By Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni | A collection of recent work by Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaibi, capturing the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. < 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 The Trilogy of Future Memory Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson Translations by Marvin Carlson and Nabil Cherni. Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaïbi are two of the most important voices in contemporary Arab theater. No theatre artists were more closely involved with the ongoing events of the Arab Spring nor more astute critics of the constantly shifting political scene and their plays are enormously helpful in understanding the cross-currents of a country like Tunisia at the opening of the twenty-first century. Baccar’s roles, acting and theatrical narratives, co-created by her director and husband Fadhel Jaïbi, are extremely intricate, psychologically multi-layered, and have the uncanny ability to capture the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. Baccar has performed in over twenty of her plays, including major theatrical productions that have been staged worldwide by Jaïbi: Junun (Dementia, 2009) at the Edinburgh Festival, Khamsoun (Captive Bodies, 2006) – the first Arab play to be performed at the Théâtre de L’Odéon in Paris, and Araberlin (2002), among many others. Together they founded Tunisia’s first private theatre company, Le Nouveau Théâtre in 1976, as well as (in 1994) Familia Productions, instrumental in modernizing Tunisian theatre and engaging it in contemporary political concerns. This collection of their recent work, The Trilogy of Future Memory, includes Khamsoun (2006), translated by Nabil Cherni, and Amnesia (2010), and Tsunami(2013) translated and Marvin Carlson who has also provided an introduction. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Karl G. Ruling 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 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Karl G. Ruling By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Jason Sanchez and Xavier Cano in Long Wharf’s production of El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography. “We’re still here,” is the declaration announcing Long Wharf Theatre's 25-26 season. It's a good lede for my review of Long Wharf's last season, too. Long Wharf Theatre is still here, but “here” is not fixed; it moves. Long Wharf's performances and events were held at venues throughout New Haven and as far away as Middletown, Connecticut. All the shows and events supported Long Wharf's goal to be a nexus “where bold storytelling and vibrant communities come together to shape the future of American theatre.” The shifting event locations also got audience members into communities and venues they'd perhaps never visited before. The season started with a three-day “Artistic Congress,” 15 consecutive sessions each scheduled for 1 1/2 to 2 hours that were talks, panel discussions, audience workshops, and short scenes at venues in New Haven, culminating with a staged reading of Anna Deavere Smith's work-in-progress, This Ghost of Slavery, in the Crowell Concert Hall at Wesleyan University in Middletown. The New Haven events were held at Gateway Community College, BAR (a nightclub), the New Haven Public Library, Yale's Schwartzman Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Long Wharf's signage—often sandwich boards on the sidewalk—was excellent for guiding attendees to the venues, and there always were smiling greeters to tell us we'd arrived at the right place. Long Wharf's publications often talk about how storytelling is essential for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world around us. The Congress touched on those ideas but also suggested that collaborative work (what theatre makers do) can be a way for our communities to address our common problems. One of the sessions, “Civic Scores #2 : 'Who has the pen to shift the housing crisis,'” had audience members in teams using Lego blocks to design ideal communities. What's ideal and for whom? There were interesting discussions among participants about the complexities of zoning and building codes. We didn't solve the housing crisis, but we got far beyond, “Somebody should do something.” Anna Deavere Smith's This Ghost of Slavery is an extension of her work in documentary theatre. Previous verbatim theatre works of hers have featured a solo performer (often herself) portraying a multitude of people with a script based on interviews she had with those people. This Ghost of Slavery is a bit different, being based on archival material as well as recent interviews. The 39 characters of the play, originally published in The Atlantic magazine's December 2023 issue, were portrayed by 17 performers, including two musicians, in a staged reading, arrayed across the platform at Crowell Concert Hall. The play, directed by Aneesha Kurdtarkar, is set in Baltimore and Annapolis, moves between the 1860s and the present, and explores the school-to-prison pipeline as part of the legacy of American slavery. Although published, the script was a work in progress, a bit long in performance, but an important exploration of how the past affects how we treat each other now. She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and book by Joe Masteroff, was a wonderful holiday celebration, performed at the Lab at Conncorp in Hamden. Based on a play by Miklós László and set in Budapest in 1937, the plot revolves around the employees of Maraczek’s Parfumerie. Clerks Georg and Amalia loathe each other in the shop, while unaware that each is the other’s secret pen pal who met through lonely-hearts ads. A lovely final scene had the lovers together under falling snow. Director Jacob G. Padrón, assembled an excellent singing company of actors of different races and ethnicities, different body types. The only nod to conventional American musical casting expectations was that the lead couple were thin people, young and lively. The performance space at the Lab at Conncorp was formerly a middle school gym. The staging, designed by Emmie Finckel, was tennis court style, with the audience on two facing sides, the main playing space in the middle, and the larger scenic elements at the ends. One end was the parfumerie shop. The other end, a comfortable 1930s living room, held the four-piece orchestra. Scenes outside the parfumerie, such as the restaurant, were played in the middle space with a few props quickly brought into place by the actors playing the minor characters. Changes of season were indicated by simple devices such as the delivery boy taking leaves from his pocket, tossing them into the air, and announcing “Autumn.” Later he took snow from his pocket and tossed it and announced “Winter.” The lighting, designed by Jiyoun Chang, shifted color to match. The show ran smoothly and the singing was beautiful. I found it enchanting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom had us visiting Southern Connecticut State University’s John Lyman Auditorium in New Haven for a show in the stage left wing. The Lyman stage is so big that the stage wing provided enough room for five rows of audience seating facing an end-stage. The setting, designed by Gerardo Diaz Sanchez, was a city block in Brooklyn: three brick building facades, a fire escape, a roll-up steel door, and a billboard facing a sidewalk, forming a wide but shallow playing space. The door rolled up and a wagon rolled out for interior scenes. The brick walls and the billboard were surfaces for projections by John Horzen. The play, written by Matt Barbot and directed by Kinan Valdez, is a mash-up of comic book superhero fantasy and Puerto Rican real-life in American capitalist economy. Alex, the main character, a young Nuyorican comic book artist, creates a comic book superhero, El Coquí Espectacular, a crime-fighter based on Puerto Rican folklore about a tree frog. Alex takes his invention further by creating an El Coquí costume and wearing it as a real-life protector in his neighborhood. His older brother Joe, a marketing exec for a major soda company, sees an opportunity to use Alex's help marketing to Puerto Ricans a spicy, sugary soft drink Voltage—so sugary it's unhealthy. The play at SCSU worked with the tensions between identity, responsibility to community, and making a living—and went off into fantasy with the appearance of the blood-sucking El Chupacabra and battles between it and El Coquí, punctuated with POW! and BAM! as seen in the Batman 1960s TV series projected on the setting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom was an interesting piece, but many scenes were played with the volume turned up to eleven. That intensity was amusing for the 25-minute Batman TV shows but wearying for a full-length play. However, it spoke to the audience. One person during the talkback said, “I am in a comic book,” and he seemed to like that. Another audience member said he appreciated seeing Puerto Rican folklore being taken seriously. Why can't there be Puerto Rican super-heroes? Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny was a one-person show written and performed by Terrence Riggins. It was presented at the Off Broadway Theater, behind the Shops at Yale—literally off Broadway, accessed via a footpath through the middle of the block. Unbecoming Tragedy was his own story of addiction and incarceration. The setting was the corner of a jail cell. The blank cell walls served as projection surfaces for fantastic images by designer Hannah Tran. In the playwright's notes in the program, Riggins calls his show a ritual, a confession, a rite of passage, a cleansing, a way through. I saw an exorcism. Riggins portrayed a tortured soul, trying to tear the shame of stealing his dying mother's opal necklace to support his drug habit out of his life. The director, Cheyenne Barboza, in her program note invited the audience members to “become more aware of the systems in our society that isolate and marginalize. And in that awareness, I hope we choose compassion.” An insert in the program listed thirteen local resources offering help for people and their families dealing with addiction, hopelessness, and problems with mental health, incarceration, and reintegration into society. “More than a theme, We’re Still Here is a statement of resilience,” said Long Wharf Theatre's 2025-26 season announcement. In early May, Long Wharf Theatre was notified that the National Endowment for the Arts had terminated four grants, totaling more than $170,000. Besides terminating these grants, the NEA issued new guidelines for grant applications prohibiting programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173, or promoting “gender ideology,” in keeping with Executive Order No. 14168. "Gender ideology" has no accepted definition but is used by opponents of gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. Unlike some major entertainment corporations, Long Wharf Theatre has not canceled shows to align with Executive Orders; DEI is integral to its vision. The season webpage promises the next chapter in this vision: “co-productions that reach beyond state lines, programming that uplifts historically marginalized voices, and performances that blur the boundary between art and civic action.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. 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.

Henry Bial 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 Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Henry Bial By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. The concept of artistic research travels under various names (practice as research, performance as research, creative research, etc.) through various national and institutional contexts. At the same time, performance studies scholars insist that art-making constitutes not just the preservation and transmission of culture, but the generation of new knowledge. “Yet,” as scholar-artist Ben Spatz notes in their introduction to Race and the Forms of Knowledge, “a wide gulf remains between this critical assertion and the activation of its implications, which in their implementation imply nothing less than an epistemic revolution” (3). The stakes of that revolution are the decolonization of knowledge itself, demanding a radicalized and reflective approach to artistic research that is informed by “black studies, critical race studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies, as well as feminist and queer theory” (11) [an Author’s Note (ix), explains Spatz’s choice to lowercase all identity designations]. An Introduction, “Materialities in Artistic Research” lays out the book’s intent “to reformulate and radicalize artistic research as an intervention into the racialized forms of knowledge” (23). This is accomplished through three chapters, each a lengthy meditation of fifty pages or more exploring how and why performance can and must challenge our concepts of knowledge, power, and identity. The introduction also announces the author’s desire “to avoid what I call ‘white writing’: the logocentric usage of alphabetic writing to inscribe a dominating sense of prior reason and truth” (21). Instead, Spatz offers sustained engagements with a range of ideas and practices both familiar and unfamiliar to performance studies scholars. These engagements, which unfold gracefully across each chapter, are as provocative as they are evocative, frequently gesturing at understandings that the text itself cannot contain. Chapter 1, “Molecular Identities,” begins from the premise that considering identity in performance solely through the lens of casting is inherently limiting, anchoring analysis to a fixed notion of identity as adhering only and always to an individual performer. “To think beyond casting,” Spatz writes, “is to bypass the individualist framing of identity as that which a given person is or is not and to think instead about how racial and other identities cut through a given moment, event, or practice, at levels both above and below the individual” (31). Instead, drawing on the work of dramaturgs Dorinne Kondo and Katherine Profeta, the chapter argues for greater attention to the lived process of performance-making, in which racial and other identities are continually explored, negotiated, and played with. In this context, suggests Spatz, “the individual performer is no longer taken for granted as a premise or starting point but is recognized as a nexus or site at which multiple layers of technique and identity intersect” (36). Building on the framework established in What a Body Can Do (Routledge 2015), the chapter offers a complex and radically interdisciplinary model in which elements of performance technique (gesture, melody, breath) are understood as “molecule[s] of gendered and racialized material” (60) that have both material and sociocultural significance. Significantly, this means shifting our attention from a finished public performance to the rehearsal room as the most active site of artistic research, as well as looking beyond the live performance to technologically-mediated audiovisual works. Chapter 2, “Whiteness and the Racialization of Knowledge,” provides a dense but masterful opening section (“White Writing,” 83) that synthesizes a wide range of theoretical perspectives from black studies, performance studies, and poststructuralist theory to argue that concepts such as “ knowledge, expertise, science, thought, rationality and research ” should be reframed “in the context of european colonialism and the ongoing global hegemony of european and eurocentric modes of thought, as artifacts of white writing” (101, emphasis in original). In response, the author calls for a critical whiteness practice, one that unmasks whiteness from its unmarked claim to universality. The chapter considers the post-theatrical work of Jerzy Grotowski as a possible model, noting that in his interculturalism and his move away from logocentrism, “Grotowski looked for techniques that could transform or even transcend identity” (131). Yet Grotowski’s work, Spatz argues, proved difficult, if not impossible, to scale beyond the individual, suggesting that more significant social transformation demands confronting institutional forms and structures of knowledge, i.e. the university. The latter part of the chapter then considers three approaches to artistic research developed in European and North American universities, “roughly glossed as those of inclusion, escape, and experimentation” (134). The inclusive approach seeks to make space within the research university for artistic work to be recognized and valued; such attempts, as illustrated by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), are well-intentioned but prone to co-optation by the corporate and political power of the institution. Escapist approaches take the opposite tack, positioning artistic research as “always in excess of the university, constantly fleeing and escaping its expectations and in this way radically unavailable to capture and co-optation” (140). This tactic, which looms large in contemporary performance studies, is illustrated through an analysis of Erin Manning’s Concordia University (Montreal)-based SenseLab. The third model, experimentation, takes more direct aim at the institutional structure itself, explicitly challenging the primacy of (white) writing. Though all three approaches have their merits, the author concedes, “It is only honest to admit that I find myself personally in closest alignment with pragmatist and experimental approaches: those that neither take prevailing institutions for granted nor seek to disappear from them but instead grapple with them through a kind of technics that is deeply engaged with matters of form” (134). This is vividly illustrated in Chapter 3, “Audiovisual Ethnotechnics,” which details some of the author’s own experiments in artistic research. Most of these examples are drawn from “The Judaica Project,” an extended multi-year series of investigations conducted at various sites in the US, UK, and Poland, and organized around “an embodied practice of singing or songwork in which jewishness is treated as molecular” (152). These examples are richly described, with particular emphasis on how strategic uses of audiovisuality, including both sound and video recording, can enhance the generative power of artistic research by capturing the dynamic relationship between identity and technique theorized in the first chapter. This is not simply a matter of documentation, but of using the potential of audio-visual media to juxtapose and layer sound and image in ways that explore new relationships between identity, temporality, and place. Importantly, Spatz’s explorations of “molecular jewishness” are based not only in practice, but in a deep engagement with major thinkers in Jewish cultural studies, such as Jonathan Boyarin, Shaul Magid, and Santiago Slabodsky. Along the way, the chapter makes a compelling case that critical theory itself can be understood as a counter-hegemonic mode of reading and writing that is specifically Jewish. Building on the work of other scholars who have highlighted the marginalized position of figures such as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Derrida, as well as the Talmudic tradition of learned disagreement that, some argue, anticipates poststructuralism, Spatz suggests that a critical Jewish studies might find common cause with critical Black studies, critical Indigenous studies, and other decolonial approaches to knowledge, if and only if it can acknowledge and overcome its “entanglement with whiteness” (136). While not the central focus of the book, this nevertheless represents an important contribution to Jewish studies, and I hope Spatz finds an opportunity to expand on this thesis in the future. Considered singly, each chapter of Race and the Forms of Knowledge makes a substantial contribution to conversations within theatre and performance studies about practice-as-research, about audio-visual media, and about the critical slipperiness of identity in performance. Taken as a whole, however, this ambitious and uncompromising volume poses a different kind of challenge to the field: to embody that which we profess, and to profess that which we embody. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. 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.

Andrea Harris Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF When the frontier melodrama, The Scouts of the Prairie , And, Red Deviltry As It Is! , opened in Chicago in December 1872, it marked the beginning of a performance genre that would have significant impact on the American national imagination. Written by Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), the dime novel author who christened William F. Cody “Buffalo Bill,” The Scouts of the Prairie was the first stage play to star the famous frontiersman as himself, playing out the “real” drama of his Western adventures for spectators. Scouts launched a fourteen-year theatrical tradition that evolved into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , the extremely successful performance spectacle that played across the US and in Europe for three decades. Scholars have long credited Cody’s Wild West as “the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier,” the thesis that the road to modernity was necessarily fraught with violent conflicts between “civilized” and “savage” peoples. [1] Appearing alongside Cody in the frontier play were Buntline himself, the scout John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and, as the American Indian princess Dove Eye and Cody’s love interest, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi. The lion’s share of the existing scholarship on Cody’s performance focuses on his better-known large outdoor spectacles, sidelining the theatrical combinations that started his thespian career. More recent studies are expanding our knowledge of Cody’s stage plays, but even here, no one has questioned the incongruous casting of the famous Italian ballerina as an American Indian woman in the production that launched the western celebrity’s stage career, The Scouts of the Prairie . [2] Most authors mention that the cast of Scouts included a well-known Italian dancer, but stop short of asking what kind of dance she did in the play, why dance might have been included, or what meanings it might have expressed. But by casting such a neutral lens on the dancing Dove Eye, scholars have failed to understand dance itself as a meaningful text in the play. As I will show, Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie —not only the fact that she danced, but how , set in context with nineteenth-century discourses on ballet, the female ballet dancer, and the city—produces a more complex reading of Morlacchi’s character and the frontier melodrama. Born in Milan in 1836, Morlacchi was six years old when she entered the famed La Scala ballet academy, then the world’s leader in classical dance under the leadership of Carlo Blasis. With her impeccable training, Morlacchi worked with some of the most reputable choreographers in Europe, and was soon invited to join the ballet company at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. She was engaged by artist-manager Don Juan de Pol to come to the US to appear in the 1867 The Devil’s Auction , one of the elaborate ballet-spectacles that became immensely popular after the success of The Black Crook in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Morlacchi worked as both a dancer and choreographer on the ballet-spectacle stage, until she left that genre to pursue her own choreographic career. Making its home in Boston, the Morlacchi Ballet traveled the country from 1868-1872, performing a mixed repertory drawn from European Romantic and post-Romantic ballets and American spectaculars and melodramas. Critics saw in Morlacchi’s dancing the essence of European culture transported to American stages. “She has sparked an excitement among the most cultivated of our citizens and everyone wants to see her perform,” [3] asserted the New York Evening Transcript , and Boston papers concurred, “Many of the refined and cultivated people . . . whose knowledge of art has been perfected by European experiences have been the first in America to detect the genius of this danseuse.” [4] How interesting, then, to find Morlacchi, the embodiment of European classicism, the exemplar of cultured taste, appearing alongside the rugged western scouts, bringing European academic dance onto Buffalo Bill’s (otherwise) “wild” frontier stage. It is not clear how Morlacchi found her way into the western melodrama. Her company was performing at Nixon’s Opera House in Chicago in late 1872, when Buntline finally convinced Cody and Omohundro to meet him in that city for their theatrical debut. Morlacchi was a sought-after performer by theatre managers, and was known as a talented dramatic mime. Perhaps previous roles she had created for herself, including a mute Native American woman in The Wept of Wish-ton-wish , made her seem an especially attractive choice for the Dove Eye role. Perhaps it was Morlacchi’s manager, Major John M. Burke, who met Cody a year later through the dancer and became the highly influential publicity manager who crafted much of the legendary imagery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , who pointed her towards Buntline’s cast. At any rate, at the end of her company’s season in Chicago in late 1872, Morlacchi was engaged to join the cast of The Scouts of the Prairie as Dove Eye, the Indian maiden. [5] Though no script survives, scholars have been able to rebuild much of the plot of Scouts through program scene synopses and newspaper reviews. [6] As the play opened, trapper Cale Durg (played by Buntline) entered the camp he shared with his ward, the “lovely white girl” Hazel Eye. [7] Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack (both played by themselves) stormed in “with a fiendish yell” [8] and a tale of their last hunt. Dove Eye ran into the scouts’ camp to warn them of her tribesmen’s plans to attack them, led by Wolf Slayer. Yelling war whoops, the four exited, intent on revenge. In the next scene, Hazel Eye was captured by Wolf Slayer and his Indians, recruited by the renegade Mormon Ben, who desired her for his fiftieth wife. Durg tried to save her, but he was outnumbered, and he and Hazel Eye were tied to the stake to be burned. The Indians danced and sang a “Death Dance” around Durg, while he, unperturbed, taunted his captors. Dove Eye “dance[d] in [and] sever[ed] the bonds of Hazel Eye;” together they freed Durg, and fought the Indians. [9] Bill and Jack came to the rescue, vowing “Death to the Redskins,” and Act I concluded with a massive slaughter of Indians, leading the New York Times reviewer to comment that “the unmitigated bloodshed that ends every act and almost every scene of this unique composition were so satisfactory to the public, that the management might be forgiven for hereafter assuming that the key to success must lie in the exhibition of cataracts of gore.” [10] In Act II, Bill declared his love for Dove Eye, and, in turn, Jack his for Hazel Eye. Their bliss was short-lived, however, as both women were again abducted by the Indians, and Durg again captured. Once again tied up (to a tree this time), Durg took the opportunity to deliver a temperance lecture, one of actor/playwright Buntline’s long-time causes. Durg was shot and killed by Wolf Slayer. As Act III opened, Bill and Jack swore vengeance for their slain friend, and Dove Eye and Hazel Eye expressed their loyalty to one another. The Indians gathered for a “Scalp Dance,” as a struggle between Wolf Slayer and Big Eagle, Dove Eye’s father, ended in the stabbing of the latter. When Dove Eye found her father’s body, she prayed to Manitou, the Indian god of revenge—perhaps another opportunity for a dance—then she and Hazel Eye returned to the camp for a final battle. [11] The renegades started a fire and a ferocious war ensued as the scouts and women “triumph[ed] over their enemies, with a train on the Pacific Railroad and a burning prairie in the background.” [12] In the play’s final tableau, the two couples embraced, the lights fading on the triumph of romance framed by the inevitable progression of America’s western frontier. In the very few studies that give her more than a passing mention, Dove Eye is interpreted as “the ubiquitous friendly native maiden,” or the “noble savage” in contrast to the “utter savage” of the warlike Indians around her. [13] Her character is viewed as a Pocahontas figure, giving up her people and culture for the love of the white man, Cody. A common trope on the nineteenth-century stage, the Pocahontas character served as the “most well known and irresistible symbol” of the absorption of American Indians into white culture and the expropriation of their own culture. [14] That absorption was accomplished through the lens of gender and sexuality; as Mary Dearborn notes, “it is precisely because Pocahontas is expected to embody both aspects of the image [the noble Princess and the randy Squaw] that hers is so convenient, compelling, and ultimately intolerable a legend. . . . Her story functions as a compelling locus for American feeling toward . . . miscegenation, or sexual relations between white men and ethnic women.” [15] As Buffalo Bill’s love interest, Dove Eye’s Indian Princess role fulfilled many of these elements in Scouts : the contrast of royal heritage and sexual availability; the assimilation of the forgiving, supportive Indian woman; and proof of the supremacy of white culture with the reassuring combination of Native consent and cooperation. Although the centrality of movement in Morlacchi’s role has not been taken into account in previous scholarship, a dance analysis would reinforce this reading, particularly given the fact that at least some of her dances as Dove Eye seem to have been performed on pointe . One critic noted how a “few graceful steps inserted into one of the scenes reminded playgoers of [Morlacchi’s] former triumph in the ballet.” [16] Another observed in her performance “the fawnlike bound of the antelope—if the antelope ever bounds on the points of its toes.” [17] Joellen Meglin has shown that ballet served to symbolize “civilization triumphing over savagery” in representations of Native Americans in productions at the pre-Romantic Paris Opéra. [18] In Scouts , Morlacchi’s ballet dancing would seem to have functioned similarly, the consummate European ballerina serving as the “whitening” force that mediated between civilization and savagery in Dove Eye’s character. When the Italian ballet star rose to the pointes of her slippers, the image signaled that Dove Eye was more civilized, closer to European culture than her tribesmen, especially in contrast to the other “Death” and “Scalp” dances in the play that served as signs of an “authentic” Indian culture. [19] The incorporation of ballet into Scouts literally replaced a Native dance form with a European one on Dove Eye’s body, an erasure that colluded with the US government’s efforts to colonize Native lands. Yet the “civilization” and “savagery” binary only in part explains the incongruous mixture of buckskin and pointe shoes in Morlacchi’s Dove Eye performance. Robert C. Allen has shown the way in which the female burlesque performer’s body was a site of multiple interpretations, often ambiguous and contradictory, that were related to changing gender and class roles. [20] As I will show, the ballet dancer (or “ballet-girl,” as she was known in popular discourses, no matter her rank onstage) embodied a similar set of tensions, and Morlacchi brought this complexity with her into The Scouts of the Prairie : a little bit of the burlesque tradition on the frontier stage. When dance becomes an equal part of the analysis, the way in which the foreign ballerina and her dancing served as a necessarily complicated signifier for a host of socio-cultural anxieties appears, many of them conflicting, and all of them indicating the need for the stabilizing and reassuring force of the exemplary western hero, Buffalo Bill, at the end of the play. In what follows, I attempt to widen the scope on the meanings that ballet brought into this frontier melodrama by putting it in dialogue with contemporaneous discourses of ballet and the ballet dancer in the mass circulation print industry out of which Scouts arose. Critics certainly found Morlacchi to be a civilizing force in the play, and a much-needed one at that. Although little venom was spared in appraisals of Scouts or its audience, Morlacchi was persistently set apart in the press. “Mlle Morlacchi deserves a word by herself in this wholesale slaughter,” decreed the Boston reviewer; “In the opening piece . . . she danced exquisitely and with all her accustomed grace and skill, and the audience recognized her merit and called her before the curtain accordingly.” [21] Penned another, “in her opening performance she gave a number of her beautiful dances