyo origen fue el contacto con la cultura dominante; y en el peor de los casos aparece como un intento occidental de convertir la vida ritual de los mayas en un espectáculo para los ojos occidentales.Theatre among Maya communities, in the best of cases, remains a marginal phenomenon whose origin was contact with the dominant culture; and in the worst of cases appears as an occidental attempt to convert the ritual life of the Maya into a spectacle for occidental eyes. [2] I take issue with Castillo Rocha’s statements above in three respects: first, she argues that Maya theatre is a marginal phenomenon compared to festival and ritual; second, she insists that in the best-case scenario, theatre in the peninsula owes its existence to western or dominant cultures; and finally, she implies that theatre in Maya communities is intended for western eyes. I explore Castillo Rocha’s statement more below, but I introduce it here to argue that Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been viewed as marginal because of the way that it has been mediated in scholarship, not because it is inherently marginal within the community that created it. In this article, I argue for the necessity of studying Maya language theatre in the Yucatán peninsula as an art world. [3] This approach reveals the ways in which the multiplicity of discourses regarding Maya identity and the outside alliances that intersect with individuals and organizations that produce theatre have had an effect upon the valuing of theatre in some Maya areas but not in others. [4] This recognition is critical for understanding why Maya language theatre in the peninsula has been dismissed as marginal when compared to Mayan language theatre in the Mexican state of Chiapas, for example. I do this by first reviewing the relevant literature on the art world and artwriting, I explore the literature regarding contemporary Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula and Chiapas, and I end with a short exploration of the community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum,” (The Plot of Xinum) as an act of artwriting. Through this discussion, I argue the play “La conjura de Xinum” should not be dismissed as merely a marginal act by a community theatre group in rural Mexico; rather, I maintain it reveals the agency of Maya artists in advocating for language and cultural revitalization. An in-depth overview of Maya identity is not possible in an essay of this scope, but a brief review is necessary to contribute to a deeper understanding of Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula. The Maya peoples are comprised of a number of interrelated yet distinct linguistic and cultural groups. They have been grouped together under the name “Maya” by both academics and Maya peoples themselves as an act of resistance. The Maya civilization spanned a large portion of Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico and into the countries of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador). Colonization and independence movements in these countries had a profound effect upon the Maya peoples and their resistance strategies and contributed to shaping distinct practices within linguistic and cultural groups. [5] While Maya people continue to live throughout Mesoamerica, in this essay, I am focusing on the Maya in Mexico, and even more specifically, within the states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. Yucatán and Quintana Roo are two of the three states which comprise the Yucatán peninsula, Campeche, the third, will not be explicitly addressed in this article. [6] Yucatec Maya people are the ethno-linguistic group who live in the Yucatán peninsula. In Quintana Roo, Maya is by far the preferred term to use for an Indigenous person from the area, whereas in the state of Yucatán, mestiza/o is the preferred term. I use the term Yucatec Maya theatre to refer to theatre created by Maya people in the Yucatán peninsula. While most of these plays are presented in the Yucatec Maya language, some use Spanish as well. On Art Worlds and Artwriting My approach for this study of Maya theatre is based on a recognition that the creation, production, and distribution of art, both in its original form and how it is mediated through writing and other modes of criticism, is a collective activity; and further, that the discourses around the work of art itself allow for artwork to gain value in new markets. Howard Becker and David Carrier have theorized these issues through the concepts of “art worlds” and “artwriting,” respectively. [7] Becker describes an art world as “an established network of cooperative links among participants.” [8] Amongst these participants are the artists, the people who interact with the art during and after its production, as well as the critics and scholars who write about the work. Becker refutes the idea that an artist creates their work independently, arguing that the systems within what he calls the art world affect the way that the art is produced, received, and written about. [9] Thus, the study of Maya language theatre, including this article, is an integral part of the art world of Maya language theatre. Becker describes this further in his chapter on aesthetics in his book Art Worlds : Aestheticians study the premises and arguments people use to justify classifying things and activities as “beautiful,” “artistic,” “art,” “not art,” “good art,” “bad art,” and so on. They construct systems with which to make and justify both the classifications and specific instances of their application. Critics apply aesthetic systems to specific art works and arrive at judgments of their worth and explications of what gives them that worth. Those judgements provide reputations for works and artists. [10] Becker, through his concept of art worlds, argues that criticism about art is not outside of the artwork but creates value for a particular work of art or artist. Instead of relying on established aesthetic systems to critique the work of community-based artists, we should heed Cohen-Cruz’s call to look to the totality of the community-based endeavor, considering the context around the work itself in order to understand “what critical approach is appropriate.” [11] In order to better understand how the “cooperative links” comprising the art world affect the work of art itself, it is first necessary to understand who is involved in the process and how the work of art or artist has been mediated in writing or other forms of criticism. [12] David Carrier argues through his concept of artwriting that art can gain or lose value culturally and materially based on how it is mediated in various discourses that interpret the art. [13] George Marcus uses Carrier’s notion of artwriting in his book on the anthropological study of the art world, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology . He notes, “objects (or performances) only accumulate cultural value to the extent that they are inscribed in ‘histories.’” He continues, neither the early debates about the avant-garde and modernism nor more recent framings of artistic activity in postmodern terms are external commentaries. They are neither part of a scholarly framework to be settled nor outside the production of art in which the boundaries between the “discipline” and its “object” are distinct. Rather such debates comprise much of artwriting itself; they are quintessentially enabling art to have a “history.” And history, or the narrative of art history, is central to the evaluation of paintings and other objects, whose importance is established by their place in a privileged story of culture and civilization. [14] Thus, it is the discourses accumulating around art that create a history of it. I am not advocating that art without history lacks intrinsic value, but rather that art can be mediated in such a way as to allow for the possibility of acquiring a material or new cultural value within a different society or economy. George Marcus highlights the influence of artwriting on the market: Imagine, for example, a painter such as Frida Kahlo, who is reevaluated after her death, in contrast to the previously more celebrated Diego Rivera. Her paintings, valued at $30,000 ten years ago, are now worth over $1 million. Her work—which emphasizes gender, informality, and the body—becomes significant in the light of current theoretical trends. And, although Rivera’s work is far more concerned with the Mexican state, as soon as Kahlo became important outside Mexico, her work acquired national value exceeding Rivera’s. [15] Although Marcus here refers to visual arts, one can extend this concept to an understanding of theatre and performance. As I explore below, Maya theatre in the state of Chiapas has been represented in criticism as internationally relevant. The influence of participating scholars and institutions have lent credibility to the theatre in Chiapas and as a result, it has acquired value outside of the original context of production. By comparison, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention and, as a result, it is generally described in scholarship as a local phenomenon of little consequence when compared with other performance forms. Director of “La conjura de Xinum,” Marco Poot Cahun, is keenly aware of the value of academic writing to his work, as he wants people outside of the peninsula to know about what he and his company are doing. He wants people to know about the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) and the continual struggle that Maya people in the peninsula face—poverty, inability to access lands that were once their own, discrimination, and appropriation by the tourism industry. [16] In interviews I conducted during fieldwork, both Marco and his brother and co-collaborator Manuel Poot Cahun acknowledged that academic writing has value for their work in language and cultural revitalization. [17] As reflected in the above review of the literature on art worlds, the discourses around a work of art are implicated in the study of that artwork. In the following section, I review literature on theatre in Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula in order to explore how Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been made to seem marginal when compared to Maya theatre in Chiapas. The Art World of Maya Theatre in Chiapas Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Mexico often features international collaborators and Maya theatre in Chiapas is no exception. This international component is indicative of how pan-Indigenous organizing has traversed the borders of nations to involve collaborations with international partners, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to protect against human rights abuses. [18] Pan-Indigenous organizing has also occurred on a national level in Mexico through a series of workshops and programs aimed at Indigenous revitalization beginning in the 1980s. These programs had a profound impact on the production of Indigenous language texts in Mexico. [19] It is within this context that Maya theatre collectives emerged in the state of Chiapas. Maya theatre in Chiapas is largely represented by two theatre groups: Lo’il Maxil (part of the collective Sna Jtz’ibajom ) and La FOMMA. Both collectives work out of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a popular tourist destination in the state. The work of these two companies has been described by and associated with anthropologist Robert Laughlin as well as the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, based at New York University. In this section, I briefly review these two theatre groups and the reason why they have become almost emblematic of Maya theatre in Mexico. The civil association, Sna Jtz’ibajom (House of the Writer), began through the efforts of former local members of the Harvard Chiapas Project in coordination with anthropologist Laughlin. Laughlin helped the group secure funds from Cultural Survival, an NGO, based in the United States with a mission of “advocat[ing] for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and support[ing] Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures and political