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Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sound Ceremony Guy Yair Beider Music, Other English 90 minutes 2:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. Content / Trigger Description: Guy Yair Beider is an accomplished sound meditation facilitator, sound wellness arts educator, and Himalayan singing bowls expert. With a passion for promoting healthy sonic nourishment and facilitating mindful and safe sonic journeys, Guy has extensive knowledge of working with sound, drawing on research in psychology, musicology, and psychoacoustics. In the pursuit of sonic aesthetics, Guy meticulously hand-picked every single instrument to unveil its beauty to his audience. This quest for perfection has spanned nearly a decade and has taken Guy as far as India, Nepal, and Tibet, where he tested thousands of singing bowls, attentively listening to and learning from the ancient wisdom imbued in these antique masterpieces. Since 2010, Guy has facilitated hundreds of meditations in a range of settings, including yoga studios, martial art schools, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, schools, businesses, private circles, medicinal plant ceremonies, and various organizations for people with special needs, PTSD, and AA groups. In 2015, Guy founded the internationally recognized Bells of Bliss project. In 2020, Guy introduced a unique method for educating sound therapy practitioners and meditation teachers, which was launched through the online Sound Medicine Academy. https://www.guybeider.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Encounter Kinesis Project dance theatre's work Bridge Matter / The Reach in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event Kinesis Project brings new life into Inwood Hill Park with this excerpt of Bridge Matter/The Reach, created specifically for the park and Kinesis Project's uptown community, audiences will be led along pathways, waterways and bridge views with gorgeous dancing and the live music of Grammy Award winning musician, Johnny Butler. Bridge Matter / The Reach is a second collaboration with the research of geoscientist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, studying how our shifting climate is affecting even the bedrock of our earth. Featured Image Credits: Sabrina Canas Kinesis Project dance theatre Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company produces large-scale, space-changing and unexpectedly intimate dances. Kinesis Project is at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement with diverse communities and the cultural imperative of art in public spaces. Kinesis Project dances are inspired by Riker’s questions about the world around us. Those questions are excavated and answered through a generative, collaborative process with the dancers and designers of Kinesis Project. As the work moves into a site, Riker focuses on the expanse, scope and depth of the environment. Dances then further evolve based on the site, resulting in unique and custom performances in each space that the company enters. Aimed at democratizing contemporary dance for audiences at all ages and demographics, Kinesis Project injects movement and stillness into unusual and inspiring places, pushing the boundaries of how people see and interact with that space. As an educational and outreach organization, Kinesis Project teaches dance and creative thinking in schools, leads non-dancers in community movement making activities, and brings dance into public spaces. As a producing organization, Kinesis Project dance theatre founded Women in Motion, a platform to support female choreographers in New York City. Visit Artist Website Location Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Visit Partner Website

Watch This is Ballroom by Juru and Vitã at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning!. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents This is Ballroom At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juru and Vitã Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 4pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Portuguese, English Running Time 92 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning! About The Artist(s) Vitã is a filmmaker and screenwriter. Director of the short film "The day I remembered the trip to Bicuda" (2015), producer of the feature documentary "It's Not the First Time We Fight For Our Love" (2022). Curator of Brazilian Comedy FF and of showcases on Hong Sangsoo films in four cities in Brazil. Master's degree in Audiovisual at UFF (Brazil). In the ballroom scene, they participate as an independent photographer and are a member of the Legendary House of Lauren Intl. Juru is a researcher, dramaturgist and performing arts critic. Casting coach for the feature film "Com O Terceiro Olho na Terra da Profanação", by Catu Rizo (2017) and the short film "Sunset", by Bruno Roger (2014). Dramaturgist in the performance "Repertory n. 1", by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira. Master in Contemporary Arts Studies at UFF and PhD student in Arts at UERJ. Get in touch with the artist(s) festival@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media https://www.utopiadocs.net/ renato@utopiadocs.net Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage 2024 Report from London and Berlin By Dan Poston Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF Covid pushed many people out of the theatre, but in Germany, at least, it was not just Covid. For several years before, regular theatregoers had begun to complain of a stagnation in the theatre. The once-innovative “post-dramatic” directorial styles that had drawn international crowds to German theatres and festivals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had grown standard, rote. Visitors and young people who had only seen realist, dramatic theatre before could still experience the revelation of intelligent, well- theorized, post-everything theatrical aesthetics in their first attendance at a theatre in Berlin. But after a while, the experience devolved into just another yelling actor in a dark, minimalist room interrupted occasionally by heavy intermittent electronic music instead of scene changes. Yet more cycles of Brecht Kabuki or a Castorf stage flooded with orange balls pouring out of cupboards did not seem to cut through the deadening sense of nothing-new. In Germany as in many parts of the world, theatregoers had quietly retreated even before the pandemic into their living rooms and bedrooms, where innovation took the form of a new abundance and diversity of streaming films and series available on demand. General historians will likely focus on how the pandemic created a newly mediatized society, but for many of us, the ready, mass obedience to strict public- health guidelines during the pandemic was also a result of so many of us having lost our connection to in-person institutions and events: we were already increasingly sitting at home, anyway, waiting for something, well, dramatic. Although I had continued to attend theatrical productions on a limited basis, as available, during the pandemic period, I experienced the desire for a renewal of theatregoing on a post-pandemic trip to London in Fall 2023. In short, I was surprised to feel again like a bored tourist, longing to have some contact to Shakespeare, to live Culture. It was professionally necessary, anyway, since I was writing and teaching about the Bard, so I booked a ticket at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark. I had been reading early modern travelers’ accounts of going to theatre, and this proved a helpful way to frame my walk across the Thames, embracing rather than snobbishly shirking from an authentic, new tourist impulse. Why, after all, should the dramatic tourist theatre be any less interesting than the intellectual theatre of Berlin, the conceit of theory to one side? The audience in the lobby was an appealing, sociable group of highly educated tourists, vibrant evening celebrants, and people working in theatre or culture, a familiar scene. The ushers led us into the closed round Jacobean winter theatre—modelled after Blackfriars —with an admirable mixture of routine professional friendliness and vigilance. They stood watch at each entrance of the auditorium throughout the entire show, adding an energy to the spectacle. I could not decide if their vigilance had to do with pride and excitement about working in such a London institution during peak-rent neoliberalism, or if it had been impressed upon them how easily even this modern wooden theatre might accidentally burn up with everyone inside if the wax candle lighting went somehow awry. I decided it was probably both, though I am sure the Globe complex has a formidable sprinkler and fire-prevention system in place. I noted the relief of feeling safe from yelling actors here, a fact which I associated with some small distance from the War in Eastern Europe, and I gave myself what felt like almost scandalous permission to look forward to hearing what some traditionally trained Shakespearean actors would do with a classic text. My only hesitation, which had nearly prevented me from buying tickets, was that the text to be performed was not Shakespearean at all but rather Ibsen’s Ghosts . O n second and third thought, however, this bit of anachronistic meditation on theatrical ghosts seemed peculiarly, teasingly smart, a way of making something new in a well-established, historicist tourist venue. The production, in this sense, turned out to be entirely satisfying, a validation of director Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production concept and the Globe’s artistic direction under Michelle Terry, who has begun to widen the productions staged there beyond texts from the early modern period. The stage candelabra lighting ritual, performed by the actors, immediately established the conversation between the Shakespearean stage’s essential anti-realism and Ibsen’s conventional drama of servants and bourgeois rulers behaving as if they really are captured in the four walls of an established house. Seeing the faces of other audience members in-the-round doubled for the gaze of the Shakespearean theatre on its later cousin, 19th-century picture-box realism. This effect was emphasized by the production’s backdrop: a large, square mirror, reminiscent equally of a cheap bordello as of the hard regime of tightened neoclassical control in Versailles’ 17th-century mirror room. The stage was otherwise bare, though covered by a large, long-shag burgundy rug on which the artist-son, Osvald (compellingly played by Stuart Thompson), lay and seemed to dream much of the action of the evening, as if himself gazing back on or hallucinating theatre history from a plastic technicolor simulacrum of the 1970s. Rosanna Vize’s highly effective set and costume designs gave strong visual support to the production’s well-crafted and subtle play with multiple historical ages of avant-garde production and fraught relations with realism. Osvald’s costume—a faux-fur sweater jacket over a plain white undershirt and light boxer shorts—featured a faded, elaborate floral pattern that evoked Renaissance court doublets and beast masquerading, at the same time as gesturing towards a slipperiness between much more antique figurations of the satyr and contemporary, neo-bohemian, art-world fashion. This still minimalist aesthetic of allowing-the-ghosts-in, this conversation with the gaze of various historical theatres and the avant-garde, was captured by one of the opening gestures of the play when Osvald, before lying down for his reverie, lit a real cigarette on stage. The smell of that cigarette lingering throughout the intermission-less Ibsen drama participated in an already well-entrenched 21st-century performance tradition of smoking actors critically reminding us of the suspiciously sanitary odor of our own mega-liberated time. It also quickly established the play’s driving allegory of an artist understanding his “rebellion” as a sociologically forced exile, about which he previously—as the supposed hero of a happy family non-drama—had been kept effectively and relatively brutally in the dark. The acting was accomplished with intelligence and spirited handiwork. The mother, Helene, played by Hattie Morahan (known for her award-winning turn as Nora in a 2012 production of A Doll’s House ), dominated the dark bare stage. Her nervous tight stage business became increasingly legible, in the exposed allegory of the play, as a 19th- century effort to keep artists and their next-generation representations away from the corruption of society’s actual making, while at the same time seducing them just enough into a torpidly incestual drama to prevent what would otherwise be their disastrous free relation to the state and the servant classes. European Realism became for the duration of the play a moment within the Shakespearean theatre’s long, shuffling repertoire. The English Renaissance theatre was opened again as a laboratory for contemplating the extended human transhistorical in both directions, past and future. With exquisite scenic minimalism and the speed of a sharply cut and knit-together text (clocking in at 100 minutes), Hill-Gibbins’ Ghosts staged the artist’s paradoxical epiphany about his own exile from the actual primal scene of Realism: the intentionally guarded, representational inaccessibility of the driving truths and negotiations of society’s actual practical, historical construction and business deals. Realism became in the Shakespearean gaze a ma nufactured narcissistic ghost-machine, the previously glimpsed netherworld of entrances from a backstage now blocked—not by a façade with necessary doors but more essentially by a supposedly endlessly revelatory mirror, a very basic but entirely effective installation mimicking Louis XIV’s mechanism of virtual social surveillance while displaying how easily and cheaply such a mechanism could be constructed, at will, via mass, industrial production. By foregoing bourgeois furniture and historicism in favor of lightly suggestive long-historical minimalism and the surreal, visual centering of the fantasizing artist, the production opened the bare allegorical dimensions of the play and its meditation on what the artist and ultimately art can be, if anything other than ghosts among ghosts. Productions at the Sam Wanamaker are dominated by the tourist desire to visit Shakespeare’s original site of creation. This production seized this reality and dealt with it not as an impediment to original creation but as a critical tool for showing the artist’s relation to theatre vis-à-vis one of the most famous, classic plays meditating on just this theme. In Ibsens’ Ghosts , the will of the young painter, returned as the prodigal son from art school in Paris, to create a new mirror for his time, society, and family is fatally and ironically mixed up with his art education being a doomed escape, arranged by his mother’s financial management, from the disease and corruption that he is otherwise due to inherit from his father. This meditation on artistic abyss and generational juncture at the center of Ibsen’s realist dramatic career functions like a theatre-historical Verfremdungseffekt. Paradoxically, it brings the audience nearer to contact with the floor and room of modern artistic creation and exposes that site’s (childlike) separation from society—the artist’s ambivalent inheritance of society’s own will to erase its hidden bad deals—even as the artist thus captured attempts to critically represent society. Ibsens’s Ghosts at the Sam Wanamaker, in short, fulfilled the tourist wish to approach the Shakespearean ghost by demonstrating the realism of a transhistorical, always returning artistic dilemma only contingently attached to a period’s furniture or wallpaper. If the double-binds of bourgeois false consciousness was Ibsen’s pet theme, Hill-Gibbins’ production used the Shakespearean gaze to more fully unearth the less historically bound, allegorical dimension of the drama. Sitting as it were in the presence of one of the larger, shaping ghosts of Shakespeare’s theatre, Queen Elizabeth I, audience members read Ibsen’s play about uncanny revenants differently. Helene haunts Helen, and vice versa, beauty in her maternal capacity becoming the controlling, tragic demi-goddess on which the play ruminates. Regine (the household maid who lights the lights and is destined to be the artist’s muse before it is revealed she is his half-sister) doubles for the state in the fantasy that beauty will make the state its servant, rather than both being the servants of other, baser powers-that-be. The artist as the pure liberated heir of beauty is doomed by his actual mixed heritage, the same construction that blocks his potentially monstrous love affair with the state. Fated to be an impotent mental invalid, a quasi-universal, de-historicized ghost-heir about whom the realist world will tell some seemingly objective history, the Shakespeare-like, authorial artist-ghost of this production attempted to break the double-bind of realism by thrusting the representation of his own compositional dreaming on stage. With the Shakespearean theatre came the loosened historical gazes of other theatres, including those most ancient and our own most contemporary, the recurring self-reflective moment of an artist attempting to create a theatre both freed and captured autotrophically again by its ghostly colleagues. When Helene, unable to repress the ghosts she has attempted to keep at bay along with the corruption of the family’s past and present, declares in Act 2 that “there are ghosts everywhere,” the actress seemed to show her seeing us, too, seeing ourselves as images in the mirror. The audience was appropriately riveted, as energized as our kind sentinels at the doorways, who then ushered us out with the assurance of professionals knowingly relieved again that the theatre did not entirely burn down, despite its one slight violation of code, that anti-Zeitgeist cigarette. Laios. Photo © Mark Brenner When I walked after the play north across the Millenium Bridge over the Thames that night, I decided to continue this new engagement with the theatre as a returning tourist. In May, I was able to secure several tickets for productions at the annual Theatertreffen in Berlin, where most of the jury-invited shows continue to sell out within the first hours of tickets becoming available. These used to be named the ten “best” productions of the year in German-speaking countries, but now they are simply called ten “remarkable” productions since few of us working in culture and the arts today want to be burdened with assigning hierarchies to works (see the essay on the Berlin Theatertreffen elsewhere in this iss ue.) One of the most buzzy productions of this year’sfestival was Falk Richter’s autofictional, family history play The Silence , which had been selling out at the Schaubühne since its November premier, but I was unable to get a ticket for that show using the ordinary purchase system. As it was, my first show at the festival was Yael Ronen and Shlomi Shaban’s Bucket List , which was staged away from the festival theatre (the Berliner Festspiele) at the Schaubühne, where it had been playing since it opened in December. The playwright and director Yael Ronen has been a fixture of Berlin theatre since 2009, when her Israeli-Palestinian-German ensemble comedy Third Generation, about the conflicts in the Middle East, debuted at the Schaubühne. For more than a decade, her dark, humane, and funny comedies have been a steady part of the repertoire at the Maxim Gorki Theatre; three of her plays were invited to previous Theatertreffen editions, including her 2021 “almost-a-musical” Slippery Slope , which was also co-created with Schaban. Shortly before arriving at the full theatre, I realized that the Theatertreffen premiere of Bucket List had been scheduled to take place on Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembranc e for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and for Jewish heroism and resistance