as gracefully and as equisitely [ sic ] as ever.” [22] And one reviewer noted that that the “Indian scalping, buffalo shooting and redskin-whooping drama” appealed to the lower classes seated in the gallery, while the better class of patrons in the house preferred Morlacchi’s dancing in the curtain raiser. [23] For critics, Morlacchi’s dancing was a welcome respite of upper-class taste in the otherwise uncouth frontier melodrama. Such praise of Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie has been interpreted rather straightforwardly as evidence of her talent. But here the plot thickens. Critics’ responses to Scouts , and to Morlacchi’s appearance in it, are indicative of the cultural hierarchy that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one that Lawrence Levine has described as a “struggle to establish aesthetic standards, to separate true art from the purely vulgar.” [24] Persistently dividing the audience and the content of Scouts into “high” and “low” components, the extant criticism points to the struggle over class that that was waged in theatrical life in the latter nineteenth century. And critics indeed saw The Scouts of the Prairie as class warfare. “To criticize this composition as a play, or analyze its plot, would be ridiculous, for it has nothing to do with art,” declared a New York writer. “It is simply a dime novel set to scenery.” [25] While critics readily perceived ballet as a civilizing influence in The Scouts of the Prairie , the existing criticism cannot fully demonstrate how the mostly male, working-class audience that cheered the play would have responded to the incongruous contrast of the “best dancer in New York” playing the role of an Indian woman who shot a rifle, fought, screeched war whoops and chased the bad guys—and mixed it all with the occasional Romantic-style divertissement. [26] The comparison to a dime novel pointed to the fact that playwright Ned Buntline was among the highest-paid authors of the dime novel industry: cheap popular fiction mass-produced by publishing firms between the 1840s and the 1890s, predominantly for a male, white, lower class readership. [27] Buntline’s readership was likely the same audience targeted by The Scouts of the Prairie ; the script was created very quickly by piecing together characters from his dime novel series on Buffalo Bill (although the novelette on Dove Eye was published after the premiere of the play, which suggests she was a new character he created for the stage,) [28] and, as a celebrity author, Buntline received top billing, along with Cody and Omohundro. Before he turned to Western tales in 1859, Buntline was well known for his mystery-of-the-city books, which unveiled the crime and poverty of the city, along with the extravagance and decadence of the rich. [29] Alexander Saxton aligns Buntline’s turn to the West with an overall shift in dime novels after 1850 that brought the ideological dimensions of the “Free Soil hero,” particularly white egalitarianism and class mobility, into the new Western hero. [30] I will return to Saxton’s argument at the end of this article. For now, it is worth noting that Buntline was committed to a nativist political ideology that preached anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and class mobility, and blamed urban problems onto foreign presence in the US. [31] As author and activist Buntline helped shape a working-class, anti-immigrant culture in opposition to the elite and foreign corruption of the industrial city. In Buntline’s urban fiction, the city is a dangerous and unpredictable place, full of dark, secret corners in which foreign-born villains prey on working class heroes and heroines. As Shelley Streeby describes, Buntline’s urban adventures cast the city “as a feminizing space in which ‘fashion’ holds sway and distinguishes a ‘simple’ yet civilized yeoman masculinity from a ‘savage’ state that is implicitly identified with foreign, nonwhite, or urban others.” [32] Buntline often positioned the theatre as one of the primary sites of corruption and immorality in the city, as was the case in his 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [33] More precisely, the ballet theatre was the setting for his urban melodrama, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge . Written seven years before the premiere of The Scouts of the Prairie , this dime novel portrayed the ballet world as a den of underground crime in which wealthy and licentious immigrants preyed on poor American girls. Every time Rose, the impoverished, motherless heroine who auditions to be a ballet-girl, enters the Broadway theatre, or even dons her ballet costume, her situation quickly becomes life-threatening: she is pursued, abducted, imprisoned, lusted after, and even set aflame one night when her muslin skirt brushes the gas lights. At one point, six particularly rough male audience members, overcome by her performance, leapt onto the stage and chased her through the theatre, howling and breaking down doors in their pursuit. [34] Published four years before he gave up urban reform literature for the Buffalo Bill dime novels that launched Scouts , the ballet theatre figured in Buntline’s story as a handy metaphor for urban perversions; a violent place devoid of morals, where passions ran wild, appearances could not be trusted, and dangerous foreigners, “rich, handsome, and liberal,” constantly sought to destroy Rose’s innate American goodness. [35] Buntline’s characterization of the moral and social dangers of the ballet theatre was part of a much larger set of nineteenth-century discourses that viewed ballet as a foreign threat to American values. Anti-ballet rhetoric was multi-faceted: religious reformers saw it as a menace to middle-class morality, while dime novel and story paper authors, like Buntline, cast it as part of the larger threat posed to the working classes by immigration and industrialization. That is, attacks on ballet appeared in a wide variety of popular literature, directed at different segments of the population. But these genres were united in their anxiety over the increasing influence of a rapidly growing middle class after the Civil War. Persistent connections were made in popular discourses between this new “fashionable” class, European social and political decay, and the presence of ballet in the United States. The “ballet-girl” (as she was called, no matter her rank) became a site for these anxieties; as in Buntline’s Rose , she was a trigger for multiple concerns about foreign influence, social divisions, and the dangers to American virtues within a rapidly transforming urban space. Unlike on the Opéra stage, to American audiences in 1872, ballet would not necessarily have served as an uncomplicated or even positive symbol of modern civilization. As Barbara Barker has shown, the history of ballet in the US involved “the slow transplanting and rooting of an essentially foreign form.” [36] Since before the turn of the nineteenth century, French and Italian troupes had been touring to America, and by the early decades, European ballerinas were appearing in the US with increasing regularity. As ballet become more popular, debates raged over the meaning of a European high art on the American stage. According to Christopher Martin, by the late 1820s debates over ballet in the US had evolved into a discourse that superimposed questions of national values and identity—indeed, the very fate of the nation—onto the theatrical representation of the female body. [37] While some hoped that European ballet would help America develop its own high culture, detractors saw ballet as symptomatic of a decadent and degenerate European civilization. The latter is perhaps most famously expressed in Samuel Morse’s vitriolic speech on French ballerina Francisque Hutin’s 1827 appearance in New York, in which he decried ballet, “the PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF A NAKED FEMALE,” as “the importation of these lowest instruments of vice from the sinks of monarchical corruption.” [38] For like-minded dissenters, the problem with ballet was that it went for the senses instead of the intellect, inappropriate for the values of the young republic. As the Christian Register put it: There is nothing in Europe which so directly and effectually saps the fountains of virtue and moral sensibility. It has no fellowship with the mind. . . . It excites none of the finer sensibilities of the heart—it calls forth no moral sentiments of any kind. It is the product of a state of society worn out with luxury and indulgence and seeking excitements in the lowest order of natural propensities. . . . We should consider the establishment of the Ballet in the U. States not only as a wide dereliction from the virtues of our forefathers, but as a great moral evil—an evil more contagious and more pernicious to society than any bodily disease which has ever afflicted our country. [39] In such discourses, ballet, seducing viewers with its spectacular and feminine beauty, represented the bread and circuses of the European monarchy, a threat to not only the American theatergoer’s morals, but also to American political institutions. In the furor over ballet in America that raged for most of the nineteenth century, the dance form was linked to European civilization, and the anxieties it provoked for its critics were inextricable from concerns about the fate of the republic. Some hoped that the European art would help America develop its own high culture, but ballet’s dissenters saw it as a threat to the moral, social, and political fabric of the country. When foreign correspondents wrote columns home about the corruptions of Parisian society, ballet was embedded in their warnings. The Parisian ballet-girl was a representative of “the loosest class in the world”: self-indulgent and reckless with her body, her money, and her health. [40] Behind Paris’s proliferation of glittering amusements—its cafes, gardens, department stores, theatres, operas, and ballets—lay a society in decay, a darker world of courtesans and immorality. An attitude of extravagance had overtaken French culture, replacing the Revolutionary “watchwords” of “liberty, equality, [and] fraternity.” While the French people mouthed these ideas, and were taught that they had a democratic government, in reality, they have undergone a social revolution and have come to regard these words in another sense. Liberty [here] does not imply freedom of political action and opinion. On the contrary it means to be free from all concerns of government and to have license to do anything they please with themselves and their property. . . . The French notion of liberty is fulfilled [as long] as the people have the wherewithal to fill their stomachs and indulge their sensuality. [41] Beneath the Parisian fashionable life lurked the ruins of revolutionary ideals. In these accounts, ballet, with its “sumptuous and exhausting lifestyle,” was emblematic of the ruin to which such a life of self-indulgence would inevitably lead. [42] Ballet was a foreign other, a symbol of a decadent and degenerate European culture and political system, and a menace to republican values. But if ballet’s sensuality and excessive “indulgence” made it morally suspect in the antebellum US, by the mid-1860s such lavishness had become the major selling point for a new form, the ballet-spectacle. Most famously represented by the 1866 The Black Crook with its “bewildering forest of female legs” and “barbaric splendor,” ballet-spectacles combined elements from melodrama, farce, and parody, and featured fantastical plots, spectacular special effects, and numerous grand ballets with large casts of European ballerinas. [43] The popularity of these productions generated an outpouring of warnings about their dangers, many of them focused on the female dancer as a site of moral and social transgression. Ballet dancers contrived “to reach men through the senses; to stir their blood with material agencies as the Maria Bonfantis and Sohlkes, and Morlacchis do. Charming exemplars they for American ladies—for the pure daughters of a proud country.” [44] The real cause for alarm was that these amusements indicated a growing preoccupation with pleasure as an end in itself. As a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle parsed, it was not the popularity of ballet per se that was the problem; it was that “the function of a ballet-girl in a modern burlesque or spectacle has nothing to do with either graceful or pantomimic action. She is hired to look pretty, and to appear in little clothing.” The worry that ballet went for the senses, rather than the mind, had long troubled its critics, particularly the religiously-oriented. But after the Civil War, ballet’s pleasurable ends increasingly pointed to larger socio-economic concerns; in particular, “the enjoyment of wealth by a class to whom labor, whether of hand or brain, is alike strange. Money which brings with it no obvious duties . . . can hardly fail to be a disastrous inheritance.” [45] Whereas ballet triggered fears of the corrupting influences of foreign culture throughout the bulk of the nineteenth century, postwar it became central to a new domestic threat: the rise of a culture of consumption and the growth of a new bourgeois class. William Leach has identified the decades after the Civil War as the key period in the development of a “culture of consumer capitalism,” marked by “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness, the cult of the new, the democratization of desire, and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” [46] Urbanization and industrialization eroded the familial and agricultural culture that had characterized America to that point, bringing not only rapid economic and lifestyle changes, but also creating a much more fluid socioeconomic system and an expanding class of nouveau riche in the metropolis, variously known as the “fashionables” or the “shoddy aristocracy.” This new class had gotten their fortunes quickly, probably in a business venture, but completely lacked the “good breeding and intelligence” that suited their new social class. [47] The shoddies were the most flagrant example of a society that worshipped money, and was “content with nothing less than . . . an ever-changing life of amusements.” [48] Certain spaces in the city that were built to accommodate this new upper-middle class, including the park, the shopping mall, the theatre, and the ballet-spectacle—spaces, in other words, in which the fashionable life of newness, leisure, pleasure, and social display was lived—became geographical symbols of the debauchery of this new class in popular literature. [49] Such was the case in a new genre of urban nonfiction formed after the Civil War. These works retained the “wicked city motif” found in their dime novel antecedents, yet they purported to be true accounts of city life, even guides to urban spaces. On the surface, it seems that these urban exposés were primarily addressed to upper class concerns over the disruption posed by the shoddies to the socioeconomic order; yet their wide readership also suggests they were highly popular. Nonetheless, there was a clear relationship between the genres, as the nonfiction works carried forward the core themes of popular urban fiction, including the concern that the metropolis was generating both an aristocracy and an underclass whose degenerate lifestyles were endangering American values. [50] Most of these urban nonfiction works were organized around social types and/or social spaces. A repeated structural motif was the grouping of classes of women to symbolize various forms of urban vice. As Mona Domosh notes, as the primary class of consumers, women often served as targets for fears about the rise of consumer capitalism in post-Civil War discourses. The “desiring” woman became the symbol of the lack of control and tendency for excess responsible for the moral decay of the city. [51] In the urban nonfictional exposés, certain types of women who disrupted conventional social and gender boundaries stood for the physical and moral danger of the city streets: the prostitute, the working woman, and, most importantly for my purposes, the “New York Woman.” The New York Woman served as a metaphor for the vices of “fashionable society,” as illustrated in two urban nonfiction books published in the 1860s: Marie Louise Hankins’s Women of New York and George Ellington’s The Women of New York or the Underworld of the Great City . She dressed stylishly, even extravagantly, performed an elaborate daily toilette to make herself beautiful, and devoted her time to shopping and going to parties, the theatre, the opera, and the ballet, all to the neglect of her children. Amongst the New York Woman’s trespasses was her artifice: through dress, make-up, facial enameling, false hair, false teeth, and devices such as padded calves and ankles, she could appear to be what she was not. Such external artifice pointed to internal deceit; the New York Woman could appear respectable on the outside, but be of wicked heart. “Did we speak of the falsity of women as regards their heart and their inner life,” wrote Ellington, “we would not only tire the reader, but make him lose all faith in human nature, at least as far as women are concerned.” [52] A particular dilemma was the New York Woman’s ability to pass for a higher social class than the one to which she belonged. The New York Woman was also self-indulgent. Obsessed with money and luxury, she gave into her own desires and was seemingly incapable of restraint. The urban exposés traced two possible “routes from personal indulgence to societal destruction: one path followed the course of overconsumption; the other route followed the course of sexual deviance.” [53] In the first of these, her New York Woman’s extravagance led to the downfall of others around her: the men who struggled to support her resorted to illegal ways of getting money or, frustrated by her indulgences, to infidelity; or her servants found themselves buying things they could not afford in a vain attempt to keep up with her expectations of social status. “There is no influence so powerful as that of example; and when one woman steps beyond the bounds of propriety in any direction, she is sure to be followed by a dozen other weak ones,” avowed Ellington, until finally, “the whole of society becomes demoralized and corrupted.” [54] In the second path to social degredation, women turned to various modes of prostitution in order to fulfill their extravagant need for goods, either in gift or payment form. The ballet-girl was a special subtype of the New York Woman in these books. She shared the same faults: she was overindulgent, and her appearance was the result of a great deal of embellishment. “The coryphée is not one to let a chance slip that promises any pleasure,” noted Ellington. “The majority of these girls need and must have excitement. Without it they could not exist. . . . Seemingly, they live but for the pleasures of the day.” [55] The ballet dancer’s grace was a façade that required not only make-up and hair care, but also great physical pain. Accounts of the arduous, violent nature of ballet training were ubiquitous in mid-nineteenth century exposés. Not unlike the fashionable metropolitan woman, who would undergo foot binding to make her feet smaller for the latest footwear, the ballet dancer submitted her body to abnormal suffering in order to create her illusion of perfection. She could not be trusted either. “When ‘made up’ on the stage, with aid of ribbons, gause [ sic ], false curls, a gay costume, and pearl power and vinegar rouge,” cautioned Hankins, “she will appear to be not more than sixteen, and as beautiful as an angel; but […] by day light, in her plain clothes, she might be taken for thirty-five—perhaps forty!” [56] Moreover, her lifestyle all too often led to sexual deviance or to her own destruction. Ellington’s summation is characteristic: “Many have risen to the goal of their ambition, many have given up and returned to their former occupations, while many have sunk low into that dark abyss from which there is no resurrection, without hope and without mercy, betrayed by those who flatter but to ruin.” [57] On the one hand, authors saw the ballet-girl as a victim of this dangerous urban world, even though her temperament made her particularly susceptible to its temptations of materialism and indulgence. This was especially true if she were American: numerous dime novels and newspaper short stories followed the adventures of good American girls, who, being forced into the ballet world (usually because they suffered financial distress, and lacked a mother’s moral guidance), had no choice but to navigate its moral and physical dangers. [58] As Ellington put it, American ballet-girls tended to be much more chaste, especially when compared to the “peculiar ideas of morality” of the French dancers. [59] But on the other hand, the ballet-girl was a symptom of a much bigger socio-economic epidemic. She personified the destruction of simple American values in the one of the city’s most dangerous places: the ballet theatre. The theatre, and especially the ballet theatre, figured prominently in this literature as one of the primary signifiers for the transforming class structure of the city under the influence of the new bourgeoisie. The ballet was one of the places the shoddies could be found flaunting their extravagance, “throw[ing] bouquets to the bare-legged dancers;” even worse, ballet was one of the disrespectable professions, along with “mineral waters” and prostitution, on which the shoddies depended for quick money. [60] In Hankins’ tale, the ballet-girl, whom she calls Helen, came from this shoddy class, forced into dancing to keep her family from starvation when her father quickly made a fortune in some unnamed business, then just as quickly lost it. Helen’s life was miserable: “with an aching heart, and a brain too often burning with the insults which she has received from those who take advantage of her exposed and unprotected situation, poor Helen Bray, like many of her sisters, comes upon the stage to dance and smile, and entertain the public world.” [61] For these authors, ballet served as a locus for the shoddies and their transgressions in multiple ways; it was the site of their creation, existence, and also their downfall. The ballet-girl thus functioned in mid-nineteenth century sensationalist urban literature very much in the way that Peter Buckley has noted of the prostitute. As a “fallen” woman, she served the narrative function of being authorized: to move among the dangerous classes of the city and to recognize—where the novelist and the reader might not—the evil intentions of the fashionably dressed. Because she [was] situated in the places of social and sexual promiscuity, where the extremes of social class converge, she provoke[d] the story of the city. [She allowed] the narration of the unnarratable. [62] The same might be said about the ballet-girl. In both the fictional mysteries-of-the-city and the nonfiction urban exposés, she was able to simultaneously reference the feminized hedonism of “fashionable” society, and the encroachment of European decadence on American society and values. Connoting an influence that was unavoidably “foreign” and potentially deviant, the ballet dancer ushered in the class conflicts and contradictions of the industrial city in all of its most dangerous, “unnarratable,” connotations. Alexander Saxton argues that what united the dime novel industry was the reliance on class struggle as a structural trope, across a diversity of subject matter. Most importantly for my purposes here, the Western narrative was “conceptualized in dime novels in terms of conflicts between fraternal egalitarianism on one hand and social hierarchy and deference on the other.” [63] The widespread support for territorial expansion in the mass press was buttressed by the belief that western lands held the fix for the socio-economic problems of the city. [64] Following this argument, Indian killing was de rigeur for the western hero because western expansion held the promise of a concept of civilization not racked by class conflict, “a western expanding white republic.” [65] Saxton views the western hero as the progeny of the prewar Free Soil hero, the literary representative of the ideals of social mobility and white fraternity that lay at the foundation of Republican ideology. Key characteristics of the western hero included lower-class roots, a background in Indian killing, and the ability to cross class divisions, usually by winning the favor of an upper-class woman’s family and marrying her. [66] Saxton’s exemplary model of such a character is Buntline’s first depiction of Cody in his 1869 Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men , the work that soon led both author and subject to their theatrical debut in The Scouts of the Prairie . As Bill, in Buntline’s story, leaves his modest vernacular beginnings to, first, fight the Indians who work for white ruffians, and finally, marry a banker’s daughter, he dramatizes American social advancement. Importantly for my purposes, romantic partnership is crucial to the western hero’s liberation from class boundaries. “It is not so much that lower-class origin has been denied,” explains Saxton, “but that equal access to privileges of the upper class, including acquisition of wealth and marriageability, has been triumphantly vindicated.” [67] From this perspective, one might speculate that, in the eyes of the working-class audience, as Buffalo Bill and Dove Eye embrace at the end of The Scouts of the Prairie against the backdrop of a speeding locomotive, symbol of the westward push of industrialization, perhaps the corruptions of a foreign, elitist culture that the Italian ballerina signified were at least as much in need of containment by the western hero than the alterity represented by the Indian Dove Eye. Not only the savagery of the Native American, but also the vices and cruelties of industrial conflict, were quelled under Cody’s stabilizing hand. When read intertextually with the narrative of the ballet-girl in popular literature, the spectre of a European “other” who gestured Eastward to the class and cultural reorganization of the metropolis emerges in The Scouts of the Prairie , the earliest prototype of the Wild West spectacles. In addition to affirming Dove Eye’s civilized side, Morlacchi’s ballet-dancing body pointed to social and economic worries about class, gender, and race in capitalist civilization. Several issues linger: how was Morlacchi’s dancing positioned in the play, and did the relationship between text and dance ultimately embrace these various levels of meaning or attempt to resolve them somehow? How would audiences in non-urban geographical locations have perceived ballet dancing in Scouts ? What role did the racism aimed at immigrants during the period play in Morlacchi’s—and ballet’s—positioning in the frontier play? [68] These questions remain difficult to answer, given the extant textual and critical resources through which we might rebuild the way in which a high “foreign” art intersected with this dime novel drama. [69] Such problems emerge, however, when we see the incorporation of ballet dancing, and the associations it carried, as a specific dramaturgical choice in The Scouts of the Prairie , one that went far, far beyond mere spectacle to gesture towards the class and cultural divisions at the heart of the question of “civilization” itself. References [1] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 87, 86. On the Wild West as American mythology, see also Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). [2] Sandra K. Sagala’s monograph is the most comprehensive source on these theatrical productions: see Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). See also Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50-67. Neither author considers Morlacchi’s dancing in the role of Dove Eye or explores the historical context of ballet in the image or the plays. [3] Qtd. in Chris Enss, Buffalo Gals: Women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2006), 4. [4] Qtd. in Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York: Dance Horizons, 1984), 121. [5] Morlacchi’s company was in financial trouble at the time, but there is no direct evidence that she took the role in Scouts out of financial desperation. The year after Scouts premiered, Morlacchi married Omohundro. She appeared in two subsequent Cody melodramas, playing an Indian maiden in The Scouts of the Plains and an Irish girl in Life on the Border , in between which she returned to the opera house for productions of Ahmed and her own production of La Bayadère . Morlacchi and Omohundro split from Cody in 1876 to create their own western combination plays, in several of which Morlacchi played an Indian maiden role. After Omohundro died in 1880, Morlacchi retired from the stage, and spent the following years teaching ballet lessons to the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she and Omohundro owned a home. All biographical information drawn from Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 111-167. For John M. Burke, see Chris Dixon, “Introduction: The Mysterious Major Burke,” in John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace . Introduction ed. Chris Dixon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Online at Cody Studies , http://www.codystudies.org/?tag=john-m-burke (accessed 5 September 2014). [6] Early studies that mention the plot include James Monaghan, “The Stage Career of Buffalo Bill,” The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 31, no. 4 (December 1938): 414-416; and William S.E. Coleman, “Buffalo Bill on Stage,” Players, 47, no. 2 (1971): 80-91. Craig Francis Nieuwenhuyse’s unpublished dissertation is the most detailed study of The Scouts of the Prairie , and his attempted reconstruction of the plot the most thorough. See Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage: Buffalo Bill Cody’s First Celebration of the Conquest of the American Frontier” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981), see especially 43-74 for the plot. Sagala also includes a detailed account of the narrative ( Buffalo Bill on Stage , 21-23). [7] Chicago Daily Tribune , 19 December 1872, 4. The role of Hazel Eye was initially played by Eloe Carfano, but the secondary sources are not clear about her identity. Barbara Barker, Morlacchi’s biographer, says that Carfano was a member of Morlacchi’s ballet company (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 153); Sandra K. Sagala describes her as a “Cuban actress” who joined the Scouts’ company on tour (Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 27). Both could be true; as Sagala notes, the reviews are confusing, and it may be that reviewers could not always tell the two women apart. However, Barker’s evidence that Carfano danced with Morlacchi in Scouts is based on the after-the-fact recollection of Omohundro’s brother that “both women danced on the tips of their toes” in the play (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156). I have found no reviews that mention Carfano’s dancing, only Morlacchi’s. [8] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 54. Nieuwenhuyse’s source for the following quotations regarding the plot is the Troop C Ledger , Buffalo Bill Historical Center. See note 9 for details about this Ledger. [9] “The Scouts at Pike’s Opera House” (Cincinnati), Clipping, n.d n.p, William F. Cody Collection, “Stage Play Notices and Reviews 1872-1880: Black Book,” in Buffalo Bill Cody Scrapbooks 1875-1903, Manuscript 6, William F. Cody, roll 1. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY. This is a microfilm of the Troop C Ledger, held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which contains numerous newspaper clippings cut so as to fit as many as possible on a page. Most of these clippings do not include dates or page numbers, and in some the name of the publication and/or its location has been omitted as well. Hereafter: BBHC Ledger. [10] “Amusements,” New York Times , 1 April 1873, 4. [11] Barker suggests a dance may have been incorporated into Dove Eye’s prayer scene; see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156. [12] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 72. [13] Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 54; Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 111. [14] Rebecca Jaroff, “Opposing Forces: (Re)Playing Pocahontas and the Politics of Indian Removal on the Antebellum Stage,” Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006/2007): 486. [15] Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 99. [16] “The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” (Utica), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p. [17] “Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [18] Joellen Meglin, “‘Sauvages,’ Sex Role and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet 1736-1837, Part Two: The Nineteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 3 (2000): 291. [19] Real Native Americans were added to the cast after the premiere, where they were mixed with non-Native “extras.” Costumes, weaponry, songs, and dances included in the play all worked to signify the display of an authentic Native culture onstage. Nieuwenhuyse notes that critics had trouble seeing the difference between the Native and non-Native performers, and that, ultimately, reviewers emphasized the overall brutality of the Indians through stereotypes that reinforced government’s eradication policies. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 29, 43, 79-80, 130-31. [20] Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [21] Boston Daily Advertiser , 4 March 1873, issue 54, column G. The reviewer’s reference to “Madmoiselle” Morlacchi points to the fact that, although predominately Italian, dancers in the ballet-spectacles were typically billed as “French” to cater to an emergent bourgeois class who saw Paris as the apex of cultural refinement, see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 6. [22] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 50. [23] Qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 64. [24] Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 128. Also see Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 12-14; Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 16, 64. [25] “The Scouts of the Prairie” (Niblo’s Garden, New York City), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [26] BBHC Ledger, no title, n.d., n.p. Reviews note that, while the packed houses at The Scouts of the Prairie were predominantly male, the audience was a mixture of upper and lower class patrons. See also “From the Prairie: Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Ned Buntline at the Academy of Music,” which describes how “men seemed to be arranged in close layers from the orchestra railing clear away up to the remotest corners of the gallery.” BBHC, n.d., n.p. My account of Morlacchi’s dancing in the play draws on the account of her biographer Barbara Barker, who describes that Morlacchi’s choreographic style adhered to the pantomimic, dramatic style of the ballet d’action tradition in which she was trained. [27] The dime novel industry included story papers, dime novels, and pamphlets like the cheap library. Michael Denning states that the continuities and repetitions between these formats justifies embracing them all under the term “dime novels,” which also distinguishes this genre from publications aimed at a middle-class readership. I am following his usage of the term. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 10-12. On the composition of the dime novel audience, see Denning, Mechanic Accents 27-30, and also Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 328. [28] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82-83. This is not to say that Dove Eye did not have antecedents in Buntline’s novels, which invites further research. [29] Buntline’s first frontier story was Stella Delorme; of The Comanche’s Dream: A Wild and Fanciful Story of Savage Chivalry , which launched a series of Western dime novels. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82. Buntline’s oeuvre also included international adventure romances, Naval stories, and urban melodramas. For a well-developed examination of Buntline’s career, see Chapter 5 of Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984). [30] Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic , 196. [31] Buntline switched party affiliations often, but was a committed member of the nativist cause from at least 1848 to the late 1850s, a member of the Order of United Americans and their offspring, the Know-Nothing Party. He also played a leading role in the American Committee, which helped instigate the 1849 Astor Place theatre riot, an event directly related to the class oppositions grafted onto the growing division between “high” and “low” culture. Later, as a celebrity author, Buntline was recruited to campaign for the Republican Party in 1876, 1880, and 1884. Splitting with the Republican Party in 1884, when he refused to support candidate James G. Blaine, he announced himself as an Independent Republican, and then fell out of favor with the Party for his earlier affiliation with the Know-Nothings. See Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 162-181, 192-217, 264, 272, 279-80. While it goes beyond the scope of my analysis of Morlacchi’s role in The Scouts of the Prairie , it also bears mention that Buntline’s nativist politics are also evident in the fact that, although the Indians in the play bear the brunt of the punishment, the real villains are the Mormon and immigrant renegades who mastermind the Indian attacks on the scouts. For a fuller account of mid-nineteenth century Republicanism than I can provide here, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); on nativism, see Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: the Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996). [32] Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 143. [33] For instance, the working-class heroine is threatened by the wealthy foreigner who pursues her that he will have her reputation ruined like Clara Norris (an actress of the day) “or any other of the stock company of the theatre of vice in the city.” Elsewhere, the theatre stands as a metaphor for the dark side of the city: the domain of the city prostitute is referred to as “the theatre of nightly infamy.” Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: a story of real life (New York, 1848), 159, 9. Electronic version available by Sabin Americana . Gale, Cengage Learning, http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY103135748&srchtp=a&ste=14, (accessed 15 August 2013). [34] Ned Buntline, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge, a tale of the New-York Drama (New York: Hilton, 1865). [35] Ibid., 29. [36] Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 3. [37] Christopher Martin, “Naked Females and Splay-Footed Sprawlers: Ballerinas on the Stage in Jacksonian America,” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010): 95-114. [38] Qtd. in ibid., 100. [39] Christian Register , 8 December 1827, 6, 49. [40] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” Brooklyn Eagle , 22 February 1870, 6. [41] “Foreign Correspondence,” Brooklyn Eagle , 9 January 1858, 2. [42] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” 6. [43] Qtd. in George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Fawn,” in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham , ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 77, 70. [44] Junius Henry Browne, “The Ballet as a Social Evil,” Northern Monthly , II (2 April 1868). Qtd. in Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 18. [45] “The Social Morality of the Day,” The Brooklyn Eagle , 8 June 1871, 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=Beagle (accessed 14 November 2012). [46] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3. [47] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City: Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Etc. (New York: New York Book Co., 1869), 117. [48] Ibid., 24. [49] On the construction of social spaces, including theatres, for the growing middle-class, see Mona Domosh, “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5 (2001): 577-579. On the way in which the rise of the ballet-spectacle intertwined with and helped promote the dominance of business-class theatrical production in the post-Civil War years, see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 231-257 (especially 242-243 on ballet-spectacles, or “musical extravaganzas”). [50] Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City,” Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 11. See Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis,” 35, for the sales of these books, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. As Blumin noted in 1984, the postwar urban nonfiction is an understudied genre; I found little additional scholarship on this literature, with the exception of Mona Domosh’s “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography.” Drawing on Blumin’s work, Denning notes that the relationship between these nonfictional urban exposés and mysteries-of-the-city novels is evidenced in the fact that some authors attempted to work in both genres; Denning, 228, no.8. [51] Domosh, “The Women of New York,” 575. [52] Ellington, The Women of New York , 90. [53] Domosh, “The Women of New York,”586. [54] Ellington, 121. [55] Ibid., 515. [56] Marie Louise Hankins, Women of New York (New York: M.L. Hankins & Co., 1861), 157-58. [57] Ellington, 514. [58] See, for example, “The Ballet Dancer,” Brooklyn Eagle , 20 August 1853, 1. [59] Ellington, 513, 511. [60] Ibid., 117, 119. [61] Hankins, Women of New York , 159-160. [62] Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 442-443. Buckley’s subject is the character of the prostitute in Ned Buntline’s 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [63] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 330. Arguing that dime-novel thematic material often supported Republican party ideology, and that the industry maintained close ties to that party, Saxton places the western hero in popular fiction after 1850 within the lineage of the earlier “Free Soil hero,” who “by transcending the limits of region and class, could bid for national spokesmanship” (187). See Saxton, 183-203; 321-347. [64] Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 229-230. [65] Alexander Saxton, “The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero,” Amerasia 11, no. 2 (1984): 70. Saxton locates one source of the western hero in Jacksonian democracy, in which class divisions and upper-class dominance were broken down through appeals to egalitarian ideals within white civilization and racial hostility against enemies outside of it; see 68-70. Also Saxton, Rise and Fall , 183-201. [66] On the Free Soil hero, see Saxton, Rise and Fall , 195ff; on the western hero as the inheritor of those values, see 321-344. [67] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 337-338. [68] Matthew Frye Jacobson has documented that, with swelling immigration in the nineteenth century, “white” became no longer a singular, monolithic category, but rather plural, subject to shades and variations. Celtic, German, and Italian immigrants in particular were perceived as “savage,” or racially in-between, and thus unfit for citizenship. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Some criticism of the Italian dancers who brought ballet to American shores suggests that they were at times viewed through such racialist lenses, not readily seen as “white” in the public eye. For instance, in her role as Dove Eye, Morlacchi was referred to as the scouts’ “dusky-faced friend” (“The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” [Utica]), and as “tawny but not tawdry” [“Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p.]. And when a Omaha reviewer described Morlacchi as “a mulatto dancer,” Cody shot back that such a claim was “simply contemptible ,” and corrected that “[her] skin is as white, and blood as pure as your own—if not purer” (qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 26). The racialist conflicts associated with Italian ballerinas in the nineteenth-century US warrant greater exploration. [69] I explore the historiographic problems associated with this research more fully in Andrea Harris, “The Phantom Dancer, or, the Case of the Mysterious Toe Shoe in the Frontier Prop Closet,” in “A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective,” ed. Stephen Johnson, special issue, Performing Arts Resources 28 (2011): 151-59. Footnotes About The Author(s) ANDREA HARRIS is assistant professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current book, Making Ballet American , is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her essays have appeared in Dance Chronicle , Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance , Discourses in Dance , and Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange , and she is the editor of Before, Between, and Beyond , the most recent collection of dance historian Sally Banes’s works. Dr. Harris has also taught at Texas Christian University, the University of Oklahoma, and the Universidad de las Américas. Her performance credits include the Martha Graham Dance Company and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. 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 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 34 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng BOOK REVIEW The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini BOOK REVIEW Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Jennifer-Scott Mobley BOOK REVIEW Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift BOOK REVIEW The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans ARTICLE “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson ARTICLE Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages ARTICLE “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley ARTICLE Issue 2 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan BOOK REVIEW The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero BOOK REVIEW Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun BOOK REVIEW Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella INTRODUCTION Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa INTERVIEW On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok ARTICLE Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander ARTICLE The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo ARTICLE Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang ARTICLE Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen ARTICLE Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly INTERVIEW Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb ARTICLE Dance Planets Al Evangelista ARTICLE Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther ARTICLE Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Bindi Kang ARTICLE Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei ARTICLE Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson ARTICLE 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

Dohyun Gracia Shin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft presents an ambitious compilation of interviews with twenty-seven contemporary women stage directors, while archiving and reflecting on relatively underrepresented women stage directors in the US and the UK. Tracing the past two decades, Marty notes that few published books focus on female stage directors. She points to two volumes by Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow as rare examples. Marty distinguishes her project by focusing on mid-career women stage directors—who she argues are not featured enough by Fliotsos and Vierow. This volume provides readers the rare chance to hear disparate, highly-active women directors’ reflecting in their own words about their experiences, insights, styles, labors, and vision. Based on her experience working both as a theatre researcher and practitioner (dramaturg/director), Marty also provides a window on the contemporary theatre industry, opening far beyond how gender intersects with artistic lives. What makes this book unique in structure is that Marty directs, in effect, her book. Interview-based books deploying question-and-answer structures often feature a handful of interviewees in a chapter or section. Instead, she divides chapters, as if splitting beats, and places quotes and excerpts from her interviewees in each chapter according to its theme, as if casting speakers in dynamic dialogue. She aligns thematic chapters like scenes that build into a larger narrative: this journey of women directors pursuing their careers begins with incubating projects and concludes with each director’s own vision of today’s theatre. Although the book’s organizational structure does not provide a clear, holistic profile of each individual director, as Marty acknowledges in the introduction (9), this thematic approach instead distinctly guides readers to respect a director’s role and labor. Marty also provides a series of inspiring models, amplifying the influence of women directors working at an array of theatre venues in the US and UK. In the first two chapters, Marty sheds light on the directors’ incubating process. Chapter 1 opens by laying out how individual directors choose a particular piece of work. For example, Lear deBessonet, the founding director of the Public Theater’s Public Works project, explains that she stages classics since “no one is the authority” (24) which thereby opens up collective imagination. Marty also considers how varied directors and artistic directors actually scaffold their work: finding their niche, planning seasons, choosing collaborators, and mounting their plays in a theater. Chapter 2 demonstrates her subjects’ labor of engaging with scripts and ideas prior to rehearsals. She emphasizes each director’s signature style of analyzing the play, for instance. Further, she expands our grasp of the directorial role by examining how her subjects collaborate with playwrights, play multiple roles besides that of a director, prepare for rehearsals, and communicate with audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how these directors shape performances, starting from conceptualization of the visual and acoustic, and then moving into the rehearsal room, and, ultimately, the stage. Chapter 3 highlights how the chosen directors envision theatrical worlds visually and acoustically, collaborating with designers. Here, Marty approaches relationships between directing and designing theatre horizontally. Inspired by her subjects, she analyzes spectacle and sound beyond servers of directorial messages, conveying a comprehensive picture of the theatrical process to readers. In Rachel Chavkin’s words, it is a director’s process of “discovering the world with designers and actors” (99).True to the volume’s subtitle, Chapter 4 presents a “conversation on craft,” guided by these leading directors’ invaluable experiences and advice on the rehearsal process. Using quotes, Marty covers the practical process of rehearsal: casting actors, setting the tone for rehearsals, empowering actors, shaping the process, and using research in rehearsals. For instance, Maria Aberg, who is known for “her innovative, feminist productions of Shakespeare and other classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company” (2), introduces points she considers in the casting process when she changes the gender of a character. Readers will find many gems and tips. In the final chapters, Contemporary Women Stage Directors focuses on how each of these experienced directors develop their careers and navigate the US and UK theatre scenes. Chapter 5 considers how the directors sustain their projects, dealing with concerns such as “financial security, community, quality of life, and relationships” (159). Pursuing the theme of work-life balance, Marty places quotes from Leah Gardiner, Kimberly Senior, and Lucy Kerbel together to cover issues such as motherhood, labor and pressure. In particular, Kerbel explains that “the loop of visibility” (190) exposes directors to critics’ attention which sustains their projects. She elaborates on gendered inequality in the field by mentioning how maternity leave easily drops women directors from that loop. If Chapter 5 extensively covers their individual lives and career arcs, Chapter 6 specifically focuses on their diverse experience with systemic challenges tied to their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities in the theatre industry. The 6th chapter analyzes obstacles and disparities in the field through her array of case studies, integrating an intersectional perspective. For instance. Leah Gardiner, Paulette Randall, and KJ Sanchez tell their stories of experiencing misogyny and racism in the field. Importantly, Marty pays attention to how these women directors navigate systemic obstacles. For example, Roxana Silbert and Nadia Fall emphasize that diversity opens up more diversity and brings an alternative gaze to the field, which is dominated by white male directors. Marty concludes her book with the directors’ insight on theatre today and their expectations as working professionals. In the conclusion, Marty summarizes her interview research in two categories: what she did not find and what she did. What is notable here is her picture of a director as a relationship builder. Marty explains that “the director’s role is to build and facilitate relationships , specifically (1) between a play and an audience and (2) among members of the collaborative team” (288). Likewise, Marty, as the director of this book, builds a relationship between these women directors and her contemporary readers. She creates a bridge for these mid-stream women directors —who struggle for their comparatively underrepresented stories and insights to be heard— bringing their voices and methods as accomplished practitioners to readers, both artists and scholars. By providing many substantial examples of brilliant, motivating women stage directors from the US and UK in the early 21st century, this significant study will benefit theatre researchers and our future generation of women (and other) theater directors, artistic directors and, one hopes, producers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOHYUN GRACIA SHIN The Graduate Center, CUNY 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bennet Schaber Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF “[T]o reduce everything to terms of motion, to see everything passing into everything else by almost insensible gradations, to refuse to accept any firm line of demarcation… this running over of every art into every other art… in all the arts the principle of motion prevails over the principle of repose.”— Irving Babbitt , The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts[1] “Repose is the property of dead things; with the living it is only a passing accident.”— Hiram Kelly Moderwell , The Theatre of Today [2] “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?”— Bernard Stiegler , Technics and Time [3] In 1934, Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), celebrated stage designer and director, went to Hollywood. There he joined his friend, colleague and former Harvard classmate, producer Kenneth Macgowan, at RKO. At Harvard the two had both been students in George Pierce Baker’s famed English 47 playwriting workshop and later, in New York along with Eugene O’Neill, another Baker alumnus, formed the ‘triumvirate’ of Experimental Theatre Inc., producing over twenty plays in three seasons (1923-6) at the Provincetown Playhouse and Greenwich Village Theatre. These included two landmarks of the new movement in the North American theatre, O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1924) with Paul Robeson and Desire Under the Elms (1924) with Walter Huston, the latter designed and directed by Jones. Both plays would become motion pictures. Jones, like other practitioners of “the new stagecraft,” was celebrated for his use of color in costuming, stage architecture and lighting, and was so part of a “talent pool” courted not only by Broadway, but by the burgeoning retail industry and, of course, Hollywood. He was, then, one of the principals of what in 1928 the Saturday Evening Post called “The New Age of Color.”[4] Jones had come West to serve as “color designer,” a newly created position, for an experiment that turned out to be the first non-animated, three-color, Technicolor film, the Academy-Award winning short, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO 1934) (Fig. 1). For Jones it was, if words are to be believed, a dream come true. “Color has come to stay in pictures,” he wrote in Vanity Fair earlier in the year. “When this issue reaches the press I shall be in Hollywood where I hope to put some of my dreams into color—or properly speaking into Technicolor, for that is the name of the process in which I am interested.”[5] Fig. 1, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO, 1934). Frame grab. A year later, Jones returned to the pages of Vanity Fair , this time to discuss his work as “artistic director” for Pioneer/RKO’s Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature-length Technicolor film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and, like La Cucaracha, produced by Macgowan (Fig. 2).[6] Fig. 2, Becky Sharp (Pioneer/RKO, 1935). Frame grab. He enthused about the “advent of color in pictures” and situated it not only within the history of film—“images began to move… then they began to speak… now they are taking on all the colors of life…”—but within a world history at once aesthetic and speculative. Technicolor becomes for him a metonymy for technology itself, capable of reaching back to Homer and faithfully reproducing “the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn,” but also presaging a future in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round” and that will, finally, “make every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being.” Technicolor signaled a past, revivified in all of its chromatic intensity, and a future, anticipated in its full, living, even utopian dimensions. And he added, “I cannot say why this should be so. But it is the way things seem to be moving.”[7] Vividness and presence, movement and time: Color, or rather, Technicolor, was redolent with and suggestive of all of these. Indeed, color was suggestion itself. In Jones’s words, “it affects us emotionally; it means something to us.” Thus, he adduced an entire chromatic semiotics both natural and cultural: “Light bright colors make us feel gay. Dark sombre colors make us feel sad. We see red; we get the blues; we become purple with rage; green with envy… red and green make us think of Christmas….” In fact, this semiotics of color, bound to a strict but not inflexible set of rules and guidelines, would quickly transform into industrial standards for color films.[8] But if color required these kinds of formal, limiting and organizing procedures, it was because in it there was something else; and that something else, to Jones’s mind at least, would require “artists who will explore the infinite potentialities of the new medium.” That excess element, in order to be expressed, required an analogy that, in the long run, may have been no analogy at all: music. Beautiful color is pleasing to our eyes just as beautiful sound is pleasing to our ears. But, more than this, beautiful color, properly arranged and composed on the screen and flowing from sequence to sequence just as music flows from movement to movement, stirs our minds and emotions in the same way that music does. Color on the screen—mobile color, flowing color—is really a kind of visual music. Or rather, it is an art for which there is as yet no name.[9] Like music, “arranged and composed,” color, mobile and flowing, was a form of flux in excess of any informal patchwork or formal taxonomy of significations. Although immanent to its medium or support, it took on an independence of movement and vibration; and although an optical element of the film narrative, it transcended the order of representation of the fable. Clearly, it could “enhance the action of the drama” or become “an organic part of it….” But in principle, it was irreducible to the technical, regular and inexorable procession of the film machine or to the formal rhythms and progressions of the drama. A color of a dress? Of course. Of the sky? Yes. A metaphor? An association? Certainly. But also something simultaneously more material and more abstract, mobile, flowing. Perhaps this is why it had “no name.” Color, therefore, introduced, or re-introduced, a certain tension into the film that became even more apparent after the premiere of Becky Sharp . Color, like sound before it, re-asserted the cinema as what Rudolf Arnheim would call “an artistic composite,” with its variety of perceptual and formal registers always potentially at war with one another and themselves.[10] Forces of indeterminacy consistently threatened narrative and more general aesthetic coherence, technical feats of astonishment could overwhelm artistic restraint, perceptual and sensory independences could work below or above principles of integration, even the repetitive cycles of reels and frames were potentially at odds with the forward momentum of lengths of film. In short, there was a friction between what might be called avant-garde tendencies and conventional norms; and Jones’s work in theatre design was rooted in both camps. Color semiotics was one thing, mobile color was another. In addition, La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp were “demonstration” films, prototypes for the new three-color Technicolor process. And their need to highlight the process of color itself accentuated these tensions. The demonstration, meant to suggest a certain aesthetic and industrial teleology, in Jones’s words, “the way things seem to be moving,” also suggested its potential opposite, a kind of corrosive, vibrational undoing of that forward momentum. Reviewing the premiere at Radio City Music Hall for the New York Times , Andre Sennwald put his finger on many of these fundamental tensions while echoing Jones’s rhetoric. Although Becky Sharp ’s faults were “too numerous to earn it distinction as a screen drama,” as “an experiment it is a momentous event, and it may be that in a few years it will be regarded as equal in importance of the first talking pictures.” He added: This is not the coloration of natural life, but a vividly pigmented dream world of the artistic imagination. … [T]he most glaring technical fault is the poor definition in the long shots, which convert faces into blurred masses…. [T]here is also a tendency to provoke an after-image when the scene shifts abruptly to a quieter color combination…. At the moment it is impossible to view Becky Sharp without crowding the imagination so completely with color that the photoplay as a whole is almost meaningless. … The real secret of the film resides not in the general feeling of dissatisfaction which the spectator suffers when he leaves the Music Hall, but in the active excitement which he experiences during its scenes.[11] In short, the film’s “excessive demands on the eye” undermined “the film as a whole.” Blurred masses, after-images, active excitement, crowded imagination and the corrosion of meaning rendered nothing but dissatisfaction where conventional aesthetic norms and expectations were concerned. To rectify these alleged “faults” required “accustoming the eye” to color just as “we were obliged to accustom the ear to the first talkies.” What was at stake then, were both forms of perceptual acquaintance and aesthetic integration; the eye and the ear would require re-attunement before they could be made once again to harmonize. Thus, Sennwald took Jones’s vocabulary of dreams, aesthetic teleologies and visual music and gave them a specificity that Jones’s own rhetoric itself seemed to lack. Sound and color did not supplement a lack in the silent, monochrome image. They revivified and exacerbated an old and created and put into motion a new set of tensions, if not quite a new art or an art for which there was as yet no name. Inscribed, silently, in the demonstration were a set of avant-garde aspirations more fusional than integrative, psychologically or physiologically jarring rather than aesthetically pacifying. The sum of the film was exceeded by its parts; and these parts themselves bled through or overflowed into forms of indistinction that gave rise to, not integration, but a fusing of more… parts. Were there really after-images floating in the indeterminate spaces of cuts? Were human figures actually transforming into blurred blocs of pigment? Was this what Jones meant by mobile color? In fact, “mobile color” really did name something, and Jones once knew it, even if by 1935 he had perhaps forgotten. “Mobile color,” Stark Young, playwright and critic, wrote in 1922 in Theatre Arts Magazine , “is a new art and we have no images of speech for it…. But we sit before it with no sense of strangeness, though there may be some novelty. Like all true things in art it is recognizable. We realize its closeness to our dreams.”[12] Here again was the sublime feeling of inexpressibility; and here again were “dreams into color,” and not just in our heads. A year earlier, Young’s co-editor at Theatre Arts Magazine had also written with excitement about “mobile color,” Thomas Wilfred’s experiments with lumia , moving color projections. In the Theatre of Tomorrow , Kenneth Macgowan, Jones’s friend, colleague and the future producer of La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp at Pioneer/RKO, celebrated Wilfred’s clavilux , a console to create moving light projections and a new, luminous, environmental art, as a harbinger of a future, multi-media theatre (fig. 3). Fig. 3, Thomas Wilfred at the Clavilux Jr. (1930). Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Macgowan explained: In a laboratory on Long Island, Thomas Wilfrid [sic], a naturalized Dane, who is a machinist and a musician as well as artist, has perfected a “color organ” or “claviluse” [sic] which creates upon a plaster screen the most extraordinary, beautiful and moving progression of absolute shapes and colors. Upon a surface stained by light, develop, evolve and pass the most lovely and thrilling of bright shapes produced apparently by prisms and crystals…. Floating in three-dimensional space… they seem to turn inside-out into a fourth. The final effect is utterly apart from the theatre as we know it. It is more of some mystic philosophy of shapes and numbers, come to life, a religion of pure form sprung out of the void.[13] In Huntington, Long Island, Macgowan had attended the same, private clavilux demonstration about which Young wrote the next year. Present too were Theatre Arts Magazine ’s founder, Sheldon Cheney, photographer Francis Bruguière, and designer Hermann Rosse. Rosse, who also experimented with moving color projections, would go on to win an Oscar for artistic direction for the 1930 two-color, Technicolor musical revue, King of Jazz (Universal). Jones, who contributed texts and images to the Theatre Arts Magazine beginning with its inaugural issue, may have also attended the event. But if he was not present, he would have known and read of it and certainly attended later exhibitions. The rhetoric he later deployed à propos of Technicolor clearly echoed the rhetoric surrounding Wilfred’s lumia . Although now a rather forgotten art form, Wilfred’s invention and the performances he gave with it were a vibrant and relevant component of both the avant-garde art world and the popular culture of the twenties.[14] Painters, patrons and musicians all found mobile color provocative and intriguing, an “art of the future,” as Katherine Dreier described it to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Leopold Stokowski and Marcel Duchamp.[15] Sheldon Cheney, the experimental theatre’s leading theorist and exponent in the USA, devoted an entire chapter of his A Primer of Modern Art (1924) to it; and his descriptions, and a series of photographs by Bruguière, amounted to both a verbal and visual essay on its significance and potential futures. Like Young and Macgowan, Cheney too found himself struggling to find an adequate or satisfactory vocabulary with which to describe and take account of this distinctly modern art. And like Young, he recognized immediately a potential contradiction between its hybrid origins and its ambitions toward abstraction. According to Cheney: It is too soon to build up a particularized theory for the art of mobile color; but this much must be said at the outset: it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possibilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there will be no effort to suggest objective reality.[16] Once again, the encounter with mobile color leads, with a kind of inevitability, to music and the cinema. And Wilfred’s own lexicon encouraged both these intermedial flights and their accompanying anxieties. The Clavilux, according to its creator, was a kind of “color organ,” and each light “composition” was an “ opus .” Thus, despite his best efforts, Wilfred could never guarantee that mobile color would be understood as a strictly, unadulterated visual experience. Its condition as a motile, chromatic, temporal and ephemeral experience underscored its status as an object and phenomenon of flux. Cheney was himself forced to illustrate his essay on the lumia with static, black-and-white photographs, as if mobile color presented not only a foil to linguistic representation but to the visual as well (fig. 4). Fig. 4, Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (1924). Photos by Francis Bruguière. And he concluded his essay not with words or a photograph, but with a reproduction of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe: Music—Black, Blue and Green (fig. 5). Fig. 5, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Fig. 5a, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Music? Painting? Movie? An art with no name and, more troubling still, an art with no proper image. It was, as Macgowan had pointed out, continually developing, evolving, and passing. But perhaps the very difficulty of representing mobile color was in fact the indication of its most sublime possibilities. What exactly would be wrong with "a sort of super-colored movie?” And was that what Jones and Macgowan had gotten up to in the decade since Cheney’s book? Awful thought indeed. Trying to come to grips with mobile color brought Cheney not to the promised land of medium specificity, abstraction, non-objectivity or aesthetic autonomy. Rather, despite himself, he was drawn along, like Macgowan, Young, and Jones, toward the other arts, in this case, painting, music and the movies. Mobile color highlighted and exacerbated two conflictual but finally inseparable narratives about modern art. Claims about abstraction, about the emancipation of the arts from figuration and their deliverance into their own, particular and distinct media and vocations, invariably found themselves accompanied by claims of hybridity, immixture and confusion.[17] Thus, while critics like Babbitt, Cheney, Arnheim and, most famously, Clement Greenberg (despite their crucial differences) could all broker the legitimacy of modern art on the aesthetic limits first outlined by Lessing’s Laokoon (and to which they invariably referred), another faction (to which Jones and Macgowan belonged) could seek the same legitimacy in the sensuous overflowing of those limits manifest in Walter Pater’s rather paradoxical notion of the Anderstreben , through which the arts “lend each other new forces.”[18] Music, and especially the notion of visual music, could stand in for both tendencies. On the one hand, music was an abstraction. In it everything—perception, sensation, figuration—could be reduced to mathematics: duration, rhythm, interval, vibration. It was its own content. On the other hand, as a metaphor, it drew to it all the other arts and their allied perceptual forms. Music was the source of synesthetic experiences. Like color, it was an experience of “flow” into which memory and anticipation were soldered together. Emotion and diffusion: Cheney was honest enough to acknowledge at least that much: “It is a question whether absolute abstraction is not a will-o’-the-wisp, whether in any work of art (even musical?) the associative processes of memory and recognition are not indissolubly bound up, at least faintly, with aesthetic enjoyment.”[19] Visual music, then, confirmed the nagging suspicion that every attempt to draw the limits of, or the borders between, the various arts seemed to lead to their increasing “confusion,” as Irving Babbitt vehemently complained. No doubt the theatre and the cinema, composites by their very nature and history, were the most susceptible to these contradictions. Like Babbitt and Lessing before him, Rudolf Arnheim was not particularly a fan of aesthetic hybrids, but he saw clearly where Cheney’s, Stark’s and Macgowan’s arguments led: “[E]ven the theatre has been accused now and then of basically being a hybrid…. [A]bsolute theatre, the kind of performance that is sheer stage action… has remained sterile whenever it was attempted and must remain so unless it be stylized to the point of becoming dance or so enriched visually as to become film.”[20] Mobile color accentuated this condition. To think of it as theatre or drama was quite simply to watch theatre disappear into color or music… or cinema. Thus, it brought home the essentially composite nature of theatre itself. The entire spectrum of the arts was the condition of its sense. If Technicolor, at least in Jones’s sense of it, bore the trace of mobile color, that was because it indicated these same compositional tensions at work in the cinema. Sennwald had seen it first-hand. Mobile color could transform figuration into moving blocs of pigment. Chromatic flux, “flowing color,” provoked afterimages that signaled the spectators’ physiological and subjective, and thus ontologically obscure, contribution to the film, what Sergei Eisenstein had called “the brink of cinema,” “fusing stage and audience in a developing pattern” that seemed to lack a proper place.[21] At play then was a dual tendency: towards abstraction and high art, towards aesthetic fusions and the vernacular. This was how nameless arts were born. There was another tension at play in mobile color and this one perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. On the one hand, the lumia were theatrical, that is they constituted both an art of vision and of volume. In Wilfred’s own words, they were “a three-dimensional drama in space.”[22] This distinguished the lumia from all previous versions of color music, from Pythagoras to Castel, Rimington to Scriabin.[23] And in fact, the inaugural demonstration to the Theatre Arts group brought out, as Cheney explicitly noticed, lumia as spatial art: “the effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use of a background that is a modification of the stage-dome or cupola-horizon, in place of the flat wall.”[24] What Cheney was describing was the cyclorama that was revolutionizing the lighting effects of the modern theatre in the teens and twenties. A solid, domed, curvilinear background, usually constructed of plaster, the cyclorama enabled sophisticated light and color effects and obviated the need for painted backdrops. With it, the new stagecraft could give up traditional forms of mimesis and dedicate Itself to experiments in image generation. The cyclorama turned the theatre into a continuous field of projections. Plays like those produced by Jones, Macgowan, and O’Neill, could unfold rhythmically in a light that made prior dramatic unities suddenly indistinct if not indiscernible.[25] “Lighting is my music,” the German theatre designer, Ottamar Starke, said. And with the new experiences of theatrical light and space, the new, experimental, theatre became something closer to the flux of rhythmic progression than anything like Aristotelian mimetic dramaturgy. Plays became more episodic, putting momentum and suggestion in place of representation. Stage pictures were no longer produced before a static, painted, representational background.[26] Instead, they unfolded in the animated interplay between moving bodies and mobile light. “Let the stage, by means of its lights, be as alive as the drama itself,” proclaimed Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1914.[27] “A new theatre and a new art,” wrote Macgowan about the designs of Rosse and Jones, “in which story, action, color, music, pantomime and voice would be fused.”[28] Actors emerged as living presences from their own projected shadows and images (fig. 6). Fig. 6, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), w/ Charles Gilpin performing before the cyclorama (Kuppelhorizont) constructed by George Cram Cook, scene design by Cleon Throckmorton. Provincetown Playhouse, NY (Wikimedia Commons). “The lights and shadows on a human body reveal to our eyes that the body is ‘plastic’—that is, a flexible body of three dimensions,” Moderwell insisted.[29] The future imagined by Jones in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round,” had already happened. Had he forgotten that too? On the other hand, if the lumia resembled theatrical events or proto-happenings, they also constituted a set of distinct compositions, each one an “ opus .” They were thus repeatable, recorded, technical objects the status of which was simultaneously virtual and material, images that required a support in a medium of inscription, like a film. Thus, for each lumia opus there corresponded a “color record,” a glass disc that could be “played” and manipulated on Wilfred’s clavilux (fig. 7). Fig. 7a, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7b, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7c, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7d, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org This is why the analogies with music both made sense and fell short. It was not music as such that was at stake, but recorded music, phonography, with which the lumia perhaps were best compared. A chromo-graphy that was both a semiotic structure and the simultaneous possibility, through recorded repetition, of its technical deconstruction, like but not quite identical to either a modernist painting or a super-colored movie. A lumia opus was a temporal object but not necessarily a narrative or even a conventionally musical one.[30] What it promised, and this cannot be overemphasized, was not meaning as such, a text or a discursive semiotics, but a sensuous experience of color vision in and as time: developing, evolving, passing, repeating. And its inventor was having as difficult a time as anyone finding the means to express what was fundamentally a sensory, mnemo-technical phenomenon. In Wilfred’s own words, the “physical basis” of lumia was: “The composition, recording and performance of a silent visual sequence in form, color and motion, projected on a flat white screen by means of a light-generating instrument controlled from a keyboard.”[31] Composition, instrument, keyboard, all suggested music. Recording, light, sequence, screen, all suggested cinema. Performance linked the two arts, but also suggested the theatricality that had mesmerized the editors of Theatre Arts Magazine . “The lumia artist conceives his idea,” Wilfred wrote, “as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.” Mobile color was, like the theatre, like the cinema, a composite art. But it was also a recorded art; and the experience it promised—of emergence, expectation, disappearance and repetition—was bound up with its technical condition: not the time of seeing, but time’s entrance into, and emergence as, the visible. This is why it slipped through Cheney’s hands even as he tried—and failed—to represent it. Its ontology and locus were obscure, like a song or picture you can’t get out of your head (or ear, or eye). Modern art’s afterimage. “The mind of audiences alone can see the created thing as a unity,” wrote drama critic and future film producer, Ralph Block, of motion projections. “It never appears as such on the screen.”[32] And he added, à propos of the cinema proper and as if anticipating Jones’s own hesitations regarding color semiotics: For the camera, movement must be living, warm, vital, and flowing rather than set and defined in an alphabet of traditional interpretation. Like Bergsonian time, it must seek to renew and recreate itself out of the crest of each present moment. It is in this sense that it resembles music.[33] Thinking, in 1935, of Technicolor as “mobile color,” as “flow” and “movement” in search of its proper name, and finally as “visual music,” Jones was reviving and reanimating the lumia experiments and discourses from the previous two decades and, a bit surreptitiously, asserting their continued influence and relevance. He had clearly not forgotten—or at least was not conscious of having not forgotten—his experiences of Wilfred’s invention. He was in fact deploying its memory as the very form through which to mediate his passage from the experimental theatre of the twenties to the experimental, color cinema of the thirties. Visual music was the distributed middle term of a barely suppressed analogy between avant-garde experiments become super-colored movies, and super-colored movies become ecstatic avant-garde events. But what’s more, the cinematic future he was projecting was the perfect image of his theatrical past. Technicolor was revealing his previous life in the theatre as a dream, in some form at least, already come true. Technicolor as technics, a regime of suggestions, associations, memories and anticipations, with all of its futural momentum, was drawing him backward into a composite past. That past too had been inflected by its dreams. What was its future supposed to have been? Was its trace the imagined future of “every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being?” What kind of presence, exactly, were we being asked to imagine? The comparison or analogy of mobile color to music was reminiscent, in fact, of the ways in which the cinema tout court had been phrased as a kind of visual music. “In form and structure, expression by the motion-camera is more like music than anything else,” wrote Block in The Century Magazine . “It streams before the eye as music streams before the ear; it is in a constant state of becoming.”[34] Indeed, as early as 1921 the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, was collecting photoplays to be analyzed and taught in a curriculum devoted to film scoring. By 1923 Rouben Mamoulian, future director of Becky Sharp , was there, directing the American Opera Company on the Eastman theatre’s stage.[35] But if a film could be scored, was it not because it was, at least in principle, already a form of music: composed, measured, recorded? The film itself, like mobile color, like Wilfred’s color records, was already a visual music, and the so-called “abstract” or “musical” films of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttman, et al . only highlighted what was the case, again, at least in principle, of every film.[36] Thus, color was a kind of addition that, as Jones asserted, simultaneously pushed the cinema forward into a future of ever-increasingly animated or animatic simulacra, and backward towards its halting, uncertain and inchoate origins. It was as if it had always already been a medium of sound and color, and precisely because the technical inscription, the recording, of each of these independent registers of perceptual flux guaranteed their integration (or disintegration), their articulation (or disarticulation) in a singular, technical object or performance. According to Bernard Stiegler, “A film, like a melody, is essentially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow…. Cinema can include sound because film, as a photographic recording technique capable of representing movement, is itself a temporal object susceptible to the phenomenological analysis proper to this kind of object.”[37] The discontinuities and fusions, those afterimages and blocs of pigment that Sennwald remarked of Becky Sharp , were not in reality “faults.” They were in fact a kind of contribution to the phenomenology of film as a temporal object. What Jones’s Technicolor experiment demonstrated was that discontinuity and fusion were the technical preconditions for continuity and integration, not their undoing. Technicolor was indicative of the fragility of cinematic continuity and by extension the continuity of the spectatorial consciousness that resonated with it. Experiences of this sort, ecstatic but also critical and analytical, were precious. Every subsequent film experiment with the relation of image to sound, form to color, has confirmed it.[38] The more Cheney and the dramatists, Wilfred and the lumiastes, Jones and the colorists, Macgowan and the cineastes sought out their independent aesthetic identities, the more they encountered the opposite. Continuity required composition. Composition really did mean composites. Block had put his finger on it: the “constant state of becoming” that the cinematic or phonographic or lumia object was, could only find its “unity” in the synthetic becoming of the “mind” with which it resonated. And there might be an infinity of modes of com-positing the two. Like Bergsonian time, again as Block had phrased it, every repetition was both a renewal and the production of the new—an innovation and an opening. Temporal objects were not only the accumulative recordings of what was or had been, they were also futural and anticipatory, “the way things seem to be moving,” as Jones would write in 1935. The theatre and the cinema, the two worlds astride of which Jones found himself in 1934 and 1935, were both increasingly composite arts; and theorists of both had been discovering as much for at least twenty years. During the period between roughly 1910 and 1930, a group of texts devoted to the ‘new’ or ‘advanced’ theatre in Europe and North America and another to the emerging ‘art’ of the cinema converged around a specific cluster of what might be called motifs or themes. These themes, both camps acknowledged, had perhaps as much if not more to do with ideals than with realities; that is, what was at stake was a certain idea of the theatre or of the cinema, and so a certain idea of art in general. Although some of these texts, in examining the ontology of their respective arts, sought to distinguish or disengage themselves from the other, they in general explored their manifest and increasing overlappings and interpenetrations, and not just with one another, but with the entire spectrum of the contemporary arts. For example, Hiram Kelly Moderwell, writing in 1914, could claim that “from an institution of one art the theatre has become, in the space of less than ten years, an institution of all the arts.” The theatre was, in his account, “a series of pictures… a series of architectural designs… rhythmic spectacle… a kaleidoscope of color… a collection of blending sounds.”[39] The next year, William Morgan Hannon and Vachel Lindsay would make nearly identical claims about the cinema. In The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Fine Arts (1915), Hannon explained, “The photodrama is a complex—nay, a truly composite art.”[40] As much as it might distinguish itself from the others, it more importantly included them within its own expansive and dynamic field. Lindsay too, in The Art of the Motion Picture (1915), famously took an intermedial approach to cinema, characterizing it, as his chapter titles indicated, as “sculpture in motion,” or “painting in motion,” or even “architecture in motion.”[41] However, it was Victor Oscar Freeburg who recognized the most direct and compelling link between film and music that would soon characterize the rhetoric of Wilfred’s lumia and Jones’s mobile color. From 1915-1920, Freeburg taught at Columbia University, establishing what would become film studies as a legitimate part of the university curriculum. Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) stressed the pictorial condition of film; indeed, “pictorial beauty” would serve him as a fundamental criterion of judgment with respect to the new art form. However, for Freeburg, the essence of film was recorded motion. “The essential feature of the motion picture is, of course, that it actually records and transmits visible motion.” He continued: And the photoplay as such is a single composition of these pictorial motions. The cinema composer is the artist who conceives these motions originally, relates them mentally to each other in some definite unity, prescribes and directs their production, and finally unites the cinematographed records into a film, and if the principles of pictorial composition have been applied in the making, this film will reveal pictorial beauty when projected on the screen.[42] If film was indeed a composite art, Freeburg now determined that its author was a “cinema composer.” If the filmmaker was, then, quite properly a composer, that was because a film, as motion, was a temporal object, a continuous but ephemeral art that was also a recording. Like music, a melody, for example, film was not only in flux but of flux. But its status as a recording made of that flux a permanent inscription, an image. In this respect the film was identical to the phonograph record in the grooves of which one could “see,” even “touch,” the image of sound. Freeburg thus anticipated, at least in theory, the color records that would form the material medium of Thomas Wilfred’s visual music. But he had also begun to divine the principles through which Jones’s dream of visual music could come true. The analogy between the phonograph record and the film was multiple and overdetermined, but it is clear that although it enabled Freeburg to consider film as an analog to music and painting, a composed and inscribed visual music, it crucially allowed him to think of film as a kind of writing and its study or analysis as a kind of reading. As early as 1915, he imagined that, perhaps someday, home viewing would become film’s proper sphere, with spectatorial sensitivity and sophistication cultivated through repeated scansions of superior films, in the manner of re-reading great books or listening to classical music on a phonograph. “It may be,” he speculated, “that the motion picture machine will take its place in our homes along with the phonograph.”[43] Freeburg was thereby promoting a modernist Arnoldianism that would add the best that has been filmed and recorded to “the best that has been thought and said.”[44] Today we can see exactly the ways in which his efforts bore fruit. The promise of the phonograph record was not so much the recording of a singular, unique, musical event, but that it could be listened to a second time, and again, repeatedly. One could learn not only to “appreciate” what was inscribed on the disc, but could learn to analyze, as it were, an experience that was its own emergence as such. Call it phono-grammatology. And one could, Freeburg surmised, do the same with a film. Indeed, temporal objects like films, like recorded discs, demanded nothing less. How else could these experiences be made critically accessible to the people who would otherwise simply undergo them as an experience of sense and sensation? Here was a humanist intuition that the human was fundamentally mediated, if not exactly constituted, by the technics that made it present to itself: books, records, films. Wasn’t the claim to them universal? Although he was in no real position to develop his insights in any full, philosophical way, Freeburg did notice clearly some of the consequences and implications of regarding film as both compositional and as recorded. As recorded temporal object, as mnemotechnics, a film was paradoxically both ephemeral and permanent, and in at least two ways. First, although the film was identical to itself qua object from one repetition to the next, it was rather more open and differential as a repeated experience. The spectator was changed with each viewing, so that spectatorial time was developmental and implied a kind of development of the film-object itself. The name for this relationship was “criticism,” as it might be undertaken by “specialists” or “a general public.”[45] Second, composition and recording also implied forms of com-possibility. “In the future, it may be that any given photoplay will be re-filmed over and over again until something like perfection results.”[46] A film was therefore a rather unstable, contingent object. Its fundamental openness implied not only perfectibility, whatever exactly that would be, but critical intervention in the object itself, on the order of say a mash-up, or mixtape or montage. This was the temporal object as the material of its own subversion. If none of this was happening—and it wasn’t, according to Freeburg—that was because commercial modes of exhibition were denying audiences the repeated, open experiences of difference that were the promise of the film. “A play is flashed upon the screen, fades away, and dies with that performance. It lives again somewhere… but not for us. We cannot read it. Nor can we find it again or see it at will.”[47] The mark of Freeburg’s genius was that he was able to discern in the technics of inscription the common element that linked together phonograph, cinematograph and the photoplay text as typescript, as writing. And he brought to bear on these technics a set of criteria drawn from art history and designed precisely to moderate the aleatory dissonances these technics constituted in the multiple dimensions of sound, image and symbolic language, as well as their potential, intermedial crossings. Film, Freeburg divined, was a temporal object, which was why it had to be thought fundamentally as a recording. Although his criteria tended toward the classical if not the conventional, his theory anticipated the modernist experiments with recorded discs by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and Wilfred.[48] The latter’s work, if the testimonies of Cheney, Stark, Macgowan and Jones are any indication, supplied for the advocates of the new theatre the occasion to think through the phenomenology of the recorded, temporal object, in the way Freeburg had for film. It is therefore no wonder that the encounter with mobile color invariably led to evocations of music or movies or both. Thus, it could provide the bridge from the living stage to the living color of the cinema. In the cinema, Jones asserted, echoing both Freeburg and Wilfred, color is precisely composed, mobile and flowing, and recorded. Analogy was destiny. In 1941 Jones, who had returned to the theatre after his brief flirtation with Hollywood, published The Dramatic Imagination , a collection of essays that would help solidify his reputation and legacy as a major figure of the 20th-century theatre. The book’s first essay, “A New Kind of Theatre,” however, is primarily a meditation on the cinema. One might have expected him to at least recall his own experiences in Hollywood as a color designer or artistic director. He never mentions them. Instead, he considers film art within what he takes to be the century’s overarching, aesthetic ambition: to create forms adequate to the exploration of subjective life. He cites James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, among others, as examples. Contemporary playwrights too, he asserts, are fully engaged in this project, exploring, he writes in his characteristic rhetoric, “the land of dreams.” “They attempt to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives.”[49] But it is the “motion pictures” that Jones believes constitute the art form most adequate to the representation of subjective reality. “They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do… They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time…. They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.” “Some new playwright,” Jones concludes in his typically futural mood, “will presently set a motion-picture screen on the stage above and behind the actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious…. On the stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden selves.”[50] Visual music has become visual thought, the flow of color assimilated to the flow of images in general. The cycloramic projections of theatrical lighting from which three-dimensional, “plastic” bodies emerged in the twenties, have been replaced by a movie screen before which living actors move, temporarily blind to a truth unfolding behind them but with which they must certainly merge and fuse. Jones never accomplished what he proposed in 1941. We will never know exactly what it might have looked or felt like. Would it have even been in color? But the appearance of hidden selves recalls, in a very poignant way, the Technicolor dream of “the appearance of every human being to every other one.” And suggests that in that previous dream was included the hoped-for presence of each and every human being to themselves. There is thus a therapeutic dimension at work here that is not surprising, given both the psychological armature of Jones’s discourse as well the ways in which color had itself been thought of in therapeutic ways, as chromotherapy, a tradition we can now see that Jones inherited.[51] (fig. 8) Fig. 8, Edwin Babbitt, frontispiece from The Principles of Light and Color (New York: Babbitt & Co., 1878). But as always, Jones’s prediction of a new kind of future cinema-theatre was a barely disguised recollection of the past. In 1922, Jones and Macgowan traveled to Europe on a kind of theatrical fact-finding mission. Attending sixty performances in ten weeks, the two were able to draw conclusions about the current state of the continental stage and compare it to their own experiences in the USA. Their book, Continental Stagecraft (1922)was the result. In a chapter entitled “The Twilight of the Machines,” they praised the increasing irrelevance of stage machinery, of all forms of contraptions, to the advanced theater, and compared the trend with the modern novel. “While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank and James Joyce are taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama.” What Jones and Macgowan have in mind here is a certain identity between the new novel’s direct engagement first with subjectivity, and second with writing itself as the medium through which it emerges as such. The same goes for the new theater, they contend. But here, the encounter is crucially effected through an experience of light. “A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very much like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.”