resilience.” [20] Cultural Survival granted $3,000 of seed money for the establishment of the writers collective, Sna Jtz’ibajom, in 1982. [21] Laughlin’s approach has been as an active collaborator since the beginning. Early on, Laughlin insisted upon the use of puppets in the production of plays by Lo’il Maxil, a hallmark of the group’s work. [22] After deciding to use puppets for the productions, Laughlin brought in Amy Trompetter of the Bread and Puppet Theater and Ralph Lee, founder and artistic director of the Mettawee River Theatre Company. The presence of both Trompetter and Lee in Chiapas has served to reposition the work of these Maya artists in Chiapas as internationally, interculturally, and cross-culturally significant in the discipline of theatre. Further, because of the influence of Laughlin, and his post at the Smithsonian Institute, the work of Sna Jtz’ibajom and Lo’il Maxil has always been seen as important outside of Chiapas. Underiner describes it as such, “thus, from the beginning, Lo’il Maxil’s work, celebrated everywhere as “Mayan theatre,” has been in fact a highly collaborative effort by artists and researchers trained in very different traditions.” [23] The civil association La FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya/Strength of the Maya Women) was started by two former members of Sna Jtz’ibajom, Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Tzeltal) and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (Tzotzil). [24] [24] Underiner describes the extent of the international reputation that La FOMMA has acquired: La FOMMA’s reputation both in Mexico and internationally has grown, facilitated by their contacts with U.S. supporters, who have coordinated their participation in women’s playwriting symposia and arranged performances and speaking engagements in university settings, usually in conjunction with programs on indigenous political and cultural movements. [25] The influence of these scholars and institutions have allowed the theatre to acquire value outside of the original context of production. In discussing value here I am not speaking to aesthetic value or inherent value, as that can and should really only be decided by those who are creating the work and by those for whom the work is intended. I am discussing value in terms of the stake that it provides to Indigenous organizing; increasing exposure internationally can provide tangible results within home communities. The idea of appealing to governing bodies larger than the state is a characteristic feature of Indigenous organizing. Ronald Niezen notes that one of the hallmarks of international Indigenous organizing is the avoidance of state mechanisms for grievances and moving to address these grievances on an international level. He notes that this “represent[s] a new use of the international bodies of states to overcome the domestic abuses of the states themselves.” [26] Just as these grievances can be delivered to international bodies in hopes of having them addressed at the level of the state, an international reputation for artists can provide results in terms of funding and recognition of cultural significance within the state. In comparing the international exposure in Chiapas with that in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention. The Art World of Maya Theatre in the Yucatán Peninsula Tamara Underiner and Donald Frischmann have been actively writing about Maya areas of Mexico since the 1990s and they often highlight continuities between Yucatec Maya theatre and the theatre of other Mayan language communities. [27] Their work has been influential in developing the field of Yucatec Maya theatre and performance scholarship in the US. Three trends are particularly noteworthy to highlight regarding their work: both focus on theatre in the state of Yucatán, except in the case of the recently published anthology U suut t’aan ; second, the authors focus predominantly on those individuals who have been working in the literary revitalization movement in the Peninsula; third, both focus on historical and cultural elements in performance. [28] Their contributions have paved the way for this particular research project, which shifts the focus to the theatre produced outside of the literary revitalization movement within the state of Quintana Roo. [29] Building on their analyses of cultural and historical elements within performance, I turn my attention specifically to how the Maya language is used in performance. Anthropologist Carmen Castillo Rocha has also written on theatre in the Yucatán. I cited her discussion above regarding the marginality of theatre in Maya communities. I do not believe it was Castillo Rocha’s intention to dismiss Maya theatre outright as not important, but rather to argue that performance forms occurring within festivals and rituals have deep historical continuity, whereas theatre does not. [30] I would like to spend a moment exploring her statement, however, because it reveals a number of misconceptions about community-based Maya theatre. In comparing festivals to theatrical activities, Castillo Rocha claims that theatre is marginal. I argue that theatre is an important platform for cultural and linguistic expression in Maya communities in the peninsula. Castillo Rocha argues that Maya theatre owes its origin to Western influence. Western influence is certainly present in the structure of many of the plays but that does not mean that they are not Maya plays. [31] This statement discounts the agency of these theatre artists, even when working with someone from the west or dominant culture to shape the work of theatre to their own worldview. Additionally, productions in Maya communities are not always performed for “occidental eyes” as she suggests. [32] The audiences for productions of “La conjura de Xinum,” for example, are overwhelmingly composed of members of the local community or Maya people from surrounding communities. An understanding of why and how the Maya language is being used in the work of Maya theatre artists is critical for appreciating the ways artists are engaging with the discourses of language and cultural revitalization in the peninsula. Current scholarship on Yucatec Maya language theatre has not focused on the language itself in performance, leaving an incomplete picture of how the work is significant within the community as well as on the international stage. In the next section, I put forth a brief example of artwriting that provides a view of how language is used within the play “La conjura de Xinum,” centering the performances as a tool for social change, specifically the revitalization of the Yucatec Maya language. “La conjura de Xinum” as a tool for social change In this section, I advance a brief sample of artwriting through an analysis of productions of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” I argue that “La conjura de Xinum” enacts a scenario of rebellion in order to highlight the contemporary conditions of Indigenous peoples in the peninsula. [33] Diana Taylor’s concept of scenario is useful in this study as it reveals the appeal of the historic event of the Caste War for contemporary Maya artists. Taylor’s scenario provides a framework for viewing the performances of “La conjura de Xinum” as part of a larger set of similar performances of conquest, revolution, and resistance in the Maya world. These performances, notes Taylor, make use of “paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [34] The Caste War was a nineteenth century war fought in the peninsula between factions of Maya rebels (and their criollo allies) and the elite of Yucatán. The usefulness of the Caste War as subject matter for a performance hoping to inspire social change might be called into question, as it ultimately ended in defeat for the rebels. Though this particular Caste War was ultimately unsuccessful, actor Manuel Poot Cahun notes that he wants to start a “second Caste War,” using Indigenous intelligence versus weapons. [35] His work in Maya language revitalization through the arts is one way that he is doing this. Despite the outcome of the Caste War, the strength and durability of the scenario of rebellion contributes to its repeatability and makes it useful because, as Diana Taylor remarks of the concept of the scenario, it is a “remarkably coherent paradig[m] of seemingly unchanging attitudes and values.” [36] The Maya language is central to an understanding of how the actors are performing their identity onstage in the play “La conjura de Xinum” and I argue that the actors achieve this through their positioning of the Maya language in opposition to Spanish. I analyze how the actors position the two languages through a study of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude, or likeness to “real life,” considers how characters select from their repertoire of languages based on their social setting. [37] I begin with a brief summary of the play and performance contexts, a description of the events of the Caste War of Yucatán as depicted in the play, and finally an analysis of language vis-à-vis verisimilitude. “La conjura de Xinum” “La conjura de Xinum” was written by Carlos Chan Espinosa, director of the Museo de la guerra de castas (Caste War Museum) in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo from 1994-2019. [38] Marco Poot Cahun has edited and further refined the play after he took over as director in 2010. [39] The play is structured as a series of narrations interspersed with five short scenes that are largely improvised in performance. Though the dialogue within these individual scenes varies in performance, the actors follow the scenario as outlined in the text. The title of the play, “La conjura de Xinum,” or “The Plot of Xinum,” comes from the historical title given to the early events of the Caste War, which make up the plot of the play. Figure 1– from L to R: Alfredo Pool Poot, Manuel Poot Cahun, and Marco Poot Cahun. Photo by the author. The play features three main characters, the three early leaders of the Caste War: Manuel Antonio Ay, played by Marco, Cecilio Chi, played by Alfredo Pool Poot, and Jacinto Pat, played by Manuel. The narration, which opens the play, quickly covers 500 years of colonization, oppressive land and labor policies, and a famous 1761 revolt by the Maya leader, Jacinto Canek. These events are framed as causes of the Caste War of the Yucatán in 1847. After the opening narration, the first scene features the leaders Chi, Pat, and Ay discussing the oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The second scene depicts Chi writing a letter to Ay regarding specific plans for the rebellion. In the third scene, a messenger delivers the letter to Ay. The fourth scene depicts Ay and fellow residents of Chichimilá at a cantina in the house of Antonio Rajón, where Rajón discovers Chi’s letter in Ay’s possession. In the fifth scene Rajón tells Eulogio Rosado, the commandant in Valladolid, about the letter. Rosado then sends soldiers to capture Ay. Ay is interrogated and finally put to death by firing squad. The play has been performed regularly in the area, especially in the towns of Tihosuco and Tepich, since at least 2002, usually in association with the annual commemoration of the start of the Caste War, which falls in the last week of July. I first saw the play in 2015 and saw three more performances over the following two years. All four performances were staged outside in public spaces in the center of the towns. These public spaces play a significant role in everyday life and are frequented by residents often. Residents of Tepich made up the majority of the audience members for the Tepich performances, whereas the performances in Tihosuco included local audiences as well as those from surrounding communities, some from as far away as Pisté, in the neighboring state of Yucatán, and Orange Walk, Belize. Interpretation of the Caste War within the Play The play “La conjura de Xinum” is based upon the novella of the same title written by Ermilo Abreu Gómez. In an interview, Marco mentioned that the text was used as a resource by the playwright Chan Espinosa. Abreu Gómez was a Yucatecan by birth and is known predominantly for