to Nazism. The date, May 9, was also exactly six months after the play’s premiere, and in the space of that half-year, the cultural atmosphere in Berlin, as in many cities around the world, had changed significantly. The December premiere had been met with anti-Israel protests and heightened security at the Schaubühne. In the days following the October 7 terrorist attack of Hamas against Israeli civilians, the Gorki had cancelled performances of Ronen’s The Situation (Theatertreffen 2016), a piece that centered around a Berlin-Neukölln language class and Syrian, Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, and Palestinian dialogue. The Gorki’s statement at the time took a nuanced but decided stance supporting Israel in response to the recent atrocities and ongoing (still ongoing) hostage situation. Six months after the premiere, when many people in the auditorium were returning to see Bucket List for a second or even a third time, Berlin was particularly charged by a series of relatively small, international and local student and general protests against Israel’s conduct in the ongoing war between it and H amas. Many of those protests had featured anti-Semitic slogans, occupied lecture halls, and even violence against Jewish individuals and institutions. Later in the month, a scandal would erupt when the President of the Technische Universität Berlin, Geraldine Rauch, liked several tweets with anti-Semitic content and then fought successfully to keep her job atop one of the city’s most important universities. It was, in short, an out-of-the-ordinary time for the Theatertreffen premiere of a play by two Israeli artists that meditated on the trauma of October 7, a world of increasing war, division, and terror, and the schizogenic, über-normality of ongoing, clever, smartphone-set sociality with its boring-stressful, rapid- change “turn to the left, turn to the right,” mass shock-therapy choreography (to quote one of the production’s central musical numbers.) Sitting in the theatre, I had a moment of deja-vu taking me back to the previous years’ Theatertreffen, when I saw the Ukrainian director Andriy May’s Putinprozess, a play that delved into the personal experiences of theatre-makers forced to flee from war as their theatres became bomb shelters and targets. Here again with Bucket List the reality of war and the suffering of its many victims flooded the cultural space. There ought to be a German or French word for the basic ambivalence of even highly engaged cultural consumers towards the transformation of cultural spaces into war-time spaces of activism, trauma coping, and refuge. Whatever that useful, important, healthy, dangerous, callous, or irresponsible Kriegsunterdrückungsgestalt might actually be named, it could be felt—again, ambivalently—in the audience just as it was complexly thematized in both productions, a year apart: a reminder of our world’s increased exposure to new, lethal conflagrations over that interval of time. The mood had decidedly shifted, partially, of course, due to the different historical responsibilities involved in the Ukrainian/Russian versus the Israeli/Hamas/Palestinian conflict. Whereas in the previous year, the instinct for both repression and bold certainty seemed stronger in the audience, the audience for Bucket List seemed sadder, more troubled, and more wary. Bucket List. Photo © David Baltzer Bucket List has a loose, impressionistic narrative about a patient who remembers waking up on a Saturday with his world having fallen apart, a thoroughgoing sense of alienation from self and the previously known life-scene. His name, surfacing uncertainly and somewhat robotically out of the second musical number (a darkly hilarious pastiche derived from the “Bobby” opening number of Company ), is Robert, but the scien ce-fiction context leaves open if anything about “Robert” and “his” memories are real at all or simply a postmodern, perhaps personalized insertion of “normal” memories into an otherwise mostly erased psyche. That is to say, the main plot conceit is that Robert is an imperfectly compliant recipient of a new, thorough happy-memory-replacement therapy developed by the overdrivenly neoliberal health-care firm, Zeitgeist, which hopes to profit from an accelerating PTSD pandemic. The acted-out personal memories, which largely comprise the show, might thus belong to those more painful memories to which Robert still clings in order to give his now lonely identity dramatic coherence and context. But the “sad” memories thus displayed seem troublingly not-painful-enough, framed as they are by the diagnosis of PTSD and the visually surrounding, abstracted evidence of unutterable, mass violence. Perhaps, the darker subtext of the productions suggests, even these ultimately bittersweet, sentimental moments of personal anguish are a strategic part of Zeitgeist’s functional brainwashing. In the clinical language of the attending doctor characters: suffering may be pathological when the technology to erase it exists, but a little bit of disorderly, remembered suffering may help melancholic loser-consumers (as Robert is specified) more wary of Zeitgeist to still feel human, a perhaps important factor in their tolerance of the prescribed therapy. The doubling, ensemble aes thetic of Bucket List —with its four engaging actors (Ruth Rosenfeld, Damian Rebgetz, Carolin Haupt, and Christopher Nell) d ressed in black and fluidly trading roles and observer positions—leaves open, like much of Ronen’s work, the extent to which material used in the show is autobiographical, and to whose specific autobiography it belongs. The basic sequential, episodic narrative of individual departures, losses, and partial returns stages different but emotionally and intellectually intertwined moments of breakage: adolescent rebellion, the end of a first love relationship, the long split of a mature marriage, the recovered memory of an early sexual trauma, and a mid-life individual breakup with reality. That latter breakup takes place as “Robert” undergoes a process akin to “mindfulness meets lobotomy” in which the promise of Zeitgeist begins to be realized: “in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.” Reality continues to phone-stalk Robert and the ensemble, and the traumas of Saturday, October 7th, 2023, and its (ongoing) aftermath blend with other known and unknown traumas via crucial moments of marked linguistic slipperiness and generally suggestive scenic elements. The minimalist, abstract set, designed by Magda Willi, looked similar to an Apple Store installation, dominated by clean, white, pseudo-humanely rounded shapes and simple architectures for basic, flexible staging and (product) interaction. The symmetrical, bulky wh ite background module of this corporate-like display structure featured two large holes vaguely suggestive of eye pupils. There, in silent projection, slightly abstracted images of war intermittently accompanied the split-screen jazz-rock-opera d rama of formerly mundane, now privileged, romance. From the side of the stage, a three-person band provided the varying rhythms and catchy Broadway sound for what the opening number suggested was the irresistible, childlike offering of war’s singing. The virtuoso, musical coolness of the band was centered in a memorable number featuring the guitarist (Thomas Moked Blum) singing the part of a BBC correspondent reluctantly taking a break from a cocaine-fueled love affair to report on hundreds of adults and children being killed, raped, and abducted, before returning home to his pleasure pad like a good professional, “not such a bad day” after all. Anguish, the cheerful cruelty of economic coercion and enforced agreeability in still- buffered milieus, the questions of how to create, live, react, and grieve responsibly culminated in the final number. The anonymous articles of light white clothing falling from the rafters throughout the play littered the stage. Crumpled on the floor, they represented Robert’s left-behind memories, the ghosts of the ungraspable real dead from James Joyce to the Holocaust to today’s latest non-headlines, and the discarded drafts of a writer, as Robert finally sang, trying to pass on hope without simply contaminating another page: through failure, neglect, limitation, selfishness, inability, forgetfulness and inattention—the same negatives that created the possibilities and inevitability of imagination. The aesthetic was high, humane postmodernism, the moment of the postmodern that never took decisive hold because the internet changed everything. This was the moment, now “precious,” when there was to have been a return to the idea of progressive understanding of what it was to be (universally) human via the recognized, shared experience of becoming diversely what we all were, in the midst of plastic chaos. C’est la vie. Ronen, Shaban, and the ensemble showed and mourned a generational aesthetic that has become an impossibility when there are much more urgent and serious processes and concerns at stake. In her laudatio after the show (a speech that this year replaced the ordinary audience talk-back), Carolin Emcke described her experience of this Theatertreffen premiere, a half year after the original premiere, as a kind of looking back through a snow globe at both the estranged recent past and the world-picture of childhood and earlier life. The internet, after all, performs an entirely different world- picture, one that has finally put the ambiguously emerging fence up between this aesthetic age and that of postmodernism, when the individual for all its subjectivization was still operative as the crucial center of discernment. The internet, that corporate never- endingly blank-staring, data collecting Zeitgeist, has a different, eusocial teleology, decidedly towards the hive mind and what that mind wants to articulate, or manage through aesthetics. Macbeth. Photo © Armin Smailovic If Bucket List survives—as it should—in an anthology somewhere, it ought to be read as a paragon of just-human honesty. In the theatre that night, the play was alive in a different manner. The audience’s applause was complicated, indiscernible, and consciously so: tepid, non-committal, or serious, it reflected as well as the play and players on stage did (although less bravely) the inability of art to break through the forcefields of caution and concern that are both refuge from and perpetuators of our new scenes of war, loneliness, and capture. I, for one, as I believed we all in that audience felt poignantly as isolated ones, believe that powerlessness is not a critique of works like Bucket List but a confessed limitation of art essentially in the face of bad politics. When Ronen appeared on stage after the show to accept the recognition given by the Theatertreffen producers, she wore a glamorous green, sparkling robe, the stunning color in contrast to the white set, black-clad actors, and the white, anonymous garments that had drifted down during the 75-minute piece from near some invisible heaven, to be picked up and used by the actors in recreations of remembered scenes. In one of the most poignant and funny episodes of the play, “Clara” (Carolin Haupt) had donned a fallen white dress and re-enacted a scene of childhood ballet training, dancing ever more vigorously as her teacher (Ruth Rosenfeld) admonished her to gesture with her left leg: “the other left!”, the teacher continued to correct her, until Clara gave up in frustration, unable to correct a mistake she was not making. The color of Ronen’s robe that evening reminded us of the difficulty of saying which is the correct way to grieve, to be active, to do honor to the dead and the living: through the pale seriousness of representation, through the postmodern exposure of so many crumpled-up unread drafts of history littering the theatre floor as the floor and waste bucket of the writer’s studio and bedroom, or through the recovered, inherited, and willed exuberance of individuality, hope, complexity, even ironic glamour that was and is a thread of the happiness with which those victims of human violence live and lived through or did their best to live through it all? The audience seemed to share an understanding that we have no real right left leg left to stand on, in any case. The next show I attended, back at the Festspiele main theatre, was for me—as for many attendees—the highlight of a superb festival. Lina Beckmann (Germany’s 2011, 2022, and 2024 Actress of the Year) open ed Laios unassumingly, charmingly, as if giving a pre- theatre talk to acquaint the audience with the classical context s of the play they were about to see. A short, open question-and-answer session about the knowledge of Greek myth that we were bringing to our spectatorship segued seamlessly into one of the most beguiling, memorable dramatic monologues I have ever witnessed. In a 90-minute, true tour-de-force, the equally unassuming and breath-taking Beckmann donned masks, applied makeup, and performed virtuoso stretches of dialogue, narrative, alternative narrative, and commentary, all with a historically deep yet satisfyingly contemporary perspective on the myth she was relating. Making use of an “antique” hurdy gurdy in place of an aulos, Beckmann dove into the complex, queer biography of Oedipus’ usually brushed-over father, gripping the audience with expertly mixed light humor, tragic pathos, postmodern alienation, Butoh aesthetics, and archeological enactment. The simple bare set design by Johannes Schütz displayed an array of props and reconstructed ancient masks, fitting for Beckman’s marathon-like, two-hour performance, which rarely failed to be imbued with a sympathetic, humane spirit even as she changed registers of acting and narration with world-class finesse, endurance, conviction, and irony. A particularly effective, minimalist element of the staging was the use of what seemed to be a negative, live, back-projection system to occasionally create glowing “positive” white shadows of foregrounded props and human figures on the darkened stage backdrop. Annete ter Meulen provided the lighting design, Wicke Naujoks the costume design, and Sybille Meier the dramaturgy for a show sparkling with carefully interwoven, intricately non-distracting historical, political, and pop-cultural references and ornamentation. A feeling of relief and gratitude swelled in the audience for Karin Beier’s masterfully directed production. Theatre was back. We had forgotten. Beckmann’s performance used the full range of human voice, spirit, emotion, knowledge, and craft. It was tasteful, almost perfectly modulated. Perhaps three-quarters through there was a feeling of too-much, some repetition to be cut—perhaps the species was lost hopelessly in the spin-cycle of senseless, layered myth—but this was caught by the astonishing speed of the abrupt end, leaving ringing in the air the pathos-laden recognition question asked equally suddenly by the classical texts to their contemporary audiences, by both Laios and Oedipus to each other as unknown father and son, and by the actress to herself and all of us really living in that room—in a symmetry with the lighthearted, informal opening of the play: “ Bist du das?”, “Are you that?” Here was a production again that understood the grain of the voice, the thousand variations of quiet and rhythm, for example. Individual moments—Beckmann’s uncanny coughing prophecy as the oracle in a late-night snack café or her brief embodiment of the sphinx—were enough to justify anyone’s return to theatre spectatorship; no film or image or reading could match the layered, immersive, physical understanding of the Sphinx and the Pythia that this live experience granted its audience. More impressive, in a way, was to be in the audience and feel that all of this was mutually appreciated, that theatre’s return—a novel and progressively incremental cultural achievement—was being greeted and appreciated collectively by a sensitive, living, packed audience, alive to subtlety, in historical agreement about how much of the useless noise (polemics, false honesty, and all that) could be supplanted by complex, understandable rendering. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s poetic text—part 2 of the 2023, five-part Beier-Schimmelpfennig Thebes series, ANTHROPOLIS , created at the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus— performed a new archeological layer of classical reception. We gave Beckmann seven enthusiastic standing ovations, the applause itself only ending out of the humane impulse to give the actress a chance to rest and recover after such an act, to disappear again with our gratitude into her life. Walking out of the theatre back onto the street in the crowd, the feeling was palpable: art had changed the season. The city buzzed and hovered again in the talk, reflective social silence, and enlivened eyes and ears of the groups lingering, coalescing, and dispersing into a hopeful evening. After the previous two experiences, I entered my last Theatertreffen production of the year suffering from the curse of high expectations. The veteran Dutch director Johan Simons’ Macbeth production had been marketed as a revelation of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy as a meta-comedy. What this meant in practice was that most of the speed, quick-pivoting nuance, and dizzying altitude variations of Shakespeare’s text were suppressed in favor of slapstick and elastic improvisation. The very long production (3 hours and 20 minutes) from the Schauspielhaus Bochum featured three talented, decorated actors sitting in what looked like a bare, well-lit, not well-kept modern neoclassical bath or decrepit sanatorium spa environment (stage design by Nadja Sofie Eller). There was plenty of irony, reference, and momentary pastiche to unpack, and the full insider audience had the intellectual chops to do so. But there was also a lot of time to think again about the invocation of the old writing advice never to set a short story in a bathtub. In sum, the audience witnessed a lengthy production of Waiting for Godot set to the text of Macbeth , as if we were invited to the long eternal life of the three witches, occasionally painfully acting out the script (or not), changing and condensing roles, waiting for something that would never come, waiting in that sense primarily for an authentic impulse to do something, embarrassed when that thing was active, heroic, violent, or requiring movement. A smart but long and intricately created satire produced at the audience’s expense is a puzzle to critique, like a meal of fine morsels that ironically deconstructs taste and dramatic expectation beyond all simplicity, action, and brevity. Ghosts. Photo © Marc Brenner About a quarter of the audience chose to take their seats on the smart side of things, but many in the audience used the long time of watching actors play smart theatre games on stage to look around the room and wonder if we were required to admire the emperor’s new clothes, 124 years after Ubu Roi , let alone more than four centuries since audiences first took in James I’s accension and Macbeth . Boos were reported in the intermission. For all its brilliant performative quotations, the production might have benefitted from borrowing the concept of the most famous Macbeth production of the century so far. Adding Punchdrunk’s 2011 Sleep No More into the comic world of the citational production—inviting the audience to wander and enter into the active game-playing of the actors—would have enlivened the piece; more precisely, as it was, it felt like the audience was cast as regressive, back-in-time, pre-2011 certainly. The use of a standard picture-box proscenium stage and a standard darkened auditorium felt here like an act of cruelty, creating an artificial sense of a fixed, conservative bourgeois theatre where most of the audience would have been relieved to experience anything more truly experimental. In an exception that proved the rule, one of the most memorable, humorous, and gripping moments of the production—when the three actors sat at a table open to the audience in front of the curtain for the feast scene—performed this gesture of openness. The acting, as an extended study of relational improv, was memorable, almost never naturalistic, and thickly layered over the much- daggered text. Marina Galic, Jens Harzer, and Stefan Hunstein fluidly played all the characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Simons’ casting and dramaturgy indeed innovatively and critically exposed the play’s structure of doubling and tripling in a sophisticated, meta-comical fashion. Galic took on the meta-role of the driving second (as Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and the Macduffs) to her real-life spouse, the much celebrated, Iffland-Ring-wearing Harzer as the king (Macbeth, Duncan, and Malcom). With Hunstein as the comically weirdest of the weird sisters, sometimes joining the pair in extended, bizarre make-out sessions, the impressive acting trio created many memorable, sparkling, insightful moments in the productions’ often revelatory, though drawn-out reduction sauce. I walked home that evening from this year’s Theatertreffen, then, ambivalent, wondering if the trend towards supposed insider productions and the decadent professionalization of the audience would continue (getting its second life after the pandemic) or if the new truly green sprouts of complex, generous, humane cultural achievement would be sustained and allowed, well, to flower. In the conversations afterwards, it struck me that critics and audience members downplayed a significant, surprising “return” of the German theatre towards a literary, new-author’s theatre: amidst the praise for productions like Bucket List and Laios , the writing was only minimally mentioned. Given the high and impressive production values from the other artists an d arts involved in making great theatre, that might be understandable. But it would be dishonest to not add the corrective that these productions also featured texts that deserve to be read and studied, that buoyed the performances and scenic designs and assemblages also on display. Just as Shakespeare, the outsider poet from Stratford, composed plays that we know drew much of their compelling material from the spectacular genius of ensemble—from the extraordinary talents of actors, architects, politicians, and impresario-businesspeople—a remarkable new generation of playwrights in Germany are sneaking their play texts like ghosts through the cracked mirror side-stage doors of a post-literary theatrum mundi. As superstitious as we might be, it would be a shame if we contemporaries again largely failed to remark upon them. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Poston is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tübingen. His intellectual biography of the quintessential public taste-maker Joseph Addison was published by the University of Virginia Press in December 2024. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch JJ by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. JJ. (film) follows Ami & Popo's journey to New York in the spring of 2022. In the footsteps of Jill Johnston (1929-2010), the two investigators meet people who knew Jill as a dance critic, Jill as a radical lesbian, Jill as a performer, and more. Jill's many facets provide access to lesbian heritage, the place of lesbians in art, and bodies in activist spaces.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents JJ At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 2:20pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language English, French Running Time 71 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective JJ. (film) follows Ami & Popo's journey to New York in the spring of 2022. In the footsteps of Jill Johnston (1929-2010), the two investigators meet people who knew Jill as a dance critic, Jill as a radical lesbian, Jill as a performer, and more. Jill's many facets provide access to lesbian heritage, the place of lesbians in art, and bodies in activist spaces. About The Artist(s) Pauline L. Boulba & Aminata Labor are multi-disciplinary artists. They met at the Dance department of Paris 8 University in 2016, during the mobilization against LaLoiTravailEtSonMonde (Labor Law), and have since developed a wide range of complicities and relationships. From militant collectives to radio broadcasts, from performances to text writing, from painting sessions to inter-species walks, they make art and life spaces for questioning, singing, making a mess, sharing, watching and much more. Their work has been presented together or separately at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre National de la Danse (Pantin), Villa Arson (Nice), Festival Salmon (Barcelona), Den Frie (Copenhagen), Théâtre de l'Usine (Geneva). Between 2020-2024, they created artworks dedicated to Jill Johnston: JJ, a performance ; JJ, a film ; JJ, a book. They also showed a duo-exhibition Jill ou Face, at les Capucins, Centre d'Art d'Embrun (France). Get in touch with the artist(s) jj.film2023@gmail.com and follow them on social media Pauline L. Boulba is a dance performer and researcher. Aminata Labor performs and draws. They met at Paris 8 University in 2016 during the mobilization against LaLoiTravailEtSonMonde and have since developed various forms of complicity and relationships. From activist collectives to radio shows, performances,text writing, painting sessions, and interspecies walks, they make art and life spaces for questioning, singing, zbeuler, sharing, watching, and much more. Their artistic activities are mostly subsidized by public institutions and are part of the intermittent regime. From 2020 to 2024, they are conducting a vast investigation into Jill Johnston with the JJ project, which takes the form of a play, a book, and a film. It is for the latter that they collaborate with Lucie Brux, multifunctional editor, archive geek & queer films, comrade in struggle. Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. PRELUDE Festival 2023 INTERVIEW Murder Room - Day 4 Anne Washburn, Many Others including, perhaps, yourself. Theater, Other, Discussion, Multimedia English 5 min - 55 min, your choice. 3:00PM to 8:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Sign Up to Contribute This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. This room has received material support from Playwrights Horizons, and New Georges, with numerous numerous contributors throughout the field. Content / Trigger Description: Anne Washburn is a playwright whose works include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pneumatica, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, A Devil At Noon, I Have Loved Strangers, The Internationalist, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, Mr. Burns, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides' Orestes & Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Folger, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Other contributors include: playwrights, box office personnel, artistic directors, literary managers, actors, designers, program directors, development directors, producers, interns, audience members, stage managers, directors. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Peter and Julia are going to read. They are going to read their writing. It is going to be brief. It is going to happen. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE READINGS BY PETER AND JULIA Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey English 30 minutes 7:30PM EST Thursday, October 19, 2023 Mercury Store, 8th Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open to All Peter and Julia are going to read. They are going to read their writing. It is going to be brief. It is going to happen. Content / Trigger Description: We are Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey. We collaborate together. Our work wrestles with questions of cruelty, authenticity, deception, entertainment, and power. We value simple language, functional design, autobiography, and vulnerability. Our work has been presented at Under the Radar at the Public Theater, La MaMa, JACK, Soho Rep, the Deutches Schauspielhaus, and the Radikal Jung festival at the München Volkstheater. We were both members of the 2017-2019 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater, and were Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artists in 2019. Julia has worked with New York City Players, Soho Rep, The National Theater of Hungary, and was an Assistant Director on Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. Peter has performed for or collaborated with artists such as 600 Highwaymen, The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and the Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Top of Page Curators' Note Program Prelude 2024 Schedule Prelude 2024 Team TheaterListingsNYC ASAP15 PRELUDE FESTIVAL 2024 October 16-19 The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York Curator Note Program Prelude 2024 Team PRELUDE 2024 Between the Scenes The 21st annual PRELUDE Festival, curated by Jess Barbagallo and John Hoobyar in alignment with “Not a Luxury,” a collaboration between ASAP-15 and the Park Avenue Armory, will feature works-in-process, critical conversations, and new theater and performance scholarship. As a featured program of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, PRELUDE presents a unique snapshot of the contemporary New York experimental theater. By merging the critical with the creative, PRELUDE provides a space for artists to share and discover emerging practices in form, craft, and technology. Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival (see past editions) A note from the curators A renaissance, albeit on a dime. With new performance spaces in New York proliferating despite the interminable precarity of arts and culture funding, it can feel more challenging than ever to be in the know on all the performances happening in the city on any given night. The scene, if there ever was one, has splintered into silos within silos, with performance diets increasingly dictated by the algorithm of one’s Instagram feed. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes looks towards possible connections in this seemingly diffuse landscape by bringing into conversation and programming together artists working in different corners, edges, and centers of said scene. A series of dialogues seed new relationships and activate old ones within this year’s cohort. ‘Group Dates’ present structured conversations and interviews between featured artists. ‘The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue,’ moderated by critic Helen Shaw, brings artists and artistic directors together to discuss ideas and solutions for the quandaries currently facing our field. ‘Precarious Luxuries: improvisation, performance, and planning for the unplanned,’ the keynote event of the ASAP/15 conference, presented in alignment with Prelude, addresses the stakes and strategies of improvisational practice, a prominent mode of making among this year’s Prelude cohort. The conversations continue in a launch event for Julia Jarcho’s newly published ‘Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism’ and in artist talks through the program. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes also seeks to cultivate excitement for those more subtle moments and minor benchmarks in an artist’s life and practice. While some of this year’s artists invite audiences into the very beginning of new collaborations, others come with teasers of works to be presented later this fall, and still others activate their archives to dig deeper into the traces of past performances. Again, the between. Jess Barbagallo & John Hoobyar Prelude 2024 Co-Curators John Hoobyar Jess Barbagallo Program Button HONORING PAULA COURT Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony 4pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby SEE MORE Button SKELETON ARCHITECTURE Skeleton Architecture 6:30pm October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE Building Cultural Power through Organizing 3pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY Legally Bald 5:30pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button AMANDA HOROWITZ Bad Stars 7pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button ASHIL LEE, LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY, AMANDA HOROWITZ + S T A R R BUSBY Group Date: a conversation 4:30pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button MORIAH EVANS Sharing 7pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button JULIA JARCHO Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism 3pm October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button LUCIANA ACHUGAR The Pleasure Practice 6pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button RIVEN RATANAVANH Ornamentalism 4:30pm October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button SHONNI ENELOW + DAVID LEVINE David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF 6:30pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button NOELLE GHOUSSAINI A shadow of light: a ritual gathering 4pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button LESLIE CUYJET, FRANCESCA D'UVA, MORIAH EVANS + KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL Group Date: a conversation 6pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE PETRA 8pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button MORGAN BASSICHIS, FREEDOME BRADLEY-BALLENTINE, ENVER CHAKARTASH, WILL DAVIS, CALEB HAMMONS, JILL RAFSON, TINA SATTER + TYLER THOMAS The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue 5pm October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button FRANCESCA D'UVA An Hour With Francesca D’Uva 8pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button S T A R R BUSBY Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II 4pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button WASEEM ALZER, AYA AZIZ + SARAH BITAR The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation 5pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Halll SEE MORE Button KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK Nannies of New York City 8pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned 4:30pm October 17, 2024 Proshansky Auditorium SEE MORE Button S T A R R BUSBY Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I 6pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby SEE MORE Button [CANCELLED] HOLLAND ANDREWS + YUNIYA EDI KWON [CANCELLED] How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) 4pm October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button LESLIE CUYJET + KAREN KANDEL Going Beige 5:30pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button NEEDY LOVER | ASHIL LEE + PHOEBE BROOKS | PAUL LAZAR + JERRY LIEBLICH / THIRD EAR Plays in Process 1:30 pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button NIALL N JONES - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - 5pm October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Conversations Schedule WEDS, OCT 16 4:00-4:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Lobby Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony, honoring Paula Court with the 2024 Franky Award 4:30-5:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Riven Ratanavanh, Ornamentalism 5:00-5:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Waseem Alzer, Aya Aziz, Sarah Bitar, The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation 6:30-7:20pm @ The Segal Theatre Skeleton Architecture 6:30-7:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Shonni Enelow + David Levine, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF 8:00-8:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Katiana Gonçales Rangel + Katie Brook, Nannies of New York City FRI, OCT 18 [CANCELLED] 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre [CANCELLED] Holland Andrews + yuniya edi kwon, How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) 4:30-5:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Group Date: a conversation with Léoh Hailu-Ghermay, Ashil Lee, Amanda Horowitz, S T A R R busby 5:00-6:30pm @ The Segal Theatre The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue, moderated by Helen Shaw 5:00-6:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Leslie Cuyjet + Karen Kandel, Going Beige 7:00-7:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Moriah Evans, Sharing 8:00-8:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Francesca D'Uva, An Evening with Francesca D'Uva THURS, OCT 17 3:00-3:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Building Cultural Power through Organizing: Dancers 4 Palestine & Theater Workers for a Ceasefire 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Noelle Ghoussaini, A shadow of light: a ritual gathering 4:30-6:00pm @ Proshansky Auditorium Ethan Philbrick, Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, Anh Vo, Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned 5:30-6:20pm @ The Segal Theatre Léoh Hailu-Ghermay, Legally Bald 6:00-8:00pm @ Elebash Recital Hall lobby S T A R R busby, Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I 6:00-6:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Group Date: a conversation with Moriah Evans, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, Leslie Cuyjet, Francesca D'Uva 7:00-7:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Amanda Horowitz, Bad Stars 8:00-8:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Tina Satter, PETRA SAT, OCT 19 1:30-3:00pm @ The Segal Theatre Plays in Process: works by Needy Lover, Ashil Lee, Jerry Lieblich 3:00-3:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Julia Jarcho, Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre S T A R R busby, Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II 5:00-5:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Niall Jones, - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - 6:00-8:00pm @ The Segal Theatre luciana achugar, The Pleasure Practice 9:00pm: Prelude Festival Party at The Tank! Prelude 2024 Team Jess Barbagallo Co-Curator John Hoobyar Co-Curator and Senior Producer Camilo Ramirez , Production Assistant Randi Rivera Technical Director Indigo Sparks Producer Robin Schatell/Mov!ng Culture Projects Associate Producer Frank Hentschker Executive Director and Director of Programs, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Niyoosha Ahmadikhoo Next Generation Fellow, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Nurit Chinn Marketing Communications Manager, Prelude 2024; Next Generation Fellow, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Gaurav Singh Nijjer, Digital and Web Producer, Martin E. Segal Theater Center Announcing TheaterListingsNYC.com The Martin E. Segal Center is proud to announce the launch of TheaterListingsNYC.com, a new initiative of the Center to collect and share theater and performance listings in one place for New York audiences. Please visit the site to see listings of upcoming performances throughout the city. Explore ASAP/15: Not a Luxury Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes is presented in alignment with ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, a collaboration between ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the Park Avenue Armory. Read More

Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone is an acoustic hyperpop folk opera about death, sex, God, gender, utopia and the end of the world. Co-creators/Performers: Philip Santos Schaffer, syd island, and Andy Boyd The piece centers on the Publick Universal Friend, an American mystic who had a vision in 1776 in which they were told by two angels to preach the word of God. From the moment of their vision on, the newly reborn PUF refused to use gendered pronouns or presentation, and when asked what gender PUF was, would simply reply “I am that I am.” Room, Room, Room, combines rituals from the 18th century Quaker meetinghouse to the contemporary club, using the story of PUF to reflect on our own experiences as embodied souls in 21st century America. While problematizing the American vision of utopia, we aim to invoke a temporary genderless/genderful? utopia with our audience (even if just for a second). PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone Friend of Friend Theater, Multimedia, Music English 1 hour 8:00PM EST Friday, October 20, 2023 The Brick, 579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone is an acoustic hyperpop folk opera about death, sex, God, gender, utopia and the end of the world. Co-creators/Performers: Philip Santos Schaffer, syd island, and Andy Boyd The piece centers on the Publick Universal Friend, an American mystic who had a vision in 1776 in which they were told by two angels to preach the word of God. From the moment of their vision on, the newly reborn PUF refused to use gendered pronouns or presentation, and when asked what gender PUF was, would simply reply “I am that I am.” Room, Room, Room, combines rituals from the 18th century Quaker meetinghouse to the contemporary club, using the story of PUF to reflect on our own experiences as embodied souls in 21st century America. While problematizing the American vision of utopia, we aim to invoke a temporary genderless/genderful? utopia with our audience (even if just for a second). produced by The Brick This project was developed in part by The Assembly’s Deceleration Lab. We would like to thank Dr. Scott Larson for discussing this project with us. Additional special thanks: University Settlement, Emma Rivera, Kai Song Nichols Content / Trigger Description: cw: discussions of transphobia, death, America, colonial violence, AW: projections, loud-ish music Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University. His plays include The Trade Federation, or, Let’s Explore Globalization Through the Star Wars Prequels (Otherworld Theatre, IRT), Occupy Prescott (Theater in Asylum at Jalopy Theatre), and Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist (forthcoming in Spring 2024). He also releases music as Andy the Giant and posts cartoons on Instagram at andyjboyd. The Trade Federation is published by NoPassport Press and his chapbook of short plays Lil’ Sweetums is published by Bottlecap Press. syd island (they/them) is a queer vocal and performing artist based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. they have a BA in Music from Brown University and are a graduate of Arizona School for the Arts. syd performs and collaborates with Pioneers Go East Collective in My Name’sound, most recently as a Resident Artist 3.0 at BAM in 2023, as well as in BRIClab in 2022. alongside co-creators Andy Boyd and Philip Santos Schaffer, syd developed Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone as a part of The Assembly’s 2022 Deceleration Lab. syd has collaborated on several incarnations of Devotion Devotion by Lydia Mokdessi and Jason Bartell at The Exponential Festival (2020), Crossroads at Judson Memorial Church (2021), and The Brick (2022). in 2019, syd performed in Mae May’s softboarding: medium shred at Roulette Intermedium. in addition to performing in experimental theater and dance, they sing choral and plainchant sacred music at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Park Slope. Philip Santos Schaffer is a playmaker creating interactive performances in intimate and unconventional settings. Their work has been seen in bathtubs across the country, listened to over the phone, and found in a series of living rooms (as well as appearing in more conventional spaces). Philip’s work deals with politics, pop culture, intimacy and empathy through participation, humor, music, and more. They have been an Artist in Residence at University Settlement, part of The Assembly’s Deceleration Lab, and a MORE Art Engaged Artist Fellow. Philip has a BFA in Directing from Hofstra University and an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University. Philip is 1/5 of the creative team behind WalkUpArts, which they co-founded in 2015. www.philipsantosschaffer.com Image design by syd island @fri3ndoffri3nd, @andyjboyd, @welikephilip, @syd.island Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Yoni Oppenheim By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken I don’t like most of Ibsen’s plays, Ibsen usually explains too much. —Robert Wilson (1) Robert Wilson’s aesthetics and opinion of Ibsen make him seem like a curious choice to direct an Ibsen play. However, to Robert Brustein—founding artistic director of American Repertory Theater and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard – Wilson was the perfect choice to direct When We Dead Awaken at ART in 1991. For decades, Brustein’s aim as an educator, critic, scholar, and producer was to, as told fo me in an interview, “draw Ibsen away from realism.”(2) Brustein titled his essay arguing for a non-causal view of Ibsen’s work “Theatre in the Age of Einstein: The Crack in the Chimney.” As this title, with its reference to Einstein suggests—it was Robert Wilson’s aesthetic worldview embodied in Einstein on the Beach that epitomized an approach to theatre that Brustein wanted applied to Ibsen. He urged theatre-makers to find “the poem inside Ibsen’s plays,” and it was this view of Ibsen he inculcated in his students at Harvard.(3) Wilson had directed works at ART three times before. In 1986, Brustein invited him to direct Euripides’s Alcestis . It was the first time Wilson directed a classical dramatic text. As Brustein stated, “Robert Wilson was ideally suited for directing When We Dead Awaken because he can’t think in a linear fashion. It’s impossible for him. He thinks in terms of images.” (4) Robert Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken in an adaptation by Robert Brustein with musical knee plays by Charles “Honi” Coles played at ART from February to March 1991 and continued to the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in May and to São Paulo, Brazil, in October of that year. (5) This paper sheds light on the development of that production. An archival video of the of the work is available to view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and ART’s archive Surprisingly, it was not Brustein who came up with the idea of having Robert Wilson direct Ibsen’s rarely produced final play . Rather, it was one of his directing students at Harvard - Mary Sutton - who made the suggestion to Brustein upon leaving his Modern Drama lecture about When We Dead Awaken. (6) Brustein described his phone conversation with Robert Wilson to pitch the show: “When I described Ibsen’s last play to Bob over a crackling long-distance line to Germany, he immediately agreed to direct it, though he hadn’t yet read it.” (7) It is not at all surprising that Wilson agreed to direct the play solely based on a description of it. His process when directing texts is often to have someone synopsize the work for him as he sketches and takes notes. (8) Furthermore, Brustein’s interpretation of the play as an image-laden, non-realistic work surely captured Wilson’s imagination. Wilson described his initial reaction to reading the play: “[I] was immediately drawn to it. It’s a play that’s strange, mysterious, and something we can’t completely understand. There was something I just couldn’t put my finger on. I don’t like things I can understand. If I understand something, I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t interest me.” (9) ART would go on to market Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken as follows: Rubek, an aged sculptor [played by Alvin Epstein and in Brazil by Joel Gray] , vacations with his young, dissatisfied wife, Maya [Stephanie Roth], at a mountain spa. Irene, his former model and a patient at the local sanitarium [played simultaneously by both Elzbieta Czyzewska and longtime Wilson collaborator Sheryl Sutton (10)], seeks revenge on him for having used her to create his greatest work while rejecting her selfless love. Rubek realizes that he has sacrificed his soul for the sake of his art, and Maya runs off to cavort with Ulfheim, a bear hunter [Mario Arrambide]. Rubek and Irene ascend to the mountaintop only to be killed by an avalanche. (11) Creating the Adaptation With Wilson signed on to direct, Brustein began writing the adaptation in consultation with Wilson. However, ART’s literary director Robert Scanlan recalled that: Wilson over and over wished that he could do the play without text at all. His instinct with When We Dead Awaken has been to express this work through massive elemental forms—the mountains in each of the three acts, the water of the sea in the first act, and the water of the mountain brook in the second act, the snowstorm which “whites out” the finale of the play—and minimize the play’s dependence on words. The play does not strike Wilson to be about what people say. (12) Brustein, however, insisted that Wilson use Ibsen’s text and wrote an adaptation half the length of the original without “excising anything vital to the action, the characters, or the theme.” (13) He incorporated preliminary cuts made by the director and honored Wilson’s dislike of the “ping pong” of conventional dialogue. Wilson prefers his actors focus on their lines and not on the need to respond to the other actor in the scene. Brustein’s adaptation “set about rendering Ibsen’s strange, occasionally verbose play into a kind of suggestive English [he] hoped might spark Wilson’s imagistic imagination.” (14) In rehearsal, Wilson made further cuts. Brustein explains that Wilson wanted to cut “the line ‘When we dead awaken, what? We discover that we never lived.’ A very important line. He did not want the title in the play. I [Brustein] fought him hard on this, and [I] managed to get a compromise which left most of it in.” (15) Ultimately, Wilson placed the title in bold multicolored hand lettering on the white stage curtain, and it became part of the second of three song-and-dance knee plays performed at first by Charles “Honi” Coles and Alvin Epstein’s Rubek. They were then joined by the entire cast with the knee play evolving into a tap number. They sang “Yes, we fell in love, yes we fell in love, yes we fell in When We Dead Awaken,” repeating “When We Dead Awaken” as they shuffled off the stage. (16) Rather than cutting the line entirely as Brustein feared, Wilson turned the title into a musical number. The knee plays were created by Charles "Honi" Coles, a legendary tap dancer and blues singer/songwriter whom Wilson cast in the role of The Manager of the Spa. He and Wilson also collaborated that year on Mr. Bojangles' Memory, Og Son of Fire a short musical film which included some music from the show’s knee plays and was presented at The Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the Festival d’Automne. (17) A knee play is Wilson’s term for a short vaudevillian routine which he uses in his work to introduce an act. Knee plays serve, for him, as joints linking the show together, and function either as a commentary or in counterpoint to the tone of the play. In the first knee play, Charles “Honi” Coles came onstage and sang a song which begins: I was alone when I met her Now I wish I was alone. I wasn’t doing so bad But she came along and now everything is wrong I met her and I wish I never had. (18) As Coles, sitting in a yellow chair and dressed in a white suit, sang a song which resonated with the act’s theme, Elzbieta Czyzewska, who performed the first of two Irenes Wilson had play the part, “appeared in a glittering one–piece bathing suit, high heels, and one long red glove to do a Betty-Grable-from-behind cheesecake number,” (19) as one critic described it. Such critics mocked the knee plays as dismissive of Ibsen and just attempts to lighten things up. However, it makes complete sense that Irene who says later in the play, “I worked in nightclubs” (20) would be performing in such a number. In his attention to the details of the text, Wilson honored an element of the character’s history through this knee play. Instead of proving Wilson’s disregard for Ibsen’s text, the knee play underscored Wilson’s deep understanding of it. Act three was preceded by the final knee play. In this one, Sheryl Sutton, who played the shadow-like second Irene, was in a bathrobe smoking on the side of the stage as Coles gradually walked to a metal hospital bed in front of the “When We Dead Awaken” curtain as he sang a mournful blues song featuring the line: “Unless you’ve lived it, felt its misery, joy You can’t understand L-O-V-E, the doggonest feeling ever.” (21) Wilson maintained the theme of love established earlier, but endowed it with a more serious, mournful tone, foreshadowing death in the final act. The First Workshop The production process for a Wilson work is a long one. There were two workshops which preceded rehearsal. With Brustein’s adaptation in hand, the first workshop took place over five days in July 1990 and focused on developing the design concept of the show and the visual storytelling. It began, as Stage Manager Abbie Katz described, with the production team sitting in Robert Brustein’s office, “reading the script several times, stopping whenever anyone had a question, a thought, or a visual association to offer. While we read, Bob sketched.” (22) As scenic and costume designer, John Conklin notes: We discussed Ibsen’s life, personality, and a wide range of topics—the conversation veered from Brecht to Beckett to World War I. Bob Wilson listened, absorbed, and then drew and drew and drew. Bob thinks with his hands, a pencil, and a blank sheet of paper. Ideas, dreams, images, furniture, skies, mountains, trees, water, and an avalanche all emerged. (23) By the second day Wilson and Conklin were requesting visual and literary sources based on the previous day’s discussion. “The office walls are covered with pictures and images—the Grand Canyon, Ibsen walking the streets of Oslo, an Alpine hut, mountains and glaciers in Greenland, Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno .” (24) Assistant Dramaturg Dorthee Hannappel provides an example of the impact Dore’s illustrations had on Wilson’s designs, explaining: “One of these engravings particularly intrigued Wilson while he was sketching several versions of a stone chair [which Rubek sits on] in the second act. The picture shows a steep, tall rocky cliff. Looking at it carefully, Wilson transformed the shape of the cliff into the shape of the stone chair he was working on.” (25) Each day Wilson and Conklin would work together, with Conklin building models of every possible design Wilson sketched. The most central element of theatre for Wilson is light (26), and lighting designer Steve Strawbridge used a few lights with colored gels to provide a sense of a lighted set. As Conklin described it: What begins to emerge is a series of dream-like evocations of Ibsen’s brooding world of the mountains of Norway—rendered principally in black, white and gray. They become the essence of the psychological drama of the play, not an illustration of it. Bob creates an alternate reality—vision and movement divorced from surface narration. He uses juxtaposition and irony to liberate the text from its weight and density. . . . So this last, symbolic, heavy dream of Ibsen about failure, frustration, death, and resurrection will have a show curtain in bright vivid colors—red, blue, yellow letters striding and dancing across a pure white background. (27) It is noteworthy that Conklin discusses “the psychological drama of the play” in relation to Wilson’s design for the production. Wilson is known for his anti-naturalistic aesthetic which is not concerned with psychology, at least not in the conventional sense. But in Conklin’s opinion, Wilson does deal with the psychological drama on his own terms through the visual world he creates rather than by working with the actors. As Conklin understands it, Wilson is simply choosing alternative modes to tell the story—modes which perhaps honor the mystery of Ibsen’s creation more than a naturalistic approach would. By the final day of the workshop Robert Wilson and his collaborators had a “clear outline of the set that Bob envisioned for the production.” (28) The Second Workshop The second workshop occurred over two weeks in October of 1990, during which Wilson worked with the entire cast and developed the staging. In addition, the designers were present to see how the staging would affect their designs. As alluded to above, Wilson’s work with actors is very different from a conventional rehearsal process. As Wilson discussed with ART News: Normally actors start by talking about character and motivation; discussing what is going on in the play as preparation for rehearsals where development of relationships and the telling of the story are the primary objective. With Wilson, none of this takes place. Actors are told where to go, what to do (this includes unexplained gestures and poses), and when to speak (usually uninflected in early rehearsals). Wilson also told the actors, “I’m not the type of director who is interested in psychology. Knowing where you are going, that’s the main thing. Keep it very simple. Beneath it all it can be very complicated, but let theatre always be about one thing and keep that very simple.” (29) Essentially Wilson’s movement score creates a mask for the actors that is rigidly set and quite complicated to master, although it keeps things “simple.” On top of this score Wilson layers on the text at specific moments. The article explains: Actors must take extensive notes on their timing of the text to movement. No explanations are given about what any of these things may mean. Wilson likes, in early rehearsals, to explore what he calls “the tensions and the structure of the space.” He likes to start early because, as he says: “The visual book should be able to stand on its own. Space is texture and structure—something that can’t be talked about” . . . Wilson has said that a line of text should not interrupt the silence and that “when you finish a line, it doesn’t end, it continues into silence.” (30) Once the actors have learned the choreography and where to say their lines, they can fill the rigid form he has provided them. There can be great freedom for the actor within this structure. Wilson is not interested in why the actors do what they do; he just wants them to do it. “I don’t want to know why I’m doing something. That’s why my theatre is different, noninterpretive. Interpretation is for the audience.” (31) To an extent, the experience the actors have working on the piece is similar to Wilson’s aim for the audience’s experience. “He talks about giving the audience literal and mental space within the theatre piece to fill with their consciousness and feeling.” (32) Trusting Wilson’s method was not always easy for the actors. In the stage manager’s production book for the actual production, I found a note to the actors that they must fully commit to Wilson’s non-naturalistic style and trust that it will work if they do. The note reprimanded the actors, saying that it only looked bad when they do not fully commit to his style. (33) The second workshop ended with a Bauprobe , the building of a full-size mock-up of the set, which is rarely done in the United States. It is an example of how Wilson and ART introduced European production methods to the US theatre. The Bauprobe allowed Wilson and his designers to see how Wilson’s set would work in the actual space and to make adjustments, discuss props, etc. Having the actors there as well allowed the lighting designer to work with Wilson on the lighting before the start of rehearsals. This was a huge benefit considering that lighting is, for Wilson, the most important element, and the cues in his production are always painstakingly detailed and precise. The two workshops allowed Wilson and his company to have much of the intricate elements of his design and staging ready so that the relatively short rehearsal period was sufficient time for the production to open on schedule. Rehearsal Despite his wariness of text, Wilson did reinstate one of Brustein’s initial cuts. Taken from a dialogue from the start of the play between the aging sculptor Rubek and his young wife Maja as they sit at the spa recalling their train journey there: Although absolutely nothing happened I knew that