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Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting . Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Amy Cook’s Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting argues that casting, as artistic practice and necessary strategy for everyday life, is a performative act related to human cognitive tendencies to organize a large number of stimuli into characters. Our understanding of characters happens within categories that shape assumptions about a character type’s behavior and desires. Cook claims, “The process by which we build a character from the inputs of context, memory, text, and the physical properties of the body playing that character is far more powerful than has been acknowledged” (6). Because she works with a contemporary understanding of situated (also called “embodied”) cognition, inputs like context, memory, and text are just as connected to the experiential embodiment as are the physical properties of the body. Cook uses second generation cognitive science in her theoretical matrix, and I would argue that this text is part of another second generation, that of the cognitive turn in the humanities. Cook’s overall goal is a back-and-forth conversation between cognitive science and theatre studies wherein “a cognitive approach to theatrical character” and “a theatrical understanding of a central component of cognition – characterization” are analyzed together under the term of casting (15). Cognitive humanities scholarship can be easily critiqued as simply slapping cognitive science onto an analytical object and allowing scientific conclusions to become primarily prescriptive, thus circumscribing the scholar’s interpretive work. Cook foregrounds a more difficult, subtle, and ultimately useful process here whereby epistemological models from theatre studies help elucidate cognitive scientific findings, not solely the other way around. Building Character is structured pedagogically (though not pedantically). Chapter one, “Building Titus,” introduces concepts that continue to deepen and pay off in each subsequent chapter. “Building Titus” focuses on the cognitive processes of compression. Cook argues that character building is a process of stimuli compression; characters exist only as “we create them to make sense of our perceptions” (38). Chapter two, “Building Characters,” focuses on how and why “[S]ome bodies…do not seem to disappear as easily as others into their parts” and includes a compelling engagement with celebrity studies (32). Cook takes up the work of Eve Ensler and Anna Deavere Smith in the third chapter, “Multicasting,” exploring the dynamic and embedded nature of building characters. Chapter four moves Cook’s observations about casting into the roles of our everyday lives, including the casting process involved in Barack Obama’s presidency. Cook ends her book with a necessary gesture toward the implications of her argument and the cognitive scientific research upon which it rests for social change. The final chapter, “Counter Casting,” contends that because the cognitive processes behind casting undergird both theatrical and everyday phenomena, their “creativity…suggests ways we might reimagine our selves and our ecosystems” (33). Cook’s array of examples is appropriately capacious given that her thesis depends upon the omnipresence of casting as a tool for sense-making. She examines film trailers, rap music lyrics, advertising, and senate debates; her analysis is particularly strong when the object is dramatic performance. Chapter three includes several illuminating readings of much-discussed material, such as The Taming of the Shrew , the creative methods of Anna Deveare Smith, and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More . Throughout the text, Cook responsibly owns her positionality and her “casting” by the world, which, as in cognitive scientific studies, both increases precision (her analysis of Shrew ) and limits findings (her account of listening to Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic ). When she turns her attention to dramatic examples, she clarifies her participation in disciplinary stakes; Cook effectively critiques the Method school of acting as reliant upon outdated models of psychology that prize the unconscious over more current understandings of networked consciousness and cognition, a theatre-based example of a larger critique throughout the cognitive humanities of psychoanalytic theory. The cognitive turn in the humanities can result in difficult prose; accounting for the specificities of scientific studies and the many caveats of their conclusions can often read as watering down the humanities scholar’s argument and muddying their writing. Cook’s writing suffers no such fate. She is remarkably clear in her descriptions of cognitive scientific concepts and their application to cultural phenomena. She also attends to the dynamics of live performance as a making or becoming process, simpatico with cognition as a set of situated processes. Consider Cook’s compelling analysis of Katherine’s final speech in Act Five as staged in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2016 production of Taming of the Shrew : “the all-female casting disrupts our protocols of character interpretation because we cannot find the categories of sex and gender the play insists on and thus the ensemble stages a character breakdown” (108, italics in the original). As an example of clear humanities writing within the cognitive turn, Cook’s text is a welcome addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms, as well as her peers’ bookshelves. Cook attempts an urgently necessary task if the cognitive turn is to become a flexible theoretical tool in our field, namely, the responsible synthesis of implications from this research with theoretical frames that share an investment in embodiment as epistemology, such as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. Cook’s claim, supported by second generation cognitive science, that “We do not just think differently because of the bodies we have, we think with and through the bodies we have” is an arrival at the same destination but by an alternate route from many theoretical models found in the traditions listed above (29). Cook models such a synthesis in her engagement with the work of Angela Pao and Brandi Wilkins Catanese. As Cook states, this book is a starting point. It serves as a useful tool for further investigation of, in particular, non-normative bodies and their possibilities in everyday life and on stage and screen. Indeed, claims of normativity, as Cook shows, partially result from cognitive “processes by which we jump to powerful conclusions that it is our duty to challenge” (33). Investigating the relationship between normative brain structures and neural processes that may be cross-cultural and transhistorical as well as social norms of gender, class, race, and sexuality remains a critical need. I would like to see future work engaging with the cognitive turn do more to interrogate and historicize its own theoretical frame. The selection of research areas, funding, and subjects within scientific study is hardly a neutral enterprise. Cook’s text demonstrates the value of engaging with these theories in sharpening our analytical precision using empirical evidence; yet scientific theories are still theories, and they deserve the same rigorous investigation of their cultural commitments and values that we now apply, de rigeur, to other theoretical tools. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ARIEL NERESON University at Buffalo, State University of New York Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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Watch Grand Theft Hamlet by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Grand Theft Hamlet At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 1:25pm. 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 USA Language English Running Time 89 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game. About The Artist(s) PINNY GRYLLS CO-DIRECTOR After founding Birds Eye View Film Festival, Grylls became an award-winning documentary and commercials director. Her first short documentary, Peter And Ben, won awards at Aspen, London Short Film Festival, and SXSW. Since then she has specialized in making documentaries about theatre, opera and dance. Films include The Hour (National Theatre/BBC), Becoming Zerlina (The Royal Opera House), Who Do You Think You Were (Channel 4), Voytek The Soldier Bear (BBC), Thankyou Women (The Guardian), and Skin Hunger (Arts Council/ Dante or Die). She was a contributing filmmaker to Grierson-nominated The Street bought by Amazon and is currently developing her first fiction feature Hear My Voice with BFI funding. Commercials include Dove, Aldi ‘Like series’ and British Gas. Grand Theft Hamlet will be her debut documentary feature. Pinny studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University and has worked for over a decade as a senior ethnographic researcher for Ipsos Mori and the UK government through Policy Lab. She was also an Associate Lecturer in ethnographic filmmaking in the Anthropology department at University College London. Other teaching work includes the Poplar Film School, Central Film School, University of the Creative Arts London, Creative Futures, and Here On Earth – an International collaborative environmental documentary project made online in lock down by teenagers in Taiwan, London and New York. She is a proud member of the hard of hearing/deaf community and is learning British Sign Language. SAM CRANE CO-DIRECTOR Crane is an award-winning machinima video artist and actor. He is currently playing Harry Potter in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and can soon be seen as Jacques-Louis David in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon for Sony Pictures and Apple TV. In a theatre career spanning 20 years, he has been critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End and on Broadway. He starred as Farinelli in Farinelli And The King alongside Mark Rylance, and Winston Smith in Robert Icke’s multi-award-winning 1984. His machinima film We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On won the Critics’ Choice award at Milan Machinima Festival, First Prize for Video Art at The Athens Digital Arts Festival, was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize. He is a PhD candidate at York University's School of Arts and Creative Technologies and a member of the PEERS programme of artistic researchers at Zurich University of the Arts. He read Classics as an Undergraduate at Oxford University and trained as an actor at LAMDA where he won the Nicholas Hytner scholarship. Get in touch with the artist(s) cwells@mubi.com and follow them on social media N/A 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