Canek based upon the Jacinto Canek rebellion of 1761. While Abreu Gómez’s work has been considered by many to be overall sympathetic to the Maya cause, it still represents, according to Paul Worley, a means of control over the Maya in terms of who is allowed to tell their stories. He notes that Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum , “revises the literature on events in the peninsula’s history while denouncing the exploitation and abuse visited on the Maya from the conquest down through the twentieth century, and Abreu Gómez highlights his role as an indigenista cultural broker in his attempts to represent the subaltern voice of the Indio storyteller.” [41] While Chan Espinosa used the work as a source for the play, its subsequent reformation into dramatic form means that “La conjura de Xinum,” the play, represents a shift from what Worley calls the “discourse of the Indio” to an activation of “cultural control,” wherein Maya artists write from their own perspective. [42] Just as Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum highlights a source of the conflict within the Caste War as ethnic or racial in origin, so too does the play version with which it shares a title. We can see this through the use of humor which pokes fun at the Spaniards in the play, as well as through physical gestures of the soldier characters, who are portrayed as dullards who have difficulty capturing Manuel Antonio Ay. The capturing of Ay is always an audience favorite. The soldiers are directed by Rosado to go and search for Ay. If anyone in the audience is not part of the community, this individual will typically be selected first. Thus, although they are marking difference (often racial difference, especially when white American students are present) they are also signaling to the audience that the Spaniards are unable to perform their mission satisfactorily. The search continues and finally on the third visit to the crowd, they find Ay and bring him to Rosado. This moment of highlighting outsider presence, whether racial in origin or not, is key to understanding how the actors are creatively using the play to comment upon social conditions. For Marco, however, the importance of this production of “La conjura de Xinum” is to teach audiences about the causes of the Caste War. [43] Verisimilitude Language use, despite its imprecision as a characteristic of identity, has been a category used to classify one as Indigenous from the colonial period to the present. Thus, it is a natural place to begin an exploration of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” In his book on language play in theatre, Marvin Carlson discusses what he calls the “purest” form of heteroglossia: the copresence of two languages on stage. He remarks: Often verisimilitude is the major structural motivation for such linguistic mixing, but no cultural activity, and certainly not language, is devoid of associations and values, and so beyond the rather simple and straightforward concern of verisimilitude, theatrical heteroglossia almost always involves a wide variety of social and cultural issues. [44] As Carlson suggests, verisimilitude is merely the beginning of an exploration of language use in a play, a fundamental consideration for understanding the “wide variety of social and cultural issues” that exist in a given instance of heteroglossia. [45] What Carlson calls verisimilitude operates on a basic level: just as in real life, some characters in the play speak only Maya, some only Spanish, some a combination of both. Verisimilitude thus corresponds to reality: in this case, both historical and contemporary. The languages spoken by the characters in each of these performances for the most part mirrors the language choice of their historical counterparts, where such language choice diverges from verisimilitude is a key place for investigation. For the majority of the characters in the play little fluctuation occurs in language spoken amongst the various performances. The soldiers, the judge, and Eulogio Rosado only speak in Spanish; and Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi only speak in Maya. The script that I received was entirely in Spanish, however, some actors use Maya in performance, depending on the character they play. When Spanish is used it almost exclusively matches the text in the script, whereas when the actors replace the Spanish text with Maya, they rarely follow the Spanish via a direct translation but instead incorporate a virtuosic display of conversation in Maya – as one might hear offstage in everyday interactions. The decision to change languages for individual characters in “La conjura de Xinum” is significant as it represents contemporary attitudes regarding language use that do not necessarily reflect the historical situation being portrayed. The clearest example of this is in scene five, where a judge interrogates Manuel Antonio Ay after he is captured. To understand the way language use differs from historical accounts it is first necessary to briefly review the history of Maya language use after the conquest. The onslaught of the attempted destruction of the Maya language and writing system began, of course, with the conquest. Diego de Landa, famous for his auto de fé at Maní, preserved selective aspects of the language and culture through his Relaciones de las cosas de Yucatán . [46] Spaniards as well as children of the Maya elite carried out the gradual change from glyphic writing to alphabetic throughout the early years of the conquest. [47] However, by the late colonial period, Maya, in both written and spoken forms, was used even amongst those who were not considered to be Indigenous. Mark Lentz notes that local government officials “in majority Maya-speaking pueblos absolutely needed to speak the Indigenous language in order to carry out their daily tasks effectively. Many showed an ability to read and write in Maya.” [48] Using records from court cases throughout the late colonial period, Lentz discusses how individuals in rural communities, Indigenous or not, typically relied on Maya in their everyday lives. Some were even monolingual speakers of Maya. Lentz, in particular, highlights the use of Maya among local officials like the juez español . He notes that “ jueces españoles were the officials most immersed in Maya society and thus the likeliest to speak, read, and write Maya.” [49] In other words, Maya was used by non-Indigenous Yucatecans both for and outside of official duties. Lentz’s findings become particularly striking if we consider them alongside the interrogation scene in “La conjura de Xinum.” In this scene, a judge asks several questions to Ay in Spanish. Ay, in turn, responds only in Maya. The judge repeats his questions multiple times, occasionally slamming his hands on the table, as he grows more and more impatient. Knowing what we now know about the tendency of local officials to know Maya, it is likely that the historical judge would have understood and possibly been able to speak Maya. Therefore, the actor’s choice to use Spanish as the language of interrogation in the scene is an important divergence from historical accounts. It is critical to note that by highlighting this moment, I am not indicating that there is something wrong with diverging from historical accounts in the portrayal of this scene. Rather, I am advocating for an approach that considers this an exercise of agency by the actors in actively engaging with history and shaping it to fit present attitudes and anxieties regarding language loss. The choice to have the actor playing the judge speak Spanish instead of Maya creates the opportunity for the actor playing Ay to highlight the act of speaking in Maya as a statement of resistance. This aligns with the priorities of Marco and Manuel in their work within language and cultural revitalization – speaking Maya is a way to combat erasure. While the Yucatec Maya language is not in immediate danger of extinction, the number of native speakers is dwindling as English is often the focus in schools due to the influence of the tourism in the peninsula. [50] Thus, by engaging with this well-known episode in history and pitting the two languages against one another, the actors have successfully mapped contemporary attitudes of language use onto a past event. Conclusion: Community-Based Theatre and the Scenario of Rebellion Diana Taylor’s notion of the scenario is a useful descriptive framework for understanding how “La conjura de Xinum” re-activates the cultural memory of rebellion in the town of Tihosuco each year. I use Taylor’s concept of scenario, a theatrical or performative formulaic structure that references pre-existing cultural memories and meanings, to argue that the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” has larger ramifications than might be initially thought were we to follow Castillo Rocha’s conclusion about Maya theatre’s marginality. [51] Taylor writes, “instead of privileging texts and narratives , we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [52] In Taylor’s formation “the scenario makes visible what is already there,” including “ghosts, images, and stereotypes.” [53] The play “La conjura de Xinum” can be viewed as a scenario of rebellion as it dramatizes the events of the Caste War of Yucatán. For some, this performance is radical. Others believe that the government has co-opted this scenario and that its performance every year is no longer radical, but rather a showpiece to demonstrate that the Maya are a willing part of Mexico’s pluricultural nation. Even though the actors recognize the historical and contemporary injustices in Maya communities, they believe that the elected officials and other dignitaries who attend the Caste War festival don’t take their concerns seriously. [54] Although the productions of “La conjura de Xinum” are funded by the government, the invited officials don’t often stay to watch the play, which is always the final event in the evening’s schedule. This leaves an audience comprised almost entirely of community members. The actors have a stage where they can voice their concerns but the politician’s and elected official’s exit before the start of the performance speaks volumes of their symbolic (lack of) attention to the issues the community faces. Despite the fact that the invited officials do not always stay to watch the play, their appearance at the Caste War festival is critical. Taylor notes that “the scenario places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics.” [55] It is clear here, that the political officials “watching” the event, whether they actually stay for the performance or not, are akin to the Spaniards in the play – Antonio Rajón, the soldiers, Eulogio Rosado, and the cantinero . Thus, the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” is not just a play performed as part of the Caste War festival, it is part of the larger scenario of recent Indigenous cultural and language revitalization movements–where Indigenous people fight to be heard in a neoliberal multicultural nation. The performance of this scenario of rebellion thus has a part for all to play: for state officials, who participate as oppressors; for actors and local audience members, who participate as the rebels; and academics, like myself, who participate as well-intentioned documentarians, but nonetheless possess an, often unstated, privilege in writing about Indigenous peoples. Year after year this scenario is reified in the Caste War festivities. Director Marco and actor Manuel believe that their work is making a difference in the community despite the lack of real government support. They often view the government officials in an adversarial manner, but still ultimately believe that “La conjura de Xinum” has a positive effect in their community by encouraging young people to speak Maya and to learn more about their history. Manuel is especially inspired by the Caste War and views his linguistic and cultural revival efforts as a “second Caste War.” [56] Charles Hale poses the question at issue for many Indigenous peoples in the Americas: “Under what conditions can Indigenous movements occupy the limited spaces opened by