we had crossed the border, That we were really home again, Because it stopped at every little station, No one got off and no one got on, But the train stood there silently, For what seemed like hours. At every station I heard two railmen Walking along the platform— One of them carrying a lantern— And they mumbled quietly to each other In the night, without expression or meaning, There are always two men talking About nothing at all. (34) Wilson found this passage to be mysterious and poetic. He amplified this text’s mystery by recording and using it as a taped refrain at various points in the play. Dramaturg Robert Scanlan adapted the dialogue into a monologue in rehearsal to remove Wilson’s loathed ping pong of dialogue. His focus on and repetition of this text lends insight into what attracted him to When We Dead Awaken in the first place. Throughout his oeuvre, Wilson has had a penchant for train imagery, an interest in silence, and a lack of interest in words. Einstein on the Beach has a train scene at the beginning of the opera. In terms of content, this monologue is an expression of a world in which speech is not the primary mode of communication. “I heard two railmen / Walking along the platform.” It is the sound of walking which is initially heard and noted. When they finally speak, they “mumble quietly without meaning.” The dream-like quality of the play, this scene, and Wilson’s work in general are underscored in this text. Maja thought Rubek was asleep (in the realm of dreams) on the train, but he was hearing the silence around him. This Ibsen text can be understood as an expression of Wilson’s theatrical aesthetic, and his choice to reinstate the text opens a window into his work methods. I would like to circle back now to the Wilson quote I opened with: “I don’t like most of Ibsen’s plays, Ibsen usually explains too much.” He continues: But When We Dead Awaken is different. It’s so mysterious. Nothing is as beautiful as a mystery. I like this play because I don’t understand it. The minute you think you understand a work of art it’s dead. It no longer lives in you. This play lives on in the mind like a hallucination. It’s Ibsen’s dream play.” (35) Following his rigorous engagement with Ibsen’s work at ART on When We Dead Awaken , Wilson would go on to direct two more Ibsen productions: Lady from the Sea and Peer Gynt along with countless productions of classic dramatic texts. Endnotes Arthur Holmberg, “Robert Wilson at the ART,” Harvard Theatre Collection. Robert Sanford Brustein, personal interview, March 19, 2008. Robert Sanford Brustein, Critical Moments: Reflections in Theatre and Society 1973–1979 (New York: Random House, 1980), 128. Robert Sanford Brustein, personal interview, March 19, 2008. Originally, ART was planning on touring When We Dead Awaken in Europe. Arrangements were being made to open the 1991 Ibsen Stage Festival in Oslo with the production. That tour would have been cosponsored by the Belgrade International Theater Festival. But because of the brewing tensions in Yugoslavia, the Oslo/Belgrade tour fell apart. The Festival d’Automne in Paris was also interested in the production but that possibility was not pursued because it would have conflicted with the Ibsen Stage Festival schedule. Robert Sanford Brustein, “Henrik Ibsen and Robert Wilson: New Weapons and New Armor,” ARTnews , February 1991. Ibid. Kate Whoriskey, personal interview, March 16, 2008. Robert Wilson, “Robert Wilson: Interview by Gary Susman,” Stuff , 1991, Harvard Theatre Collection. Sheryl Sutton, whom Robert Wilson had collaborated with since Deafman Glance in 1970, was his early muse. He not only cast her as the shadow Irene—muse to sculptor Arnold Rubek—but also costumed her in a dress similar to her dress in Deafman Glance . This was one of several visual references to Deafman Glance in the production. It suggests Wilson’s desire to link this newest chapter of his development as an artist directing an Ibsen play—a work centered on an artist reflecting on his life, regrets, art, muse, and masterpiece—with the wordless opera that was his first great artistic breakthrough two decades prior. American Repertory Theater, August 5, 2024, https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events/when-we-dead-awaken/ . Robert Scanlan, “Nearing the Silence,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 6. Robert Sanford Brustein, When We Dead Awaken: Henrik Ibsen, in a New Adaptation by Robert Brustein (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 3. Robert Sanford Brustein, “Henrik Ibsen and Robert Wilson: New Weapons and New Armor,” ART News , February 1991. Robert Sanford Brustein, interviewed by Elinor Fuchs with Rolf Fjelde, “An Evening with Robert Brustein,” Ibsen News and Comment: Journal of the Ibsen Year in America 14 (1993): 6. When We Dead Awaken , directed by Robert Wilson, performed by American Repertory Theatre, archival videocassette, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, 1991, call no. NCOV 974. Mr. Bojangles’ Memory, Og Son of Fire , https://www.numeridanse.tv/en/dance-videotheque/mr-bojangles-memory-og-son-fire . Stage Managers Production Book, When We Dead Awaken , American Repertory Theatre, 1991. Joan Templeton, “Ibsen Lite: Robert Wilson’s When We Dead Awaken ,” Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 287. Robert Sanford Brustein, When We Dead Awaken , 25. Templeton, “Ibsen Lite,” 292. Abbie Katz, “Scenes from a Workshop,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 3. John Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 3, Harvard Theatre Collection. Ibid. Dorothee Hannappel, “Peeling an Onion,” ART News 11, no. 1 (November 1990): 12. Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121. Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision.” Katz, “Scenes from a Workshop.” “Wilson: The Actor’s View,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 2–3. Ibid. Leigh Hafrey, “He’s Back Home, but Is It the Real Robert Wilson?” New York Times , February 3, 1991, 5, 19. Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision.” Stage Managers Production Book. Brustein, When We Dead Awaken , 4. Arthur Holmberg, “Robert Wilson at the ART,” Harvard Theatre Collection. About The Author(s) Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

New York City gave birth to the contemporary practice of performance. Theatre artists presented works in lofts, storefronts, living rooms, churches and streets. New gigantic Performing Arts Centers like the Shed and The Perelman opened recently and are highly visible — small spaces are disappearing and often feel invisible. Less and less free or affordable rehearsal and presenting spaces for theatre and performance artists seem to be available. But is it really the doom and gloom we talk and read about? Significant New York institutions are coming up with new ways to support New York’s Performing Arts scene. Participants: Randi Berry (Indie Space INC. ), Aaron L. McKinney (Hi-ARTS), Ana Fiore (LMCC), Anita Durst (ChaShaMa), Baba Israel (Performance Project at University Settlement), and Candace Thompson-Zachery (Dance/NYC). PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Space and the City Randi Berry, Aaron L. McKinney, Ana Fiore, Anita Durst, Baba Israel, and Candace Thompson-Zachery English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All New York City gave birth to the contemporary practice of performance. Theatre artists presented works in lofts, storefronts, living rooms, churches and streets. New gigantic Performing Arts Centers like the Shed and The Perelman opened recently and are highly visible — small spaces are disappearing and often feel invisible. Less and less free or affordable rehearsal and presenting spaces for theatre and performance artists seem to be available. But is it really the doom and gloom we talk and read about? Significant New York institutions are coming up with new ways to support New York’s Performing Arts scene. Participants: Randi Berry (Indie Space INC. ), Aaron L. McKinney (Hi-ARTS), Ana Fiore (LMCC), Anita Durst (ChaShaMa), Baba Israel (Performance Project at University Settlement), and Candace Thompson-Zachery (Dance/NYC). Content / Trigger Description: Hi-ARTS (founded as the Hip Hop Theater Festival) is a leading cultural hub within the urban arts movement. Through development residencies, vibrant multi-disciplinary creative programming, and civic engagement opportunities, we empower artists to develop bold new work while creating a positive, lasting impact on our community. Hi-ARTS is the only institution in New York City, and one of the few in the country, exclusively dedicated to supporting and developing Hip-Hop and the urban aesthetic. Hi-ARTS supports emerging and established theater, performance, and visual artists to develop and present new work. Aaron L. McKinney has been steadfast in building a multi-faceted arts administration career for almost two decades beginning with his early work in production and project management for theatre companies in Florida and California, including a graduate-level internship with Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, one of the largest non-profit theatres in the country. In recent years, Aaron has served as Project Manager for the Sankofa Justice & Equity Fund, founded by world-renowned artist and activist, the late Harry Belafonte, and an integral member of 651 ARTS, a pillar of the contemporary black arts community. He has also served on several grant review panels, both local and national and sat on many Zoom panels on the state of performing arts during a pandemic. Currently he serves as the Executive Director of Hi-ARTS. In addition to his current role, Aaron continues to pursue professional endeavors guided by his personal mantra “Aspire to Inspire before you Expire”, purposefully unifying the arts and social justice activism, as shown through his independent producer and consultative work across the performance arts landscape. In 2020, Aaron founded The A.L.M. Way, LLC, an arts management and producing consultancy. These opportunities of increasing responsibility only serve to exemplify Aaron’s affinity for urban arts and have solidified his place in performing arts leadership. Ana Fiore, as Director of Artist Services at LMCC, oversees re-grant programs in support of community-based arts programming in Manhattan; artist residencies providing work space for creative development; the SU-CASA program, connecting artists with senior centers; and other artist service initiatives within the organization. The core of these programs is methods for increasing the range of resources available to artists and amplifying the role of artists within society. Prior to LMCC, Ana supported fiscally sponsored artists at the New York Foundation for the Arts with a focus on demystifying the fundraising process. She has also served the Center for Performance Research, The Joyce, and Danspace Project. Anita Durst has been a star, a muse, and a patron of the avant-garde performing arts and emerging arts scene in New York City, since she was 18. She founded Chashama in 1995 following the death of her mentor and artistic professor Reza Abdoh. While performing and working in his company, Dar A Luz, she learned the value of unbridled expression and how to value art objectively. In the wake of Reza’s absence she was driven to create a place for artists free of financial and subjective constraints. Anita has worked tirelessly for over 20 years to secure over one million square feet of space in New York City for artists. Baba Israel is a Hip Hop/theater artist, poet, educator and curator raised in New York by parents who were core members of the Living Theatre. He has toured and developed projects in thirty four countries, often working as a cultural ambassador. Baba is part of Bronx Banda with Arturo O’Farrill and has shared the stage with artists such as KRS ONE, Lester Bowie, Outkast, Bahamadia and Medusa. He is a core member of Hip Hop/Soul project Soul Inscribed who recently completed the American Music Abroad program and released their second album Tune Up on Tokyo Dawn Records. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College where he studied with Daniel Alexander Jones and is the Artistic Director of the Performance Project based at the University Settlement. Candace Thompson-Zachery, born in Trinidad and Tobago, now local to Brooklyn, NY, operates between the spheres of dance, cultural production and fitness and wellness, with a focus on the Contemporary Caribbean. She has had an established career as a performer, choreographer, fitness professional, cultural producer, teaching artist, community facilitator and Caribbean dance specialist. In addition to her work in these areas, she leads ContempoCaribe, an ongoing choreography and performance project and is the founder of Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, an organisational platform for Caribbean dance in the diaspora that spearheads the New Traditions Festival in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Adelphi University's BFA program for Dance, and has presented, performed and taught at major venues including: Queen's Hall (T&T), John F. Kennedy Center, New York Live Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and The Ohio State University. She was an inaugural member of the Dancing While Black Fellowship Cohort 2015/2016, was an awardee of Adelphi University's 2017 - 10 Under 10 program, and a Dixon Place Artist-in-Residence for fall 2017. As a cultural producer and strategist, Candace has worked with the Dance and Performance Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, WIADCA (NY), Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Renegade Performance Group, and curator Claire Tancons, for the 2019 Sharjah Biennial. Ms. Thompson-Zachery holds an M.A. in Performance Curation from the ICCP program at Wesleyan University and a certificate from the Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy at UPenn. with National Arts Strategies. Of tantamount importance to her is the vital role dance plays in our communities and she is eager to see dance artists of various styles, practices and traditions thrive in New York City. Randi Berry is an indie theater maker with an arts advocacy and commercial real estate background. She is the co-founder of Wreckio Ensemble Theater Company, The Indie Theater Fund, and IndieSpace. Randi has worked on over $11B in commercial real estate transactions and has created programs resulting in thousands of artists receiving funding, free real estate consulting services, rehearsal space, and opportunities for professional growth. Select awards include: Tow Foundation Visionary Leadership Award, NYIT Indie Theater Champion, The Ellen Stewart Award, Indie Theater Person of the Year, member of the Indie Theater Hall of Fame, and a Citation for Service by the New York City Council. IndieSpace was established in 2016 to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theaters and to address systemic inequities in NYC real estate. In 2022, it merged with Indie Theater Fund, an organization focused on a new model for equitable funding for the indie theater community. By contributing a nickel per ticket from their shows to a pot of money for funding, the indie theater community could create a method of self-sustainability and could rethink philanthropy and the process of grant making. Through radically transparent and equitable grants, community resources and advocacy, the Fund supported hundreds of indie theater companies and thousands of individual artists. Since its founding, IndieSpace has: consulted with 90+ companies and venues making real estate decisions, including The Tank, FRIGID New York, The Chain, The Wild Project, Wooster Group, and Classical Theater of Harlem; helped 18 organizations sign new leases; saved seven theaters from being closed or repurposed; created four real estate operation partnerships; walked two venues through the purchase of their permanent homes. During Covid, IndieSpace supported over 50 venues navigating their leases by helping them stay open, and also provided over $1.7M in relief grants to the indie theater community. In 2023 IndieSpace opened the West Village Rehearsal Co-Op with HERE Arts Center, New Ohio and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. This 99-year lease for $1 per year will serve over 1,500 artists per year. For service to the community, IndieSpace received the Ellen Stewart Award and a citation from the City Council of New York www.indiespace.org Photo credits: Aaron L. McKinney. Photo courtesy of the Josh Walker. Ana Fiore. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Candace Thompson-Zachery. Photo courtesy of the artist. Randi Berry. Photo courtesy of the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Listening to Deafman Glance Sophia Cocozza By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Listening to Deafman Glance Multisensorial Listening and d/Deafness in the Silent Opera, Television Production and Gallery Video Installation Deafman Glance began as the result of Robert Wilson’s chance encounter with thirteen-year-old Raymond Andrews during a moment of impending violence at the hands of New Jersey police. Wilson’s recounting of their meeting tells the story of his rescuing Andrews, a young, deaf, black child. The forging of a relationship between Andrews and Wilson—an adult, white male—in the face of police brutality does not remain unnoted. In Absolute Wilson , a documentary-style portrait of the director, Wilson recalls of the event, “I was walking down the street, and I saw a policeman about to hit this child over the head with a club. I stopped the policeman and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ I said, ‘But it is . . . it is. I’m a responsible citizen.’” (1) Wilson continues to recall that he first noticed Andrews’s deafness through “…sounds coming from him. I recognized them as the sounds of a deaf person.” (2) This recognition of Andrews’s voice—“the sounds of a deaf person”—arises as Wilson’s first inspiration for the silent opera. Wilson eventually became Andrews’s legal guardian to prevent him from being placed in institutional care and, over the course of many years, developed a close personal, creative, and working relationship with him. In a 1970 interview, Wilson described his communication with Andrews stating, "[H]e’s so amazing to me, his paintings, his drawings are so amazing to me—cause he doesn’t talk, he’s never been to school, he doesn’t hear sound he hasn’t learned to read lips—he—so his way of communicating is a whole other way.” (3) This “whole other way” of communicating with Andrews, which Wilson speaks of, makes accounting for Andrews’s agency within this creative, working relationship increasingly difficult. Aside from photographs and archival letters between Andrews and Wilson, there are few indicators of Andrews’s involvement in the creative process. Wilson notes that Deafman Glance came as a direct result of Andrews’s drawings and means of communication. Wilson states, “You know, because it’s almost like, it’s his material [ Deafman Glance ] almost—to me—I’m helping him—arrange.” (4) In an effort to restore Raymond Andrews’s creative voice within this production and credit him in the development of Wilson’s celebrated use of movement and sound, I make the small, overdue gesture of referring to the production as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance . By restoring Andrews’s authorship to the production (which Wilson continually reinforces in interviews, yet publications constantly undo through naming the production solely as “Wilson’s”), Andrews’s multisensorial voice—as mediated through sound, gesture, and vision—can be more clearly heard. Andrews and Wilson’s various versions of Deafman Glance —the 1970 silent opera, the 1981 televised production, and various video installation exhibitions—demonstrate how performance mediality and direction shift audience perception of Andrews’s experience of d/Deafness. Situating Deafman Glance’s History within a Critical Disabilities Studies Framework In contemporary