Donia Mounsef Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Theatre and censorship have long been intertwined. From early Greek theatre to twenty‑first‑century performance art, political, cultural, and social powers have repeatedly sought to suppress the performing arts. Their reasons have ranged from legal restrictions to moral objections, sexual indecency, ideological conflicts, and efforts to silence work that negatively portrays certain targeted groups or communities. Following a brief overview of the legal and political history of censorship in the Canadian and American contexts, this article explores theatrical censorship, its corresponding dissent and embattled freedoms, and the way various regimes of restraints affect performative frameworks. It also considers specific cases of censorship in Canadian theatre: the case of Denise Boucher’s The Fairies are Thirsty (1978), as well as the question of cultural appropriation and pretendianism in the work of acclaimed Québécois director Robert Lepage ( SLĀV , 2018) and his collaboration with French powerhouse director Ariane Mnouchkine ( Kanata , 2018). Lastly, we will turn to an analysis of censorship of Christopher Morris’ play The Runner at the PuSh Festival (Vancouver 2024) and the way it pitted communities against one another occasioned by the Israel-Gaza War. By doing so, I demonstrate how the functioning of censorship has shifted—especially in the Canadian context—from state or institutional sanctions to self-censorship and community grounded suppression. In general, theatre tends to attract more threats to control it than other art forms, examples of which abound. One famous example is Emile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), the only work adapted to the stage by its author. Zola used this adaptation to launch a campaign against censorship in France under the Third Republic; the play was finally produced at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1888. Other examples of censored photographs, paintings, sculptures, rarely receive the level of attention performance does. In recent years, performance art has drawn more ire and suppression than other forms, such as Ai Weiwei’s performances Drowned Child (2016) and Sunflower Seeds (2010). Feminist performance artists experience similar suppression such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), which was censored while her other visual art and installations were not. The reasons why theatre and performance seem to attract more censorship range from the obvious institutional regulation of a live and living art form that has the potential to better mobilize audiences, to reasons of religious, moral, political taboos that perceive theatre expression as more subversive and less controllable than film or media. Theatre may have the power to change the world or instigate political and social unrest by promoting transgressive actions that mobilize audiences. In a way it is not censorship that conditions what is censorable: it is what is censored that often redefines censorship in theatre. Judith Butler has explained how censorship is a productive and formative power that produces that which it regulates. Butler writes: Censorship is most often referred to as that which is directed against persons or against the content of their speech. If censorship, however, is a way of producing speech, constraining in advance what will and will not become acceptable speech, then it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of juridical power.(1) Butler echoes Foucault here who considered censorship as a productive rather than a strictly regulatory mechanism. Foucault writes: What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network, which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.(2) In different ways, forms of censorship and restrictions today are welcome and tolerated, such as what can be shown on television at certain times of the day, film, video game, and program rating. This is what marks the shift from state and regulatory censorship to community directives. More recent theorizing of censorship widens the scope of definition to encompass any censorious activity that is “external, coercive and repressive,”(3) while other new assessments associate censorship with “any attempt to modify the integrity of the artistic work and its reception.”(4) The problem with wider definitions of censorship is that they do not account for more insidious forms of suppression such as self-censorship, pre-emptive censorship, or indirect censorship, prompted by community pressure, cancel culture, vandalism, digital and social media controls, press campaigns, doxing of artists, threats of prosecution or libel, etc. More recent definitions of censorship have to do with the yielding of power beyond a strictly legal framework. In this regard, Sue Curry Jansen’s position in her book Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge argues that recent censorship has shifted towards surveillance and control not only by the state, but also by actors in the market, which I unpack in more detail below. New and various mechanisms of censorship have shifted from state-based to market- and community-driven articulations that widen the scope beyond religious, political or moral grounds. Other reasons for censorship include: artistic policies, cultural and community pressures, customs and border control of artistic products, policing and surveillance action, populist opposition in the media or public sphere, community boycott and cancel culture, denial of funding (such as by the Canada Council for the Arts, or provincial and municipal Arts Funding bodies), just to name a few examples. Similarly, serious constraints in recent years have produced vehement censorship that has taken the form of violent attacks on artists, destruction of artwork, protests and riots at venues, attacks on audiences and creative teams, threats of violence, threats of damage or boycott of host venues, demonstrations to shut down productions, and so forth. These threats have raised the stakes on the question of censorship with more violent and lethal assaults on artists and art and entertainment venues, concert halls, auditoriums, often inflicting mass casualties. Censorious attacks have reached alarming levels with incidents such as the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004); the plan to murder Danish cartoonist Kurt Westegaard (2008); the Charlie Hebdo massacre (2015); the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida (2016); the attack at the Moscow Dubrovka theatre (2002); the terror attack on the Bataclan Music Hall in France (2015); the Manchester Arena attack in the UK (2017); the recent massacre at the Nova Music Festival in Israel (2023); and the sordid list goes on. Unmistakably, censorship in the twenty-first century has shifted in methods, severity, forms, and magnitude ranging from regulatory dictates imposed by the state or its agents to forms of silencing by the community. Theatre Censorship Legal statutes pertaining to theatrical censorship fall for the most part under “community standards,”(5) pushing the regulatory debate into the public arena as not all censorship is decided on the basis of the law but more on its impact on the community. More recent definitions of censorship have thus widened the scope beyond the legal framework. Sue Curry Jansen argues that a modern understanding of censorship extends to forms of “surveillance: a mechanism for gathering intelligence that the powerful can use to tighten control over people or ideas that threaten to disrupt established systems of order.”(6) For Jansen, censorship has shifted from state or official sanctions to corporate, social, and non-governmental entities exercising indirect power and control. In the first part of her book, entitled “Parables of Persecution,” Jansen argues that, despite the Enlightenment effort to separate power and knowledge, they remain inextricably linked where one ensures the functioning of the other.(7) Surveillance of dissent is a socially structured albeit arbitrary form of silencing that enables different forms of censorship such as market censorship to dictate what is acceptable and what is to be spurned in the so-called “free market of ideas.” The digital age has also expanded officially sanctioned procedures, or censorship based on propriety or community offense. With the speed at which information and material is disseminated to global audiences, social media networks, instant transmission, or quick sharing, it becomes nearly impossible to censor offending material in time. By the time the censors get a hold of the material, it has already circulated widely. Community standards have morphed into “cancel culture” and networked society pressure. Cancel culture is generally understood as canceling support for an event, a public figure, a work, or an artist if the public considers the person or the work objectionable or offensive. Social media in recent years has exacerbated the impact of such “call outs” as the public appoints itself the arbiter of what is right, wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. This point was made clear recently by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders in The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship who explain “media exerts an influence that is just as powerful in shaping and amplifying a culture of censoriousness that not only rivals officially recognised methods of censorship but often supersedes them. This has resulted in conditions that have been termed ‘cancel culture.’”(8) Overall, conventional and historical censorship was based on sanctioning by state or state agents, what the British commonly call “statutory censorship” (in addition to other institutional agents: the Church or religious authority, the military, the courts, etc.) tasked with ridding the stage of offensive and grievous material in the name of the state. However, late twentieth century and early twenty-first century regarded censorship as a response to ideological, social, or political grievances independent of the state and motivated for the large part by offences to the community or the commons. The most important example of this is the wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson at the Superbowl (2004).(9) As such, censorship may no longer be understood in its strictly legal framework. Today, the laws can rarely contemplate objections on moral grounds for works that express for example heresy, blasphemy, offense, or even libel. Moral ground, public morality, decency, propriety, and bienséance —the neo-classical rule of good taste—are the reasons why many plays were censored can hardly regulate harmfulness. Theatre Censorship Cases in Canada I. The Fairies are Thirsty [Les fées ont soif] Québécois poet and journalist Denise Boucher is well known for her controversial militant and feminist writing. After Québec’s Quiet Revolution, artists confronted the Church and state in more forceful ways, armed with newfound public discontent and inspired by the American Civil Rights movement.(10) Boucher’s 1978 play Les fées ont soif ( The Fairies are Thirsty ) showcases women’s issues and breaks down the stereotypical representation of women especially the archetype of the Virgin Mary, used by the Church to suppress female sexuality. The play’s title is borrowed from nineteenth century French historian, Jules Michelet, who described the origins of the fairies’ myth in the legend of Satanism and witchcraft in his essay La Sorcière (1862). In the legend, the fairies were originally a group of women in ancient Gaul who refused to stop dancing upon the arrival of Christ and his apostles. For this sacrilege, they were shrunk and doomed to live, in miniature form, in the woods until Judgement Day. Although no one was miniaturized in Boucher’s play, the story brings us three women: the quintessential mother and housewife, Marie; the prostitute, Madeleine dressed in kinky leather and feather boas; and the Virgin Mary, daringly playing herself. In a series of poetic monologues, Marie and Madeleine discuss their oppressed conditions, abuse, battery, and rape at the hands of husbands and clients emboldened by the Church’s hegemony and the state’s patriarchy, while the Virgin Mary attempts to escape from the religious archetypes that body-shame her and lock her in unattainable images of piety and modesty. Well-known director Jean-Luc Bastien agreed to direct the controversial play. In June 1978, five months before its premiere, the Montreal Arts Council pulled the funding citing its “filthy, sacrilegious and blasphemous language.”(11) The artistic director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Jean-Louis Roux, denounced censorship and promised that the play will go ahead. The entire city council was castigated in the media, while cultural, artistic, and labor organizations circulated petitions defending the work. Roux promised that the play would be staged on schedule whether arts funding was available or not. It opened on 10 November 1978 and ran for a month in front of full houses and garnered a lot of acclaim. Affronted, Montreal’s Catholic Archdiocese launched a campaign to denounce the show and encouraged congregations to picket the theatre while buying blocks of tickets to attend the performance and recite the rosary as disruption. Other groups threw medals of the Virgin Mary on the stage like confetti. The “crusade” against the play continued into January 1979, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Famously, Judge Gabrielle Vallée asked the group representing the Catholic militants: “who do you represent”? When they responded that they represent “Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin,” the magistrate immediately threw the case out. Further court cases to suppress the publication of the play were launched against the work until the Supreme Court of Canada, again, refused to hear them in 1980.