neoliberal multiculturalism, redirecting them toward their own radical, even utopian political alternatives?” [57] Juan Castillo Cocom argues that disconnecting from this system, by refusing to perform scenarios of rebellion as well as the stereotype of the rebellious “ indio ” is the only way that Maya people will be taken seriously in the political climate of neoliberal Mexico. [58] For others, performing within the system but using their own language to subvert the multicultural game is the best option. Whatever the standpoint, the performance of Maya identity through language and culture is an important phenomenon and is critical for understanding how neoliberal Mexico interacts with its Indigenous citizens and the way in which those same citizens fight back or decide to disconnect altogether. By viewing the alliances and connections that ultimately shape the reception of a work of community-based performance like “La conjura de Xinum,” I argue that Maya theatre is not just an inconsequential phenomenon. Theatre is used by Maya artists as a tool for voicing dissent, anger, and highlighting injustice. Maya theatre is not marginal; it is a vital force for social change. References [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 109. [2] Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007), 86. [3] In common parlance, and even in academic contexts, the terms Maya and Mayan are frequently confused. In this article, I subscribe to the use of the terms most clearly elucidated by Quetzil Castañeda in the field guide for the Maya language, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan.” See Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan,” (Field guide, Open School for Ethnography and Anthropology, 2014), 10-12. Castañeda notes that Mayan is not used to refer to a group of people, but rather a language family, the Mayan language family, which contains around 30-some different languages spoken in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Belize. Within the family of Mayan languages there is one particular language called Maya. While scholars might refer to it as Yucatec Maya, speakers of the language rarely do—to them it is more likely maayat’aan or simply maaya . In addition to the name of the language as spoken in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya can be used as an adjective—Maya culture, Maya traditions, Maya theatre, but Mayan languages (unless you are referring to the specific language of the Yucatán, in which case it would be the Maya language). Maya is a mass noun so it does not need to pluralized. To call the Maya of the Yucatán “Mayans” is not just incorrect in terms of cultural practice, but as Castañeda notes, would be like referring to native English speakers as “Germanics,” because “the language that these persons speak are part of the Germanic branch” of languages. (Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal,” 11); See Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). [4] See Stuart A. Day, Outside Theater: Alliances that Shape Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). [5] See Matthew Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2004). Translation by author. [6] I am not addressing Campeche in this article because I have not completed fieldwork there and thus my knowledge of the specific circumstances with regard to community-based theatre is limited. [7] See Becker, Art Worlds ; See David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). [8] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [9] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [10] Becker, Art Worlds , 131. [11 Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 111; 113. [12] Becker, Art Worlds , 34-35. [13] Carrier, Artwriting . [14] George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27. Within the passage Marcus cites three works by Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); “Critical Reflections,” Artform 28 (September 1989): 132-133; and “The State of the Art World: The Nineties Begin,” Nation (July 9): 65-68. [15] Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture, 28. [16] The Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) was a rebellion against the government based in Mérida, Yucatán by a majority Maya peasant force. Although the war was not explicitly racial in origin, its interpretation in academic writing in the 1960s and 1970s certainly provides that impression. Today, scholars mostly agree that class rather than race or ethnicity had more to do with the reasons for the revolt. See Victoria Bricker, Indian Christ, Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Violence and Ethnicity in the Caste War of Yucatán,” (presentation, Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, Miami, FL, March 16-18, 2000); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Of Friends and Foes: The Caste War and Ethnicity in Yucatán,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no.1 (2004); Reed, Nelson. The Caste War of Yucatán . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964; Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis;” Terry Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and the Caste War Violence in Yucatán , 1800- 1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). [17] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017; Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [18] See Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [19] See Alicia Salinas, “‘Tu táan yich in kaajal’ [On The Face of My People]: Contemporary Maya-Spanish Bilingual Literature and Cultural Production from the Yucatan Peninsula,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018) and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010). [20] Cultural Survival, “Mission.” “About Cultural Survival.” See https://www.culturalsurvival.org/about. [21] Robert Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom, Monkey Business Theatre , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2-3. [22] Laughlin, Monkey Business Theatre , 3. [23] Tamara Underiner, T heatre in Mayan Mexico: Death Defying Acts , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 51. [24] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico , 54. [25] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico, 57. [26] Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism ,16. [27] Although there are several theatre scholars writing in Spanish on Maya theatre in the state of Yucatán (See Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007); Fernando Muñoz Castillo, Teatro maya peninsular: precolombino y evangelizador (Mérida, 2000); René Acuña, Farsas y representaciones escenicas de los mayas antiguos (Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Aútonoma de México, 1978); and Jennifer Lynn Cassels, “La Utopía en Tierras Mayas: El Teatro Comunitario Maya Yucateco 1982-2002.” (MA thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2004) Frischmann and Underiner are two that have helped the work to gain a larger audience in the US. [28] I am intentionally leaving the work of the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena (LTCI) out of consideration here despite the fact that they have an international reputation as the company did not originate in the peninsula, but rather in the state of Tabasco. Underiner in Theatre in Mayan Mexico , writes that “almost everyone I spoke with expressed concern over the community participating as ‘extras’ in the spectacle, with the maestros having the central performing parts” (98). This, in addition to Maya rituals being staged out of context and fetishized for a tourist audience (93-99), leaves the company’s work outside of the scope of this particular view of community theatre in the Maya language. A more mild critique of the work of LTCI appears in Carmen Castillo Rocha, “The ‘Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena’ and the Construction of a Good Life in Ticopó, Yucatán, Mexico,” Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação 39, no. 2, (May-August, 2016): 131-144; Donald Frischmann and Wildernain Villegas Carrillo, U Suut T’aan: U t’aan maaya ajts’íibo’ob tu lu’umil Quintana Roo (Chetumal: Plumas Negras Editorial, 2016). [29] This is an important consideration because it tends to leave out those who are working at the community level but aren’t publishing their work. [30] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 85. [31] See Donald Frischmann, “Contemporary Mayan Theatre: The Recovery and (Re)Interpretation of History,” in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance , ed. J. Ellen Gainor (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71-84; and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010), 48-54. [32] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 86. [33] See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). [34] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [35] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [36] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 31. [37] See Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). [38] The Caste War Museum is a community museum based in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo that opened in 1993. See http://www.museogc.com/Museo/Museo-Museum.html. [39] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [40] Marco and Manuel have been involved with the play since 2010 and I found production photos dating back to 2002 in the museum archives. I found another photo that seemed to show the three Maya leaders from the year 2000, but I can’t be sure that this was from the play “La conjura de Xinum.” Doña Antonia, who works at the museum told me that the play had been in production since she could remember, starting a year or two after the opening of the museum in 1993. Don Carlos did not state an exact year either, saying it had been at least ten years, but said that the play was developed for the annual commemoration and that it was first performed after the museum opened in 1993. [41] Paul Worley, Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 78. [42] Worley, Telling and Being Told , 17; Here Worley is referencing Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s concept of “cultural control.” See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, “Lo propio y lo ajeno,” in La cultura popular, ed. Adolfo Colombres (México: Dirección de Culturas Populares, Premia editora de libros, 1984), 79-86. [43] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [44] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues , 14. [45] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 14. [46] Published in a commonly available English translation by William Gates, trans., Yucatán Before and After the Conquest by Friar Diego de Landa (New York: Dover, 1978). [47] Victoria Bricker, “Linguistic Continuities and Discontinuities in the Maya Area,” in Pluralizing Ethnography , eds. John M. Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 71-3. [48] Mark Lentz, “Castas, Creoles, and the Rise of a Maya Lingua Franca in Eighteenth-Century Yucatan,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 48. [49] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 49. [50] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 56-7. [51] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 13. [52] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [53] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [54] Alfredo Pool Poot, Personal Interview, 8 September 2017. [55] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 23. [56] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2017. [57] Charles R. Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 11. [58] Juan Castillo Cocom, Personal Interview, 10 October 2017. Footnotes About The Author(s) Sarah Alice Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism in the University of Idaho’s Theatre Arts Department. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama with a minor in Folklore and a Ph.D. Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Indiana University in 2018. 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.