performance studies and musicology, discussions about difference have generally referred to the representation of more commonly visited categories of gender and race. While the role of disability has seen less critical attention, discussions of disability in the field of musicology reflect a vibrant and growing subdiscipline. Critical disabilities studies has emerged as a field of cultural analysis within the humanities. More recently, the social model of disability, advocated in politics by the disability rights movement and in scholarship by disability studies, has argued for the importance of bodily difference. Under this model, disability is not a fixed, medical condition; rather, it emerges from a society that chooses to accommodate some bodies and exclude others. Attention to d/Deaf studies within music, sound, and performance studies is crucial in forming an accessible and inclusive understanding of hearing and, by extension, listening. Moving away from the assumption that auditory hearing is paramount to musical experience can offer interpretations of sound that allow for a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening. This research on Deafman Glance has been shaped by an arena of disabilities studies that has begun offering inclusive interpretations of listening through an understanding of multisensory listening practices. (5) These practices attend to an understanding of sound informed by listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating. Several performances of Deafman Glance are crucial in considering the work’s history. The 1970 work in Iowa City was initially performed by Raymond Andrews, Robert Wilson, Sheryl Sutton, and The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. This production would later be reimagined as the prologue, or overture, to Deafman Glance focusing entirely on the “murder scene.” A televised production of Deafman Glance was produced in 1981. The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation experience as part of the touring exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision in 1991 and as a solo exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1993 and 2010. The initial theatre productions of the 1970s notably came during a period where the arts were increasingly tied to notions of “identity politics.” (6) Women artists, artists of color, LGBTQ+ artists, disabled artists, and artists of decentered identities created ways to present their life experiences, interrogate social perception of their identities, and critique systemic issues that marginalized them in society. “Identity politics” gained traction in the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s to designate art that addressed issues of identity—including race, gender, sexuality, and disability. At the same historical moment, disability rights activists of the 1970s in the United Sates lobbied Congress and marched on Washington to include civil rights language for people with disabilities in the 1972 Rehabilitation Act. In 1973, the Rehabilitation Act was passed, and for the first time in history, civil rights of people with disabilities were protected by law. (7) Just prior to this moment, the 1960s saw an increase in disability advocates joining minority groups to demand equal treatment, equal access, and equal opportunity for people with disabilities. The civil rights movement of the 1960s used marches, sit-ins, and protests as tools for change, and inspired many minority groups, including the d/Deaf community, to press for greater self-determination and economic opportunity. (8) The fact that these interventions occurred at the same historical moment as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance serves to highlight the production’s distinction as a work directly tied to the “identity politics” artistic movement and underscores the production’s investment in providing an accessible, multisensorial interpretation of sound. Andrews, as both co-creator and lead of the production, literally enmeshes his own perception of the world through his performance. Stefan Brecht writes, “The one and only individual in this show, almost the protagonist, is the fictitious character created by Raymond Andrews.” (9) The entire production exists only through Andrews’s own performance and perception. Wilson, as co-creator of the work, similarly incorporates his own experience and chooses to feature his own “intrusive voice” at points of the production. (10) Wilson’s stuttering growing up, while called into question, (11) largely influenced and continues to influence his work. He credits work with Byrd Hoffman, a teacher who taught expression through dance, in helping him develop his verbal expression. Wilson notes, Byrd Hoffman was in her seventies when I first met her. She taught me dance and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through. She was amazing because she never taught a technique. She never gave me a way to approach it. It was more that she helped me to discover my body and dance on my own. (12) Hoffman’s influence on Wilson’s life was eventually credited in 1968 when Wilson founded the experimental performance company the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in honor of his teacher. (13) The company performed Deafman Glance and worked with local groups of individuals with disabilities coordinating movement workshops. These workshops explored and developed movement exercises that showed the effect that physical stimulation could have on the brain. (14) This movement-based work, which engendered sensitivity to how movement could be used to cross between various perceptual modalities, especially where the use of language was not sufficient, influenced Wilson’s emphasis on the use of movement, gesture, and sound to communicate alternative frames of mind in his theatrical works. Disability importantly lies at the core of Deafman Glance and allows for the creation of an alternative mode of theatrical expression and practices of listening. Listening to the Silent Opera Deafman Glance , the silent opera, was first performed as a workshop production at the University of Iowa in 1970. Subsequent performances in 1971 included an appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the Grand Théatre de Nancy at Festival Mondial in France, Teatro Eliseo in Rome, the Théatre de la Musique in Paris, and the Stadsschouwburg Theater at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. The various productions are noted to have run anywhere from four to seven hours in length. Limited accounts of the performances show glimpses into theatrical productions of Deafman Glance . Noting that each performance was distinctly different, however, makes providing a general overview of Deafman Glance difficult. Available video recording footage of the 1970 Iowa performance provided by the Robert A. Wilson Collection in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Stefan Brecht’s account of the February 25, 1971 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music together provide a cohesive construction of the production. Noteworthy to mention, however, is that while there was music, sound, and occasional dialogue incorporated within the production, available video footage of the 1970 Iowa performance does not feature sound. This perhaps stands to highlight that Andrews and Wilson’s vision for the production was in no way dependent on auditory sound. Rather, the listening portion of the production was intended to be experienced through multisensorial interpretation—as mediated primarily through gesture and vision. Figure 1: “Murder Scene” from Deafman Glance The production opens with a prologue, also called the overture, which is often referred to as a the “murder scene.” (Figure 1) This scene, which Wilson claims he never quite understood, becomes the basis for both the televised and installation adaptations of Deafman Glance . Within this scene, a killing is carried out two times. A tall woman, played by Sheryl Sutton, wearing a dark Victorian dress pours a glass of milk and gives it to a small child who is sitting in a chair with his back to the audience. The child slurps the milk. Sutton turns away, goes back to the table where she picks up a knife, wipes it off, goes over to the body and stabs him. The boy dies and falls from his chair. Sutton then repeats the action with a young child sleeping on the ground downstage left. Notably, both killings enacted by Sutton are witnessed by a young boy played by Andrews who is wearing a bowler hat. In some versions, it is noted that Andrews screams. The rest of the production consists of three core, slow-moving scenes. One scene, which sometimes occurs prior to the prologue, takes place at the seashore where a series of images emerge and disperse including Sutton and a raven posed motionless, a turtle, and “a dancing mistress who counts 1-2-3, seemingly endlessly.” (15) An angel later appears, after which the stage fills with characters performing a swing dance. (16) Runners and a slow-moving turtle continuously cross the stage. Another scene, which also occurs prior to the prologue in some productions, takes place in a Victorian world. Bradley Winterton writes of this scene, “Shaded, heavy mauve. Entries, confrontations, stares, silences. A huge silence surrounds everything. A poem of the past imperfect.” (17) The third scene, which is documented well in both Brecht’s account and the surviving video recordings, features a dream-like world in which Andrews is always present. The stage, which largely resembles a forest, provides the backdrop for several surrealist situations. A large frog presides at a banquet table where members continuously join at stage right. An individual who is fishing also sits at the base of this table. Just behind the table, a cottage-like structure with a decorative palm tree, that grows and shrinks throughout the performance, is positioned. At stage left, turtles become the basis of a structure, which is continuously built upon throughout the performance. Andrews sits on a bench just beyond this structure for the majority of the scene. The background consists of a forest scene with a mountain just in the distance. Throughout all of these scenes, a chair is suspended from the sky, rising and falling very slowly. The general plot of this scene is remarkably slow moving with very little, highly intentional movement. A number of figures enter the scene, perform actions, and leave. Two small turtles move across stage and a giant frog wearing a suit sits at a table. Two individuals serve the frog a martini. Another individual enters stage left carrying planks of wood. Two additional turtles join the stage. More individuals move across stage carrying planks of wood. These planks of wood are placed around the turtles and a structure begins to form. More individuals join the stage, some sitting at the banquet table. Wilson appears on stage and sits down at the banquet table. Brecht writes, “in a normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner, [Wilson] relates a rare, perhaps occult, obscurely very relevant experience into the mike on the table, reading from some papers he has pulled out from inside his jacket.” (18) This moment constitutes one of the only appearances of dialogue in the production and features Wilson’s own “intrusive voice.” (19) Smoke begins to emanate from the cottage. Many individuals pass by and around Andrews, who has been sitting stage left, with his head bowed down and forward since the beginning of this scene. Individuals carrying panes of glass form various positions around Andrews. More individuals carrying babies cross through the stage. Andrews finally raises his head and begins conversing through movement with a dancing woman. Andrews, still sitting on the bench, moves right of center stage, almost as if by magic. Individuals interact with Andrews. They perform ritualistic actions on the boy, and eventually Andrews’s bowler hat is removed and a pointed crown is placed upon his head. Andrews ascends into the air as he watches an ox down below. A paper moon falls from the sky and a figure below crumples it feeding it to the ox. The ox is later beheaded. Notably, this ox frequently appeared in Andrews’s drawings. Wilson states, “He’s [Andrews’s] very involved with an ox, for some reason. It’s almost like—he’s drawn an ox, and something about this image that keeps coming back, he almost for-for a time, he almost used it like a signature, he almost signed things with an ox—it’s like other things were happening, with this ox, and people or characters or other things, but somehow always the ox was there”. (20) Additional individuals and animals enter and leave the stage. The props and scenery begin to dissipate until the stage is nearly empty. Andrews lowers to the ground from the sky. (Figure 2) A crowd of figures emerge on stage and Andrews looks around just before leaving. Finally, apes flood the stage. These animals play with apples and one begins playing the harp, though no sound is heard. Sutton again enters the stage watching the ape play the instrument. Snow falls and the curtain closes. Figure 2: Raymond Andrews suspended on a chair in Deafman Glance The plot of this production while slow moving and intentionally disorienting at times is nonetheless important to follow. The prologue sets the tone for the production and introduces themes that carry throughout Deafman Glance . Themes of death and birth in addition to murder and motherhood run throughout the production, however, only in the prologue are these themes directly addressed. The choice to cast Sutton and Andrews purposefully incorporates black identity into late twentieth-century America’s primarily white avant-garde theatre. The prologue stresses the mother’s maternal solitude for her victims as well as for the survivor, Andrews. Performing as a Medea-like character, Sutton subverts the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (21) While Sutton’s performance has received criticism, particularly in the 1981 televised version, Sutton importantly does not view her part in this production as one where the black woman enacts a stereotypically violent act. The murder scene may serve to represent a subversive act which kills the stereotypical representation of black women. This idea is further reflected upon within the context of the 1981 televised production. The slow-moving plot, punctuated by silence and highly intentional gesture, arises as a rumination on the themes foregrounded in the prologue and as a meditation on the multisensorial experience of hearing. Through the intersection of hearing and deafness in Deafman Glance , visual and acoustic registers operate in tandem with each other and address, without providing answers, the crisis in speaking and the apparent absence of voice. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren notes that the multisensorial listening presented in Deafman Glance can be read as the “surreality of the ‘hearing eye,’” which Julia Kristeva writes of. (22) Kristeva writes that the Surrealists failed in their efforts to create a communal theatre of play because they were unable to reconstitute the sacred within the field of theatre. Furthermore, Kristeva argues that through experimentation with gesture, sound, color, and non-verbal sign systems the supremacy of symbolic order can be challenged. (23) This challenging of symbolic order through a manipulation of listening as a visual-spatial experience in Deafman Glance is perhaps why Surrealist artist Louis Aragon, fifty years after the Surrealist movement’s moment had passed, praised Deafman Glance as “an extraordinary freedom machine.” (24) Aragon wrote, “Bob Wilson is, would be, will be [the future tense would have been necessary] surrealist through silence, although one could also say it of all painters, but Wilson—it’s the wedding of gesture and silence, of movement and the ineffable.” (25) The surrealist aesthetic, which is accomplished in Aragon’s opinion through the pairing of silence and movement, is in fact a direct result of the d/Deaf experience of listening. Andrews and Wilson’s intentional use of gesture throughout the performance presents Andrews’s experience with sound. Wilson recalls learning from Andrews that listening has to do with the connection of sound and the body. The vibrational quality of sound largely influences Andrews’s mode of perceiving. In sound studies, scholars including Nina Eidsheim have offered a vibrational theory of music that re-envisions the ways in which we think about sound, music, and listening. This focus on the physical, vibrational nature of sound opens space for sensing otherwise. Nina Eidsheim writes, “approaching music as a vibrational practice offers much more: it recognizes, and hence encourages, idiosyncratic experiences of and with music.” (26) I claim that the material qualities of this approach to listening are made evident in the visual, highly gestural character of Deafman Glance . This visual and gestural experience becomes the lens through which audience members perceive the silent opera. Where auditory sound once stood in the traditional opera experience, visuals now construct an aural image for the audience of Deafman Glance . This rift in the traditional experience of theatre and opera produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to listen otherwise. Whether audience members pay attention, what they pay attention to and, furthermore, what kind of attention they pay—as mediated through the visual and sonic—are entirely dependent. Audience members must adapt to the theatrical presentation and orient themselves, choosing to determine how and what they make of the performance. While Deafman Glance is lauded for its “wedding of gesture and silence,” noting sound’s presence in the original theatre production remains important. (27) Andrews and Wilson’s productions were not entirely “silent” by the standard definition. Stefan Brecht’s account of the 1971 Brooklyn Academy of Music performance notes inclusion of voice, sound, and music. In terms of voice, an “almost neuter scream, emotionally colorless jabs at utterance, not too loud,” (28) Robert Wilson’s “normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner,” (29) a “Slavic accented” voice (30), and “remarks overheard as if not intended for us” (31) are featured at various points throughout the silent opera. Musically, the production incorporates a “hum of music, humming,” (32) an “ominous sequence of piano chords,” (33) “the fateful piano tickle” (34) that apparently accompanies the entrance of Andrews on stage, “the magician’s chords,” (36) “the brash music of a pop tune ( Mutual Admiration Society ) blaring out,” “organ music,” (37) “gongs and bells . . . That shivery, eerie music is at its height,” (38) “Fauré’s Requiem ” played at the moment of the ox’s death, (39) “the soprano aria,” (40) “a lugubrious music,” (41) and “the sounds of “When you’re in love, it’s the loveliest time of the year” from the accordion, a waltz.” (42) Additional sounds throughout the production include repeated “forest noises,” (43) “the thin sound of the ice cubes in the shaker,” (44) repeated “sounds of ocean waves,” (45) and a “hammer blowing sound from afar as though his carpentry were unreal.” (46) The voices, music, and sounds throughout this production all notably serve various functions but do not arise as the primary means of plot comprehension throughout the production. Voices do not share important plot information or dialogue, but they rather showcase the intrusive nature of language. Music seemingly serves no greater function than to signal what the visuals of the production are already pronouncing. Sounds, furthermore, set the scene which is already visually present. The silent opera is mediated through a visual listening style. This is, perhaps, why Andrews and Wilson’s archival record of Deafman Glance erases the sonic portion of the work’s documentation. The visual listening presented in Deafman Glance offers audience members a glance into Andrews’s perspective of the world and becomes the guiding concept of both the televised and installation adaptations of the