(12) After its initial production, the play was rarely staged in Canada (or elsewhere). Nevertheless, it remains a significant event of how community responses to censorship can change the course of theatre history. II. Kanata & SLĀV While the theatre community’s response in the case of The Fairies are Thirsty mobilized to defend the production, aided by a secular Supreme Court adamant on protecting artistic freedom at a time when Canada (and Québec) was defining itself in terms of civil rights, the following examples in some ways are based on the opposite response. By “opposite response” I mean one in which the community, instead of rushing to the defense of the work, mobilized against it and against the artists and functioned as the impetus for censoring and cancelling the work. In the following, I turn to an analysis of two plays dealing with settler-colonial contact, Kanata , and slave songs, SLĀV , as well as a corresponding complex community response that generated debates around appropriation and representation more than obscenity. Cultural and artistic appropriation has been central to the production of aesthetic forms in Western theatre, including Canada. Examples abound of cultural theft and appropriation of Indigenous art forms and traditions and a continued lack of awareness for the dynamic of race, ethnicity, cultural identity and representation. Culture is stolen, pilfered, appropriated and traded by those who have the privilege to usurp it. On this issue, it is useful to consider the objection to overtly appropriated work as a different kind of constraint where the community responds to artwork being stolen instead of remaining silent on centuries long colonial and neo-colonial practices. Canadian (Québécois) theatre director Robert Lepage’s SLĀV as well as Ariane Mnouchkine’s and Lepage’s censored play Kanata are perfect examples of appropriation that triggered a strong community response. The projects that have been surrounded by controversies for their defense of appropriation and the advocacy of their directors for the right to “othering”—ignorant of the discontent of the communities they purportedly speak for and about. SLĀV, A Play without Blacks Robert Lepage’s SLĀV was a project on Black slavery, a play with a predominately white cast, picking cotton and singing Black slave songs. The play was scheduled for June 2018, part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. It was widely condemned by members of Quebec’s Black and Indigenous communities. Protests erupted outside the theatre accusing Lepage of appropriating “black pain for profit.”(13) Lepage acknowledged “clumsiness and misjudgments” that led to the cancellation of the show, while he promised “to do better.”(14) Nevertheless, shortly after the cancellation, Lepage became more emboldened and denounced what he called an “angry far-left mob” for protesting and shutting down the show. He attempted to divide and conquer within the ranks of the protestors after he met with a group of them. He declared fervently: “Unlike the angry far-left extremists depicted in certain media, the people I met with were welcoming, open, perceptive, intelligent, cultivated, articulate and peaceful.”(15) Obviously, Lepage would rather deal with “perceptive, intelligent, and peaceful” protesters rather than face the legitimate anger of the “mob” he deplores. Either way the community response was justified, since, as Moses Sumney (an African-American singer-songwriter who cancelled his performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival in protest of the play) stated: there is no context in which white people performing black slave songs is okay. Especially not while they are dressed like poor field workers or cotton pickers. Especially not while they are directed by a white director and in a theater charging loads of money ... This kind of black imitation is very reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows. The only thing missing is black paint.(16) This controversy produced one of the most vehement community responses (after The Fairies are Thirsty ) as a legitimate criticism and denunciation based on ethical ground. The Montreal chapter of Black Lives Matter organized the protest and mobilized a large coalition against the work dubbed “the SLĀV Resistance Collective”. Protestors took to the streets with signs that read: “Racisme ordinaire” [“ordinary racism”]; “descendants of slaves against SLĀV”; and “Slave songs weren’t written for white people to profit from.” After the first round of protests and more meetings with the Collective, an attempt was made to revive the play, without success.(17) Kanata without Indigenous People In a similar fashion, but in a more forceful way, the play Kanata generated an even larger controversy in July 2018. The show was scheduled for staging in Paris in December 2018, and in Québec in 2020, as a co-production between Robert Lepage and Ariane Mnouchkine—director of Paris based Théâtre du Soleil. Kanata claimed to explore Canada’s history “through the lens of the relationship between white and Aboriginal people.” However, there were no Indigenous actors or creators involved in the production. The announcement of the play’s premiere sparked a letter to Montréal’s newspaper Le Devoir on 14 July 2018. The letter, titled “One more time our story will be told without us, Indigenous People,” was signed by a large group of people who are Indigenous artists and community leaders, allies, intellectuals, members of arts organizations, social justice activists, cultural workers, lawyers, theatre artists, actors and producers, and so on.(18) They protested the fact that no Indigenous artists were involved in the production and none were consulted as the play was getting ready for staging. Mnouchkine and Lepage may be well-intentioned in wanting to tell the story of settler-colonial contact with Indigenous people in Kanata (the native name of Canada from the Huron-Iroquois word meaning “village” or “settlement”), however, they miss the point by perpetuating the invisibility of First Nations or Indigenous artists. The letter concluded by saying that the signatories do not wish to censure the production, but preferred if Indigenous artists and talent were included, recognized and celebrated, because, as they say, “WE ARE.”(19) The show was cancelled for the Paris production in December 2018 after a few Lepage co-producers withdrew financial support from the production making it impossible to proceed. Lepage and Mnouchkine have maintained and fought for their right to say and do art whichever way they see fit, accusing their detractors of censorship and muzzling. The cancelled show in Paris was revamped in a shorter version carrying a new title: Kanata - Episode 1. La controverse . It opened 15 December 2018 at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, the home of the Théâtre du Soleil outside Paris, as part of the Festival d’Automne. It went on to be produced at the Naples Theatre Festival in Italy in June 2019, followed by the July 2019 production at the Epidaurus & Athens Festival. The play stopped touring after the Athens production, which is considered a much shorter run than the usual Théâtre du Soleil productions. A documentary video produced by Hélène Choquette entitled Lepage au Soleil: à l'origine de Kanata was made between 2016 and 2018 and shown in Canadian cinemas in 2019. After this documentary, the play was not talked about except in the context of critical analysis of its controversy.(20) I will now turn to the reception of the revised Paris production and the meaning of community-based censorship in response to the modified version that saw the stage at the Théâtre du Soleil, with Lepage as a guest director, marking the first time the company has invited a guest director to work for free. The revised version lasted two and a half hours and included a cast of thirty-three actors, with a revamped title and story. Mnouchkine insisted begrudgingly that there will be no actors from North America. The show ran until February 2019. The reception was, at best, mixed, and at worst, highly negative. Marianne Ackerman of the Montreal Gazette newspaper describes the opening scene with great reservation and significant disapproval: The opening scenes unfold like a dream. Flanked by a forest of perfectly cylindrical pillars, a man and a woman—museum curators—discuss the merits of 19th-century paintings of Indigenous people by European artists, then disappear into fog. Enter a drifting canoe paddled by a First Nations filmmaker capturing wilderness sounds on tape. A black bear ambles across the stage, two Mounties pass in ceremonial red jackets, the idyll broken suddenly by roaring chainsaws as a swarm of loggers reduce the woods to bare stage. A totem pole is wrecked. Mounties drag an Indigenous woman off screaming, and hand her baby to a priest.(21) Ackermann continues with her sceptical assessment as the series of horror stories play out on stage: There the dream ends, and a documentary nightmare begins, dissecting the daily tragedy of Canada’s Indigenous peoples at the dismal end of a wide spectrum: missing women found murdered, junkies desperate for the next fix, social workers and police burdened with inadequate resources, paralyzed by power wrangles. We’re taken to Robert Pickton’s pig farm, made to watch as he snaps handcuffs on a young Indigenous woman, drags her into his caravan, splashes her blood on the window. We follow the actor playing Pickton via film into a jail cell, where an actor posing as a fellow killer goads him into confession.(22) In the middle of these neo-colonial horrors, and Pickton’s terror, we are invited to witness and empathize with a French couple, Miranda and Ferdinand, an artist and a painter arriving in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, around the year 2000.(23) Ferdinand struggles to get acting roles, while Miranda paints portrait of the murdered Indigenous women much to the dismay and consternation of their grieving mothers. La Controverse (the controversy in the title), emerges from Miranda’s plan to exhibit her work at a local community center but, at the last minute, the center directors realize she didn’t ask the families of the victims for permission. This results in the cancelling of the exhibition. In this complex social setting, one Indigenous character in the play opines: “Our history has been stolen from us for 400 years…Expect some strong reactions.” Miranda replies: “I’m an artist! These women moved me as human beings, not Indigenous people.” The ending is equally clunky and unwieldy: Miranda painting an abstract piece in her studio while crying censorship as she laments: “Nowadays, to understand a black person, you have to be black! To understand a Jewish person, you have to be Jewish!”(24) The fact that Lepage and Mnouchkine put together such shows is not surprising: much of their work has had Orientalist and appropriative overtones in distinctive ways. Lepage’s Zulu Time (2002) had mainly white actors playing a cast of international and African characters; The Dragon Trilogy (1987, 1991, and 2010) was a six-hour epic that told the story of a Quebec family’s relationships with immigrants from China and Japan. The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1996) was set in Hiroshima and Terezin. As for the Théâtre du Soleil’s works: L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (1987) deals with India’s partition ; L’Histoire terrible et inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk roi du Cambodge (1985) retells the story of modern Cambodia through the eyes of the descendants of the victims of the Khmer Rouge ; Tambours sur la digue (1999) was a Bunraku play with human puppets that told the story of floods in China. Many of Lepage’s and Mnouchkine’s plays use borrowed forms to tell the story of the other under the guise of interculturalism. Without entering into a lengthy debate on interculturalism and its detractors, suffice it to say that interculturalism is no longer a valid excuse to appropriate the story of the “other” even if the masterpieces that Lepage and Mnouchkine produce regularly garner a lot of acclaim from international, mostly white audiences. Although the two prominent directors often claim that they are fighting injustices and speaking for disenfranchised groups, they continue to appropriate other cultural forms and speak for them. Can Lepage and Mnouchkine ignore the communities’ concerns and continue advocating for a post-racial, post-identitarian, world art in which the actor should be able to play anyone and become the other, as Mnouchkine says frequently? Is there any legitimacy for Lepage’s dismissal when he says: “When it is forbidden to identify with someone else, theatre becomes ‘meaningless’”?