Jada M. Campbell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Jada M. Campbell By Published on April 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past . Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. In this important scholarly work, Ariel Nereson defines historiography through movement, allowing us to see “democracy moving” through the lens of Bill T. Jones, choreographer and co-founder of BTJ/AZ. Early on, she introduces Bill T. Jones’ "The Auction," performed during the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors, and analyzes its rejection of assessing black progress as validated by white standards. The dance embodies modes of black excellence through historically white narratives, using movement. Nereson explains the symbolism of the piece’s location. For Jones, showcasing this piece in front of the former president, Barack Obama, represents his 2008 election as the signifier of "inclusion." Nereson explains how representation becomes a trend promoting the new standard of national optics in the US. While American enslavement has long ended, its modes still haunt and dilute the potential of freedom and liberty. "The Auction" succeeds by rejecting the image of integrational unity and tokenism-enforced diversity as the solution to achieving black success and overcoming racial oppression. In the first chapter, “Commission,” Nereson explains that "total artistic freedom" (Nereson 26) is a choice that comes with sacrifice. This chapter focuses on commercialized liberty. Dance artists, particularly black dance artists, are faced with the conflict of limited freedom over their craft and how it gets presented. While many dance companies in the U.S. strive to promote diverse representation, the terms are mostly conditional. Many dance companies view black dance artists and choreographers as a monolith, stripping them of individuality. Non-black funders inform the public of what it means to be black. Race influences funding as appearance plays a significant role in decisions made from positions of power. Nereson explains the ways in which Jones resists these limitations as a dance artist and a producer, knowing that being selective risks steady work. Being selective does not solely concern which jobs to reject or accept, but also how choreographers use movement to define narratives. Jones' main struggle was interpreting the narrative of Abraham Lincoln's mission as it relates to black liberty, rather than choreographing a narrative of the Great Emancipator. In the second chapter, "Text," Nereson delineates the complex relationship between text and movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade to illustrate a cohesive relationship between text and movement as the piece contains several speeches. While language can have multiple meanings, it can be more clearly defined by movements, incorporating speeches into their works. The company’s fine line between formalism and true storytelling matters: Because Jones wants to avoid over-romanticizing and making fantastical true historic events relating to black trauma and oppression, he incorporates honest storytelling. He draws parallels between the relationship of pure movement and its opposition to text/movement dualities to parallel those between separate but equal beliefs. Creating pure movement through segregation from text embodies racial purity in the form of performance art. Chapter Three, "Character," focuses mainly on alternative ways of humanizing through movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade/The Proposition and FDWH to illustrate how the development of character, especially a historical figure, can be viewed from a different angle. While this approach is not iconoclastic, Lincoln’s character gets taken down a peg from deity status to a more relatable one. This chapter identifies the shift away from the traditional historiography of Lincoln pertaining to heroism to his personal, romantic life as central to Lincoln’s story. Nereson analyzes the three primary narrative prototypes: heroic, sacrificial and romantic. While challenging the national value based on patriarchal white supremacy, Serenade/The Proposition also challenges Lincoln’s narrative as a historical figure by painting him as an erotic partner. The piece stages eroticism, yet targets the human experience rather than vulgarity. Jones forms character development through movement and the characters’ physicality. In Chapter Four, "Place," Nereson analyzes the function of site-specific projects, using BTJ/AZ's 100 Migrations to explain the relationship between location and community. 100 Migrations, also known as “The Hundreds,” is a project that premiered in Charlottesville, VA, a liberalized conservative area. This chapter’s main argument emphasizes how the climax of a piece devised by Charlottesville residents and BTJ/AZ choreographers created a “kinesthetic landscape” serving as both a performance and community space. Nereson analyzes BTJ/AZ’s 100 Migrations as history through dance, speculating on the democratic tendencies within the conservative space. Nereson looks at the relationship between staging and place, discussing the symbolism of the South as the setting, making it a physical representation of Virginia’s history. In the fifth chapter, “Body,” Nereson examines the racialized embodiment in Lincoln Repertory performances. Specifically focusing on the FDWH piece, Nereson looks for answers in Jones’ investigation of blackness as a body vs character. Blackness is not viewed through a humanized scope but is rather objectified and made for display. Here, we journey back to the discourse concerning American enslavement relating to property over agency. In this case, the Lincoln Repertory is placed on display as Nereson illustrates the redefined enslavement of company expectations and its regulations over creativity that has yet to be diluted or stripped of its authenticity. Nereson highlights how the pressure to meet company standards changes the voice of the black dance artist. Chapter six, “Circulation,” covers the cyclical relationship between art and community. Here, Nereson outlines the artistic practice of spreading cultural wealth in communities, while respecting historically minoritarian foundations. This chapter discusses the dark side of diversity that caters to optics, leading to the erasure of individuality. Nereson analyzes the power of institutional spaces and the influence that universities carry as places of education and development. Nereson narrates the event of BTJ/AZ’s visit to the University of North Carolina- Greensboro presenting Serenade/The Proposition. This piece circulated a response to critical concerns regarding race and neoliberalism. Circulating performance means engaging with the community. In the coda, Nereson examines how Bill T. Jones’ Lincoln Repertory influences movement-based performance. She also analyzes how New York’s Live Arts perception of dance relies on visual differences to speak for diversity. Democracy Moving embodies scholarship that speaks most loudly to not only black aspiring dance artists and choreographers but also mid-career dance artists and choreographers of various racial backgrounds. Rather than simply concluding the volume’s impressive analysis of dance as an engaging history, this coda questions the ways we can continue striving to avoid essentialism through the expansion of neoliberal arts in the Americas. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JADA M. CAMPBELL Texas Tech University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Segal Talks The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is proud to announce its new global series, SEGAL TALKS. New York, US, and international theatre artists, curators, researchers and academics will talk daily for one hour with Segal Center’s director, Frank Hentschker, about life and art in the Time of Corona and speak about challenges, sorrows, and hopes for the new Weltzustand— the State of the World. The newly introduced SEGAL TALKS is in English, ad-free and will be live-streaming on howlround.tv, on the Segal Center Facebook page, as well as on the Segal Center YouTube Channel. Each session will be archived on both platforms, HowlRoundand the YouTube Channel, and will raise money for a theatre artist or a company. In collaboration with HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College. The Segal Center Play Video Play Video 23:05 The Barbarians by Paul Lazar and Jerry Lieblich | Prelude 2024 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. Play Video Play Video 40:22 Bad Stars by Amanda Horowitz | Prelude 2024 Two brothers writing a Hollywood movie about worms struggle to split apart. Like a worm cut in half, one play becomes two, becomes three, becomes many. Adapted from True West by Sam Shepard. Written & directed by Amanda Horowitz Performed by Brian Mendes, Peter Mills Weiss, Isa Spector Set and costumes by Maggie Fitzpatrick Bathtub painting by Adi Blaustein Rejto Rehearsal asst.: Carolyn Kettig, Hannah Applebaum, Hayley Stahl Special thanks to Jess Barbagallo, Sophia Cleary, Arne Gjelten Play Video Play Video 34:54 Going Beige with Lelie Cuyjet and Karen Kandel | Prelude 2024 Performing artists Leslie Cuyjet and Karen Kandel sit down for the first time to speak about their experiences, forming the start of a collaboration of a potential project. Play Video Play Video 16:03 Ornamentalism by Riven Ratanavanh | PRELUDE 2024 Ornamentalism is a ritual that explores the gendered racialization of the Asian transmasculine body, using tattoo as a way to inscribe personal loss and collective histories onto the skin. Through the duration of this piece the audience is invited to witness the act of transforming the body as an act of adornment, adornment as transformation; and the ways in which the two respond to and rub up against the world. In collaboration with Zhiyu Lu. Play Video Play Video 30:55 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Theatre Without Borders @9:30 pm ET, Hour 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Theatre Without Borders was the 24th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 9:30 pm ET in Hour 12 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. They invited Lebanese violinist Layale Chaker and American playwright-librettist Lisa Schlesinger to perform excerpts and speak about Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children—their opera about displaced children. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 29:37 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Ukrainian Actors of NY@9 pm ET, Hour 12 of 12, 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Ukrainian Actors of New York was the 23rd of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 9 pm ET in Hour 12 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Ukrainian Actors of New York's Alex Ozerov-Meyer, Sasha K. Odesa, Cynthia Adler, Tjaša Ferme and Tony Naumovski read excerpts from The Paris Review's Conversations to the Tune of Air-Raid Sirens: Odesa Writers on Literature in Wartime by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky to honor and amplify the voices of the brilliant writers of Odesa, Ukraine. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 30:28 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Mabou Mines @8:30 pm ET, Hour 11 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Mabou Mines | Performance Space New York were the 21st and 22nd of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 8:30 pm ET in Hour 11 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Mabou Mines represented by Sharon Fogarty and Senior Artistic Associate actress Maude Mitchell read poetry and texts in solidarity with Ukraine, joined by Yulia OK representing relief aid and street theatre organisation Razom For Ukraine. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 29:07 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Noor Theatre @8 pm ET, Hour 11 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Noor Theatre was the 20th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 8 pm ET in Hour 11 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Noor Theatre invited New York MENA/SWANA artists Noelle Ghoussaini and Bazeed to present digital and written pieces in response to global current events, diaspora and displacement. Introduced by Kate Moore Heaney, Artistic Producer at Noor Theatre. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 59:13 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: La MaMa & Yara Arts @7 pm ET, Hour 10 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. La MaMa & Yara Arts Group were the 18th and 19th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 7 pm ET in Hour 10 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. La MaMa invited resident artists Adham Hafez and Sophia Gutchinov from its 60th season to read poetry and texts in solidarity with Ukraine. Artists including ‘Maria from Mariupol’ from the Mariupol theatre community in Ukraine joined Virlana Tkacz to share their perspectives. Introduced by Mia Yoo, Artistic Director of La MaMa and Nicky Paraiso, Director of Programming at La MaMa. Yara Arts Group is a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. Together with actor Marina Celander, Yara Arts Group artistic leaders Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps read their award-winning translations of poetry by Serhiy Zhadan (Kharkiv, Ukraine) and Katerina Babkina (today a refugee in Poland). ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Load More