[52] What follows from this is the contention that theatrical realism can no longer be considered a mere fidelity to or representation of the actual, but a deep concern with form through which, in a sense, the actual submits itself as material for thought and thus finds itself materially transformed by that thought. The matter of the stage, then, finds itself decomposed and recomposed by the rather more immaterial forces of light and shadow. And this is exactly what Jones was asking from his new kind of theatre, now mediated by his passage through film and Technicolor. The “uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time” that he attributes to the cinema, he might also have attributed to the theatre, or the novel, or his considerations and reflections on his own recurring dreams. There is something remarkable about the ability to relive, again and again, nearly identical experiences and to experience them, each time, as new and as open, as generating the ongoing possibilization of life. It is as if Jones is consistently forgetting in order to remember, proposing a dream of the future that was already an accomplishment of the past. But time requires forgetting. If the past did not fundamentally slip away, there would be no place, no occasion for the present. But if there were no memory, no past crystallized or reduced to image or pattern, there could be no anticipation. For what, after all, would we be waiting, anticipating? This is what the phenomenology of the temporal object, its technics, brings into the open. Temporal objects record and thus repeat the emergence of the experience of time as sensation, each one woven into the other. Mobile color was the sublime experience of color as time. Color-technics. Before it was trademarked and subdued—but also, sometimes, explosively renewed—as Technicolor. “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?” asked Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of technical and temporal objects. But he also asked from whence comes the desire to listen to a pop song, or watch a film, again and again… and again. Jones’s career was not a series of re-inventions; it was precisely not that. It was instead a life constantly in need of resuscitation. The pattern is always the same. The announcement of something new, of a dream come to life, that anticipates a future to be achieved, of an art on the brink… of cinema. But that future has already happened. The dream was already in color. So the ground must be cleared, the needle placed back at the record’s edge, the film rewound. And then replayed, but with a difference, each time. This is the shape of consciousness, the pattern of thought and behavior, shaped by temporal objects. The temporality, the melody, the film through which the “already” resuscitates itself as the “not yet.” More importantly—and Jones did not neglect this when he imagined the colors of the Homeric similes—this time precedes us (as archive or history) and extends beyond us (as archive and legacy): “a never-ending stream of images, running incessantly through our minds from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond.”[53] The experience of the emergence of consciousness as time and sensation and ideation thus always harbors a potential emergence into collectives of which consciousness is always already a part.[54] Jones’s experiences with mobile color, including his forgetting of those experiences and their repeated re-emergences, constitute a small chapter in what might be called the historical phenomenology of the technical, temporal object in the 20th century: the grammatization of sense and sensation, the recording of sounds, images and words that played in the theatres, the homes, the automobiles, the elevators, and especially in the heads of people all over the world. These recordings, their deployments of memory and anticipation, helped shape the forms of consciousness of modern men and women; but their status as objects gave those same men and women critical and creative access to those selfsame forms and their always yet-to-be-thought possibilities. Jones dreamed these as multi-media performances; Freeburg as multi-media libraries.[55] The desire of many young people to have these forms back may be more than nostalgia, or perhaps even a nostalgia for the futures and resuscitations these objects of becoming once promised. The apotheoses of mobile color, however, were the extraordinary and even hallucinatory light shows that accompanied the rock and soul concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, Apollo, and the other theatres of the 1960s and 70s. There, fueled by LSD, pot and alcohol, the performers and the audience did find themselves ecstatically on “the brink of cinema,” “fused in a developing pattern” the promise of which may not yet be in default. Bodies really did “step off the screen and appear before you in the round.”[56] Fig. 9, The Grateful Dead, performing before light projections by Heavy Water, Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, 1970 (Photo Credit: Jim Baldocchi). The pattern of Jones’s life indicates, indeed is symptomatic of, not only the profound effects of technical, temporal objects on the temporal orientation of the organism within the flux of sense and sensation, an orientation that, as Stiegler maintained, could always become a disorientation, but also of the condition and possibility of the critical deconstruction and thus creative re-orientation of those same flows.[57] The experiments with color technics of Wilfred and Jones clearly speak to the latter in profound and poignant ways. And this is why, making sense of what Jones and Wilfred were accomplishing, requires not close readings of the particular films or opuses they produced, but the meta-discourses surrounding them. The aim is to produce partial readings of the three mnemo-technical objects—film, phonograph, lumia —the dispositions and depositions of time and sensation in a technical support of inscription, to which these meta-discourses lent their words. And the stakes remain very high: the inventions and re-inventions of the forms of presence of beings to one another, and to themselves. References [1] Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 214-219. [2] Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today (New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1914), 150. [3] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 16. [4] Stephen Eskilson, “Color and Consumption,” Design Issues . Vol. 18, No. 2 (2002), 17-29. [5] Robert Edmond Jones, “Dreams into Color,” Vanity Fair , October (1934), 14. [6] The film, which starred Miriam Hopkins, was an adaptation of Langdon Mitchell’s 1899 play, itself an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair (1848). [7] Robert Edmond Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” Vanity Fair . June (1935), 13. [8] Scott Higgins, “Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor: Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design,” Film History , Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 358-383. [9] Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” 13. [10] Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971[1938]),199-230. [11] Andre Sennwald, “The Screen: The Radio City Hall Presents ‘Becky Sharp,’ the First Full-Length Three-Color Photoplay,” New York Times . June 14 (1935), 27. [12] Stark Young, “The Color Organ,” Theatre Arts Magazine . Vol. 1, No. 1 (1922), 20-21. [13] Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 122-3. Macgowan’s evocations of the “fourth dimension” and “mystic philosophy” are indications that he had discussed the theoretical bases of the lumia with their inventor. According to Andrew Johnston, Wilfred’s work “was developed out of a desire to achieve an aesthetic experience that was mystical in orientation….” See Johnston’s “The Color of Prometheus, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia and the Projection of Transcendence,” in Simon Brown et al. eds., Color and the Moving Image (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67-78. [14] Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 118-120. [15] Keely Orgeman et al ., Lumia. Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017), 24. [16] Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1924), 184-185. [17] Noam M. Elcott, “The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th-Century Art,” PhotoResearcher , No. 29 (2018), 7-23. [18] For a powerful account of Lessing and the aesthetic and political stakes of artistic borders, see, W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing's Laocoon, ” Representations , No. 6 (Spring, 1984), 98-115. For accounts of Pater and the trespassing of artistic borders, see, Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins eds., Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2010). Also, Andrew Eastham, “Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian "Anders-streben," and the Politics of Soundscape,” The Yearbook of English Studies , Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2 (2010), 196-216. [19] Sheldon Cheney, Modern Art and the Theatre (Scarborough-on-Hudson: The Sleepy Hollow Press, 1921), pp. 3-4. [20] Arnheim, 201-2. [21] Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949 [1934]), 15. [22] Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 7, No. 4 (1947): p. 252. [23] Judith Zilczer, "Color Music: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et Historiae , Vol. 8, No. 16 (1987), 101-126. [24] Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art , 186. [25] For an account of the tempos and rhythms common to the new theatre and the contemporary cinema, see John Grierson, “Tempo,” Motion Picture News (1926), quoted in George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 432–33. [26] On ‘stage pictures’ and their persistence in the theatre and in early cinema, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). [27] Moderwell, 72. [28] Macgowan, 120. [29] Moderwell, 71. [30] The notion of temporal object originates in the early 20th century with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the analysis of internal time consciousness. Husserl’s example of a temporal object, that is an object-phenomenon that has to be comprehended in the time of its emergence, was a melody. A melody has to grasped in its unfolding for which each present moment contains both its immediate past (retention) and an anticipation of a future (protention). Bernard Stiegler has demonstrated the ways in which Husserl’s analysis neglects the technics required for the model of consciousness he adumbrates. Stiegler’s example, then, is not the melody as such, but the melody recorded on a disc or on tape. For a clear account of the temporal object as developed by Stiegler, see Matt Bluemink, “Stiegler’s Memory: Tertiary Retention and Temporal Objects,” 3: AM Magazine .com. Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020. [31] Wilfred, 252. [32] Ralph Block, “Motion,” The Freeman , October 27 (1920),157. [33] Ralph Block, “Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting,” The Dial . Vol LXXXII, Jan.-Jun. (1927): 20. [34] Ralph Block, “The Movies versus Motion Pictures,” The Century Magazine , No. 102, October (1921), 892. [35] Tom Milne, Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),12-13. Mamoulian would also work, like Jones and Macgowan, with Eugene O’Neill, before making the move to Hollywood. [36] Malcolm Cook, “Visual Music in Film, 1921-1924: Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman.” In Music and Modernism. Edited by Charlotte de Mille (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). See also Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 41: “In cinema, speech echoes already there in the image, even when, presumably, the image is silent…. And the image is already an element of sound.” [37] Stiegler, 12. [38] Deleuze, Gilles, “ Having an Idea in Cinema .” In Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14-22. [39] Moderwell, 17-18. [40] William Morgan Hannon, The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Arts (New Orleans: Ruskin Press, 1915), p. 23. [41] Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1915). [42] Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918),2-3. [43] Freeburg, 6. [44] Peter Decherney, “Inventing Film Study and its Object at Columbia University, 1915-1938,” Film History . Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 443-460. [45] Freeburg, 5. [46] Freeburg, 6. [47] Freeburg, 10. [48] To readers familiar with Freeburg’s book, my account may seem somewhat surprising. And it is true that I am concentrating on the early, preliminary observations on film in a text that is quite long. But Freeburg’s remarkable attempt at constructing what amounts to a poetics of the photoplay is dependent—and he knew this—on the technological conditions necessary for forming the judgments that would eventually give rise to that poetics. Thus, his analyses of sensation, emotion and intellection at the cinema, and the deepening of those both independently of one another and as linked in an overall organization of feelings and thoughts, emerge from an attention to a film as the composite, temporal and sensory phenomenon that produces the impression of reality characteristic of these kinds of experiences. In fact, he speculates that that “impression” may, over time, be mistaken for reality in what becomes a “confused memory,” so that in old age one might believe themselves to have had experiences “in reality” that were only ever had at the movies (p. 19). To counter this permanent submersion in and subjugation to the moving image, Freeburg advocates for a kind of film literacy, an attentiveness to the forms of grammatization (the filmic ‘writing’) out of which the film is composed, in order to bring out “beneath the attractive surface… the permanent values of illuminating truth, universal meaning, and unfolding beauty” (p. 25). These are humanist aims, certainly. But they are not the only aims that would logically follow from Freeburg’s essential, early, and in many ways materialist, insight. Indeed, his consistent unwillingness to separate the quasi-independent compositional elements of film from their technical base (from their mnemo-technics) gives rise to many of his crucial observations. [49] Robert Edmond Jones, “A New Kind of Drama,” in The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1967 [1941]), 16-17. [50] Ibid. 17-19. [51] T. W. Allan Whitfield and Jianne Whelton, “The Arcane Roots of Colour Psychology, Chromotherapy, and Colour Forecasting.” COLOR: research and application . Volume 40, Number 1, February (2015), 99-106. One of the 19th-c. originators of chromotherapy, a kind of theosophical art, was none other than Edwin Babbitt, father of Irving Babbitt, for whom color aesthetics, and his father as well, were anathema. [52] Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1922), pp. 66-7. [53] Jones 1941, 15. [54] What Stiegler calls, following Gilbert Simondon, “transindividuation.” [55] Anthony Hostetter and Elizabeth Hostetter, “Robert Edmond Jones: Theatre and Motion Pictures, Bridging Reality and Dreams.” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 19 (2011), 26-40. Kevin Brown, “The Dream Medium: Robert Edmond Jones’s Theatre of the Future.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media , Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 1-10. Steven Marras, “The Photoplay as Emergent Media Form: Victor O. Freeburg and Vachel Lindsay on Photoplay Aesthetics,” Screening the Past , www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12. [56] The phenomenology of these sensory, temporal dynamics extends itself in our own time not only in the ubiquitous retreat of bodies back into screens of all sizes, but to VR and neural mnemo-technical practices as well, some of which perform the kinds of reflexive, critical deconstructions once advocated by Jones, Block, Freeburg, et al. That is, some of these objects (films, installations, etc.) enable us to touch, as it were, the time of our brains. See Mark B. N. Hansen, “From Fixed to Fluid. Material-Mental Images Between Neural Synchronization and Computational Mediation,” in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Releasing the Image (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83-111. [57] On orientation and disorientation in Stiegler, see Patrick Crogan, “Essential Viewing,” Film Philosophy . Vol. 10, No. 2 (2006), 39-54. Footnotes About The Author(s) BENNET SCHABER teaches filmmaking and film theory in the Department of Cinema and Screen Studies at SUNY Oswego, USA, and at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia. He is the editor of Eugene O’Neill’s Photoplays of 1926 ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 40:1, 2019), the author of “Towards a Cinematic O’Neill” ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 42:2, 2021) and “Little Cinemas: Eugene O’Neill as Screenwriter” ( Journal of Screenwriting , 13:1, 2022). Forthcoming essays on theatre critic, film theorist, screenwriter and producer, Ralph Block (1889-1974); and ‘voice’ in silent cinema. bennet.schaber@oswego.edu Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Watch Respoken by Sidney Ken / Thai Phirun Hul at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A visionary actor and his team working to revive Cambodia’s Lakhon Niyeay (Spoken Theatre) facing personal and professional challenges as he prepares for a show that hasn’t been staged in six years, amidst an uncertain future. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Respoken Sidney Ken / Thai Phirun Hul At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 1:40 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Cambodia Language Khmer Running Time 26 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film A visionary actor and his team working to revive Cambodia’s Lakhon Niyeay (Spoken Theatre) facing personal and professional challenges as he prepares for a show that hasn’t been staged in six years, amidst an uncertain future. Producer KIMKAHAPTEI TANN Co-Directors SIDNEY KEN THAI PHIRUN HUL Extra Camera Work CHANDARA KOAM Assistant Camera KIMSRUN SOK Interviewees PHEARITH NEN SOPHEAK SOUNG PONRONG SENG SREYLEAK CHAN SINA CHHON Editors SIDNEY KEN CHANDARA KOAM Colorist CHANDARA KOAM Special Thanks to EsaiVoler's Media Team Department of Media & Communication CHHEANGMENG THAY CHANTHIDA HEM About The Artist(s) Sidney Ken is a Cambodian director and colorist working at the intersection of documentary and commercial filmmaking. His work blends cinematic storytelling with real-world narratives, often focusing on identity, youth, and cultural shifts. Sidney is the founder of Limelight, a vintage lens rental house based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is best known as the director of Respoken (2024), an award-winning documentary on Cambodia’s spoken theater scene, and Cool Like Us: La Cima Series (2026), a 6-part branded documentary series spotlighting emerging hip-hop artists. Sidney has directed multiple digital commercials for Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra launch in Cambodia. Sidney has also directed and color graded campaigns for international brands and organizations, including Starbucks, Prudential, Oppo, UNDP, and the European Union. Hul Thai Phirun is an award-winning Cambodian filmmaker working across documentary and cinematic storytelling. His practice centers on people-driven narratives, grounded in trust, observation, and emotional authenticity. As a cinematographer, his work includes Sbek Touch (2024) and A Taste of Tradition (2024), recognized at regional festivals. As an alumnus of Cambodia Film Lab, he has collaborated with NGOs and international organizations on socially driven projects, contributing to stories focused on reconciliation, culture, and community. Chandara Koam is a Phnom Penh–based filmmaker and photographer working across directing, editing, and visual storytelling. Since beginning his practice in 2017, he has developed his craft through independent projects and professional productions, with a focus on music videos and narrative-driven visuals, and recently graduated from Cambodia Film Lab training. Tann Kim Kahaptei (Kris) is a Cambodian filmmaker and producer with a background in Media and Communication. His work focuses on creating films that balance entertainment with cultural preservation, often aiming to spark meaningful conversation. Through his projects, Kris explores ways to connect contemporary storytelling with tradition, positioning his work within Cambodia’s evolving film landscape. Get in touch with the artist(s) sidneyken.dp@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.sidneyken.com/, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13891739/, https://www.instagram.com/ken.sidney/, https://www.facebook.com/sidney.r3d/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respoken, 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

Angela L. Robinson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Angela L. Robinson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Given the ubiquity of “aloha” in Pacific tourism and marketing, Hollywood feature films, and Hawai’i state politics, what precisely does the concept offer for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) now? Stephanie Nohelani Teves’s Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance crucially intervenes into the discourses, practices, and performances of aloha that appropriate the concept from its Hawaiian cultural context to the detriment of Kanaka Maoli. Drawing from Native Pacific cultural studies, American Indian studies, performance studies, and queer and feminist theory, Teves’s multidisciplinary text examines the complex negotiation and resignification of aloha within a range of contemporary Hawaiian performances, from Hip Hop musician Krystilez and drag queen Coco Chandelier to ghost tours and online commenting forums. The varied performances that Teves examines point to how Kanaka Maoli experience aloha as both a constraining, disciplinary force and a connection to Indigenous identity and community. Teves tracks these contradictions of aloha throughout chapter one, such as its actual codification into law through the 1986 Aloha Spirit Law. She ultimately argues that Hawaiian performance articulates aloha as a strategy to disarticulate it from its most commodified forms and to enact defiant indigeneity. According to Teves, defiant indigeneity is performance that challenges, deconstructs, and resists colonial settler state politics, while also affirming the ongoing defiance, existence, and survivance of Indigenous peoples. Akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, defiant indigeneity “pushes forward this possibility of something else that creates and reconfigures Kanaka Maoli life through performance” (84). As a theory and method, defiant indigeneity allows for a capacious understanding of Indigenous performance and performativity as world-making. For Kanaka Maoli, Teves contends, aloha has become the essence of Hawaiian Indigeneity, circumscribing what is expected and valued by non-Natives. This normative version of aloha is at once Hawai’i’s welcoming gift to tourists and non-Natives and a strict regulatory measure of specific forms of Hawaiian cultural expression. In the next two chapters, Teves focuses on how Hawaiian performance refuses, subverts, and queers the prescriptive nature of aloha and its subsequent policing of authentic Indigeneity. In her close readings of work from Hawaiian Hip Hop artist Krystilez and drag performer Coco Chandelier, Teves draws from theories of performativity, such as Judith Butler’s gender performativity and E. Patrick Johnson’s racial performativity, to outline a specifically Indigenous performativity. She argues, “As the process by which indigenous bodies generate social meaning, Indigenous performativity centers Indigenous articulations of culture, outsider perceptions of such, and the constant interplay between them” (52). For example, in her readings of a photograph of Coco Chandelier at the 2006 Diva of Polynesia Pageant and the photo’s Facebook comments, Teves observes how the photograph operationalizes both a sense of Kanaka Maoli pride and a queered aloha “in drag.” In their refusal to submit to hypercommodified notions of Hawaiianness and aloha, both Krystilez and Coco Chandelier create new ways of performing Indigeneity through countercultural spaces that at once draw from Hawaiian cultural knowledge and critique notions of a pure, authentic Indigeneity. Moving away from the fringe performance spaces of chapters two and three, Teves uses the fourth chapter to analyze the narrative and afterlife of Princess Ka’iulani through mainstream media productions, such as the 2009 film Princess Kaiulani and the 2015 revival of the 1987 play Ka’iulani written by Dennis Caroll, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Robert Nelson, and Ryan Page. Focusing on the 1898 illegal overthrow and annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the legacy of heir to the throne Princess Ka’iulani, these texts underscore the power of cultural memory. Cultural memory provides the opportunity for Kanaka Maoli to mourn history and loss, restage resistance to the ongoing occupation of Hawai’i, and connect to their ancestors and to the kingdom. To this end, cultural memory provides Kanaka Maoli with a linkage to Hawaiian nationhood, past, present, and future. A primary concern of Defiant Indigeneity is how Kanaka Maoli at times wield authenticity as a weapon to disconnect and exclude in their debates around Hawaiian nationhood. For example, in chapter five, Teves argues against the “inauthentic” moniker often applied to those in the diaspora, those who are queer, and those who simply know the experience of un-belonging. Through a close reading of Kristiana Kahakauwila’s short story, “The Old Paniolo Way,” Teves illustrates how connections to Indigeneity can and should look different, take alternative paths, and occur in unexpected places. Teves expands upon the connections made possible through cultural memory in the previous chapter, and she concretizes them through present relations between Kanaka Maoli in order to advance alternate forms of Hawaiian belonging and membership that can hold the various contradictions and complexities of Indigeneity. In her conclusion, Teves examines the 2014 U.S. Department of Interior public meetings in Hawai’i. While the meetings were intended as a forum to discuss Hawaiian governance and nation-building, Teves remarks on the ways the meetings exacerbated the contentious divide between pro-federal recognition Kanaka Maoli and pro-independence nationalist Kanaka Maoli. Thus, Teves contends that what Hawaiian performance offers to these debates is not only a warning of how aloha can silence, erase, and marginalize, but more importantly, an understanding of how Kanaka Maoli can re-center and reaffirm aloha as a relationship with and between each other and the land. Calling for an expansive understanding of belonging, community, and nationhood, Teves writes, “Our belonging as a people cannot be contained within a document, and our sovereignty and nationhood are about relationships with each other, the plant and animal worlds, and the land and water that surround us” (165). For the past two decades, Indigenous Studies scholars, such as Mishuana Goeman and Vilsoni Hereniko, have highlighted the importance of performance for thinking through Indigenous identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Defiant Indigeneity effectively supplements that genealogy while also breaking ground as one of the first texts to engage in a theoretical dialogue between Native Studies and performance studies. As such, Defiant Indigeneity is itself performative—a bold enactment of defiant indigeneity. Teves’s dynamic voice, nuanced readings, and careful attention to her community highlight a deep commitment to the world-making potentiality of insurgent aloha. After all, as Teves argues, “We [Kanaka Maoli] need aloha—not the wasteful forms of aloha spread through tourism, but the kind of aloha that is sustainable and has actually allowed us to survive” (21). Defiant Indigeneity is a critical addition to Native Studies and performance studies, and a powerful testament to Kanaka Maoli survivance. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANGELA L. ROBINSON University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martin E. Segal Born July 4, 1916 in Vitebsk, Russia. Died August 5, 2012 in New York City. (click here to read the New York Times Obituary ) Officer, Board and Committee Memberships: Founder (1939), The Segal Company, international consultants and actuaries for employee benefit plans; President, 1939-1967; Chairman, 1967-1991; Chairman Emeritus and consultant – 1991-2012 Founder and Chairman, Board of Directors – The New York International Festival of the Arts, Inc., 1985 until discontinuation in 2002 The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Trustee, 1986-1991; Advisory Trustee, 1991-2012 The ASCAP Foundation – Member of the Board of Directors, 1997-2003 American Theatre Wing – Member of Advisory Committee/Tony Voter, 2000-2008 Board of Hospitals, City of New York – Member of the Board, 1962-1970 City Center of Music and Drama, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors and Chairman of the Executive Committee, 1971-1974; also Treasurer, 1974; Governor Emeritus – 1974-2012 Commission for Cultural Affairs of the City of New York (predecessor to Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs)– appointed by Mayor Beame as first Chairman, 1975-1977 Cultural Assistance Center (predecessor to Alliance for the Arts) – Founder and President 1974-1982; Chairman, 1982-1984; named Honorary Chairman in 1984 Film Guild of New York – Founder (1940-1941) The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Inc. – Founding President and CEO, 1968-1978; Founder and President Emeritus, 1978-2012 The Glenridge Performing Arts Center, Sarasota, Florida – Member, Board of Advisors, 2004-2012 The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York – Member, Board of Visitors, 1983-1996 Member, Board of Trustees, The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc., 1996-2008 Vice Chairman, 2003-2008 Harvard University – Member, Visiting Committee, School of Public Health, 1979-1992; Member, Dean’s Council, School of Public Health, 1990-2006; Member, Board of Advisors, Center for Health Communication Mentoring Program at School of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 2003-2012 The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton – Trustee, 1972-1991 (positions included member of Executive Committee, Chairman of Finance Committee and Chairman of Review Committee); Trustee Emeritus, 1991-2012 The Library of America – Founding Advisor, 1984-2012; Sole Honorary Member of the Board of Directors, 2005-2012 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. – Vice Chairman, 1978-1981; Chairman, 1981-1986; Chairman Emeritus, 1986-2012 Mayor’s Committee on Cultural Policy, NYC – Chairman, 1974 The George Meany Center– Member, Board of Trustees, 2001-2010; Trustee Emeritus, 2010-2012 Mount Sinai Hospital – Trustee, 1966-1970 Museum of Modern Art – Member, Board of Trustees, and Chairman, Exhibitions Committee 1978-1981 (retired from Board) Musica Sacra – Member, Honorary Council, 2001-2012 National Building Museum – Member, Board of Directors, 1983-1991 National Urban League – Member of National Board, 1961-1970; Vice President, 1967-1970; Chairman of the National Urban League’s First Equal Opportunity Day Dinner, November, 1961 New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation – (Mayor Lindsay’s first appointee), Member of the Board, Chairman of Finance Committee and Member of Executive Committee, 1970-1972 Office for the Arts at Harvard – Member of Advisory Committee, 1993-1999; Member of Council, 1999-2012 The Public Interest – Founding Member; Publication Committee, 1965-2002 (The Public Interest discontinued publication in 2005.) Public Radio International (formerly known as American Public Radio) – Founding Member, Board of Directors, 1981-1994; Director Emeritus, 1994-1998; Counselor at Large – 1998-2012 Helena Rubinstein Foundation, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors, 1972-1995 S.L.E. Lupus Foundation – Member, Board of Directors, 2000-2012 The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors, 2000-2004; Member of Executive Committee, 2002-2004 The Studio In A School Association – Member, Advisory Board, 1988-2012 Theatre Development Fund – Member, Advisory Council, 1992-2012 Town Hall Foundation – Member, Advisory Council, 1986-2012 Young Audiences, Inc. – Member, National Board, 1979-2012 Mr. Segal was Organizing Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Future of Arts Education – November 11-13, 1999 He was General Chairman of “Night of 100 Stars II” (first AIDS benefit – The Actors’ Fund of America– held on February 17, 1985). In 1979, Mr. Segal was co-chairman of the mission to lay the basis for cultural exchanges between the United States and China via the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange; visited China with the U.S. delegation, as co-chairman, for this purpose (March 8-23, 1979). Mr. Segal served on the Advisory Council of the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange from 1982-1988. He served on the Board of the Fund for the City of New York from 1978-1987 and was Chairman of its Public Service Awards Committee in 1978 and 1979. Mr. Segal was a Partner, Wertheim & Co. from1967-82 and President (1972-1975) and subsequently Chairman (1975-1982) of Wertheim Asset Management Services. He is a former columnist for the Associated Press. Honorary Degrees: New York University – Doctor of Humane Letters (1988) The Juilliard School – Doctor of Humane Letters (2006) Graduate Center of The City University of New York – Doctor of Humane Letters (1979) Mannes College of Music – Doctor of Music (1976) Pratt Institute – Doctor of Humane Letters (1976) Long Island University – Doctor of Humane Letters (1986) Manhattan School of Music – Doctor of Music Honoris Causa (1999) Commendations and Awards (in order received): International Film Importers and Distributors of America (1973) The Municipal Art Society of New York – Certificate of Merit “for his innumerable contributions to the well-being of the City…” (1974) Third Street Music School Settlement – Award for Service to Music (1981) Museum of the City of New York – Annual Award of Distinction, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the cultural life of New York (1982) Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture – New York City (1982) Concert Artists Guild Award (1983) League of Women Voters of the City of New York Education Fund Award, in recognition of his leadership and public service to the cultural life of New York City” (1984) Royal Swedish Order of the Polar Star, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (1984) Ministry of Culture of The French Government – Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (1984-2005) The International Center in New York, Inc. – Distinguished American of Foreign Birth Award (1985) Alumni and Friends of LaGuardia High School – annual Award for leadership in the arts community (1985) Alumni Association of the City College of New York – John H. Finley Medal (1985) Board of Directors/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – established annual Martin E. Segal Awards (1986) Town Hall – Friend of the Arts Award (1987) Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. – First Directors Emeriti Award (1987) Songwriters’ Hall of Fame – Patron of the Arts Award (1988) National Federation of Music Clubs – Presidential Citation (1989) Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center – Public Spirit Award (1989) New York State Governor’s Arts Award (1989) The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York – President’s Award (1990) The National Arts Club – Medal of Honor (1992) Lincoln Center Laureate Award (1997) Museum of the City of New York – Our Town Treasure Award (1998) Arts Roundtable – Award of Honor (1998) Citizens Union of The City of New York – Civic Leadership Award (1998) The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center – CUNY Graduate Center (2000) The Acting Company – The Joan Warburg Humanitarian Award (2001) S.L.E. Lupus Foundation Award (2001) Alliance for the Arts – Honoree (2004) The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Honoree, 2004 The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – Honoree (2005) New York Landmarks Conservancy – Living Landmark (2005) Ministry of Culture of The French Government – Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2005) The American Academy of Arts and Letters – Presidential Citation of Distinction (2009) The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Award for Distinguished Public Service – (2010) Club Affiliations: The Century Association The National Arts Club The Pilgrims of the United States

Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo: Selfie by James Ijames. Playwright James Ijames was already a household name in Philadelphia before he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham . He first garnered critical attention as a performer after graduating with an MFA in Acting from Temple University. He then turned his attention to directing at major Philadelphia theaters such as the Arden and the Wilma, and he later became one of the co-Artistic Directors of the latter. And plays like 2017’s Kill Move Paradise , a meditation on the killing of unarmed Black men by police set in limbo, had already gained important national interest. As his colleague at Villanova University, I have had the opportunity to watch his accomplishments grow. And in 2022, I watched as audiences flocked to the family cookout for his explicitly Black and queer adaptation of Hamlet , first at The Public Theater and later on Broadway. His public profile continues to rise, as proven by his newest play, Good Bones , which was in rehearsal at The Public as I sat down to ask him about the current state of the American theatre. Bess Rowen: I’m curious to start by asking what are you excited to see in the forthcoming season? What excites you about the American theatre season right now? It can be individual plays, playwrights, or themes you’re seeing pop. And it can include your own work! James Ijames: What am I excited to see? I’m excited to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins back on Broadway. Soon. And in a new play category. I’m excited that Jamie Lloyd is going to be directing on Broadway again. Rowen: Yes! And are there any themes that pop for you? What stands out to you as something that’s going on right now, or something that’s coming, that marks a difference? Ijames: Yeah, that’s the thing. I actually think we’re actually reverting back to some of our old stuff. A little bit. I think we, as an industry, were like, ( smugly ) “Wow, look at us. We did it. They saw us. They saw the white American theatre. And we fixed it. We’re great, right? Okay, we’re great.” It feels like that a little bit. And that’s not everywhere. But there is this sense of congratulation, of making it through a trying time—if you were able to make it through a trying time. And then I think the very real, and natural, impulse right now is to stop the hemorrhaging and get people back into the buildings. And the quickest way that people do that is by doing things that feel comfortable. And what happens when you start to make art that feels comfortable is that you start to build systems around it that also offer certain people comfort—not everybody comfort, but certain people comfort. Yeah, I think we are flipping a little bit on some of the stuff we were gonna do. Now, I do think we overcorrected as well. There were some places where I thought “how many of these do we gotta…?” There was a bit of that as well, but now we’ve sort of patted our collective selves on the back and said we’re this great inclusive space. But hey, you know, as always in transition…I do think it is better than when I started. I do think young people coming into this industry are finding a much better industry than the one that I found when I came in. Both as a Black person, as a queer person, as a person not born in an urban setting and doesn’t know how to move through those spaces, who had to sort of learn how to do that. Yeah, I don’t know. Rowen: That’s such a good point, too. Because it reminds me that so often the theatre is reacting. It’s reacting and trying to kind of guess at what the next thing it needs to touch is. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: And I have noticed more butts in seats at theaters that I’m going to that have new work in them a lot of the time. But I think a lot about what “new work” means. Is it the same story by a new person, or is it actually a new story? And those are two different ways of selling tickets, which is important for us to remember. But you’ve been a part of that change of moving the dial at least slightly forward, and that’s something! That is really an impressive feat. And I do hope that now that we went very far in one direction and are now heading kind of far in the other direction that we land in some sort of happy medium. Ijames: Yeah. I think we learned a ton so that there are lessons we all learned that we can come back to. But it’s just so easy to go back to the how you used to do it. It’s so easy. It’s so intoxicating to just go there. And just because of the circumstances, I think there’s a bit of that. But, I will say this. I also think this is a moment that is kind of ripe. I think the best work to come…How do I say this? We haven’t seen the great works that are gonna come out of this moment. We might start to see that, but I really do think we’re gonna see artists be theorists in their craft more. That’s the thing I’m kind of hungry for. Like, who’s doing something formally interesting? There was this moment with Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lucas Hnath where there were some real formal challenges. You know, we usually let Europe do that for us ( laughs ). Rowen: Yes! It’s true. But Europe is more anti-text than we are. So, we have this American writing tradition that can also be a staging tradition. But often we have not thought of it like that. We’ve thought of it as, “look at this great piece of literature that someone wrote.” And, right, but those people staged that. And that’s what’s so cool about Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work and Lucas Hnath’s work, because those plays say “okay, I need a pool on stage. Okay, there’s a moment where the audience needs to come on stage.” That’s a bold choice, and people were up for it. Ijames: You know, people are really game for that! And I think in this moment where is so easy to watch some of the best dramatic writing in the world on television, on your couch—I mean, Succession is a beautifully written show. It is incredible writing! So, what can we do in the theatre that requires liveness, that requires you to be in space with other people, to sort of be in citizenship with other people. I think we have to begin to find forms that feed that and that will draw people back. Because people pay thousands of dollars to see Beyoncé because they want to be in a community with a lot of people. Rowen: And they want to see something they can’t see anywhere else! Like we need to give them something they can’t see anywhere else, and they can’t experience everywhere else. And you’re so right about the TV aspect, too. I think about that because I watch these shows like Only Murders in the Building , which I’m not saying is the best written show in the world. But it’s a very smart show that is written by a bunch of theatre people, which is why the characters are so interesting and fully fleshed out. Bringing the theatre to TV is really interesting, now we have to figure out what we can bring from those series back into the theatre. And that’s a little more challenging. Because I feel like we often not quite apologizing to our audiences, but we’re saying, “don’t worry, it’s so worth this money, and we won’t even keep you here that long! It’s gonna be fine!” There’s something about the safeness of “don’t worry, you’re gonna sit there and see this thing and you don’t have to come back for the next episode. Just sit back and relax!” Ijames: ( laughs ) Yes! Rowen: I want us to trust our audiences a little bit more, because I do think that what we’ve learned is that they will show up for something different. It’s a different audience that might show up for something different, but they will. Ijames : They will! Yes, I think that’s the thing we haven’t confronted. Is that what an audience is has changed a little bit. And we have all of these “rules” about our industry that we have from, I guess, the 19th century. Like plays start at 8. Why do plays start at 8 still? If I wanted to catch a show on my way home from work, no, I have to wait. If I’m in midtown, I’ve got to wait around, if I’m downtown…that’s a thing that we have just accepted and not questioned. So, that’s one example of audience changing, and the needs of the audience changing. Rowen: Right! Ijames: I also think that there’s a lot of talk about how our attention span has been shortened—I just think it’s been reorganized. Like, I’m able to pay attention. You just have to hold my attention. And it’s a little more difficult to hold my attention. Rowen: Exactly! But people will sit there and binge a show. We do have the attention span to do that, you’re right. It’s just that we won’t sit there passively for just anything. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: That’s the change. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ijames: I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. And I also wonder about…what are some things that can happen in a theatre—I won’t call these play—that people can come in and out of? Like if you can get people in there because they can have some agency about how they can move through the space, you can reorient people into what this is. So, when you do ask them to sit down, they’re not like “I’ve never been here before.” Rowen: Right. Ijames: So, I just think we have to mix up what we’re doing. We can’t just plan a season of a bunch of plays and musicals and think just because they won Tony’s last year they’re going to automatically sell. The thing I always wonder about in Philadelphia is that it has this huge sports fan culture. And I just wonder: what is the way to harness and invite those people into our space to come and see? Because they wanna be in a collective. Maybe they just don’t feel like they’re allowed in that space, so they don’t come into that space. I don’t know. Rowen: Yeah, because at an Eagles game you could leave and get a refreshment and come back. Some people do sit or stand there and watch the game the whole time, and don’t go anywhere, but some people are coming in and out. And still, that creates community and there is an overwhelming community feeling with the sports teams at the center. And those fans would do anything to see those teams, like they travel all over to see those teams compete. And I’ve heard people say that the difference is that there’s no competition in the theatre. Ijames: Hmmm. Rowen: Which is fascinating because I feel like I can talk about plays where there is competition, but it’s not “real” competition. Like it’s falsified somehow because the understanding is, I think, that there’s no real risk. Ijames: Right. Rowen: But we know there is a real risk in doing live theatre. But the competition can’t be between the actors and the audience. It has to be something that people are signing up to watch. So, I’m sure there’s a way to harness that. That’s such an interesting point. Because also, as a New Yorker, I tend to defer to thinking about New York. But the New York is a very particular theatre community, and it is not like what is happening in most of our country and the world. So, we have to think local in terms of what our community needs from the theatre. And I think a lot of people don’t think like that. Thinking of an untapped audience who would be into it is a great way of thinking about it instead of worrying that we’re going to scare off our subscribers. There’s so often a reaction of, “we’re going to lose them if we don’t do something.” Ijames: And I’m like, “we’ve lost them. They’re already gone. They’re not coming back.” Rowen: And also, are we raising the next generation of subscribers? There’s no rule that subscribers have to be a certain age. If you make a season people want to see, they’ll come. […] That’s a really interesting point about untapped audiences and what we’re actually doing, aside from just doing programming we think is interesting to get people into “the American theatre.” In terms of what you’ve seen recently, what excites you as an audience member lately? Ijames: What have I seen lately? I’ve been pretty intensely in rehearsal. But I really loved Stereophonic . Yeah, I really loved that. Rowen: Me too. What an unusual, creative play. The basis is so simple and it’s so unique. Ijames: Right? I just was sort of dazzled by it. Rowen: Also proof that people will sit there for three hours if it’s good. Ijames: This is also very true, yeah. I saw Kenny Leon’s [direction of Suzan-Lori Parks’s] Topdog/Underdog last season…was it last season? The season before last? Rowen: I think it was two seasons ago. It was excellent. Ijames: And I also saw his [direction of Samm-Art Williams’s] Home at the beginning of this season. And I just love what he’s doing with bringing those plays back that, you know, had a life but didn’t really get the wind in their sails the way they should have because of the time. And it was really lovely to see that play. What else have I seen lately that I’ve liked? I really liked Hilma at the Wilma ( laughs ). Rowen: Hilma at the Wilma! Ijames: The Comeuppance . Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance . I just…he can do anything. Rowen: Yeah. I said to him when I talked to him that when I was sitting there and watching that play I literally had a thought in my head that was: this must have been what it felt like to watch a new Eugene O’Neill play at the time. Something that makes you think, formally, I’ve never seen anything that does this. It totally works, but what a different approach. What a fascinating and subtle change. I’m excited to see it at the Wilma this season. And I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it. Ijames: It’s such a good play, and I haven’t been in any rehearsals, but I imagine it will be a very good production. What else? I haven’t been seeing a bunch lately. Rowen: It’s okay, you’ve been a bit busy! I’m gonna let you go in a second, so for a final provocation for you: If you could say something to the current American theatre about what you hope is coming next, what would you like to see happen next in the US queer theatre? Ijames: Oh. I want to see larger and more robust and sustained systems of support and development for trans playwrights in particular. I feel like there are times sometimes people will come to me with “oh, this is kind of interesting, you should do something with this.” And I say, “there’s a trans playwright who should be writing this and you should find them to write it.” You know, I think organizations maybe feel timid to program it, but the audience is there. People are ready for that kind of storytelling. I think a lot of formal and structural things that we don’t even think about are happening in that space that we could all learn from. And that could really change and elevate what we’re doing in this country in theatre. So, that’s a thing I want. I want there to be plays about queer people where their queerness is completely quotidian. Rowen: Yeah, yes. Ijames: Like, the problem is: we’ve gotta sell the cherry orchard. You know, just like in a straight play. Rowen: Right! We, a gay couple, must sell our cherry orchard. Ijames: Yeah, are we gonna keep the piano or sell it? Can the problem be, “Laura, what are you gonna do if you don’t get married?” We don’t get to do that. It’s always gotta be: “Oh, you’re queer. What a problem!” ( laughs ). Rowen: ( laughs ) It’s true! Well, I feel like you do that, though. One of the things I love about your work in terms of representation, and I’ve said this to you before, is that you write bi and pansexual men, particularly Black men, who are…where that’s not the problem of the play. And specifically for bi and pan people, that is often the problem of what the representation is. It’s often like, “oh no! What kind of gender do you want to be with, and how does that define your personhood?” And, it’s like, no, they’re just existing in space. And when that’s revealed, that’s never the conflict. That is such a radical move, and so generous. It always moves me so much when I see those particular kinds of representation. And I’ve been lucky enough to see it live in a few of your plays. And I’m always thinking that there is someone in the audience who this is opening up…this is a moment where they’re just going ( exhales ). They’re relaxing. And they’re thinking, “Okay, I’m alright. I’m safe here.” And it isn’t going to be an hour and half more of people being like “Oh, but what about your identity?” So, thank you for that! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Recent articles have appeared in Theatre Survey , Theatre Topics , Modern Drama , and The Eugene O’Neill Review . Her next book project focuses on the representation of mean teenage girls on stage. She also served as the co-editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre and the performance review editor for The Eugene O’Neill Review . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

AMANDA HOROWITZ presents Bad Stars at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Bad Stars AMANDA HOROWITZ 7-7:50 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP 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 LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Amanda Horowitz is an interdisciplinary artist working between performance and sculpture. She writes and directs theater using experimental and collaborative methods. Past performance projects include: Heavenly Fools (2023, Mason Gross Playwrights Festival), Bad Stars (2023, STARS Gallery), Bad Water True West (2022, Bad Water Gallery), Suddenly, This Summer (2019, PAM), The Plumbing Tree (by Medium Judith, 2018, Highways Performance Space and Human Resources LA). She was the co-founder and director of Medium Judith (extg, 2013-2019), a theater collaboration with Bully Fae Collins. Amanda holds MFAs in Visual Art and Playwriting from Rutgers University. She is currently a member of 2024/2025 Clubbed Thumb Early-Career Writers' Group. Brian Mendes New York credits: with Richard Maxwell and New York City players: Field of Mars , Isolde , The Evening , End of Reality , Ode to the Man Who Kneels , Joe , Henry IV , and People Without History (dir); with Adam Rapp: Animals and Plants , Through the Yellow Hour ; with Annie Baker: Last of the Little Hours @ Sundance Theater Lab; with Tania Bruguera: Endgame ; with Sibyl Kempson:The Securely Conferred Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S . Most recently Brian performed in the film Baltimorons directed by Jay Duplass. Peter Mills Weiss is a theater artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been nominated for a Henry Hewes Design Award and a New York Drama Critic's Circle Award. He is a former member of the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab and the Public Theater Devised Theater Working Group. His work has been presented locally at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Soho Rep, Ars Nova, and Under the Radar Festival, and internationally as part of the Radikal Jung Festival at the Munchen Volkstheater, most recently at the Noorderzon Festival Groningen. Isa Spector is a performer, choreographer, and theater maker living in New York. Their work has been shown at Abrons Arts Center, Performance Space New York, Center for Performance Research, and Pageant. As a performer, Isa has worked with Korakrit Arunanondchai, boychild, Danielle Agami, Sam Max, and Alexa West. Isa holds a BFA in Dance and BA in Dramatic Literature from New York University. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Watch ORESTEIA by Carolin Mader at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. This short film is a 6.30 minute version of Aeschylus' ORESTEIA (original excerpts from part II COEPHORES by choir/choir leader/Electra/Orestes), spoken by a mysterious sea creature: „beamed“, apparently, into a very confined space near some very noisy street of Berlin, in order to complete the task of the ancient tragedy choir: to reflect and give advice. The dilemma is huge: a father murdered by the mother’s hand. Is the sin of matricide worth the revenge? Is repaying evil with evil worth it at all? Waiting for Electra and Orestes, their questions and possible answers are forshadowed in an inner monologue. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents ORESTEIA At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Carolin Mader Theater, Film, Performance Art, Spoken Word This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 6 minutes Year of Release 2022 This short film is a 6.30 minute version of Aeschylus' ORESTEIA (original excerpts from part II COEPHORES by choir/choir leader/Electra/Orestes), spoken by a mysterious sea creature: „beamed“, apparently, into a very confined space near some very noisy street of Berlin, in order to complete the task of the ancient tragedy choir: to reflect and give advice. The dilemma is huge: a father murdered by the mother’s hand. Is the sin of matricide worth the revenge? Is repaying evil with evil worth it at all? Waiting for Electra and Orestes, their questions and possible answers are forshadowed in an inner monologue. Directed/filmed/edited by: Carolin Mader, Siren: Marina Frenk, supported by: Philipp Engelhardt, Fabrik Osloer Straße, Frauenkulturbuero NRW About The Artist(s) Carolin Mader has studied Italian and German philology and Political Science in Italy and Germany and has worked as a theatre director, actress and musician at the municipal theatre of Dortmund and in Berlin, where she lives. Her production „Die Hamletmaschine“ (Heiner Müller) was shown at the supporting program of the NRW Theatertreffen; „Ithaka“ (Gottfried Benn) and „Medea“ (Euripides) have been awarded with the young director’s award of the Frauenkulturbuero NRW. Get in touch with the artist(s) carolin.mader@hotmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/carolin.mader.35 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

James M. Cherry 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 August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. James M. Cherry By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays . Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. The principal undertaking of August Wilson’s playwriting career—the “Pittsburgh Cycle”—is a singular accomplishment in American theater. A series of ten plays highlighting the cultural shifts and stresses of African-American experience throughout the 20th century, the Cycle was written and staged over the course of three decades and completed shortly before Wilson’s death in 2005. Wilson situated his opus largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he spent his childhood, a once-vibrant African-American community that fell into decay following failed urban development schemes and resultant poverty. Throughout the Cycle, Wilson connects the Hill District’s transformations to the larger history of African-Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, persistent institutional racism—and the ways in which these realities reveal themselves on stage in micro-histories of Black lives. Wilson also foregrounds the historical linkages of music, ritual, ceremony, and oral culture as critical dramaturgical elements. As their descendants replace characters on Wilson’s stage, these are the ties that bind still. The restoration of a fragmented ancestry is personified in the reoccurring figure of Aunt Ester, the wise woman who physically embodies the link across time to Africa. Taken together, the plays of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be seen as the work of playwright tethering a community to an obscured past. As Sandra G. Shannon rightly notes in her introduction to a new collection of essays, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays, the narratives that fill Wilson’s plays are not simply representations of African-American life, but are also intensely personal, “reflect[ing] the playwright’s own fragmented life exacerbated by a complete disconnect with his biological father, by his flight from a racist Pittsburgh’s school system, and by his discovery or “reunion” with the blues, Africa, Amiri Baraka, and by his newfound regard for the vernacular of fellow Pittsburgh natives” (5). For Shannon, as well as many authors in this excellent collection, Wilson’s dual roles as an “autoethnographer of the black experience,” and as “the wounded healer” (6) who confronts his own personal history as a way to make sense of the larger historical narrative, are essential to understanding Wilson’s great accomplishment; they are also essential to comprehending what Wilson’s vision of the twentieth century means in our twenty-first. Since August Wilson’s death, there have been many attempts to examine and reconcile Wilson’s completed project, and recent scholarly treatments of the complete Cycle resonate throughout the volume under review here. Shannon’s text joins an already active critical conversation, including Harry Elam’s touchstone work The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), a recent Cambridge Companion collection, and the frequent stagings of the plays across the country. Appropriately enough, Shannon’s collection ranges widely in subjects and inventive theoretical perspectives. Sarah Saddler and Paul Bryant-Jackson’s piece on Two Trains Running brings together Manning Marable’s advocacy of a multidisciplinary “living history” to reclaim the lost narratives of people of color, and Diana Taylor’s argument to consider the “embodied behaviors that serve to e/affect the outcome of the social drama, and thus “ history” itself” (53). Saddler and Bryant-Jackson conclude that Wilson creates a document of living history in which the political struggles of the 1960s are played out on a personal and spiritual level on stage. In another essay, Psyche Williams-Forson probes the Wilson’s frequent use of food as way to depict communal and gender relationships, citing Wilson’s own interest in cultural anthropology. These arguments reframe August Wilson not just as a significant “realist” playwright, but as a writer whose works respond to various theoretical frameworks. Wilson deploys African ritual in his plays, often as a way to reconnect with a lost heritage, and several essays in this collection tease out the various dramaturgical and symbolic meanings of this connection. Artisa Green’s analysis of the “Òrìșà archetypes, sacred objects, and spaces” (10) and the Yoruban week calendar “which comprises a seven day cycle characterized by daily attributes that resulted from events which occurred in Yoruba creation stories” (156), facilitates a significant new understanding of the spiritual architecture of Gem of the Ocean . In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , Connie Rapoo looks at Loomis’ “acts of sacrifice” (177) as ways to “remember the spiritual African past in order to restore cosmic order” and to reclaim a forgotten cultural identity. More significantly, this collection often shows how Wilson’s work uses history to reflect upon contemporary concerns. Isaiah Matthew Wooden’s piece on the fraught relationship between the American justice system and the African-Americans subject to it in Gem of the Ocean is deeply relevant to the America of Black Lives Matter and police action captured on cell phone video. The concluding essay by Susan C. W. Abbottson deploys the work of theorists Alan Wilde, John McGowan, and Linda Hutcheon to investigate the optimistic, inclusive humanism in Wilson’s work. For Abbottson, “what Wilson is modeling through this cycle are lessons of responsibility, connection, history, and identity, which combine to create a final vision of what contemporary society most needs: active democracy” (200). In illuminating the experience of Black people in America, Wilson’s “self-defining American chronicle for the ages” (199) also sheds light on the desires, anxieties, and possibilities of all human beings. The main utility of the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is as a companion to, and an expansion of, previous Wilson scholarship. While it is inevitable for any collection to focus on some works more than others, Jitney (1982), Fences (1985), and Radio Golf (2005) are seldom addressed in this volume, though they are certainly topics of examination elsewhere. The inclusion of a production history of the Cycle would have made the text more user-friendly. Yet, the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives here acts as a provocation for other scholars to look at August Wilson’s work in new, inventive ways. Just as Wilson himself sought to forge links between the present and past, readers of his work should be encouraged to connect it with our present and future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JAMES M. CHERRY Wabash College 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.