(25) One might ask: meaningless for whom? Is there ever an ethics of appropriation? Is there such a theatre that can be at the same time a guarantor of meaning making for disenfranchised communities, a safe, affirmative space for racialized or gendered identities without resorting to silencing, occupying, or appropriating? It is a fine balance between artistic freedom and the right to free speech and literal cultural theft—museums and collections are still full of pilfered art and artifacts by colonial powers (there would be no museums in the Western world without artefacts stolen from the colonies). White entertainers continue to profit off of Black musical styles while Black performers continue to be impeded by racism. I am not arguing for or against censoring appropriative work, nor am I claiming that these artists are being unfairly censored. I am simply exercising the questions that are missing in the debate around intercultural theatre. We need not ask if artists have the right to speak or represent any culture; rather, we should ask: What has intercultural theatre done to reduce the harm done by slavery, colonialism, othering, orientalism, stereotyping? Is casting a whole show on slavery without Black actors the postmodern version of blackface or a contemporary version of nineteenth century minstrel shows? Is doing an entire show on contact between Settlers and Indigenous people without any significant participation of the Indigenous community really that far removed from ethnological expositions , which literally put indigenous people as “savages” on display in the nineteenth century? Conversely, I am not justifying or condoning the censorship of these works, I’m proposing to look at them with a different lens that challenges their methods and interrogates the norms by which societies construct dominant culture and excludes, silences, or fetishizes the other. I will conclude this section with the words of Indigenous (Anishinaabe) writer and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm who sums it up perfectly in an article in the Globe and Mail : if the past 30 years have taught us anything, it is that there is a powerful, loud bunch of privileged white settlers who do not want to learn about us or from us. They spew out their impressions of our experience and double down when confronted with research and data and our first-hand accounts. They want to “debate” appropriation, on their terms and make these demands as if it has not been done before. As if the past 30 years of our work is meaningless because they are unaware and do not have to bother doing the research. For us, to continue to debate at this point is nothing but a type of busy work that pulls Indigenous writers and publishers away from what we ought to be doing – namely, writing, telling and publishing our own stories.(26) III. The Runner I conclude this article with a brief analysis of the events surrounding Christopher Morris’s play The Runner at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver 2024. The Runner had its first production at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in 2018, followed by six different productions in cities across Canada to much acclaim. It won three Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto’s awards for excellence in theatre) for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Production, and Outstanding Direction. The play was scheduled to open at the PuSh Festival in 2024. But in agreement with the playwright, the festival cancelled the play after it received an open letter of protest from a collective of Palestinian, Indigenous, and Jewish community members who expressed concerns about the play’s portrayal of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the current thorny context. The censorship of the play was complicated by another protest by Palestinian artist (based in England), Basel Zaraa, whose installation/performance Dear Laila was also scheduled to open at the same festival. Zaraa issued a statement that he would pull his performance if the festival went ahead with The Runner . The Runner tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox Z.A.K.A. member, Jacob, who decides to treat a young Palestinian woman instead of an injured Israeli soldier who the woman may have killed in an alleged attack. The Z.A.K.A. ( Zihuy Korbanot Ason , or Disaster Victim Identification) is an Israeli volunteer force comprised of paramedics and disaster relief workers who respond to scenes of violent attacks and collect the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they may receive proper Jewish religious burial. Jacob is torn between his duty to attend to Israeli victims and the decision he made to give the woman CPR even though she is suspected of carrying out the attack. The backlash against the play at PuSh was due in large part to the timing (a few months after the October 7 attacks) as audiences are more and more divided on the Israel-Palestine conflict. What interests me here is the consequences of the censorship as both artists and PuSh Festival put out a statement acknowledging the harm the play may cause to Palestinians and the disappointment and anger of some members of the community who supported Morris. Alongside Morris’s statement, saying that he is saddened and unsettled “when Canadian theatres cannot be a space for the public to engage in a dynamic exchange of ideas,”(27) a joint statement from the directors of PuSh, Gabrielle Martin and Keltie Forsyth, as well as Zaraa and Morris was issued. It reads: On January 2nd, we released a statement that expressed our hope that PuSh bring us together and inspire us to have complex and nuanced conversations; to challenge ourselves and each other not only to think differently, but to feel differently…Over the past two weeks, we have been in conversation with various members of our community. We have heard those who call to cancel The Runner, feeling it is a work that perpetuates the oppression of Palestinian people. We have heard the call to present it by those who feel the work provides an empathetic, and fundamentally humanist perspective. We have also heard from those who believe theatre is the right place for difficult conversations and want us to resist censorship. We have heard the call that now is not the right time…And we have felt the desire to uphold relationships with artists. We have felt the anger expressed to us. But most importantly, we have felt the words of Festival artist Basel Zaraa.(28) The festival also included a statement from Basel Zaraa: Dear Laila is an installation I created for my young daughter, which tells the story of our family’s ongoing trauma and struggle as Palestinians exiled by Israel, starting with the massacre in our village of Tantura in Palestine, in 1948. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, I cannot agree for Dear Laila to be shown alongside The Runner, a play which reinforces dehumanising narratives about Palestinians. Palestinians appear in The Runner almost exclusively as perpetrators of violence. While the Israeli characters are vividly portrayed, the Palestinian characters don't even have names, and barely speak…While many voices are welcome, artistic endeavors on this subject have a responsibility to reflect the reality that there is an occupier and an occupied.(29) To add to the mix, a statement from Christopher Morris was also issued. It reads: The Runner is a fictional story about an Israeli man who saves the life of a young Palestinian woman and is ostracized by his peers for doing so. It is an award-winning, one-person play, told from the singular perspective of a man who confronts his community’s fear and their dehumanization of others. Criticised by his own people, his empathy never wavers. For me, The Runner is a nuanced play about the need to see the humanity of others. Basel Zaraa's voice is new to Canadians and his installation Dear Laila—also nuanced & award-winning— focuses on his family experience as Palestinians exiled by Israel. It is an extraordinary, important work. Holding space for other viewpoints is essential, particularly at this moment of trauma and division. I sympathize with the PuSh Festival’s distress when Basel shared that he’d withdraw his work if The Runner remained in the festival; and when they arrived at their difficult decision to prioritize one artist’s voice over another. PuSh’s leadership has navigated this complicated situation with transparency and care. If removing The Runner is the only way Canadians can hear Basel’s crucial voice, then there is value in stepping aside…(30) In light of Zaraa’s and Morris’ statements, the festival concluded that the Runner should be cancelled and Zaraa’s performance should proceed: As a Festival, we respect Basel’s perspective. We will honour the artist whose work reflects their lived experience and cancel the presentations of The Runner by Canadian playwright Christopher Morris, whose work is rooted in years of research but who has no religious or cultural ties to the region. . . .At the same time, we believe it is a necessary choice to prioritize the work of an artist whose perspective is grossly underrepresented in Canadian theatre and performance culture.(31) I choose to cite these statements whole and in block by the artists and the PuSH Festival producers to show the level of engagement in complex and ambiguous censoring and how oppositions and dichotomy do not always play out in predictable ways. What The Runner case (and other recent cases) shows us is that the centers of power that govern censorship have become diffuse, which hints to what Gilles Deleuze called a “society of control” in his Post-Script on the Societies of Control . Deleuze delineates contemporary forms of control by government, socio-cultural and administrative regulations as operating according to different mechanisms than the conventional “normative” modes of (Foucault’s) “disciplinary powers.”(32) Deleuze’s thesis is particularly relevant for an analysis of contemporary theatre censorship in the era of networked communications, social media, and decentered power. I return to Jansen to elucidate how these diffuse centers of power in liberal democracies operate using covert censorship where there is, on the surface, a guarantee of free speech, which also becomes a commodity, but in practice, there is self-inflicted or socially sanctioned suppression that reshapes public discourse with new imperatives.(33) In this context we may not know clearly whose interests censorship serves, but we are saddled with its consequences on social and cultural ambits as the battleground is no longer between the “questionable material” and official entities, but in a network pitting various socio-cultural values and communities against each other. Conclusion Is this cancel culture or “call out” culture that produces decentered censorship a danger to theatrical freedom? Certainly, this form of censorship may run the risk of shutting down conversations that we expect the performing arts to foster in the current chilling climate of division, fear, and bias. Conversely, under-represented communities in the theatre have taken up the fight and protested against the structures that organize their exclusion in the art. Their “call outs” may have become more effective at combating racism, sexism, silencing, and marginalization, since neoliberal identity politics—the so-called “dialogue of cultures” and the “right of anyone to play anyone”—are no longer suitable to address the imbalance of power occasioned by unfettered representability. Irrevocably, questions of community censorship underline the dichotomy between the ethical and the questionable, the center and the margin, the represented and the under-represented, the mainstream and the absented. But more importantly, it underscores the reciprocal awareness of the falsity of these dichotomies, necessitating a third term. The third term is perhaps the collective “we” that the theatre can endorse in its gathering albeit irreconcilable space. References Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 128. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77 , ed. Colin Gordon (Harlow: Pearson, 1980), 119 Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54 (2015): 29. Anne Etienne and Chris Megson, eds, Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe: Silence and Protest , (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2024).7. In general, Canadian law considers obscene, work “that is beyond contemporary standards of tolerance” with exceptions for work that is deemed to “have artistic, literary, scientific, or educational value; material that does not extend beyond what serves the public good; material that is not beyond what is acceptable by community standards.” (The Canadian Penal Code, https://www.criminalcodehelp.ca/offences/sexual-offences/obscenity/# ). Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 14. Jansen, Censorship , 6-7. Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 5. For an in-depth discussion of this incident see Donia Mounsef, “The seen, the scene and the obscene: Commodity fetishism and corporeal ghosting,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no2 (2005): 243-261. The Quiet Revolution (La Révolution tranquille) marks Québec’s period of transformation, secularisation, and anti-religious influence. Inspired by the American Civil Rights Movement, it followed the election of the Liberals to power in the 1960s and the civil rights efforts to liberate education and culture from the hold exercised by the Catholic Church. “Le Conseil des Arts de Montréal exige du TNM la modification du texte jugé « sale, d’un langage ordurier, trop vulgaire ».” “Archives, Des fées dont la soif crée la controverse.” September 24, 2018. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1125808/fees-theatre-censure-quebec-histoire-archives Marilyne Brick. “La fonction sociale du théâtre. Étude de la polémique autour de l’affaire Les fées ont soif (1978).” 18. “Quebec playwright Robert Lepage promises ‘to do better’.” Global News , December 28, 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4799541/quebec-playwright-robert-lepage-says-controversial-slav-play-reworked/ “Quebec playwright Robert Lepage promises…” “Quebec playwright Robert Lepage promises…” Graeme Hamilton, “Montreal jazz fest comes under fire for a show based on slave songs — with a mostly white cast”, The National Post , July 8, 2018, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/montreal-jazz-fest-comes-under-fire-for-a-show-based-on-slave-songs-with-a-mostly-white-cast . “Robert Lepage commits to changes as controversial SLĀV musical returns to stage.” CBC News December 28, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/robert-lepage-slav-update-1.4960627v “Encore un fois, l’aventure se passera sans nous, les Autochtones,” Le Devoir, July 14, 2018, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/libre-opinion/532406/encore-une-fois-l-aventure-se-passera-sans-nous-les-autochtones . My translation: [“ Nous ne souhaitons pas censurer quiconque. Ce n’est pas dans nos mentalités et dans notre façon de voir le monde. Ce que nous voulons, c’est que nos talents soient reconnus, qu’ils soient célébrés aujourd’hui et dans le futur, car NOUS SOMMES ”]. "Lettre ouverte : Odeiwin, la réplique à Ariane Mnouchkine," Radio Canada July 14, 2018, https://ici.radio-canada.ca/espaces-autochtones/1112629/lettre-ouverte-odeiwin-la-replique-a-ariane-mnouchkine . The documentary “shows how, the 36 actors from 11 different countries, discover in their own stories an astonishing resonance with those of the natives. How, inspired by the cosmopolitanism of the troupe, Robert Lepage tries to get them to talk about their own stories through those of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. The documentary plunges into the heart of a theatrical creation in search of universality, but turned upside down by a media scandal even before its premiere.” “Lepage au Soleil: At the Origins of Kanata.” 2019. https://www.emafilms.com/en/film/lepage-au-soleil-at-the-origins-of-kanata/ Marianne Ackerman, “Robert Lepage’s controversial Kanata opens in Paris as a rehearsal.” Montreal Gazette . December 20, 2018, https://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment-life/article217779.html . Ackerman, “Robert Lepage’s controversial Kanata…” Robert Pickton (October 24, 1949 - May 31, 2024) known in Canada as the Butcher or Pig Farmer Killer, was a Canadian serial killer in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland who was accused of killing at least 49 women between 1995-2001, most of them Indigenous women. In 2007, he was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for 25 years. However, he was killed in prison by another inmate in 2024. Laura Cappelle, “Review: In Robert Lepage’s ‘Kanata,’ the Director, Too, Plays the Victim.” The New York Times , December 17, 2018. Rick Salutin, “Cultural Appropriation sees two Robert Lepage Productions Cancelled.” August 17, 2018. https://rabble.ca/columnists/cultural-appropriation-sees-two-robert-lepage-productions-cancelled/ Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, “The cultural appropriation debate is over. It's time for action,”, Globe and Mail , May 19, 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-cultural-appropriation-debate-is-over-its-time-for-action/article35072670/ Janet Smith, “Performing Arts Festival Cancels Israel-set The Runner after Palestinian artist's input.” January 11th, 2024, https://www.createastir.ca/articles/push-festival-cancels-the-runner . Smith, “Performing Arts Festival Cancels…” Smith, “Performing Arts Festival Cancels…” Smith, “Performing Arts Festival Cancels…” Smith, “Performing Arts Festival Cancels…” Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle,” Pourparlers , (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 3. Jansen, Censorship , 168. Bibliography Ackermann, Marianne. “Robert Lepage’s controversial Kanata opens in Paris as a rehearsal.” Montreal Gazette , December 20, 2018. https://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment-life/article217779.html Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri “The cultural appropriation debate is over. It's time for action.” Globe and Mail, May 19, 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-cultural-appropriation-debate-is-over-its-time-for-action/article35072670/ “Archives, Des fées dont la soif crée la controverse.” September 24, 2018. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1125808/fees-theatre-censure-quebec-histoire-archives Boucher, Denise. Les Fées ont soif . Montréal: Typo, 2008. ---. The Fairies Are Thirsty . Translated by Alan Brown. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1982. Brick, Marilyne. “La fonction sociale du théâtre. Étude de la polémique autour de l’affaire Les fées ont soif (1978)." https://www.erudit.org/fr/livres/lart-en-proces/proces-polemiques-art-quebec-france-1978-2021/947li.pdf Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54 (2015): 25–44. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative . New York: Routledge, 1997. “The Canadian Penal Code.” https://www.criminalcodehelp.ca/offences/sexual-offences/obscenity/# Cappelle, Laura. “Review: In Robert Lepage’s ‘Kanata,’ the Director, Too, Plays the Victim.” The New York Times . December 17, 2018. Deleuze, Gilles. “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle.” Pourparlers . Paris: Minuit, 1990. “Encore un fois, l’aventure se passera sans nous, les Autochtones.” Le Devoir, July 14, 2018. https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/libre-opinion/532406/encore-une-fois-l-aventure-se-passera-sans-nous-les-autochtones . Etienne, Anne and Chris Megson, eds. Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe: Silence and Protest . Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2024. Etienne, Anne and Graham Saunders, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship . Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality , New York: Pantheon, 1978. ---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. ---. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77 , Edited by Colin Gordon. Harlow: Pearson, 1980. Hamilton, Graeme. “Montreal jazz fest comes under fire for a show based on slave songs — with a mostly white cast”. The National Post , July 8, 2018. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/montreal-jazz-fest-comes-under-fire-for-a-show-based-on-slave-songs-with-a-mostly-white-cast Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 . New York: Zone Books, 1993. Jansen, Sue Curry. Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. “Lettre ouverte : Odeiwin, la réplique à Ariane Mnouchkine.” Radio Canada , July 14, 2018. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/espaces-autochtones/1112629/lettre-ouverte-odeiwin-la-replique-a-ariane-mnouchkine “Lepage au Soleil: At the Origins of Kanata.” EMA Films, 2019. https://www.emafilms.com/en/film/lepage-au-soleil-at-the-origins-of-kanata/ Michelet, Jules. La Sorcière. (First Published 1862.) Paris: Flammarion, 1993. Mounsef, Donia. “The seen, the scene and the obscene: Commodity fetishism and corporeal ghosting.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 2 (2005), 243-261. “Quebec playwright Robert Lepage promises ‘to do better’ after SLĀV controversy.” Global News , December 28, 2018. https://globalnews.ca/news/4799541/quebec-playwright-robert-lepage-says-controversial-slav-play-reworked/ “Robert Lepage commits to changes as controversial SLĀV musical returns to stage.” CBC News December 28, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/robert-lepage-slav-update-1.4960627v Salutin, Rick. “Cultural Appropriation sees two Robert Lepage Productions Cancelled.” August 17, 2018. https://rabble.ca/columnists/cultural-appropriation-sees-two-robert-lepage-productions-cancelled/ Smith, Janet. “Performing Arts festival cancels Israel-set The Runner after Palestinian artist's input.” January 11, 2024. https://www.createastir.ca/articles/push-festival-cancels-the-runner Footnotes About The Author(s) DONIA MOUNSEF (she/her), PhD, is Professor of drama and performance studies at the University of Alberta and Associate Dean, Access, Community, & Belonging (Faculty of Arts). A performance and media theorist, she is the author of Chair et révolte dans le théâtre de Bernard-Marie Koltès (l'Harmattan) and the co-editor of Toxic Media Ecologies: Critical Responses to the Cultural Politics of Planetary Crises (forthcoming) and “The Transparency of the Text” ( Yale French Studies ). She publishes widely on intermediality, visual culture, performance and politics. Her work appeared in Global Performance Studies, Contours Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Yale French Studies , Esprit Créateur , Yale Journal of Criticism , Women and Performance Journal , Féminismos , Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art , etc. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Peak Hour in the House by Blue Ka Wing at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China). The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Peak Hour in the House At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Blue Ka Wing Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country United Kingdom Language No Dialogue Running Time 7:19 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) About The Artist(s) https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Gegq0SmwG6MQfWj7imX2CZ5cSxTaZsU/edit Get in touch with the artist(s) bluekawing＠hotmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/bluekawing/, https://www.instagram.com/bluekawing/, https://www.youtube.com/@danzrainbow Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE This Play is Native Made Opalanietet Theater 6:30PM EST Friday, October 20, 2023 Torn Page, 435 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, USA Free Entry, Open To All Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio Content / Trigger Description: Opalanietet is a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribal nation of New Jersey. He is currently a PhD student at The Graduate Center at the City of University of New York (CUNY), and the Founder and Artistic Director of Eagle Project, www.eagleprojectarts.org . Upon graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Opalanietet has performed in workshops and productions at such renown New York theatrical institutions as the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, New York City Opera, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In November of 2020, Opalanietet made history by giving the first-ever Lenape Land Acknowledgement at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. Ash Marinaccio (Director) is a multidisciplinary documentarian working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Currently, Ash is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc, dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. Website: ashmarinaccio.com/ Instagram: @ashmarinaccio Eagle Project Founded by Opalanietet (Ryan Victor Pierce) in 2012, Eagle Project is the only Lenape-led performing arts company in New York City. Its mission is to explore the American identity through the performing arts and our Native American heritage, deciphering what exactly it means to be American while using the Native American experience as the primary means for which to conduct its investigation. Since its inception, Eagle Project has produced six full productions, numerous readings and workshops, and has collaborated with the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Rattlestick Theater, and Ashtar Theater in Palestine. For more information, visit www.eagleprojectarts.org . Photo by Ash Marinaccio www.eagleprojectarts.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