Deric McNish Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Deric McNish By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices . By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices is an illuminating and much-needed resource for directors, scholars, students, and Shakespeare aficionados. Between 2004 and 2015, Ney interviewed a veritable “who’s who” in the American Shakespeare scene. He selected 65 directors to participate in this study, an impressive feat as these are among the most prolific practitioners and artistic directors in the United States. Any of the interviewees in Charles Ney’s book could be the subject of an entire monograph, but Ney demonstrates a remarkable ability to curate this wealth of wisdom in a way that is compelling and easy to follow. Rather than presenting the interviews as self-contained essays, he has taken the much more useful approach of extracting and collating advice from each interviewee and organizing it based on topic. He identifies common approaches and creates convincing categories in which each director can be viewed. The book is engaging as a straight read-through, but it’s equally useful for the reader that wants to skip ahead and explore concise essays on various topics, such as approaches to table work, or how to navigate tech and previews. These practices are invaluable for directors of Shakespeare, but can be more broadly applied as resources for directing any kind of live theatre. A prolific director himself, Ney no doubt has his own informed opinions about how to approach directing Shakespeare, and yet he manages to serve as a fair and impartial conduit for each interviewee’s ideas. He transmits a variety of approaches without prejudice, saying “… there is more that can be learned by setting those judgements aside” (28). He is present in this work, not as a director, but as a keen scholar organizing a chaotic cacophony of ideas. Still, his underlying tone in this book is that of a person with great reverence for the artistic process and great respect for a diversity of approaches. Part I includes an introduction to each director’s career and attempts to identify their major beliefs and aesthetic sensibilities. Part II focuses on preproduction, how the director prepares to work with designers and actors. Part III explores the various approaches to rehearsal, with focuses on table work, staging, speaking the language, and middle stage rehearsals. Part IV, titled “Finishing the Production,” explores tech and dress, as well as the added element of the audience. Ney intends this book “to be a framework in which to view an individual’s work” (1). It accomplishes that and much more. A director can read Ney’s book and apply this framework to their own process. For example, a “Shakespeare as a Contemporary” director takes artistic license to promote the text’s relevance to the present. Conversely, an “Original Practices Director” works as a “director archeologist,” using Elizabethan staging practices to reveal possibilities in the text (31). The “Invisible Director” aims to “erase the traces” of the director (31) while the “Interpretive Director” actively attempts to collaborate with Shakespeare while putting forth a strong artistic vision for the play. For each of these approaches, Ney provides examples of specific directors’ processes. Categorizing directors based on their theoretical or practical approaches is challenging, but Ney makes convincing arguments for his breakdowns, while acknowledging that any individual director will defy those at times, based on the practical demands of their production or the nature of collaboration. These approaches are sometimes contradictory in a way that feels invigorating, as Ney creates a dialectic between powerful voices. The book then presents a breakdown of the common elements of production – selection, casting, concept, table-work, rehearsals, tech, previews, performance, etc. – and each section offers reflective advice from a number of directors. Ney doesn’t allow the discussions to become a collection of disconnected essays, but curates this information, extracting relevant information and placing it in appropriate sections. He develops useful categories and identifies major themes in each chapter. He sometimes identifies which approach is dominant, but never which approach is right. One can assume, based on the success of the interviewees, that every approach delineated has merit. The reader is invited to pick and choose. He manages to contextualize without getting in the way. These directors’ voices shine through. Ney’s contribution is unparalleled, in part because of his specific focus on the rich community of directors in the United States. A 1990 book by Ralph Berry called On Directing Shakespeare featured 12 interviews, including Trevor Nunn and Peter Brook, with no specific geographic focus. The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare , edited in 2008 by John Russell Brown, includes interviews with 31 directors (4 of which were American), and each chapter focused on a different director’s approach. Nancy Taylor’s 2005 book, Women Direct Shakespeare in America , focused on feminist performance theory in practice during the 1990s. Elizabeth Schafer took a similar approach in 2000 with her Ms – Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare . Countless instructional books exist that focus on directing Shakespeare, but each of those only focuses on one author’s specific approach. Ney’s book astonishingly avoids privileging one approach over another. This is a study that attempts to truly capture diverse approaches and contextualize them. Each interviewee generously throws open the doors to their process and the result is instructive. There were moments when I craved more examples from specific productions to illustrate points, or to more clearly set up the contrast between directors, but I understand this would have made things lengthier and perhaps cumbersome. This book is an effective snapshot of an incredibly diverse body of work and a must read for Shakespeare directors, scholars, and enthusiasts. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERIC MCNISH Michigan State University Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Germany Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Marvin Carlson Image Credits: Article A week or so in Germany in May, Covid years excepted, has long been a high point of my annual theatre-going. Although Berlin has often been my focus, the decentralized nature of the German theatre makes available an even richer selection even if one’s visits are limited to theatres only an hour or two train ride from the capital. Thus I began my 2023 visit with a mini-Shakespeare indulgence, beginning with King Lear in Hamburg, followed by Hamlet in Dessau and Macbeth in Dresden. Such a selection is by no means unusual in Germany, where Shakespeare makes an important contribution to the repertoire of almost every professional theatre. One of the results of this is that in Germany, where the director is often the dominant artist, the variety of interpretation, especially of the more familiar works, is almost beyond imagination (or some might say, reasonable justification). Accordingly I booked these productions expecting to see very little resemblance in any of them to the Shakespeare I might see in London or New York, and this indeed proved to be the case. King Lear . Photo: Armin Smailovic. I began with the Lear at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre, directed by Jan Bosse, who was in-house director there from 2000 to 2005 and has particularly close ties to Hamburg, though he directs regularly at most of the leading German-language theatres. Bosse is now in his mid-50s, the generation of Thomas Ostermeier and Michael Thalheimer. In the fairly predictable cycle of directorial reputations in Germany, leading directors like these, once considered revolutionary, are now generally considered respectable but very much a part of the establishment. In another decade or so, if they are still active, they will probably be considered hopelessly dated by at least the younger generation, as Peter Stein and Claus Peymann were in their time. In the meantime, Bosse is considered a major if somewhat conservative director although his work would appear quite radical in the Anglo-Saxon world. His production begins not in Lear’s palace but in a glittering disco ballroom, where instead of a throne, a shiny musicians’ platform is the focus. Above it a huge half globe with reflecting mirror surfaces provides a visual element that will be ingeniously used in various forms throughout the evening. Lear is the master of ceremonies, making a rather awkward entrance below the globe through a curtain of sequins to seize the microphone. Although he is dressed in full drag, with a brilliant glittering low-cut black gown with a sweeping train, and with deep black fingernails, there is nothing effeminate about him—an aging but still strongly virile figure. The actor is Wolfram Koch, a leading figure in contemporary Germany who recently played a magnificent Prospero directed also by Bosse at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and the colorful, but gender fluid costumes are the work of Kathrin Plath. The scene is developed as a TV spectacle, with Lear calling up his daughters from their seats in the front row (where they smile and wave as the audience applauds) to present their clearly scripted testimonies on stage. Goneril and Reagan (Anna Blomeier and Tioni Ruhnke) are perfect properties for Lear’s production—elegant model types, with splendidly glittering ball gowns, perfectly coiffed silver hair and of course long black fingernails and striking but subtle makeup. Poor Cordelia (Pauline Renevier, who also plays Edgar) lacks their visual elegance as well as the expected verbal display. She has not even the consolation of a volunteer husband, since Bosse has removed from this production many of the lesser characters, leaving only the three sisters, Lear and the Fool, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund (Johannes Hegemann, who also plays Oswald). After the glittering opening scenes, the elegant disco back curtain disappears, and the remainder of the production takes place in a cold black void, the central feature of which is the glittering half dome, which appears in an impressive variety of configurations. Still hanging in the air, it sometimes reveals its back side, essentially as assemblage of wooden supports, forming a kind of rough retreat where the villain Edmund can weave his plots, or the imprisoned King can be kept. Sometimes it sits dome-like on the floor as various characters climb up and down it to gain better positions. On the heath, tilted slightly upward, it becomes the sheltering hovel containing