work. Watching Television Figure 3: Sheryl Sutton in televised Deafman Glance In 1981, the murder-scene of Deafman Glance was excerpted and adapted to become a twenty-seven-minute-long work for television. (Figure 3) Produced by the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Sutton again stars with Jerry Jackson and Rafael Carmona playing the two children. Interestingly, Andrews does not appear in this work,yet remains central to the its visual listening style. The televised Deafman Glance contains a nearly identical plot to the silent opera’s prologue. Sutton moves from the kitchen throughout various spaces in a home, murdering two children along the way. Similar to the silent opera, Sutton’s performance works to subvert the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (47) The noticeable lack of remorse and almost-emotionless murders are emphasized through intense repetition, focused shots, and intensified sound. Not a word of dialogue is uttered, and this silence suggests Sutton’s rejection of her role as mother figure. The performance is filled with paradoxes: the events are terrifying but not violent, characters are both real and symbols of reality, pacing reduces action to abstraction, and morality and mortality are ambiguous. Within this dreamscape, scene, gesture, vision, and sound collide to become a reflection on and refraction of a dark American history interlaced with racism and prejudice. Sutton’s performance, as mediated through the camera lens, becomes an undoing of stereotypes created through the white gaze of the late-twentieth-century avant-garde cast upon her and her character. Despite the performance’s intent, however, critics reacted negatively regarding Sutton’s performance. Amy Taubin questioned, “What does it then mean to present without any critical context a black woman as a totally omnipotent figurer, with complete power over life and death?” (48) Furthermore, others negatively critiqued the work’s depiction of a black woman enacting a stereotypically violent scene. The implications of race within Deafman Glance demands further research, and points to the work’s relationship to the “identity politics” movement of 1970s. Despite the consistency in plot to the prologue of the theatre production, the televised mediality of the performance has distinct implications for viewers. The New York Times “Television Week” reads the following: There will be sound but no dialogue in ‘Deafman Glance,’ which will be this week’s presentation on the “Matters of Life and Death” series Sunday at 11 P.M. on Channel 13. Described as “a gothic video-drama,” the half-hour work uses sound effects, as well as time and space, light and movement, in lieu of spoken words to recount a stylized tale of murder. (49) The televised adaptation of Andrews and Wilson’s silent opera harnesses the medium of video to amplify division, difference and multiplication within the experience of multisensorial listening. By segmenting, narrowing in, further stylizing, and more directly navigating viewers’ experiences, the televised production becomes Wilson’s first aestheticized interpretation of Andrews’s experience. The theatre performance of Deafman Glance provided the ground for Wilson’s interrogation of video, even as the televised production worked to challenge and extend the terms of the live work. In these ways, Wilson’s televised production is bound to the terms of performance, which the work has developed through radical steps into and out of these media. Samuel Weber argues that television’s operation confuses the relationship between representation and its object. In bringing events “closer,” television sets before the viewer not simply the reproduction of the distant object but a mode of perception. (50) In this operation, Weber proposes that television “transports visions as such and sets it immediately before the viewer. It entails not merely a heightening of the naturally limited powers of sight with respect to certain distant objects: it involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself.” (51) Figure 4: Pre-production storyboard of televised Deafman Glance This “transposition of vision” is evident in the planning of the television production. Pre-production storyboards from the Watermill Center Archive are timestamped and carefully illustrate each still of the production highlighting the highly visual listening style of the production. In fact, only one initial sound—that of running water—is indicated in the storyboard. (Figure 4) The opening moments of the piece orient audience members to a stylized, very intentional viewpoint. Intensified sounds of birds chirping and running sink water open the performance with a close shot of Sutton’s back to the viewer as she presumably looks out of a window. The camera momentarily follows her line of gaze but redirects down to her hand which slowly and carefully turns off the sink. She continues washing and drying dishes with the sounds of the cloth wiping each plate noticeably intensified. Here, each action performed by Sutton is matched with an intensified sound of the task literally at hand. The gestural, visual, and sonic collide into one creating a close-up and sonically amplified view for viewers. In a 1970 interview, Wilson speaks of Andrews’s experience hearing. He refers to this mode of listening as “seeing-hearing” noting, He [Andrews] developed another sense of seeing-hearing that, that’s very amazing—his association with color or light with people is—just amazing, amazing—and he always, if he wants to—if he wants to tell me about someone he doesn’t know how to write their name or spell their name he can draw some symbol or some meaning, that you know who that person is or what it is. (52) Through video and post-production processing, the multisensorial, “seeing-hearing” experience is edited and reimagined by Wilson. The viewer’s gaze nearly becomes the tactile experience of Sutton’s actions. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating coalesce in Wilson’s stylized interpretation of the multisensory listening experience. The televised production continues to explore this seeing-hearing relationship with the opening of the fridge, pouring of milk, pacing throughout the space, reading of pages, drinking of milk, and killings. The murderous act is repeated twice with amplified sounds and close-up shots. Only with Sutton’s stabbing of each child can non-diegetic, foreboding cello music be heard. Existing outside of the television production’s visual landscape, these musical moments create an alternative space where hearing beyond gestural, object-relationality is possible. Sound within the televised production is closely linked to the visual except in the musical, ineffable moments of murder. Viewing the Gallery Figure 5: Robert Wilson’s Vision at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation in several gallery spaces. Within the context of the exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision , Deafman Glance became a portion of a video installation. (Figure 5) The show was organized as a traveling tour, first opening in Boston and thereafter Houston and San Francisco. The Epilogue: Video Room featured five video works that Wilson created since 1978, including Deafman Glance . The space featured several monitors each paired with nearly seven-foot tall, white Wilson-chairs. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the chairs that “Wilson designed [these] as surrogate viewers.” (53) These chairs remarkably resemble magnified versions of the hanging chair Andrews sits in throughout the silent opera. Visitors of the gallery are placed within a noticeably uncomfortable space forced to either gaze from behind the large, looming chairs or strain their necks as they wedge in front of the chairs to view the screens. The chairs, which serve as surrogate viewers, block and nearly physically disable gallery visitors. As viewers struggle to navigate the space and overcome obstacles, the videos play on loop creating an overlay of sound for visitors. Notably, the entrance and three additional rooms of the exhibition were designed with an accompanying sound environment by sound artist, Hans Peter Kuhn. While the rest of the exhibition featured a sound environment, the five video projects were placed separately as an Epilogue. To prevent their soundtracks from undermining Kuhn’s sound environments, and their televised images from interfering with the free flow of visitors through the spaces, the videos were shown separately. This intentionally created a multilayered video-sound installation separate from the larger exhibition. Figure 6: Deafman Glance at Paula Cooper Gallery In 1993 and again in 2010, a solo video installation of Deafman Glance was exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. (Figure 6) Similar to the Epilogue: Video Room in Robert Wilson’s Vision , the exhibition again featured monitors paired with elongated chairs, only this time Deafman Glance was exclusively played on all monitors. In 1993, New York Times ’s Charles Hagen noted, perhaps not in the best terms, “These constructions suggest dunces’ chairs, for slow learners to sit in while they struggle to understand the dark deeds portrayed in the tape.” (54) Whether interpreted as figures of disability, surrogate viewers, or performers in their own right, the chairs alter viewers’ physical encounter with and perception of the work. Here, a complex experience of encountering the art object, the space, and the viewers’ own body is carefully at play. Notably in the installation, the videos play on the six monitors at a three-second delay causing not only an undulation of images, but also a rippling, overlay of sound. The placement of the six monitors operating at various playback times in a single installation serves to amplify the “vibrational acoustic” that video artist Bill Viola has suggested marks the “real-time” operation of the video technology. Viola notes, “All video has its roots in the live. This vibrational acoustic character of video as a virtual image is the essence of its ‘liveness.’ Technologically, video has evolved out of sound.”(55) In Viola’s view, video is an intrinsically multisensorial media. In addition to temporal manipulation, sound is aesthetically manipulated yet again through looped layering further reinforcing sound’s secondary importance to gesture and vision in the exhibition. Once again Wilson creates a space in which the audience is forced to choose where and how they focus their attention. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating all became possible modes of interacting with the space, however, a certain discomfort remains hyper-present. Staging the gallery space as inaccessible and overstimulating can be viewed as Wilson’s reflection on the experience of disability. The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the video installation: Wilson claims that he has never understood the murder scene from ‘Deafman Glance,’ which may explain why he returns to it as he does. It is the clearest example of an involvement with relativity in his art. He insists that meaning depends on so many factors that it [is] pointless to ascribe single interpretation—however obvious it might seem—to a given work of art. Things are perceived differently depending upon the time, space, and frame or context in which they are presented. One intention of all Wilson’s art is to stretch our awareness of these conditions: he wants to teach us to listen with our whole bodies, as a deaf person must, and not only with our ears; and to see with a similarly expanded sensibility. (56) Each iteration of Deafman Glance explores Andrews’s multisensory experiences of sound as a d/Deaf individual. Visuals construct an aural image for the audience of the staged production, unlike in traditional experiences of theatre and opera. Wilson’s critical move produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to experience a multisensorial interpretation of listening. Gestural expression and visual cues become the means by which audience members hear Andrews’s perspective as shared through Deafman Glance . Furthermore, adaptations of the initial silent opera, in the form of a televised production and gallery installation video exhibition, continue to explore the multisensory experiences of sound that characterized the staged production. In each re-mediatization of Deafman Glance , alternative modes of listening and sensing are explored as Wilson’s curation pushes viewers to “listen with their whole bodies.” Endnotes Absolute Wilson , documentary (New Yorker Films, 2017), 38:34–39:00. Ibid., 39:04–39:10. Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 429. Ibid., 430. For further reading see Joseph Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (2006): 113–84; Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus, eds., Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York: Routledge, 2006); Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica Holmes, “Expert Listening Beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; and Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). Nizan Shaked, “Conceptual Art and Identity Politics: From the 1960s to the 1990s” in Conceptual Art and Identity Politics (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2017), 27–59. Mara Mills, “Deafness,” in Keywords in Sound (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 51. Doris Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Brecht, 121. Ibid., 122. Telory D. Arendell, “Thinking Spatially, Speaking Visually: Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles,” International Journal of Music and Performing Arts 3, no. 1 (June 2015): 18. Liam Klenk, “Robert Wilson, The Master of Experimental Theater,” TheatreArtLife (blog), September 9, 2020, https://www.theatreartlife.com/artistic/robert-wilson-the-master-of-experimental-theater/ . Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 4. Arendell, 21. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference: The Third Eye and the Performance of Diversity” (PhD diss., New York University, 1991), 84. Ibid., 85. Bradley Winterton, “Theatre Feature,” Time Out , June 18–24, Columbia University Archives, Wilson Papers. Brecht, 63. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 432. Kochhar-Lindgren, 85. Ibid., 89. Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine, and Thomas Gora, “Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) Place,” SubStance 6/7, no. 18/19 (Winter–Spring 1977–78): 131–34. Louis Aragon, “An Open Letter to Andrew Breton on Robert Wilson’s ‘Deafman Glance,’” Performing Arts Journal 1, no. 1 (1976): 7. Ibid., 5. E Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sending Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10. Aragon, 5. Brecht, 55. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 77. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 74. Kochhar-Lindgren, 85. Amy Taubin, Alive , vol. 1, no. 2 (1981), Columbia University Archives, Wilson Papers. C. Gerald Fraser, “Television Week,” The New York Times , July 11, 1982, sec. A, 2. Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media , 116. Ibid., 116. Brecht, 429. Gallery Notes (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1991). Charles Hagen, “Art in Review,” The New York Times , December 17, 1993, sec. C, 29. Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning,” in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994 (London: Thames and Hudson and Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1995), 157. Gallery Notes . About The Author(s) Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II S T A R R BUSBY 4-4:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part II will provide audience members a space to relax, listen deeply, and recharge. The performance will be followed by a conversation with River Ramirez. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I on Thursday, October 17, 6-8 pm in the Elebash Recital Hall Lobby. Visitors are invited to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm for this event. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant 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). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE EYO Taiwo Aloba Theater, Dance, Performance Art Yorùbá 90 minutes 3:00PM EST Sunday, October 15, 2023 Culture Lab LIC, 46th Avenue, Queens, NY, USA Reserve Seats EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. This project was developed as a part of Culture Lab LIC's 2023 Emergence Artist Residency. This project is supported by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, Statewide Community Regrants Program (formerly the Decentralization program) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and administered by Flushing Town Hall. Content / Trigger Description: Fog Taiwo Aloba is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Nigeria. She was educated at Lagos State University in Lagos, New York Film Academy in New York, and Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild and a USRSA Certified Run Streaker. Culture Lab LIC is a 501(c)(3) formed to be the arts and culture umbrella for Western Queens. We present local, national, and international art of all genres, while supporting New York artists and other nonprofits by providing space, resources and a sense of community. Operating out of a 12,000 square foot converted warehouse, Culture Lab LIC hosts two fine art galleries, an 80 seat theater, classroom space, an 18,000 square foot outdoor venue, and a robust residency program. Culture Lab LIC is dedicated to upholding, equity, diversity and inclusion across all our platforms. www.TaiwoAloba.com , @modelvoss, www.culturelablic.org , @culturelablic Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I S T A R R BUSBY 6-8 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part I will take place in Elebash Recital Hall Lobby, where visitors will each individually be invited to experience a private sound meditation. Visitors are welcome to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II on Saturday, October 19, 5-5:50 pm in the Segal Theater. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant 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). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Encounter Richard Move / MoveOpolis!'s work Devrai (Sacred Grove) in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm and 6:30pm Riverside Park, Manhattan Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event "Devrai (Sacred Grove)” calls attention to our local ecosystems and landscapes. The Indian word “Devrai” is a compound of Dev meaning 'God' and 'Rai' meaning forest. A prehistoric tradition of nature conservation, sacred groves have long been revered as sacrosanct and imbued with the belief that no creature may be harmed within its boundaries. This performance of Devrai (Sacred Grove) is a section of Richard Move’s Herstory of the Universe series commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island as part of Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island, named “Best Dance of 2021” by The New York Times. Devrai (Sacred Grove) will be performed by Aristotle Luna (Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Richard Move / MoveOpolis!) at 6:00pm and again at 6:30pm. Featured Image Credits: Akua Noni Parker in "Devrai (Sacred Grove)" by Ben DeFlorio. Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Richard Move, Ph.D., M.F.A. is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, TED Global Oxford Fellow, New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow, Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! and Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Dance. Move's choreographic commissions include productions for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, two works for the Martha Graham Dance Company, a solo for New York City Ballet Principal, Heléne Alexopoulos, and a trio for PARADIGM - Carmen De Lavallade, Gus Solomons, Jr. and Dudley Williams. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Summer on the Hudson is NYC Parks' annual outdoor arts and culture festival that takes place in Riverside Park from 59th Street to 153rd Street. With a mix of music concerts, dance performances, movies under the stars, DJ dance parties, kids shows, special events, wellness activities, and more there is something for everyone! All programs and events are free to the public and registration is not required unless specifically stated in event information. The mission of the Riverside Park Conservancy is to restore, maintain, and improve Riverside Park in partnership with the City of New York for the enjoyment and benefit of all New Yorkers. We support the preservation of the park’s historic landscape, structures, and monuments, engage the community in active stewardship of the park, and provide a wide range of public programs. Visit Partner Website