"In the whole world there is no king who has peacocks like unto my peacocks. But I will give them all to you." SALOME, OR THE CULT OF THE CLITORIS: A HISTORICAL PHALLUSY is a verbatim theatre piece devised from the transcripts of the 1918 libel trial of Noel Pemberton Billing and the text of Oscar Wilde’s Salome around which the trial revolved. Internationally renowned dancer Maud Allan was starring in a private performance of Salome, a play still banned for its radical depictions of female sexuality. In an elaborate publicity stunt before a reelection campaign, British MP, conspiracy theorist, and conservative firebrand Noel Pemberton Billing published a defamatory article titled “The Cult of the Clitoris,” accusing Allan of secretly conspiring with a ring of lesbian secret agents to sabotage the British war-effort. Allan was not simply performing in a play, Billing argued—she was seducing the wives of high-ranking British officers, and generally participating in the insidious feminization of the British public through art and culture. When Allen sued him for libel, he fought back publicly, in court—contending that not only had he not defamed Allen, but everything he had written was true. This performance will be a staged reading workshopping materials gathered from 500 pages of verbatim court transcript. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: A Historical Phallusy The Goat Exchange Theater English 90 Minutes 5:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All "In the whole world there is no king who has peacocks like unto my peacocks. But I will give them all to you." SALOME, OR THE CULT OF THE CLITORIS: A HISTORICAL PHALLUSY is a verbatim theatre piece devised from the transcripts of the 1918 libel trial of Noel Pemberton Billing and the text of Oscar Wilde’s Salome around which the trial revolved. Internationally renowned dancer Maud Allan was starring in a private performance of Salome, a play still banned for its radical depictions of female sexuality. In an elaborate publicity stunt before a reelection campaign, British MP, conspiracy theorist, and conservative firebrand Noel Pemberton Billing published a defamatory article titled “The Cult of the Clitoris,” accusing Allan of secretly conspiring with a ring of lesbian secret agents to sabotage the British war-effort. Allan was not simply performing in a play, Billing argued—she was seducing the wives of high-ranking British officers, and generally participating in the insidious feminization of the British public through art and culture. When Allen sued him for libel, he fought back publicly, in court—contending that not only had he not defamed Allen, but everything he had written was true. This performance will be a staged reading workshopping materials gathered from 500 pages of verbatim court transcript. Content / Trigger Description: Co- Directed by Mitchell Polonsky and Chloe Claudel Cast: ROBERTA COLINDREZ, PETE SIMPSON, PAUL LAZAR, CHLOE CLAUDEL Lighting: Finn Bamber THE GOAT EXCHANGE is an international ensemble making crazy potatoes theater and live art since 2016. We work with a wide variety of source materials from classic plays to bold new writing, to films, poetry, prose, verbatim historical transcripts and found texts, often pulling from obscure, forgotten corners of history. Our work is interdisciplinary and deeply collaborative, incorporating wide-ranging influences from opera, dance, literature, film, vaudeville, slapstick, pop-culture, and public art. We have developed over 20 productions both in traditional theaters and in a range of site-specific venues, from museum galleries to swimming pools to football stadiums. Recent work includes DEADCLASS, OHIO (Ice Factory), MEMONICA (HERE Arts Center), JASON (Vault Festival) and 7 BLOWJOBS (La Mama). www.thegoatexchange.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Philip Wiles Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF APPLIED IMPROVISATION: LEADING, COLLABORATING, AND CREATING BEYOND THE THEATRE. Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure. London: Methuen Drama, 2018; Pp. 304. More than forty years since Keith Johnstone published Impro and more than sixty years after Viola Spolin’s seminal Improvisation for the Theater , there remains a paucity of literature concerned with either “impro” or “improv.” In this context, the scholarly rigor in Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre , a collection of essays by practitioners/facilitators as edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure, is refreshing. “Applied Improvisation,” here, refers to the use of the theories, techniques, and teachings of Spolin and Johnstone (and quite a bit of Augusto Boal) as applied outside of traditional theatrical performance contexts — often with the goal of training intrapersonal skills. While it might commonly be considered a subcategory of the broader “applied theatre,” an explicitly stated goal of this collection “is to establish AI as a field of study worthy of independent investigation” (3). While the viability of “AI” as an acronym for something other than Artificial Intelligence may be questionable in a post-ChatGPT world, the book does provide a foundation for further inquiries and can serve as a resource for practitioners and educators. As in the practice of improvisation, this collection emerges from the disparate contributions of a diverse set of practitioners and scholars. The book begins with a foreword by improvisers Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, and an introduction by editors Dudeck and McClure that gives a brief history of the theory and practice of improvisation. Dudeck returns in the concluding chapter, moderating a conversation between comedian Neil Mullarkey and creativity and learning expert Keith Sawyer. The body of the book consists of autoethnographic essays; each chapter functions essentially as a postmortem of an applied improvisation project reflecting on successes, limitations and discoveries. Except for the introduction and conclusion, every chapter ends with a “workbook” detailing instructions for between one to three of the exercises referenced in that chapter. Application remains the editors’ central concern, and thus the book is tailored for practice in the field. The collection is divided into four parts that highlight the diversity of this field. The first, “Bringing Brands Back to Life,” consists of two essays describing how improvisation techniques were used to develop intrapersonal skills amongst service workers at a Pacific Northwest fast food chain, and to enliven market research in Karachi, Pakistan. Part 2, “Resilience and Connections,” looks at applications of improvisation in more humanitarian contexts: training resilience amongst Baltimorean oncology nurses, juvenile refugees in San Antonio, and in the wake of a typhoon in the Philippines. Part 3, “Leadership Development,” returns to a corporate environment with contributions describing how improvisation was used to modify the management culture at Tiffany & Co., coach executives in leadership skills in Hong Kong, and shake-up the organization of a real estate agency in Portland, OR. Part 4 “Higher Education,” includes chapters detailing the use of applied improvisation within the academy, including to facilitate conflict resolution at Portland State University, social justice initiatives at the Catholic University of America and communication with non-academics at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis and the Indiana University School of Medicine. The contributors to the collection are all knowledgeable about and committed to the theory and practice of applied improvisation. However, readers should be forewarned that many of the authors have continuing relationships with their corporate clients and sometime their prose can slip into what is essentially ad-copy. “Charles Lewis Tiffany would have been amazed that 174 years after founding his stationery and small goods store in New York City, the name Tiffany & Co. would still be synonymous with quality, craftsmanship, and extravagance…” (141). That passage from Caitlin McClure’s “Tiffany & Co. Says Yes, And,” comes from one of the stronger contributions to the collection, despite a handful of sentences that read like advertisements. In her case study, McClure details how she used techniques and exercises developed by Johnstone as part of a broader effort to shift Tiffany’s management team from a theory of an “organizational culture” to an “organizational climate .” While such a distinction might appear inane, McClure ably identifies how this shift in management theory mirrors the practice of improvisation and illustrates how her workshops helped to facilitate a meaningful shift in behavior at the company. It is a highlight of the collection. Both McClure and Dudeck are heavily influenced by Johnstone—Dudeck has written a biography of Johnstone and is his literary executor—but other contributors draw on the work of Spolin, Boal and other improvisation theorists, often mixing and matching across these different and distinct traditions of improvisation. As scholarship, the book misses an opportunity to flesh out these separate genealogies and explicate how discrete strains of improvisation practice circulate and intertwine in contemporary workshops. Instead Dudeck and McClure flatten history and blur the distinctions between Spolin, Johnstone and Boal. They argue that the terms “impro” (the title of Johnstone’s book) and “improv” (closely associated with Chicago theatres like The Second City) are interchangeable (10). Neither their reasoning, nor the Facebook survey they marshal to support their claim is convincing. It is disappointing that a collection that aims to establish a new field of study would inadvertently erase complexity from that same field. Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre will interest practitioners of applied improvisation who are looking to see the cultural, practical and global range of the field as well as educators who want to demonstrate the uses of improvisation beyond theatre. The contributing essays are all written in a readable style and function as essays independent of the collection; this makes the volume easily digestible by undergraduate students. The exercises at the end of every chapter are thoroughly explained and should be easy to reproduce in studio classrooms. For these reasons and more, this volume very well may establish itself as a mainstay on the shelves of improvisation instructors. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre. Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure. London: Methuen Drama, 2018. Footnotes About The Author(s) Philip Wiles is a scholar/actor/improviser from Houston, Texas who comes to the CUNY Graduate Center by way of Oklahoma and Los Angeles. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he maintains his improv practice in the various improv comedy theatres sprinkled through the city. He holds a BFA in Drama from the University of Oklahoma, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! 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Watch Jesus and The Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Jesus and The Sea At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Ricarda Alvarenga Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film showcase) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language non-verbal Running Time 4 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture. About The Artist(s) They are a professor in the Dance undergraduate program at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais; a Ph.D. candidate in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and hold a master's degree from the Dance Graduate Program at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) in Salvador, Bahia. Their work mobilizes actions and compositions in performance, contemporary dance, photography, video, installations, and writing — inferring and interfering with life as a work of art. Get in touch with the artist(s) provisoriocorpo@gmail.com and follow them on social media @ricardalvarenga Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska discuss their work, past and present. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Nature Theater of Oklahoma Theater English 60 minutes 4:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska discuss their work, past and present. Content / Trigger Description: Discussion about their work Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska began their collaboration in 1997, and together founded Nature Theater of Oklahoma in 2006. The company is committed to “making the work they don’t know how to make,” an approach yielding new amalgams of opera, dance, and theatre, combined with popular culture and humor. Their work has been commissioned by theaters and festivals around the world, including Rhurtriennale, Hebbel Theater, Wiener Festwochen, Burgtheater Wien, Mousonturm, Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Festival d'Avignon, Kampnagel Hamburg, and Salzburger Festspiele. Copper and Liska have each been recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts. They have received two OBIE Awards for their work on No Dice and Life and Times, and were recipients of the Salzburg Young Directors Award in 2008 for Romeo and Juliet. In 2018 they received the Nestroy Speical Prize in Theater for their work on Die Kinder der Toten. www.oktheater.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Karl Kippola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage American Tragedian Karl Kippola By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth. By Daniel J. Watermeier. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015; Pp. 464. More has been written on Edwin Booth than any other American actor. Three popular biographies lionize Booth in the late-nineteenth century. Another four in the mid-twentieth century, one of which ( Prince of Players , 1955) was even made into a movie, perpetuate his tragic legacy. Charles Shattuck’s several, more scholarly, works on Booth, beginning in the late 1960s, revived interest. In the last quarter century, fascination with Booth has grown: Gene Smith’s American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth and L. Terry Oggel’s Edwin Booth: A Bio-Bibliography (both in 1992), Nina Titone’s My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy (2010), Arthur W. Bloom’s Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History (2013), the more popularly focused Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth (2005) by James Cross Giblin and The Assassin’s Brother: The Tragedies of Edwin Booth (2013) by Rebecca Wallace. With Between Actor and Critic: Selected Letters of Edwin Booth and William Winter (1971), Daniel J. Watermeier established himself as a formidable archivist and an authority on Edwin Booth. American Tragedian , dedicated to the memory of his mentor Shattuck, represents the culmination of Watermeier’s lifework on Booth and the American theatre. He effectively contextualizes the period, details the events, and explores the strengths, limitations, and temperament of “the last truly great American tragedian and Shakespearean actor” (362). Several recent works primarily and reductively view Edwin through the lens of his infamous brother. American Tragedian addresses the assassination in only six pages and wisely keeps the spotlight on the titular Booth. When Edwin returned to the stage a year after Lincoln’s death forced an early retirement, “It was as if the American psyche, scarred by years of war and then the shocking assassination of an esteemed president, needed to invest its collective suffering into a single individual. . . . Booth’s personal suffering . . . became emblematic of the nation’s suffering” (127). Watermeier honors the inescapable impact of John Wilkes’ act, but unwavering focus on Edwin encourages a more complex understanding of both the actor and the country. Previous Booth biographies often privileged limited aspects of his career, but Watermeier’s study is remarkably comprehensive. Readers finally experience Booth’s complete story, with scrupulous accuracy and documentation. Watermeier is at his best when he contextualizes and analyzes, fully capitalizing on the forty-year relationship with his subject and sources. Edwin as Hamlet wore his father’s portrait on a chain around his neck. When Watermeier posits, “It was as if his own father was King Hamlet, a tangible memento stimulating a complex emotional memory that fueled the believability of Edwin’s performance” (22), we receive genuine insight not only into Booth, but also into an acting process decades ahead of its time. Watermeier skillfully contextualizes the complex and often contradictory responses to Booth in his analysis of the “Joint Star” tour with Lawrence Barrett (a pair he convincingly identifies as pioneering “theatrical capitalists” [331]), which closely coincided with President Grover Cleveland’s own “Good Will Tour.” Cleveland had chosen not to intercede in the impending executions of anarchist assassins convicted in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, and “against these local events, Booth as Brutus [in Julius Caesar ]—whether heroic martyr or tragically misguided conspirator—may have had a special resonance with Chicago playgoers” (322), polarized in their response. If the book has a weakness, it lies in synthesis and interpretation. Too often Watermeier merely reports weekly theatres, roles, and box-office receipts, in lieu of complex analysis. Watermeier details the powerful connection that Booth shared with his audiences—an affinity that sometimes reached the level of obsession. Booth’s physical beauty, combined with his passionate and soulful portrayals, especially fascinated a number of young women and men who returned dozens of times to view his performances, to connect with him on a personal level, and to write voluminously and fanatically in their attempts to comprehend, if not demystify, his magical power. While Watermeier reports the fascination, he never truly grapples with the reasons behind it. Booth was born with a lucky caul, yet tragedy clung to him. Booth entered the profession when the first generation of serious American actors were in decline. Criticized for lacking tragic power, he aspired to a refined and intellectual approach that fortuitously matched temperament with the soon-to-be-dominant middle class and the sacred domain of the cultural elite. Booth consciously sought to elevate and ennoble audiences through repertoire selection, realistic stagecraft, and popular publishing of his acting texts. He built and managed Booth’s Theatre, arguably the finest in the world, to showcase his artistic ambition; yet, he was undone by bad choices and timing: “He did clearly put his trust too readily into the wrong partner and financial advisors, and, equally damaging, he overestimated his ability through hard work and substantial income to control the situation and unforeseen events—principally, the Panic of 1873” (175). In choosing his title, and in the focus of his study, Watermeier sees Booth as tragic, and tragedy did follow the actor in the death of his father, two wives, and infant son, as well as a crippling carriage accident, John Wilkes’ shooting of Lincoln, and an assassination attempt on his own life. Yet Watermeier frequently reveals playfulness, and often deliberate anti-intellectualism, in Booth’s private correspondence and poetry. Booth said of himself, “I was always of a boyish spirit. . . . But there was always an air of melancholy about me that made me seem much more serious than I ever really was” (358). Watermeier lets Booth’s self-assessment pass without comment or analysis, yet this contradiction between the man and his public perception seems key to a complete picture. While somewhat conservative and traditional, American Tragedian remains scrupulously researched and documented, accessibly written, and complete in scope. This comprehensive biography presents the clearest picture yet of its endlessly compelling and maddeningly elusive hero. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Karl Kippola American University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 By Steve Earnest Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Editor’s Statement I am very grateful for the opportunity to continue the great work begun by Marvin Carlson with his foundation of EUROPEAN STAGES (formerly WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES) in 1969. Devoted to the analysis and review of theatre in both eastern and western Europe, EUROPEAN STAGES remains one of the USA’s most important storehouses of European theatre history. Because of the emphasis on unique performances, directors, actors and styles of production, this publication focuses directly on the art of performance itself, with less emphasis on theoretical or external issues. It’s a great honor to take over this role from Dr. Carlson who has been, arguably, America’s most prominent theatre scholar for many decades. This edition, the first issue of EUROPEAN STAGES published in Spring/Summer since the period of COVID, includes articles that discuss productions and artists from Italy, France, Germany, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Spain. Just as WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES featured many of my early publications, I also hope to feature new and early career writers in addition to established writers from major world institutions in order to consider work that is produced or presented in Europe. To that end, this edition features work by both previously unpublished artist/writers in addition to other individuals who have regularly contributed to the journal. The Segal Center views it’s many journal publications as important centers for the preservation of knowledge about world performance. Many of these records of plays, musicals, operas, dance works, and other uncharacterized works of performance are not recorded in any other medium, therefore these records of works serve as primary information about the history of performance in our world. Commissioning, obtaining and maintaining these precious records of performance is central to the Center’s mission and I am excited to be a part of the continuation of this great task. It's wonderful to feature two works by outgoing Editor, Dr. Carlson in this issue and we look forward to publishing many of his works in the years to come. I am looking forward to creating two issues each year in the future and we are working to create an even greater profile for the journal as we move forward. Steve Earnest, Professor of Theatre Coastal Carolina University Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Timmy is being bullied at school because of his favorite backpack—a bright pink backpack full of little ponies from his favorite TV series. Daniel and Irene try