the outcast Edgar. In some scenes this central element is surrounded by a cloud of individual lights hanging from the flies. During the tempest scene, it is pelted by countless small white balls, which suggest a crushing hail, or much more ominously but more metaphorically appropriate, a rain of detached eyeballs. The imaginative and constantly changing design is by Stéphane Laimé. The reduced cast size leaves only leading actors, each of whom turns in a bravura performance. Perhaps especially notable is the flamboyant Edmund, a consummate villain in his flowing black hair, black petal sweater, shiny gold sports pants and cowboy boots. The ethereal Fool (Christiane von Poelnitz) in a yellow jumpsuit layered with gauzy wisps of fabric, hovers about Lear like a bedraggled and ineffective guardian angel, reduced to making ironic comments on a darkening situation. The production is dominated however, by the powerful visual images of Laimé and by the fading ruin of Koch’s Lear, a major addition to his already impressive creations of other monumental figures of the Western theatre. The next two evenings were devoted to other major Shakespearian tragedies, and although quite different from each other, both clearly demonstrated the general stylistic difference that exists between a “conventional” German director like Bosse and many members of the upcoming generation Bosse himself has jokingly referred to as the “pseudo-young savages.” This is not simply a matter of age. Both Phillip Preuss, director of the Dessau Hamlet , and Christian Friedal, director of the Dresden Macbeth , are only five years younger than Bosse, but both are clearly among the “young savages,” firmly on the other side of a distinct stylistic divide in contemporary German directing. This difference has many variations and has been described in many ways, but many German critics would use the term popularized by the theorists Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book, Postdramatic Theatre . Although the term has been much discussed and debated, the Preuss and Friedal productions would surely be characterized as postdramatic, in opposition to Bosse, despite his radical changes to the play. The central difference is that Bosse still essentially follows the plot and action of the original, respecting its overall narrative construction, while the others assemble and arrange images and motifs from the original or related sources and present these as a visual and oral collage which bears the name of its grounding text, but accepts no responsibility to the narrative contained in that text. The approach is clear from the moment when the audience enters the Dessau Theatre to see the Preuss Hamlet . We see two similar male figures (Niklas Herzberg and Felix Axel Preißler) in dark military garb with sparkling accents, seated downstage at a table. The audience assumption is surely that these are Marcellus and Bernardo, the watchmen whose dialogue has opened Shakespeare’s drama for centuries. In fact as they begin to speak, their lines are not the familiar opening of the play, but a series of unrelated exchanges of apparently free association, in which can be recognized fragments of the play, including parts of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Gradually we come to realize that these are not the guards but a divided Hamlet, out of joint with both his world and himself. In his (their) constant repetitions, false starts and recirclings, he (they) resemble less Shakespeare’s character than such postdramatic protagonists as the couples in Beckett or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The cast, in addition to these, consists of Stephan Korves, a loud, grotesque, insecure Claudius, Boris Malré as a fawning and servile Polonius, Cara Maria Nagler, who slips back and forth disturbingly but convincingly between Gertrude and Ophelia, and two “utility” men—Sebastian Graf, who plays Horatio, Rosencrantz, an actor and a gravedigger, and his “double” Roman Welzien, who plays Laertes, Guildenstern, another actor and another gravedigger. Lines from the Ghost are spoken by the entire company, often over the heavy booted tread of the unseen spirit. The stage, designed by Ramallah Sara Aubrecht, is in some ways extremely simple, in others highly complex. At the opening the table at the end of which the two Hamlets sit, is a long narrow one, running upstage and disappearing in the folds of a large curtain. On the curtain appears a live video showing a closeup of Claudius, carousing at his wedding banquet, and surrounded by everyone but Hamlet (the video is designed by Konny Keller). This scene actually takes place at the upper end of the long narrow table running down from far upstage, which is the main element of the set, although at this point it cannot be scene in its entirety. The offstage video then follows Gertrude/Ophelia as she leaves the King, climbs onto the table and walks slowly down it to where the Hamlets are sitting. As she comes through the curtains they part and for the first time we see her physically present, as the entire stage, and table is revealed. The effect is increased by a large mirror far upstage behind Claudius. We also for the first time see several other figures, dressed as courtiers, seated along the sides of the table, but soon realize they are actually dummies, somewhat reminiscent of the dead figures in a Kantor production. Most of the action takes place on or (thanks to the tracking live video, beneath this table, which serves as most of the settings of the production. A section in the center can be opened to suggest a grave, which from time to time welcomes the bodies of various actors, who climb in, are covered with dirt, and then climb out again to resume their eternal and repetitive dance of life and death. The other major scenic element is a variety of full stage curtains, of widely varying styles and set at different depths, suggesting a constant play of somewhat arbitrary beginnings and endings. Upon each curtain plays a continuing live video image of the apparently never-ending wedding banquet. Now and then a fleeting image suggests a particular scene –the player king and queen embracing Ophelia lowered into her grave, but these are merely passing images, sometimes repeated, never contextualized, and always embedded in a sea of contentious language. Like all three of the Shakespearian productions I saw, this was accompanied by the almost continuous contributions of a small onstage band with keyboard, strings, and percussion (music by Cornelius Heidebrecht). The continual repetitions and opening and closings of curtains calculatedly gave little indication of an approaching conclusion. On the contrary every effort was made to suggest something of a never-ending dream—perhaps that suggested in Hamlet’s central soliloquy, fragments of which are constantly repeated. Before the production begins, as the audience assembles in the lobby, confused noises are heard from behind the closed doors into the theatre. When the auditorium doors open, the audience enters to find the two seated figures in place on the stage, and projected behind them the live video of the loud and unruly wedding party, which has been going on for some time, and which we heard from outside. Like many post-dramatic creations, the production ends where it began, suggesting that there is in fact no ending. The two Hamlets resume their positions and conversation downstage and the video of the celebration continues on the closed curtain behind them. Eventually, their conversation ceases but the video continues. Perhaps ten minutes passed before the audience decided the performance was over and there was scattered applause, but nothing changed on stage. After another rather long wait a few audience members left, then others. When the house was perhaps half empty I went to the door and waited as others left. It was now about twenty minutes since the last words or live action on the stage, though perhaps a hundred determined spectators remained to watch the unmoving Hamlets and the continuing video projection. Out in the lobby I recognized that the sounds I heard there from inside the theatre were much the same as I had heard before the theatre opened, and I realized that the effect was to suggest that the display within presumably never ended, like the waiting for Godot. One might wonder if so extreme a version of this well-known drama would be well received, and the answer is that although naturally the performance had its critics, this Hamlet was selected by a jury of leading German critics and theorists as one of the ten outstanding productions of the year, and invited to participate in the annual Theatertreffen held later this same month in Berlin. Macbeth . Photo: Sebastian Hoppé. My third Shakespeare, the Dresden Macbeth , was as unconventional as the Dessau Hamlet , but developed from a very different set of assumptions and circumstances. In 2011, Christan Friedel, an actor at the Dresden State Theatre, joined the four members of the pop rock band Arctic Circle 18 to form a new group, dedicated to working in theatre and film as well as on the concert stage. They significantly took their name from Shakespeare, the Woods of Birnam. The first major undertaking of the new group was in providing the onstage live musical accompaniment for a production of Hamlet in Dresden in 2012, directed by Roger Vontobel. Friedel played the title role, for which he created and performed several songs. The group’s second theatrical venture was a collection of dramatic and musical works inspired by various Shakespearian texts and presented in Dresden under the title Searching for William in 2016. As the group’s reputation grew through a series of album releases, tours throughout Germany and Austria, and as far as Elsinore and major concerts, a production of Macbeth itself became inevitable. Like major and minor theatre projects all over the world, however, it fell victim to Covid. Just a week before its scheduled opening in Dresden in 2020 the theatre was closed, and although a much reduced concert version, Searching for Macbeth , was presented later that year for a limited audience, the full production could not be mounted for another two years. At that time it ran for over three hours, as compared to the seventy minutes of Searching for Macbeth and the approximately two and a half hours of both the Bosse Lear and the Preuss Hamlet , both based on much longer texts. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. Although more of the original in terms of lines and scenes could be perceived in this production than in the Dessau Hamlet , the Dresden Macbeth was essentially not so much a theatrical production as a no-holds-barred rock concert, with the emphasis not on the music, and even less on the text, but largely on the spectacular visual effects, stunning even for a m ajor German theatre. The witch’s realm was represented by a large open metallic box, filled with a writhing figure, that from time to time rose up out of the stage floor, the first time under the feet of Macbeth and Banquo. The menacing Birnam Woods formed an ever-present threat, both visually and aurally, appearing in countless and ever shifting forms—using video projections, beams of light, and massive moving screens, among other devices. Often hovering over the action was what seemed like a skeletal craft out of Star Wars , lined with machines that engulfed the stage with billowing clouds of smoke and powerful spotlights that could pick out particular actors, usually Macbeth, or in different combinations send down shafts of light that could suggest the walls of an insubstantial room. Certain images, like the bleeding hands, were developed into complex visual sequences, partly live and partly filmic. A striking example was the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would produce many royal descendants—a brief passage in the play—which was elaborated into a complex visual spectacle lasting several minutes and primarily created by film and video technology using the image of an adolescent boy in crown and royal robes splitting, multiplying, and creating increasingly complex visual patterns rather like a kaleidoscope or the dancers in the climax of a Busby Berkley musical. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. With all this spectacle the acting contributions of individual performers (there were over fifty of them) made a distinctly lesser impact. Indeed in terms of acting, critics regularly referred to this as a one-man show, not only because Friedel directed, created the music and acted and sang the title role, but also because spots and mikes often picked him out as the only distinct character amid a background of dark and constantly shifting configurations of characters. Like all the rest, however, he remained rather upstaged by the physical production, and his Macbeth was generally considered adequate, though rather conventional and even old-fashioned, considering the competition from the production as a whole. Aside from Friedel, the real stars of the show were the designer, Alexander Wolf, the lighting designer Johannes Zinc, and the video designers Clemens Walter and Jonas Dahl. By and large, the critics considered the production as a success in terms of its technical spectacle and far less impressive as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. For audiences, however, the production was a major event, and the show is playing to continuously sold-out houses and standing ovations. Although all the productions I attended in Germany had good audiences, only in Dresden did I have real difficulty in obtaining a seat. Antigone . Photo: David Baltzer. The remainder of my trip was spent in Berlin, where my choices became much more varied. I began with one more major world classic, Antigone , at the Gorki Theatre, which once again demonstrated the liberties taken with such texts in many contemporary productions. The setting, designed by Zahava Rodrigo, was composed of dark billowing cloud-like forms, suggesting perhaps Antigone’s fatal cave or perhaps, given the feminist orientation of the work, a sheltering womb. In it, four Antigone figures (Lea Draeger, Eva Löbau, Julia Riedler, and Ҁiǧdem Teke) and an accompanying musician on an electronic keyboard (Fritzi Ernst) presented what might be described as a highly emotional group therapy session lasting about an hour and 45 minutes. Director Leonie Böhm is well known for her radical revisions of the classics, particularly for her 2019 feminist version of Schiller’s The Robbers , performed, like this Antigone, by four women. Of the Sophocles text, little is left but fragments of the famous choric ode on the wonder of man. The text and actions have been instead developed from the ensemble’s improvisations on the themes of shame, exposure, personal loyalties, physicality and death. Some of the material is clearly improvised, especially when one or another actor directly addresses members of the audience. It is not an easy production to watch, especially the first ten minutes, when not a word is spoken, but the four actresses collect their saliva, play with it rather like chewing gum and mix and smear it on the faces and in the mouths of their partners. In a theatre just recovering from Covid, this sequence provided the audience with a serious initial challenge, and not a few departed. After saliva came shit, the central image of shame, and clearly the most often repeated word in the text. A large pool of the appropriate color and texture provided material throughout the evening for the actresses to smear themselves and each other, and each of them, some nude, at least once immersed herself completely and emerged dripping to continue the performance. Certainly, the audience could sympathize with the often stated feelings of shame and embarrassment expressed by the actresses, but it seemed to me that these feelings were on the whole shared by the audience, and not in a positive way. The Broken Jug . Photo: Arno Declair. My last three evenings were scarcely more conventional, but on the whole more enjoyable. All were at the Deutsches Theater, which on the whole remains the most distinguished of the many major theatres in the capital. On my first night there I saw a German classic, rarely done abroad, Kleist’s The Broken Jug , generally considered among the few major German comedies. The plot concerns a provincial Dutch judge, Adam, who gains access to the bedroom of a local young woman, Eve, falsely claiming that for the proper favors he can rescue Eve’s fiance Ruprecht from military service. Surprised in the bedroom by the fiance, Adam escapes through the window, smashing an heirloom jug prized by Eve’s mother. The play consists of an investigation brought by the mother to reveal the intruder’s identity, a trial in which Adam serves as judge. His increasingly desperate attempts to avoid exposure are finally thwarted by a visiting external official who insists on seeing justice done. Interestingly, this was the only production of the seven I saw that related to its grounding text in a conventional way. Kleist’s sprawling text was cut, and in a few cases slightly updated, but generally faithfully followed, with careful attention to psychological and linguistic nuance. Still, it was definitely a contemporary interpretation. Perhaps most notably, the visiting magistrate who ensures the moral order is no longer a man, but a shrewd, thoughtful, authoritative, and clearly pregnant young woman (Lorena Handschin). Director Anne Lenk has presented a series of popular classic revivals at the Deutsches, and is known for her general faithfulness to the text, with moderate, usually feminist updating. The Broken Jug shows this clearly, with justice at last established by a female judge, despite the best efforts of a corrupt patriarchy (led of course by Adam) to cast all blame on the female victim. The sleazy Adam, his face still revealingly scarred by his encounter with the jug, is beautifully played by Urich Mattius, one of Germany’s most revered actors, and although he dominates the stage, he is ably supported by leading members of the theatre’s famed ensemble, including Lisa Hrdina as the abused Eve, Tamer Tahan as the wronged fiancé, Franziska Machens as Eve’s ranting mother, more concerned with her jug then her daughter, and Jeremy Mockridge as Adam’s faithful but rather dull clerk. Aside from its excellent acting, the production is a visual feast. Scene designer Judith Oswald has created a narrow stage, containing only a row of 14 chairs, facing the audience and close to the footlights. The actors move ingeniously among these chairs such a way as to constantly suggest the shifting relationships among them (Eve and Ruprecht for example, are placed at opposite ends of the row for much of the early action, and gradually coming together as they are reconciled). Immediately behind these chairs is a magnificent still painting filling the entire stage space—a 17 th- century Dutch still life showing a lavishly furnished table, with goblet and play, oysters and ham, peaches, pomegranates and grapes, and even a huge parrot. No such opulence would be found in the home of a Dutch village judge like Adam, but costume designer Sibylle Wallum has created a set of somewhat anachronistic but richly imaginative costumes in the pink, orange coral range which combine beautifully with the opulent background. The following evening I returned to the Deutsches Theatre, to its smaller venue, the Kammerspiele, or more precisely to the stage of the Kammerspiele where seventy or eight chairs had been set up in rows on the revolving turntable in the middle of the stage. Here the audience was turned to different positions where various backstage areas (and occasionally the auditorium itself and the walkways above the stage over our heads) became temporary performance spaces. The production was of special interest to me, Ibsen’s very rarely performed early work, The Pretenders , one of the few Ibsen plays I had never seen. The young director Sarah Kunze argues that Ibsen’s historical drama has been unjustly neglected, but this so-called “limited edition” does not really offer enough of the original to make a strong case. Ibsen’s play owes much to Shakespeare, with a huge sprawling plot and dozens of characters. Everything in this adaptation is vastly reduced—the length, the complex plot, and most striking of all, the characters, reduced to only three actors, who primarily appear as the three central characters—rather like reducing Henry IV to the Prince, Hotspur, and Falstaff. Granted, these characters anchor the action: the two rivals for the crown, the attractive and gifted Haakon (Lorena Handschin), and the dark and manipulative Skule (Natalia Seelig) and the Machiavellian Bishop Nikolas who feeds off of their rivalry (Elias Arens). This distinctly melodramatic edge was even more clearly evident in Arens’ Bishop Nikolas, whose flamboyant delivery, especially in his death scene and his return as a minister from hell, were high points of the production, as they are of the original play. I was pleased to see this theatrical rarity in any form, but the staging, cutting, and presentation in fact left so little of the original that I doubt it many audience members will accept the director’s assertion that she has rediscovered a forgotten gem. Leonce and Lena . Photo: Arno Declair. My final production, back on the mainstage of the Deutsches Theatre, was a new interpretation by Ulrich Rasche of George Büchner’s Leonce and Lena , a popular revival piece in Germany, but almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since his groundbreaking innovative production of Schiller’s The Robbers in 2018 Rasche has been hailed as one of the most powerful and original of young German directors, with his highly technological, powerfully lit, and perpetually and obsessively acted reworkings of classic texts. Büchner’s grotesque fantasy/comedy seems far removed from Rasche’s usual dark material, but he brings it unquestionably into his distinctive dramatic world through a striking directorial choice. Very little of the actual text of Leonce and Lena remains in Rasche’s production. It is replaced by extensive passages from other Büchner writings, including his letters, his revolutionary play Danton’s Death, and most significantly a good deal of an eight page call for political revolution, the 1834 Hessicher Landbote , for which the author was charged with treason and forced to seek asylum in France. The stage, designed by Rasche, is typical of his work, a vast essentially dark and empty space, here largely occupied by a massive, constantly revolving turntable, and a striking abstract element, here a huge, steadily shifting monumental lattice screen composed of color-changing fluorescent tubes (lighting by Cornelia Gloth). A chorus of ten actors, all clad in black with only their faces and hands dimly visible in a wash of blue light. Occasionally a chorus member will briefly emerge from the group to deliver a line, but the main body of the chorus remains steadily trudging onward, upon the constantly turning treadmill, slowly chanting the litany of oppressions and injustice making up the notorious pamphlet. Four musicians, placed in the front boxes with synthesizers, provide an appropriately crushing and continuous techno beat to accompany the unrelenting treading and chanting of the company. The effect is undoubtedly a powerful one, but at two and a half hours with no intermission, I found myself as much stunned as energized. This is an impression I often get from Rasche’s work, despite the unquestionable power of his visual imagination. In summary, I found the German theatre as always far more daring, more innovative, and more open to works (especially often neglected historical ones) than the Anglo-Saxon stage, which expands most of its creative energy on musical theatre and otherwise is satisfied as best with formulaic revivals of a handful of mostly English language plays. The German interest in pushing the boundaries certainly does not always work for me, but equally offers new insights into traditional works and into the potential of theatre to relate in new ways to the world around it to make this theatrical culture, so different from my own, continually fascinating. References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.