Watch The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Jacket At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mathijs Poppe Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 3:55pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Netherlands Language Arabic Running Time 71 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present. About The Artist(s) Mathijs Poppe, born in 1990 in Ghent (Belgium), graduated in 2017 with great distinction from School of Arts Ghent (KASK) with OURS IS A COUNTRY OF WORDS. For this medium length documentary, he worked together with a couple of families in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, to tell a story that balances on the thin line between fiction and documentary. The film was selected for Visions du Réel, screened at numerous international film festivals around the world and got awarded with a Wildcard by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF). Since then, Mathijs has developed several film and video projects as a director, cameraman and editor. At the moment Mathijs is working on his first feature film, THE JACKET, in which he will continue and deepen his collaboration with the Palestinian community in Lebanon. Get in touch with the artist(s) rebecca@plutofilm.de and follow them on social media https://www.plutofilm.de/films/the-jacket/0092 Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

This installation will be open on Friday Oct 13th (6pm-9pm), Saturday Oct 14th (12pm-6pm) and Sunday Oct 15th (12pm-6pm). “Qualia” is a sensory voyage where the line is blurred between the physical and the digital world, between the real and the imaginary. The gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand holding sand, falling and rising again. Conceived as an immersive projection mapping design using cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy, “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive scenarios drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom, and self-perception. An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape; the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, and the body is the self, giving the audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still open to our chosen actions. The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness. The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. The immersive experience - environmental video sculpture - is designed as a large wall with white canvases spread across, seemingly in random positions, creating video spaces. Using the concept of ideasthesia, a bridge that metaphorically links rational abstractions, we open a dialogue between the different film streams - within the canvases and throughout the wall - with an original music score and sound design, extending the installation in time and space. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE QUALIA – You Matter to Me Immersive Cinematic Art Installation Directed by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger Music and Sound Design by Nana Simopoulos With the participation of Catherine Correa Multimedia Non-Verbal October 13-15 at Jersey City Theater Center 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Jersey City Theater Center, Barrow Street, Jersey City, NJ, USA Free Entry, Open To All This installation will be open on Friday Oct 13th (6pm-9pm), Saturday Oct 14th (12pm-6pm) and Sunday Oct 15th (12pm-6pm). “Qualia” is a sensory voyage where the line is blurred between the physical and the digital world, between the real and the imaginary. The gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand holding sand, falling and rising again. Conceived as an immersive projection mapping design using cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy, “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive scenarios drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom, and self-perception. An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape; the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, and the body is the self, giving the audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still open to our chosen actions. The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness. The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. The immersive experience - environmental video sculpture - is designed as a large wall with white canvases spread across, seemingly in random positions, creating video spaces. Using the concept of ideasthesia, a bridge that metaphorically links rational abstractions, we open a dialogue between the different film streams - within the canvases and throughout the wall - with an original music score and sound design, extending the installation in time and space. Content / Trigger Description: The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. JCTC presents QUALIA – You Matter to Me Produced by Laia Cabrera & Co. Laia Cabrera (Filmmaker and video artist) Laia Cabrera a multimedia artist working in immersive content experiences and visual storytelling. Her work includes traditional and experimental filmmaking, site-specific projection mapping, visual poetry, virtual reality and immersive interactive art installations. Identity and consciousness have been a long research in her work exploring concepts of mental states, symbolism and hope, creating stories that unfold across a series of immersive interactive scenarios. Her first interdisciplinary exhibition aimed to revitalize and strengthen the intercommunication of different artistic languages. Since then, her projects are searching new ways of using the space and the visual imaginary as a tool for narrative storytelling and audience connection. Interactivity and experienceability are intrinsically part of her new work, always challenging the conventional form and designed to be native to multiple platforms and exhibitions. Sculpting time through a looking-glass and creating a sensorial experience, her quest is to establish a language that makes this relationship possible and to invent stories to be told, stories that represent a profound exploration of the human experience in contemporary artwork. laiacabrera.com laiacabreraco.com Isabelle Duverger (Visual artist) Isabelle Duverger is a French Kabyle award-winning visual artist based in Jersey City for the past fifteen years. Her work as a painter and immersive interactive installation artist has been presented throughout the US, Asia and Europe. It includes public art with projection mapping on buildings, immersive interactive video and sound installations, projection art for theater and dance, video-art and animation. She is the recipient of the 2023 Artist Fellowship Grant awards by JCAC Trust Fund, 2021 Motion Award Nominee and 2022 Hybrid Vision Panasonic Digital Art Competition Nominee. Her work has been presented in Spring/Break Art Show, St John the Divine Cathedral, Time Square Plaza in New York, Nuit Blanche Washington DC, Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Center, Barcelona, Spain and Tempietto Di Bramante, Roma, Italy, Hong Kong City Hall among others. isabelleduverger.com Nana Simopoulos (Musician and Sound Designer) Nana has been on the forefront of world fusion music with several recordings of original music, soundtracks, music for dance and theater. CDs include Daughters Of The Sun, After The Moon, Still Waters, Wings and Air, Skins and Live at the B&W Montreux Music Festival, Vol. II. She has performed with the New York City Opera and RAI Symphony Orchestra in Torino, Italy, and with her group at the Warsaw Electronic Festival, Symphony Space, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and St John the Divine NYC. Her musical quartet appeared in Lykavitos and Veakeo at the 1st Cultural Capital of Europe festival in Athens in 1985. She has created dance commissions for Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Joffrey Ballet, American Dance Festival, Ballet Hispanico, and North Carolina Dance Theater. She has conducted original works at the Joyce theatre in NYC, on Broadway and her score “Vessel” was performed by Westfield Symphony Orchestra. Her film scores are for Domain of the Senses; Touch and she has made music for theatrical productions of Antigone Through Time, Conversations With the Goddesses, by Soho Repertory Theatre. Musicals include An Absolute Mystery, Matrix Maison, Studs Turkel’s American Dreams, Lost and Found. She has written music for multimedia production Turbulence’s Tilt and is currently collaborating with Laia Cabrera and Co in creating music for live interactive immersive video art. nana.net Catherine Correa (Performer and interdisciplinary artist) Catherine Correa is an interdisciplinary artist and dance dramaturg hailing from Colombia and currently based in Brooklyn. Ms. Correa's illustrious journey includes active involvement in international programs dedicated to performance development, creative movement, and theater production. Her invaluable expertise has significantly contributed to the growth of theaters, performers, and workshops on a global scale, spanning South America, the United States, and Europe. catherinecorrea.com Website: www.laiacabreraco.com Immersive Art: www.laiacabreraco.com/immersive-art Portfolio: www.laiacabreraco.com/portfolio Instagram: www.instagram.com/laiacabreraco Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch PACI by JULIETTE ROUDET at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents PACI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by JULIETTE ROUDET Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language French Running Time 33 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. About The Artist(s) Juliette Roudet is a versatile artist. Trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, she was quick to seek out other avenues of interpretation and creation. She was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris (CNSAD), and has since performed under the direction of David Bobée, Jean Bellorini, Pierre Rigal, Laurent Laffargue, Caroline Marcadé... Since 2016, she has been teaching at the CNSAD and working with numerous artists and directors as a choreographer. In cinema and television, she has appeared in films by Alain Tasma, Manuel Flèche, Gérard Mordillat, Jérôme Cornuau and Ionut Teianu. In 2024, with “Paci”, she signed her first documentary film. Get in touch with the artist(s) dmorel@tsproductions.net and follow them on social media ✨https://www.instagram.com/julietteroudet/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. Theatre Image Collection Welcome to the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project. The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. For more than 30 years it has been maintained by Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson and his students as an important resource for those looking for the visual materials that are a crucial part of theatrical research. Starting in December of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project moved to the open source software Omeka to increase accessibility and searchability of the many images and to make uploading and cataloging of the images easier. This transition also brought the image database under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center's digital initiatives. The source is available for many images and a citation for each image is also provided on the item view page. Please note the collection is password protected and those interested need to get in touch to receive the login details. For queries related to database access, content and image collection, please write to Prof. Marvin Carlson at mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu or Frank Hentscher at fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu Visit Collection

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Devised Theater After COVID With Allen Kuharski and others English 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open to All American Devised Theater After COVID: Teaching, Archiving and the Practice The past, present, and future of devised physical ensemble theater in the US was the topic of an historic NEH Institute in Philadelphia in June. A diverse group of over 50 professors, artist/teachers, grad students, editors, and archivists from around the country as well as several foreign countries gathered for 12 days to discuss the issues of archiving, criticism, and especially the theoretical and historical teaching of this 60-year-old practice in American and world theater. This exchange was prompted by the recent proliferation of the teaching of the practice of devising in colleges, universities, and drama schools (often without a theoretical, critical, historical framing) and the larger challenges to such innovative live performance following the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the growing impact of climate change. The Institute was initiated by Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron Theatre Company's School for Devised Performance, and co-hosted by Allen Kuharski of Swarthmore College. The panel at CUNY will consist of participants in the Institute and will be a report and critical reflection on the larger issues that emerged from the Institute. With Allen Kuharski, Rye Gentleman (NYU), Tracy Hazas (CUNY-Queens College), Rebecca Adelsheim, Tom Sellar (YSD) and/or others. TBC. Content / Trigger Description: Allen J. Kuharski is Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College and teaches in Pig Iron Theater Company’s MFA Program in Devised Performance. Kuharski is a widely published critic and scholar on contemporary directing history, theory, and practice and on modern Polish theater and drama. He is co-editor of the 16-volume Witold Gombrowicz: Collected Writings published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. He has served as an editor for journals such Theatre Journal, Slavic & East European Performance, Western European Stages, and Periphery: Journal of Polish Affairs. His articles and reviews have been published in Polish, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, and Bulgarian translations. His own translations from Polish and French have been widely performed in the United States and abroad. As a dramaturg and translator, he has shared two OBIE Awards and a Fringe First Award, and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has awarded him the country’s Order of Merit. Kuharski was a Fulbright Scholar in Theater to the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in Warsaw in 2017-18. With Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron, he was Co-Director of the 2023 NEH Institute in Philadelphia titled “Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre.” Tom Sellar, a writer, curator, and dramaturg, is Editor of Theater magazine and Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. His writing and criticism have appeared in national publications including Artforum, BOMB, the New York Times, the Guardian, 4Columns, and American Theatre. From 2001-2016 he was a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, where he covered theater and performance art nationally, serving as an Obie award judge and for two terms as chief theater critic. He has also contributed to numerous book anthologies including The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy; Joined Forces: Audience Participation in Theater; Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice in Performance; and the history BAM: The Next Wave Festival. He has curated programs for American Realness, Queer Zagreb, the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue (with Anna Deavere Smith), Prague Quadrennial, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, and other organizations. With Antje Oegel, Tom co-curated Prelude 2015 (What Could We Build, or Is the Future Already Behind Us?) and Prelude 2016 (Welcome Failure). Rebecca Adelsheim is a doctoral candidate in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale where they study queer theater and performance, and lecturer at Tufts University. As a new play dramaturg and producer, Rebecca has worked for companies including Audible Theater, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Baltimore Center Stage, the Goodman Theater, Philadelphia Theater, and Barrington Stage, among others. Recent credits include co-adapator for Affinity based on the novel by Sarah Waters with director Alex Keegan and dramaturg and researcher forsoldiergirls by Em Weinstein. Their writing has been published in Theater magazine, where they also serve as the associate editor. They have received research grants from the Beinecke Library and theFund for Gay and Lesbian Studies (FLAGS) at Yale University and is the recipient of the John W. Gassner Memorial prize and the G. Charles Niemeyer Scholarship. Rebecca is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and received their B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and their M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. Rye Gentleman is the Librarian for Performing Arts in the Division of Libraries. He holds a PhD from University of Minnesota's Theatre Arts & Dance Department and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Gentleman conducts research at the intersection of performance studies, transgender studies, and new media studies. His dissertation-based book project explores the ways transgender embodiment is conceptualized in and shaped by digital media and shows how actual and imagined transgender bodies are enmeshed in digital systems that exert a normative pressure, while also offering the capacity to materialize more expansive actualizations of gendered embodiment. He is also currently working as contributor and co-editor on an anthology focused on transfeminist theatre and performance. His writing has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (Routledge). TRACY HAZAS is an actor and movement director. She has performed at NYC theaters including New York City Center, Dixon Place, Abrons Art Center, and Theater for the New City; most recently, she was seen in Preparedness, co-produced by the Bushwick Starr and HERE Arts Center. Hazas is an affiliated artist with Counter-Balance Theater. She is the voice of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, and has appeared in commercials for Xbox, Tide and others. She made her feature debut in White Rabbit at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Currently she’s designing movement for The Wolves at Queens College; and developing an original work, Los Kentubanos, which reconstructs moments from her family’s history in Cuba, utilizing archival documents and her father’s digital collection of roughly 30,000 family photos dating from the early 1900s. Hazas teaches performance, movement, collaboration and voice at Queens College (CUNY). Previous academic positions include Lecturer of Acting and Movement at Stanford University, and work at Emerson College Los Angeles, Montclair State University and others. Photo credits: Allen J. Kuharski. Credit by Ted Kostans. Tom Sellar. Photo credit by the artist. Rebecca Adelsheim. Photo credit by the artist. Rye Gentleman. Photo credit by the artist. TRACY HAZAS. Photo credit by the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on