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

Watch The Books of Jacob by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Books of Jacob At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Krzysztof Garbaczewski Theater, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art 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 54 minutes Year of Release 2023 La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. CREATIVE TEAM Performers – Danusia Trevino, Anna Podolak, Ola Rudnicka Adaptation – Rébecca Pierrot Costume Design – Monika Palikot, Sławomir Blaszewski Music: Jan Duszyński Avatars – Anastasiia Vorobiova Set Design – Bettina Katja Lange, Krzysztof Garbaczewski Set Coordinator – Piotr Gawelko Director, VR Design – Krzysztof Garbaczewski CULTUREHUB DeAndra Anthony – Technical Director Mattie Barber-Bockelman – Producing Director Sangmin Chae – Creative Technologist Billy Clark – Artistic Director Evan Anderson – Lighting Consultant Live Park NY – Audio About The Artist(s) Krzysztof Garbaczewski (born February 24, 1983 in Bialystok, Poland) is a Polish theatre director, stage designer and digital artist. He creates interdisciplinary performances, theatrical installations combining performance, visual arts and virtual reality. Get in touch with the artist(s) krzysztof.garbaczewski@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.culturehub.org/the-books-of-jacob dreamadoptionsociety.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

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 27 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom Jordan Schildcrout ARTICE "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin ARTICLE James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris ARTICLE Issue 2 Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) Jonathan Chambers INTRODUCTION The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera ARTICLE Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Kee-Yoon Nahm ARTICLE Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson ARTICLE Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks ARTICLE 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 Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic by Giada Colagrande at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This documentary film captures the creation of an experimental opera based on the biography of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, directed by Robert Wilson with music and performance by singer and composer Anohni, and featuring actor Willem Dafoe as a central figure. Director Giada Colagrande provides access to the process of making the piece through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they work — revealing the complex dynamics, creative tensions, and moments of genuine discovery that accompany the development of a performance of this kind. The result is an intimate portrait of four major artists in collaboration: Wilson's exacting visual sensibility in dialogue with Abramovic's biography of radical durational endurance, Anohni's vocal presence, and Dafoe's physical precision. The film documents both the content of the piece — which treats Abramovic's life, her Serbian childhood, her decades of physical and conceptual performance, and the mythology that has grown around her — and the process of translating that biography into Wilson's distinctive theatrical language of image, light, and formalized movement. Rather than serving simply as a record of a production, the film functions as its own kind of portrait: of the making of art, the trust required between artists, and the particular vulnerability of creating something large and strange together. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic Giada Colagrande At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 2 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 Germany / Switzerland Language English Running Time 57 minutes Year of Release 2012 About The Film This documentary film captures the creation of an experimental opera based on the biography of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, directed by Robert Wilson with music and performance by singer and composer Anohni, and featuring actor Willem Dafoe as a central figure. Director Giada Colagrande provides access to the process of making the piece through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they work — revealing the complex dynamics, creative tensions, and moments of genuine discovery that accompany the development of a performance of this kind. The result is an intimate portrait of four major artists in collaboration: Wilson's exacting visual sensibility in dialogue with Abramovic's biography of radical durational endurance, Anohni's vocal presence, and Dafoe's physical precision. The film documents both the content of the piece — which treats Abramovic's life, her Serbian childhood, her decades of physical and conceptual performance, and the mythology that has grown around her — and the process of translating that biography into Wilson's distinctive theatrical language of image, light, and formalized movement. Rather than serving simply as a record of a production, the film functions as its own kind of portrait: of the making of art, the trust required between artists, and the particular vulnerability of creating something large and strange together. Director: Giada Colagrande Featuring: Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Willem Dafoe, Anohni About The Artist(s) Giada Colagrande is an Italian filmmaker and actress based in New York. She has directed several feature films including Febbre (2006) and A Woman (2010), as well as documentary projects focused on the intersection of performance and visual art. Her film Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic offers an intimate account of the creation of an experimental opera bringing together four of the leading figures of contemporary performance: Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Willem Dafoe, and Anohni. 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

M. Landon 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. M. Landon By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. A decade after her TaPRA Research Award-winning monograph Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century challenged traditional modes of theatrical authorship, Yugoslavic-British dramaturg Dr. Duška Radosavljević delivers yet another groundbreaking intervention in performance research. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age , published by Routledge in October 2022, emerged from its namesake, the Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age Project (henceforth referred to as the A/OD Project). This project was an ethnographic, “creative and methodological departure into the unknown,” (35) involving the work of four A/OD Artists in Residence. The A/OD Project (a digital compendium taking place from 2020-2021, during the first wave of COVID-19) was developed to investigate post-verbatim performance, amplified storytelling and gig theatre—three popular British “trends” that Radosavljević believes resulted from the digital age—through dramaturgies of speech and sound. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies is split into five chapters, supplemented by the Lend Me Your Ears collection, the project’s digital archive accessible at https://www.auralia.space . The opening chapter, “Introduction(s): The Difficult Second Album,” is broken into Sides A and B, calling to mind old-school records. Radosavljević notes that the tracks of this introduction can be shuffled and listened to out of order, but that is not “crucial” to the experience of the book (39). Chapters two, three, and four are titled “Post-Verbatim,” “Amplified Storytelling,” and “Gig Theatre,” respectively. Radosavljević deploys Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field , Nic Green’s Cock and Bull , Kate Caryer’s The Unspoken Project, Rambo Amadeus’s 1991 music video, “Smrt popa Mila Jovovića,” and Wildcard’s Electrolyte as case studies to demonstrate how the myriad dramaturgies of speech, sound and technology amplify each form of performance discussed through their technicity. Radosavljević indicts the traditional dramaturgical maxim of “show, rather than tell” as a Western-central, logocentric way of knowing. Instead, she favors an aural and oral approach that considers the performance artist central in theatrical creation. Furthermore, Radosavljević refreshingly focuses on creative strategies and processes as opposed to simple critique of the final projects (although she offers these as well for interested readers). Not only seeking to shift away from a text-focused paradigm, Radosavljevič posits her work firmly within the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking to reckon with these pedagogical questions digitally. While Radosavljević admits that she is not proposing any “radically new ideas,” (25) the A/OD Project and the book’s myriad case studies draw on a wide variety of performance scholars and ethnographers to offer an alternative and accessible methodology for dramaturgically interrogating Western theatre’s obsession with written text and developing new “meta-discursive insights” (164). In the final pages, Radosavljević writes about dramaturgical layering – a methodology that is expertly woven throughout her narrative. She observes the resident artists’ engagement with three facets of layering: 1) metaphorically, “in reference to different types of performance material,” 2) dramaturgical methods “directly influenced by the workings of … software,” and 3) conceptually, “in relation to malleability of text enabled by… digital technologies” (167). While Radosavljević doesn’t make apparent the connection between this method and the organization of her own work, it underpins the ethic. In each chapter, she offers the reader variety in performance modalities and analysis of the effects of software and other digital variables on her examples —always grounded in a strong theoretical foundation which traces the larger genealogy of essential scholarly texts (e.g., Steven Feld, Fred Moten, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Dwight Conquergood). She also considers the artists, art forms, and negative connotations that fell beyond the scope of the A/OD Project. Importantly, Radosavljević often acknowledges the irony of her attempt at troubling the hegemonic standard of the written word by writing about it in this book. Even as she is pressured to write within the academic framework of logocentrism, Radosavljević shakes the dominant modes of theatrical critique by providing the reader with the Lend Me Your Ears collection, expertly curated and a vital companion to any scholar’s reading of Radosavljević’s work. Returning to the age-old dramaturgical maxim of “show, not tell,” Radosavljević concludes that theatre should be “show and tell” as performance is a “multimodal sensory perception” and a “mimesis of the thinking process itself” that together contributes to audience reception and engagement (170). Aural/Oral Dramaturgies presents a step forward in both performance and sound studies, appropriate for graduate students and academics familiar with the body of literature surrounding one or both of these fields. Additionally, any theatremaker with an interest in shifting their dramaturgical approach to the “ethos of DIY performance-making” (166) will find in this book not only a vast fountain of knowledge, but a generous guide for practice. References Footnotes About The Author(s) M. LANDON University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 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.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba By Hala Khamis Nassar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba By Hala Khamis Nassar In such trying times and in the face of eradication, there is an urgent need to counter the Israeli-settler colonial hegemonic narrative. This article demonstrates how Palestinian theatre in recent years adamantly organized site-specific festivals to reclaim Nakba stories. These selected sites, all built before 48, have their own stories to tell, albeit ones that accentuate remembrance of the past. Concerning such site-based performance, McAuley writes, “the site becomes the dominant signifier rather than simply being that which contains the performance, as the theatre building does in traditional theatre practice. Site-based performance engages more or less deeply with its chosen site and as a result tends to be drawn into engagement with the social and political issues that seem inseparable from place” (McAuley 2005: 30). The combination of a Nakba story with pre-1948 sites evokes and highlights the Palestinian past, reminding the audience of its uninterrupted lineage. On the Palestinian stage, enactments of the Nakba and its ongoing significant repercussions are being revisited, dominating the cultural scene. A very recent example is al-Harah's experimentation with Site-Specific Theatre in Beit Jala. Site-specific theatre is not new to the Palestinian context. The late Iraqi director Awni Karumi introduced it to Palestine at the Palestinian National Theatre Festival in 1993. Ashtar Theater, based in Ramallah, embarked on experimenting with sites and produced Richard II in 2012 at Hisham Palace in Jericho. [1] In July 2021, Al-Harah Theatre, in cooperation with Grid Iron Theatre in Edinburgh and supported by leading EU countries, organised its first Site-Specific Theatre Festival in Bethlehem and Beit Jala [2] . Grid Iron Theatre conducted two weeks of rigorous workshops for aspiring young playwrights and directors in the winter of 2020. After the final selection, five plays were picked and developed into a performance under Grid’s mentorship. [3] In the festival’s First Edition, the play Dar 13 reflected the ongoing resistance against the Israeli eviction orders of Sheikh Jarrah residents; Al-Hosh lamented about destroyed sites and dispersal of its inhabitants due to 1948 War; The Perfect Crime investigated a murder that still hovers the corridors of an abandoned house; The Port recalled a lost culture and a country, and Buldozer shed light on Israeli house demolition orders in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The festival also included storytelling, some based on fairy tales, others like Animal with Plague subtly narrating the Nakba. Scouting locations in Beit Jala and Bethlehem, Dar-al Sabbagh Center played a crucial role in selecting sites for the festival and in performing the plays. [4] The chosen sites reveal their own stories. Some sites are already abandoned, with their inhabitants in the diaspora; others are dilapidated or being restored and renovated as part of Bethlehem’s two-thousand-year-old Cultural Heritage. [5] Yet, the selected buildings in the old cities reveal a unique style of pre-1948 architects. Large spacious houses, with cathedral windows, carpet design floor tilings, high ceilings, and green courtyards in the midst where there is either a well or a water fountain; a fitting atmosphere, and a space to tell a story. The plays in the festival portrayed life before and after 1948, the brutality of Israeli occupation, and the threats to Sheikh Jarrah residents against the backdrop of the Israeli onslaught on 10 May 2021, when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip lasting eleven days. While Hamas called the ensuing conflict the Sword of Jerusalem Battle, the IDF officially dubbed the military campaign in the Gaza Strip Operation Guardian of the Walls. The aggression on Gaza comes after Hamas’s ultimatum to Israel to remove its security forces from the Temple Mount complex and from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. In this charged atmosphere, storytellers, independent artists, directors from the West Bank and Israel, and the Freedom Theatre were the main participants in the festival. The 2 nd Edition of the Bethlehem Site-Specific Theatre Festival took place from the 26 th to the 30 th of July 2023 in the cities of Beit Jala, Bethlehem. This time, it expanded its participation to the southern part of the West Bank, including the city of Hebron. Grid Iron Theatre in Scotland conducted a training workshop for a new cohort of aspiring directors and playwrights. However, the performances in the Second Edition of the festival were “based on personal stories of older people in Bethlehem and Hebron governorates being documented by the researcher and storyteller Sally Shalabi” (al-Harah Theater, 2023 Playbill). Shalabi collected memories and narratives by interviewing older people from different backgrounds and rewrote them in the form of stories. Through the Capacity Building Program for Young Artists implemented by al-Harah Theatre in collaboration with Grid Iron, six directors and three storytellers presented their productions during the festival in the three above-mentioned cities. On 26 July 2023, the old alleys of Hebron hosted the performances of The Almond Flower and Heaven Door is Open , and the storytelling of The Qazzazin Neighborhood Boy , and Struggle and Success based on interviews with refugees from the 1967 War with Israel. In the old hosh/alley compounds of Beit Jala, the plays and stories from Hebron were also performed in addition to the play Equivalent and storytelling of Boqja . As for Bethlehem and at the Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation, two other performances were added: The Freedom Fabric and I Was There . It is worth noting that at the end of each festival day, the interviewees were acknowledged by Al-Harah Theatre and presented with the theatre’s logo, carved from olive wood. One major difference between the first and the second editions of the festival is that the latter aims to “shed light on the importance of historical and heritage spaces in the old cities to show the richness of these cities that are full of stories since thousands of years” (ibid.). Nonetheless, one cannot overlook the fact that the most outstanding plays in both festivals are storytelling monodramas documenting Palestinian life pre- and post-1948 and 1967. The discerning illustrations of such enactments are biographical plays, for they never cease to be relevant, nowadays more than ever. Al-Harah’s Site-Specific festivals document memory accounts of the Nakba survivors. In Masalha’s words, “compiling and recording oral history and encouraging annual commemorations [is] designed to preserve the memory of the catastrophe, while emphasizing the link between refugee rights, collective identity, and the challenge to return” (Masalaha 2012: 254). The biographical stories Buqja and The Country that Loses its Birds Loses its Goodness draw the audience “into engagement” [6] with life under occupation. The stories document the Zionist aggression on historic Palestine, resulting in the erasure of entire villages, depopulating them and displacing their inhabitants, making them internal refugees or forcing them to migrate outside the geographical borders of Palestine. They document Palestinian life before 1948, the ramifications of refugee displacement, and the Judaization of the Palestinian landscape, villages, towns, and cities, particularly Jerusalem. The above selections delve into the collective memory of Palestinians and use it as a political weapon in the process of a national struggle when wars and peace agreements have proved to be ineffective. It also aims to remind, educate, politicize, and inform the public that the Zionist project is ongoing (Nassar 2023) Buqja Buqja ( Bundle ) [7] is based on the life of my mother, Faiza Tawfiq Nasser Nassar (Um Hanna), interviewed by the well-known Sally Shalabi and performed by Majeda Subhi. The performance took place on 26 July at Ma’an lil Hayat/L’Arche Bethlehem, and on 30 July 2023 at Khalilieh Arch/hosh in the old city of Beit Jala. Left to right, Sally Shalabi, Faiza Tawfiq Nasser Nassar, Hala Nassar in the audience for Bundle. Courtesy of al-Harah Theatre. The play begins with the narrator welcoming the audience and explaining that she is going to tell my mother’s story. Seated on the old hand-carved stone stairs in the Kahlilieh Arch Compound in the old city of Beit Jala, the narrator points to my mother in the audience, thanking her for agreeing to be interviewed and for the chance to tell her story. Subhi starts narrating, telling the audience that she wanted to tell Um Hanna’s story as she is also from the suburbs of Jerusalem. Um Hanna, born in Nazareth, grew up in an upper-class landowners’ family. Her father then relocated to Jerusalem to become one of the personal guards to the commissioner of the British Mandate in Palestine. They lived in what is now known as West Jerusalem on Saint Julian Street, a couple of streets down from the YMCA. In 1948, British forces started to withdraw from Palestine. [8] Um Hanna’s father, Tawfiq, received orders to deploy to Cyprus with the remaining British troops, which he flatly refused, insisting that Palestine “is my country, I live and die in it!” [9] fully knowing that his pension benefits would be stopped, and his British passport revoked (al-Harah 2023). The last troops left Palestine on 15 May 1948. On that day, “they heard a lot of shooting in Jerusalem and the Jewish loudspeakers telling the Arabs to surrender” (ibid.). Out of fear, they remained inside the house and comforted themselves with the fact that there were enough provisions to sustain them for some time. After “two days, the Stern and the Hagenah gangs come and surround the neighbourhood […] Faiza does not forget what they looked like” (ibid.). The Stern separates men from women. They blindfolded the men, loaded them into trucks, and drove away to an unknown destination. They tell the women to go home. Many families, at this point, start abandoning their houses and streets. Teta Christina, a neighbour, comes and stays with them. A month passes confined in the house then the gangs come again. Hearing the commotion in the house yard, Teta Christina asks Faiza’s mother, Haneh, “What are we going to do now?” Haneh responds, “sssh, pointing with her fingers to the mouth, be quiet, do not stir, let us wait it out” (al-Harah 2023). Majedah Subhi as the narrator. Courtesy of al-Harah Theatre. While they are standing silently against the wall, the gangs storm in through the door, they turn the house upside down, throw the oil and wheat on the expensive imported hand-made woollen Iranian carpets, gather the remaining food from the pantry, and force them to lock the door with clothes on their back and take the keys with them. They blindfold the women, load them onto trucks, and drop them off at Piccadilly Square in Jerusalem at 10 o’clock in the evening. The families are asked to ride the trucks, and after driving around for some time, they are again dropped off at the YMCA and into the gymnastics hall. Haneh is shocked to see so many people, some she knew, others not, from different backgrounds. Scared to death, she does not get a wink of sleep that night and hugs her three children until morning. The next day, trucks come to carry the families to locations outside Jerusalem, which will constitute the nucleus of refugee camps in the West Bank. As for Teta Christina Shiber, since she descends from one of the affluent families of Jerusalem at that time, the Red Cross arranges for her to join her family in Lebanon, leaving behind vast wealth and real estate all over the western part of the city only to be confiscated by the new state of Israel. Haneh asks Mr. Miller, the YMCA director at the time, to help her go to Nazareth to stay with her family, only to be told that Nazareth has fallen. [10] Relentless and depending on her social connections, Haneh manages to relocate to al-Jawzi’s office in the YMCA with her family, thereby evading relocation. The narrator, Subhi, takes a deep breath and continues to tell us how Haneh and her three children remain hidden in the YMCA. Then, she decides to go and check on her home. Haneh informs Mr. Miller, who refuses her request multiple times and forbids her from leaving the compound. Haneh is still anxious about the fate of her home, and she attempts to sneak out. Fire S hots are heard in the surroundings, but she decides to keep walking towards the house, only to be stopped by people running away while the body of Count of Wisborg, Folke Bernadotte is ushered into the YMCA. [11] Undeterred, Haneh secretly attempts a second dangerous venture towards home. There are shots fired; nevertheless, she makes it, collects whatever she can carry, and wraps everything in a bedsheet, making a bundle. As she is about to leave, she notices the sewing machine lying on the floor and picks it up. Walking in Jerusalem is dangerous as the city is already divided into zones, and one cannot cross from one to another without having the proper papers. “The more she runs on the streets towards the YMCA, the more gunshots are fired. As she is about to reach the YMCA, she counts eleven bullets aimed at her, but makes it to the front entrance. Her daughter, Faiza, sees her and runs to Haneh, screaming, ‘Mama mama.’ Faiza is hit with a bullet that scratches her arm” (al-Harah 2023). At this point, Faiza stops the storyteller, corrects her, and tells her: “It was not me, it was my older sister Aida who was shot” (ibid.). Such is an example of how the spectators engage with the site as the story is being told. As McAuley asserts when discussing Segments from an Inferno , “the way performance can impact upon a place, activating memories and permitting the past to resonate in the present, and of the way the spectator’s experience may exceed what the performer’s intended” (McAuley 43). Incidentally, Faiza was the only spectator who interrupted the performance and corrected the storyteller in the festival’s performances! Hence drawing the attention of the other spectators to the then and now, when the “aesthetic experience of the performance is always, for good or ill, embedded with the social reality,” (ibid 47) where the individual spectator, in this case, Faiza, experiences the performance in the company of other audiences. Being in the performance, Faiza becomes part of the performative experience, where “the aesthetic is enmeshed in complex ways within the social, the fictional within the real; but in site-based work […] the social reality is foregrounded” (ibid.). After Faiza’s correction, Subhi continues the story. Witnessing the incident, Mr Miller shouts at Haneh and says in a hoarse voice, “What if something happens to you? Who is going to take care of your children!” (al-Harah 2023). Subhi, as if reading from a book, continues to chronicle Faiza’s life story to a very attentive audience and describes how the Red Cross starts to collect the Christian families from the YMCA and distribute them among the churches in the Old City of Jerusalem. Faiza’s family is put up in the Lutheran Church. After spending six days on the benches of the church with little to nothing to eat, they are eventually given an empty room in the German Hospice in the Christian Quarter of the Old City. Faiza recalls how humiliating and painful it is to fall from grace. From a spacious multi-room in a two-floor villa, with lovely furniture, abundant food, beautiful clothes, and a private German school, to an empty room with no furniture, no food, and rags for clothes. She also recalls how her mother, Haneh, puts the sewing machine to work, making shirts for the refugees. “It did not pay much as all of us are now refugees and our pockets are empty” (ibid). In site-specific theatre pertaining to -Nakba, the engagement among the narrator, the audience, and the interviewee is immersive; the site and the story become one and the same. Subhi, at this point in the performance, looks towards my mother, Faiza, among the attentive audience, as if seeking approval to continue. She then recounts how the family receives a word through the Red Cross to go to the Mandelbaum Gate crossing. [12] Life of struggle, poverty, displacement, and survival continues in the storytelling of the play, as Subhi tells us another trauma in Faiza’s life: Tawfik’s return from detention. While they are standing at the checkpoint under the scorching sun, a tall skinny man appears, much like a vagabond with buried eyes, long hair, and a beard. Aida and Haneh run toward the man, but Faiza does not. When Tawfiq approaches her and says, “I am your dad, you do not want to hug me?” Faiza shrinks away, screaming, “I do not know you; you are not my dad!” Faiza recalls how Tawfiq squeezes her in a way only a father and daughter know; only then does she welcome her father’s hugs. Living in poverty and deprivation continues for Faiza, and it reaches a turning point in her life when the Lutheran Church offers to send one girl from each newly refugee family to a German boarding school, run by the nuns: Talitha Kumi in Beit Jala. Faiza cries her eyes out but is forced to go, as Aida, the older sister, is helping Haneh with the sewing. Also, Yoel is born in that lowly room, and Faiza’s departure leaves space for the newborn to be fed. Despite the harsh treatment, cold dormitory, measly food, strict nuns, and unkind teachers, Faiza studies hard, passes her GCE, and becomes a teacher at the same school. There, she meets the electric engineer Khamis from Beit Jala, and they marry. Another chapter of displacement occurs in the life of the key characters. Faiza’s story continues as her husband gets a job offer as the head of engineers in a newly built chemical factory in Amman, Jordan. The couple move to Jordan with their baby boy. During that time, they travel every month back and forth between Amman and Jerusalem until the 1967 War, when traveling over the bridges becomes too dangerous. Unable to visit her family in Jerusalem, Faiza is sad and anxiously waits for news. Political tensions between the Palestinians and the Jordanians escalate, leading to the bloody events of Black September in 1970. As the Palestinian fedayeen militant’s stronghold is in Zarqa, the Jordanian army runs house-to-house to search for them. Khamis and Faiza send the two older children to Aunt Angail’s house, and with the two younger ones, they stay with their neighbors, hiding in the basement under a table as the battle rages on outside. Faiza describes the screams of the fedayeen as they are being slaughtered in the streets. Afraid of being expelled from Jordan with the PLO, thus becoming, yet again, refugees in Lebanon, they remain in hiding until the Jordanian army discovers and interrogates them. Life becomes unbearable for the new family in Jordan, and they decide to move back to Palestine. Moving back home has not been easy since the 1967 Israel occupation of the West Bank, and they need a family reunion military permit, which is hard to obtain. After four years, the permit is issued, but for the West Bank only, while Faiza’s request to join her family in Jerusalem is denied. Such a denial of entry makes Faiza angry as “she always has held Jerusalem in her heart” (al-Harah 2023). As Edward Said eloquently describes, the Palestinian story is “not a narrative… but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations and its limitations” (Said 1986, 38). Like many Palestinians, Faiza always defines her life in terms of major political events overshadowing Palestine since the Nakba of 1948. During the first Intifada of 1987, Faiza’s husband’s work deteriorates, and, as the children are already scattered across the Americas and Europe, Khamis decides to try his luck this time in Honduras. Reluctantly, Faiza is uprooted once again and goes to Honduras. Still, she studies Spanish and becomes a citizen. In 2009, due to Khamis’s declining health, they return to Beit Jala, only to witness the impact of the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993: the Separation Wall, the bypass road carving the landscape to make safe roads for Israeli settlers, the checkpoints, and the need for permits to move between zones A, B, and C. Refusing up till this moment to issue a biometric identity card and apply for permit to go to Jerusalem or Nazareth to visit her family, Faiza prefers being smuggled into Jerusalem. Up until now, Faiza refuses to acknowledge the existence of the State of Israel. Her act of defiance is loudly articulated when a priest in her Lutheran Church gives a sermon about forgiveness and reconciliation. When asked if she is willing to forgive someone, Faiza stands tall and says: “I will never forgive or reconcile with the Zionists. They have deprived me of my childhood, and they have expelled me from my home more than once. My family has led a harsh life of poverty, and as refugees because of them. During my lifetime, I will never forgive them.” Faiza’s parents lived and died in that room in the German Hospice, now turned into a hostel. They never went home. The keys to the house on Saint Julian Street are still with Faiza. My mother’s story is one of thousands of stories of Palestinians, who were driven out of their homes by force, with only the clothes on their backs. No trace of my mother’s parents’ house can be found today. Palestinian Nature and Settlers: The Country that Loses its Birds Loses its Goodness As Buqja documents the steadfastness against the Zionist aggression and Judaization of Jerusalem, The Country that Loses its Birds Loses its Goodness is hitherto another testimony of the ongoing Nakba in the southern regions of historic Palestine . In its Second Edition, al-Harah Theatre contributes to al-Makhrour’s festival and presents the biographical storytelling The Country that Loses its Birds Loses its Goodness , performed by Nicola Zreineh and Sally Shalabi about the life of Carlos Barham, Abu Saliba. It is a fitting choice, not only as a striking example of employing site-specific theatre but because al-Makhrour’s land is constantly under threat of being cordoned off to the adjacent settlement of Har Gilo, which is also built on illegal confiscation of Beitjalian’s lands and, as a consequence, strangling the town. [13] Inad Theatre in Beit Jala has organised its Second Edition of Al-Makhrour Festival to begin on 7 September 2023. The three-day program usually takes place after the harvesting of Al-Makhrour’s almonds, apricots, plums, pistachios, and grapes, and before the start of olive picking in late October. Al-Makhrour is a vast valley, and the peaky green hills belong to the people of Beit Jala. Since the Oslo Peace Accords, the area has been carved under Israeli control as it is surrounded by the large settlement of Har Gilo, hence confiscating Beitjalian’s fertile agricultural lands. Celebrating the harvest in Al-Marhrour and even with an Israeli settler seizing the highest hill, the festival’s program usually includes musical shows, stand-up comedians, theatrical performances, workshops, camping, guided walking tours, and storytelling. “ The Country that Loses its Birds Loses its Goodness ” is site-specific theatre in the strict sense of the word, given its location in al-Makhrour, for the storytelling “emerges from a particular place and engages with the history and politics of that place, and with the resonance of these in the present” McAuley, 32). Carlos’ story exists in the site where it is produced and performed. Shalabi starts telling us the story by saying, “If you search for Carlos, you will find him in his castle amidst the valley surrounded by the beautiful nature and accompanied by cats. From there, Carlos reminisces” (al-Harah 2023). Carlos remembers the good old days before 1948, when the townspeople of Beit Jala started the journey to al-Makhrour on the 5 th of May after celebrating Saint George’s Festival in the nearby village of al-Khader, named after the saint. The townsfolk bring furniture, bedding, food, and herds and remain in the green valley and hills until the first rain and the petrichor fill the air. Only the sickly and those who cannot walk to al-Makhrour stay back in town. Carlos recalls how every clan in Beit Jala owned at least a plot of land, which they planted with olives and fruit trees, including grapes, figs, almonds, apples, and plums. Such a tradition lasted until 1967, and to this day, Carlos can name the owner of each piece of land in the valley. In the summer, al-Makhrour is buzzing, as the townspeople build a small Qaṣr (a castle) to spend the season in the green valley. Usually, the castle is built out of hand-carved stones; it has two floors and a window called Ṭāqa . The family occupies the upper level, and storage and the livestock are kept at the lower level. Back then, families would put a lantern in the window so people in the valley could see the light and come over to visit during the cool summer nights. Remembering, Carlos stresses the fact that in the old days, the sky was full of stars, and you could even read the Milky Way. Now smog is filling the sky, and you can hardly spot any stars even on a clear night. Carlos enthusiastically explains how the remaining green area surrounding the city of Beit Jala is named al-Makhrour. It is due to the steepness of the valley connecting to the village of Batir’s valley and the abundant water springs, where you could hear the gurgle of the running water seeping loudly in the valley to Jaffa and into the Mediterranean Sea. Lamenting, Carlos says, the springs and groundwater have dried up, and the climate has changed; however, once the rain comes down, it fills some of it, and you can still hear the purl of water. Here, Carlos does not mention how the adjacent settlement of Har Gilo has installed water pipes in the valley and pumps the water all year round up into the settlement. Still evoking the past, Carlos spends time telling us how his grandfather built the Qaṣr and says, “We are a chain of a longer one. He built it and lived in it, my father did too, and I am only a caretaker of the land and trees, leaving it to my children… such is life” (al-Harah 2023). Since the signing of the Oslo Accords II in 1995, the city of Beit Jala has been divided into ABC areas. [14] Al-Makhrour is part of the C area; thus, Israel maintains full control of the valley and its hills. Therefore, it is forbidden to restore a ruined castle, a stone hedge, or even a well of water, since you need a special Israeli military permit for construction in the valley. Nonetheless, Carlos maintains the well and the small pond near the spring, which his father built. In the past, they used to water the trees and the plants from the spring. Now it has dried up. Although there is no electricity in the castle, and the well is only full of rainwater, Carlos prefers to stay on his land, taking care of the trees, running away from the hustle and bustle of Beit Jala and its congested air. At a young age, Carlos’ father not only taught him how to take care of the land, trim the fruit trees, harvest the olives, and sew all kinds of plants, but also how to use a hunting rifle. Pondering, Carlos recalls how Beit Jala’s residents used to hunt birds, and how the grandmother would wrap them in dough and cook them over a fireplace. Now, the “Israelis, if they spot you holding a slingshot, you are immediately arrested, so how about owning a hunting rifle? Decades ago, the skies were full of migrating birds; now we hardly see any” (ibid). Carlos sighs and says, “The country that loses its birds, loses its blessings” (ibid). Taking over the narrative from Shalabi, Zreineh tells us that in 1966, Carlos is drafted into the Jordanian reserve army. He is taken to Nuweihmeh Camp in Jericho for training. In 1967, and still in the training camp, Israeli aircraft bombs the trainees, and everything goes ablaze. After the airplanes fly away, Carlos notices something still glittering on the ground. He touches it and it burns his finger. He instantly realizes that they have been hit with Napalm bombs. Once the West Bank of the River Jordan falls from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan int Israeli hands, Carlos’s family starts to worry about their son’s fate. Zreineh keeps narrating Carols’ fate in Jordan. The family sends word to Hanna Salman to find Carlos. Salman moves from one camp to another until he finds himself in the city of Zarqa’s military camp. Once spotted, Salman tells Carlos to take off his military uniform, then rides in the car pretending to be a labourer. Salman hides Carlos in Amman; however, his name is on the list of the deserters. Later, he is moved to Madaba to avoid arrest. Although the fighting has stopped, the bridges between the two banks of the Jordan River are either closed or destroyed due to the 1967 War. Carlos’ uncle drives him to the border to be smuggled by a Bedouin, who carries people on his back and crosses the Jordan River. Zreineh, as the narrator, tells us it is an arduous journey and full of danger, as the river’s water is rapid, and if you do not know how to swim, you can easily drown. Carlos makes it to Jericho, seeks the Greek Orthodox Church, and hides. With the help of Orthodox clergymen, Carlos arrives home to Beith Jala, meets his friends and family. His father cries as he hugs him (al-Harah 2023). Zreineh continues narrating as Carlos. He goes back to the land after changing jobs, getting married in 1971, and building a family home. More than once, he is offered a job in Israel, as Carlos is known in Beit Jala for having a green thumb, but he always declines. Nothing deters Carlos from al-Makhrour, no siege of area A and B, or curfews imposed on Beit Jala and Bethlehem, nor the first intifada of 1986, the second intifada of 2001, or Covid -19, he always walks through the old alleys of the city, down the valleys of Beit Jala and up the mountain to go all the way to his castle. Now and then, the Israeli soldiers stop Carlos and ask for an identification card, his response to the occupation is always the same “Look at my grey hair, this is my identity, why would I need to carry one when I am going to my land” (al-Harah 2023). The soldiers always let him pass to al-Mkahrour. As I am writing this article, Carlos is still seen walking towards al-Makhrour. He recalls that now the road is paved and wide enough for cars to drive on, while before it was a narrow dirt pathway barely wide enough for one donkey to pass. Intervening in the narrative, Shalabi sighs and tells us that Carlos thinks “Oslo” has caused a lot of damage in terms of the land swap with Israel. Al-Makhrour is under Israeli control, area C, and “there is a settler, who seized a fertile plot of land on the top of the mountain four years ago, watching everyone’s movement. You cannot build, renovate, or even dig out the oak or fir trees, and if you leave your land unworked for five years, the occupation confiscates it under the absentees’ law of 48” (al-Harah 2023). To Carlos, the land is wealth as is his children to whom he taught the love of the land. Carlos conjures his father’s words “if you would ask the land how are you doing? The land could answer: I am doing well if you visit me. If you will stop visiting me, then there is woe!” (ibid.). The above performances, with storytelling and dramatic play, are based on interviews with elderly Palestinians who witnessed, survived, and are resisting the impact of the 48 Nakba and the 67 War. Additionally, experimenting with Site Specific Theatre and performing in spaces that predate 1948 is revealing as the Palestinian sites themselves also have stories to tell, and in the words of Pierre Nora (1996), the ‘site of memory’ ( lieux de mémoire ) is a site of trauma, dispossession, and anger. [15] Accordingly, the chosen locals are powerful stimuli to memory. For in site-specific performances, “telling and retelling stories of our own lives and of the lives of our forebears, telling the stories official society does not want told, listening to other people’s stories are foundational acts in the creation of personal and social identity” (McAuley, 49). Thus, in the Palestinian context, the political consequences of such Nakba storytelling are immensely profound because the settler colonial project is aware of the impact of memorialising the Nakba and is unwilling to let it find its own level. On the surface, Palestinian theatre might appear to be “trapped” in the Nakba narrative. Israeli settler colonialism’s enduring systematic appropriation of land, demolishing houses, expelling people, indiscriminate detentions and imprisonment, destroying infrastructure, academic institutions, and research centres, and denying people the right to enter Jerusalem to worship in the religious sites, are all measures to make life intolerable and to drive people to seek safety and refuge elsewhere. However, as I have argued elsewhere, those biographical monodramas also reflect the oral history and collective memory of Palestinians, who use it as “a political weapon in the process of a national struggle when wars and peace agreements have proved to be ineffective. It also aims to remind, educate, politicize, and inform the public that the Zionist project is ongoing” (Nassar 2023). Site-specific stories of the already-displaced refugees in historic homes and on lands facing ethnic cleansing have become a necessity to combat whatever the future may hold for Palestinians, who simply resist just to exist. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] https://www.ashtar-theatre.org/richard-ii.html . Accessed 25 March/2024 [2] I have attended the two editions of Site-Specific Theatre Festivals organized by al-Harah Theater. In the last two years I have conducted interviews with a-Harah Theatre Director -Ms. Marina Barham-, the directors, and the actors. I also had a Zoom meeting with Grid Iron Theater on.I also would like to express my gratitude to Ms. Barham’s for her assistance and for sharing the scripts used in this article. [3] Zoom meeting with Grid Iron on 16 July 2021. Details about cooperation can be found here: https://gridiron.org.uk/2023/08/03/recently-returned-from-the-bethlehem-site-specific-theatre-festival/ . Accessed 19 March 2024. [4] To read more about Dar Sabagh Diaspora Studies and Research Center, refer to https://thisweekinpalestine.com/bethlehems-dar-al-sabagh/ , and to the center’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/DarAlSabaghCentre/ . [5] “ The Bethlehem 2000 Project, implemented between 1997 and 2000, is one example of the exceptional initiatives that were carried out to protect heritage sites and create a more attractive destination for tourists. Its initiatives included updating the city’s infrastructure and emphasizing the significance of important cultural sites. The Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation (CCHP) is continuing this mission through its work on the rehabilitation of traditional buildings and sites. The center has restored several buildings in Bethlehem and adapted them for reuse by turning them into handcraft centers, visitor centers, and guesthouses. All these projects have helped increase Bethlehem’s appeal among both the local community and international visitors who can now better enjoy the built-up cultural heritage of Bethlehem” https://thisweekinpalestine.com/morcos-nassar-palace-bethlehem/ [6] McAuley, Gay (Published 2012) Site-specific Performance: Place, Memory and the Creative Agency of the Spectator . In The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association. Vol. 27 (2005) 27-51. [7] The scripts and interviews -originally written in Arabic- used in this article are the property of al-Harah Theatre in Beit Jala. The translation from Arabic to English is mine. [8] Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham a fter WWII he served as high commissioner in Palestine during the last years of the British mandate , from 1945 until the proclamation of Israel in 1948. [9] Since the scripts used in this article are not published, for sake of consistency I will refer to them as “al-Harah” [10] “ With very little resistance to speak of, the mayor, accompanied by religious leaders, surrendered the city [ Nazareth] on 16 July 1948 to the Haganah officer from Canada who commanded the occupying contingent.” https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/41376 . [11] Stanger, Cary David. The Swedish Count of Wisborg Folke Bernadotte, was the United Nations mediator for Palestine, was assassinated in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948. “Bernadotte sought to modify the provisions of the partition plan approved by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 in order to create more contiguous and homogeneous Arab and Jewish states within Palestine. “A Haunting Legacy: The Assassination of Count Bernadotte” Middle East Journal , Vol. 42, No. 2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 260-272. Here 260. Also refer to https://www.palestinestudies.org/en/node/38640 . [12] Kobi Cohen-Hattab (2017): The border as bridge: an Israeli perspective on the Mandelbaum Gate in divided Jerusalem (1948–1967), Middle Eastern Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2017.1318378. Mandelbaum Gate was named for Mandelbaum House, built by “family patriarch Simcha Mandelbaum in 1929. Simcha and his wife Esther Liba were Jewish dealers in thread and materials. During the years in which Jerusalem was divided (1948–1967), the location was the only official crossing point between the city’s two sections. As it was close to the house’s ruins, it was called ‘Mandel- baum Gate’. With the end of the War of Independence, a truce was signed between Israel and Jordan in Rhodes on 3 April 1949”. (Page 2) [13] “ Following the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Government had unilaterally expanded the Jerusalem municipal boundary to include lands from surrounding villages and cities. Beit Jala was among the Palestinian cities that had parts of its lands expropriated to the new illegal boundary of Jerusalem; hence, 3,147 Dunums; some 22% of Beit Jala's lands were included within the Israeli defined but illegal boundary of Jerusalem” http://poica.org/2008/04/the-strangulation-of-beit-jala-city/ [14] “ The Oslo Accords divided the Palestinian West Bank into three administrative zones: Area A (18%), where the Palestinian Authority (PA) administers civil and security matters; Area B (22%), where the PA administers only civil matters; and Area C (60%) where Israel maintains full control. Area C includes all Israeli settlements and two thirds of the West Bank’s fertile agricultural land. While Area C is a continuous territory, Areas A and B are fragmented into 166 separate enclaves. In spite of the breakdown of the Oslo process, Areas A, B and C remain in force today.” https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/resources/glossary/areas-a-b-c#:~:text=The%20Oslo%20Accords%20divided%20the,where%20Israel%20maintains%20full%20control . [15] Quoted in Masalha 2012. Here, page 4 References About The Author(s) Dr. Hala Khamis Nassar is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, Palestine. From 2017 to 2021, she served as the Assistant Vice President for Teaching and Learning and as the Director of the Center of Excellence at Bethlehem University. Dr. Nassar holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies (Theatrewissenschaft) from the Free University of Berlin, an M.Phil. in Stylistics and Drama, and dual B.A. and M.A. degrees in Theatre and English Literature. Between 2003 and 2016, she taught at several universities in the United States, including UC Berkeley, The Evergreen State College, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, and Yale University from (2003-2016). Her peer reviewed publications focus on Palestinian literature, culture, and theatre. She is also the co-editor of Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet: Critical Essays (Interlink 2007). Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. 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Talya Kingston 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 Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston By Published on May 19, 2023 Download Article as PDF Patrick Gabridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. 2018. Plays In Place is a Massachusetts-based company that collaborates with museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to commission plays that are fully produced in their space. While re-enactment on historical sites is not uncommon, this company contracts professional playwrights to pull historical information into fully realized stories that allow audiences to more fully engage with the human interactions that happened in different times and contexts. This engagement can bring new audiences in, and open new conversations, thus enlivening the site and making it more relevant in the life of its community. The commissioned playwright is similarly offered a fulfilling creative collaboration that they know from the outset will be both compensated and produced for an audience. It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that a company that centers writers, both creatively and in the budget, is run by a playwright. Producing Artistic Director Patrick Gabridge’s own work is often featured in the repertoire, but as the company has grown, he has commissioned a cadre of other playwrights (including me). Through the creative process he connects us with historical resources, strongly advocates for our creative freedom, and pays us at every stage of development. I sat down with Patrick to talk about his company’s process for developing new works of theater. I’m curious about your original inspiration for starting Plays In Place. Tell me the origin story of this playwright-led company. Plays In Place was inspired from the production of a play called Blood on the Snow that I was commissioned to write for the Bostonian Society for the renovated council chamber at the Boston Old State House. I’ve always loved writing historical work, and I’ve always loved doing site-specific work. This gave me a chance to do both together. It was clear there was a strong hunger from audiences, especially in New England. We sold out that first run before we even opened. We added a week and sold out that week. We came back in the second year for a twelve-week run. Years later, people are still calling that museum regularly asking when the show is coming back! Starting a company made it easier for me to approach other museums. Our goal is creating new site-specific plays in partnership with museums, historic spaces, and other institutions. I’ve founded theatre companies before, but in this particular case, I wanted to found a theatre company where we didn’t have to manage a space or raise money. I didn’t want a development department and I didn’t want a building. Speaking of raising money, can you describe the financial model for playwrights that you’ve developed through Plays In Place and how it differs from the traditional model of play development in this country? There are a few dozen playwrights who operate on commission for larger theatre companies, and they make money that way, and they get their plays produced that way and that’s great. It doesn’t happen for most of us – not all the time anyway! So, the typical model is you write a play on spec, you send it out to a lot of theatres and those may or may not get produced. It’s a scattershot approach to doing your work. It’s nice that you have a lot of control over what you are going to write, but your possibility of getting it in front of an audience, let alone getting paid for it, is pretty small. Even if you are in a position where a theatre company is commissioning you, they might be commissioning a bunch of different writers. They’ll do some development of your plays, and maybe they’ll pick one or two of those plays to fully produce, but maybe they won’t. So, it is good that you got paid and you still have a play that you can shop around somewhere else, but sad if the commission doesn’t end up in a production. What is different about our model is that the commission is part of the development process. We’ve learned to set up our contracts in multiple phases. Typically phase one is writers working with the institution on basic research, to come up with the storyline and structure. In this phase, the writer is paid upfront to come up with a proposal. This puts us in a good spot for phase two: the commissioning to write the plays and one or two in-house readings. And then phase three is rehearsal and production. In general, the institutions we’re working with are not developing a lot of different plays and starting the project because they intend to produce the work. This phased model allows them to raise the money in steps. It’s easier for the institutions to say yes to the partnership if I say to them that phase one is going to cost them $5000 – they might have that money, or a way to get it. Phase Two is significantly more money but it’s not a huge amount, and once we have scripts in hand, it’s easier to raise money for the rest, for the production. Plays In Place can commission playwrights at very competitive terms, especially for shorter plays. There are very few theatres commissioning one-act plays unless the playwrights are very famous. We don’t need our people to be famous, they just need to be good at what they do and willing to collaborate with the partner institution and keep their needs in mind when writing. For example, we are partnering with a historical site, so our production has to connect to the actual history. I like talking about money with writers because I think we don’t talk about it enough, and then we go into our conversations with producers a little ill-informed. Plays In Place mostly develops work in a community, which is different from the somewhat isolated traditional playwriting mode. Can you talk about the development process for writers and other artists, and how we work together with the sites? The process that you and I are involved in now [a partnership with Historic Northampton], as well as the National Parks Service’s Suffrage In Black and White , both involve three writers and we are all meeting somewhat regularly to talk about our work and to coordinate our presentations to the institutions. There is significant independence between each play, but also, I feel that it’s very important as a group to build that project together, so it has some liminal level of cohesiveness. They are plays that are going to sit together in an evening so whatever that meal is going to be for the audience it must be palatable and delivered in some stylistic framework. The model varies quite a bit from project to project. The Historic Northampton plays are shorter and all have the same director, so there will be a unifying feel between them. We are already talking about what shared actors we’re going to use and what the handoff is going to be between the plays. Whereas the Suffrage In Black and White pieces are full-length plays that will each have their own director. Plays In Place acts as a Creative Producer. We work with the teams to kind of tie them together and the writers are part of that tying things together so that we each understand what the other is doing. Having parameters for a writer can be a very stimulating part of the puzzle. We’re solving puzzles. In the traditional theatre the puzzle presented to us is pretty much “here’s a blank stage” and we act like all blank stages are the same, which I think is a fallacy, but it also causes us to create a somewhat generic version of our play. The business model in the traditional theatre is: get your play done at a professional company, have it be very successful, and have it be done by a bunch of other professional companies, and then have it be done by a bunch of community theatres, and then by a bunch of schools, and together that’s going to make you a bunch of money. Which is true when it works out, but you’ve also had to design a play that fits in all those different spaces. Our model is much less practical in some ways, in that if we do our jobs well the play can’t be done nearly as effectively in other places. For example, I just ran Moonlight Abolitionists , which is designed to be done under the full moon at Mount Auburn Cemetery as a concert reading in the dark. A friend of mine saw it and wanted to know if she could do it in her theatre in London. She could, of course, but it would lack the context that the cemetery brings and the atmosphere the moonlight brings. I wrote it for this place and time on purpose. The specificity of what we create as an artistic team is exciting to me. And I’m more interested in that than the ability of it to be done a thousand times elsewhere. It’s a tough question to ask yourself as a writer: would you be ok if this play was only ever done twice? Would it be worth the work? I will say so far, the answer has been yes. The production experiences are so intensely rich that it is worth it. Moonlight Abolitionists directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. October 2022. Walking around the site at Historic Northampton before I even had a story was such an inspiration. As a writer, how is the development process different when you are writing for and from a specific place? It depends on what the place is bringing. The plays are still going to be driven by story and character, but how are those stories and characters related to this place? Often the physical action and visual nature, even the sonic nature of the play, is already influenced by the setting. The question I’m always asking as a dramatist is: what is active about this place? As opposed to just a setting. In the plays that we’re writing for Historic Northampton what is interesting is the historic homes, we are in someone’s yard and so there is a familial sense that is going to inform all our writing, as our characters inhabited this neighborhood. The plays that I did at Mount Auburn Cemetery were different. Cemeteries sound like great places to write plays, except for the fact that the things you know the people for are not things they did in that place. This makes it difficult to create present scenes in the space. I wrote ten plays for the cemetery, in two sets of five. The first set was about the natural world, so that involved things that were there like salamanders and mushroom hunters and birdwatchers, all really rooted in the place. The second set of plays tended to be about people who were buried there. So, there is a play that starts out at this giant sphinx monument that is a memorial to the Civil War, but the scene is between the sculptor and the man who commissioned that piece, Jacob Bigelow, who was old and blind at the time. The scene takes place at the arrival of the sculpture, and then the way we made it active is that we know when he arrived, he inspected it with his hands. So, we got permission to bring this old wooden ladder on and the actor is actually feeling the sculpture and asking all these questions and they are in conversation about this object that is there. Matthew C. Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision . Photograph by Corinne Elicone. The action of the play is strongly influenced by the physical environment, and that in turn determines the structure. A good example is Moonlight Abolitionists . I knew I wanted to write a play to be done under the full moon, and I knew I wanted to write about abolition. So those things come together but then under the full moon, it’s going to be dark, so structurally that sends it towards a concert reading. It wasn’t going to be safe to move people around in the dark. I decided that it was OK if the characters were static physically as long as it was dynamic relationally between them. This decision also allowed the play to encompass a broad range of times. It is performed in the dark and the characters are lit only by their music stands lights, which casts this really eerie glow on the giant sphinx behind them. Lisa Timmel, who was the Director of New Work at the Huntington when I was a Playwright Fellow there, used to say, “structure is destiny” and I think place informs the structure. My mantra is “Don’t fight the site”. Understand where the site is guiding you and use it because you have so much, but if you try to go against it, you can’t win. I could do a play at Mount Auburn Cemetery set on the moon, but why? The audience will have spent all their imagination jumping to this new place. There are things that I can do in these spaces that I could never afford to pay to do. In a theatre I could make a full moon but it’s not going to be the same as a real full moon with the wind blowing on you at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of a cemetery. We also did this play about the Armenian genocide in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and when someone died, they would exit and they would walk away from the action, but the exits would take five minutes! The play would be continuing, and these people would be just walking way off in the background. When we performed at dusk when characters died, they would just wander into the gloom and disappear, in a lighting effect that would take a huge amount of money to replicate in the theatre, but the earth was doing it for us! You also have the dramatic tension in the fact that these events happened in the same place that they are being reimagined and that your audience knows this. Yes! The audience has that feeling, but so do the performers. When we were at Mount Auburn, I knew one of the actresses had gone to visit the grave of one of the people that she had portrayed in the Armenian play, this young woman who had died in childbirth shortly after arriving in America. It’s impossible for that not to deepen your performance as an actor. There is this richness that you feel. When we did Blood on the Snow it was intense because the play depicts this meeting that happened the day after the Boston Massacre, but you’re in the room where this meeting took place 250 years ago and there are 50 audience members crammed in with a dozen cast members but they are all in the room and you can feel the bones of the place all around you. The people feel so alive, and the audience soaks it in. Amanda J Collins and Robert Najarian in Consecration. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TALYA KINGSTON is a playwright, dramaturg and educator working primarily in new play development and theatre for social change. She is the Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. 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.