to confront the brutal school bullying that Timmy endures. A school that protects its bullies and a couple that tries to do the best for their child will witness how Timmy escapes to an imaginary universe to protect himself from the insufferable reality. With Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton Directed by Kimi Ramírez Written by Paco Bezerra Translated by Marion Peter Holt PRELUDE Festival 2023 READING The Little Pony Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton, Kimi Ramírez Theater English 60 Mins 4:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Timmy is being bullied at school because of his favorite backpack—a bright pink backpack full of little ponies from his favorite TV series. Daniel and Irene try to confront the brutal school bullying that Timmy endures. A school that protects its bullies and a couple that tries to do the best for their child will witness how Timmy escapes to an imaginary universe to protect himself from the insufferable reality. With Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton Directed by Kimi Ramírez Written by Paco Bezerra Translated by Marion Peter Holt This reading is in partnership with, and to benefit, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Healing TREE. It is done in cooperation with Theatre Authority Inc. Healing TREE (Trauma Resources, Education & Entertainment) advocates healing from abuse and trauma rather than coping with the symptoms, in order to transform lives and, ultimately, society. They achieve this by providing trauma-focused resources and education and by producing and partnering with relevant film, television, and theatre, empowering the social change necessary to create a healing movement. Website: www.healingtreenonprofit.org Facebook: Facebook.com/healingtreenonprofit.org Instagram: @healingtreeorg You can learn about Healing TREE’s life-saving programming and their current need for support, as well as make a donation, here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/healingtreeorg Content / Trigger Description: Marissa Ghavami (they/she) is an Iranian-American, queer artist, advocate and creator based in NYC. Most recently, they played Khalilah, opposite Tony Winner KO (Karen Olivo), in a workshop of Siluetas, part of 4xLatiné Off-Broadway. Up next on stage, they can be seen as Jessie in Divine Riot’s Cry It Out this November. Film/TV highlights include starring in the feature film The Gift of Christmas, alongside Academy Award Nominee Bruce Davison, and roles in Paramount’s Not Fade Away, with James Gandolfini, and on CBS’s Without A Trace; as well as singing on NBC’s It’s Showtime at the Apollo. Marissa has also sung at Joe’s Pub (alongside Tony Nominee L Morgan Lee), Birdland (alongside Academy Award Winner and Tony Nominee Ariana DeBose) and 54 Below. Voiceover/Commercial/Print highlights include Audible, McDonald's, Ford, JCPenney, Belvedere, PepsiCo, Girl Scout Cookies and KFC. Marissa co-produced the feature film Mass, starring Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs and Reed Birney. Mass premiered at Sundance, was acquired by Bleecker Street, had a theatrical release, won the Robert Altman Award, was a Gotham, Critics Choice and BAFTA nominee and is now streaming. They produced and co-wrote the short film Silk, directed by John Magaro (Carol, The Big Short), an Official Selection at the Academy Award Qualifying Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival, among others. Marissa is the Founding Executive + Artistic Director of the nonprofit Healing TREE (Trauma Resources, Education & Entertainment). They are a national public speaker, a healing trauma-focused coach for artists and a trauma consultant for productions. They are a Queer Writer Fellow at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an Artists Striving To End Poverty (now Arts Ignite) Fellow and participant in the Artist As Citizen Conference at Juilliard. They are a Founding Company Member of Divine Riot, a new theatre and film company that defies convention. They are also an avid meditator, vegan and cat parent. AEA, SAG-AFTRA. www.marissaghavami.com @marissaghavami www.healingtreenonprofit.org @healingtreeorg www.divineriot.org @adivineriot Montgomery Sutton (he/him) is an actor, director, playwright, and educator. LONDON: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s Globe); OFF-BROADWAY: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New York Classical Theatre); REGIONAL: One Man, Two Guvnors (Florida Studio Theater), Oswald (Casa Manana), Shakespeare in Love, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest (Shakespeare Dallas), Henry V (Cape Fear Regional Theatre), Measure for Measure, Richard III, Love’s Labours Lost, King Lear (Trinity Shakespeare Festival), Pericles, The Winter’s Tale (Seven Stages Shakespeare Company), Booth, Gruesome Playground Injuries (Second Thought Theatre), Tomorrow Come Today (Undermain Theatre), The Temperamentals (Uptown Players), On the Eve (Theater Three). FILM/NEW MEDIA: 1865 podcast; Skindiving; Trouble with Women. He has directed for the Gilbert Theater, Rude Grooms, Junior Players, Seven Stages Shakespeare Company, and written and directed several short films including Between the Lines (winner, Best Screenplay; nominee, Best Director). His plays and adaptations include Advent (semi-finalist, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), Ruins, two versions of Antigone (verse and modern), Oedipus, Broken Water, Your Colonel, and Moonlight Gospel which have been produced and developed with the Gilbert Theater, Kitchen Dog Theater, Metropolitan Playhouse, EBE Ensemble, and Salt Pillar Productions. He is on faculty for the Atlantic Theater Company/NYU and has taught for the Shakespeare Theater Association, World Shakespeare Congress, Shakespeare Dallas, the Gilbert Theatre, Junior Players, Dallas Children’s Theater, Cape Fear Regional Theatre, New York Shakespeare Company, and Rude Grooms. He received his BFA from NYU / Atlantic Acting School and was a member of the International Actors Fellowship at Shakespeare’s Globe. montgomerysutton.com Paco Bezerra is one of Spain’s most exciting dramatists. His awards include National Literary Drama Award in 2009, The Calderon de la Barca National Theatre Prize in 2007, and the Eurodram Award 2014. Paco's plays and writings have been translated into several languages and are being produced all over the globe. He trained as an actor at William Layton Theater Laboratory Madrid and read Theatre Science and Dramaturgy at the Royal School of Dramatic Art of Madrid (RESAD). Marion Peter Holt (1924-2021) remains a leading translator of contemporary Spanish and Catalan theatre. His translations have been staged internationally and by regional and university theatres throughout the United States. A member of the Real Academia Española since 1986, he was an emeritus professor of The City University of New York and visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and Barcelona’s Institut del Teatre. Dr. Holt’s many translations include publications by The Martin E. Segal Center. Kimberly “Kimi” Ramírez is a professor, playwright, and critic with an M.F.A. in Playwriting and a Ph.D. in Theatre & Performance whose writing has been published and presented internationally. They are affiliated with The City University of New York, Speranza Theatre Company, Macondo Writers Workshop, Lucille Lortel Awards, Talkin' Broadway, and are a member of the Dramatists Guild. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Academia and NYC Performance Tomi M Tsunoda, Daniel Irizarry, Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot 4:30PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? Featuring Tomi M Tsunoda , Daniel Irizarry , Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot. Content / Trigger Description: Tomi Tsunoda has spent most of her career as a director, deviser, designer, and producer of independent performance, developing sustainable systems for performing artists to self-produce work outside of institutional contexts. This included the creation of Breedingground Productions, which shepherded more than 200 projects over the course of ten years. She is one of 17 artists worldwide who are certified in all levels and disciplines to teach Soundpainting, the universal sign language for live composition created by jazz composer Walter Thompson. Her current projects combine both practical and critical work in dramaturgy, progressive arts pedagogy, fiber art, literary non-fiction, eco-philosophy, and facilitation, putting these fields into conversation as a way to address sustainable practice and systemic change. Tomi is currently serving as Chair of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having previously served as Director for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Head of the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, Education Director for the Powerhouse Training Program at Vassar College, and as faculty and guest artist at several additional schools and conservatories. Daniel Irizarry is a Puerto Rican born International Experimental Theatre director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. His work embraces highly stylized visceral acting, pataphysics, a celebration of GERMS & consensual audience participation. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater and full time Lecturer at MIT Music & Theatre Arts. In his most recent work, he directed and performed the final project for the historic closing of the New Ohio Theatre titled, ‘Ultra Left Violence’ written by Robert Lyons. Other notable credits directed and performed; The Maids by Jose Rivera (New York Times Critics pick); UBU by Adam Szymkowicz (Time Out NY Critics pick), world premiere of Busu by Mishima at Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, YOVO by Robert Lyons in NYC, Poland, Cuba, South Korea & My Onliness by Robert Lyons at New Ohio Theatre in NYC (One of the best performances Off-Broadway in 2022 by Theatermania and nominated for a 2023 HOLA award for best Outstanding performance by a lead actor. Over his career he has directed, performed and taught in Turkey, India, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Italy, Romania, UK, Colombia, among others. Most notably at: Folkwang University in Germany, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. He holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, a BA in Drama at The Universidad de Puerto Rico where he has returned to teach at both. Solana Chehtman is a cultural producer and engagement curator born in Buenos Aires and based in New York City since 2012. She is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she supports artists with unrestricted funding and professional development through the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, as well as in their long term career stewardship via the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program. In the past decade, Solana has partnered with a wide range of cultural organizations across the performing and visual arts to create new opportunities for artists and avenues for public participation in the arts. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as inaugural Director of Creative Practice and Social Impact at The Shed, and as Vice President of Public Engagement at Friends of the High Line. Solana received a BA in international studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and holds an EdM in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was an adjunct Professor at the MA in Arts Administration at Baruch College, City University of New York between 2018 and 2021. Alexis Jemal, LCSW, LCADC, MA, JD, PhD, associate professor at Silberman School of Social Work-Hunter College, is a critical-radical so(ul)cial worker (practitioner, scholar, researcher, educator), social entrepreneur, and artivist who specializes in racial justice, radical healing, wellness, and liberation. Dr. Jemal grounds her research and scholarship in her Critical Transformative Potential Framework that develops critical consciousness and taps into radical imagination to convert consciousness into action that heals and transforms people, relationships, and environments to support everyone’s humanity to the fullest extent possible. This framework guides the development and implementation of multi-(from the molecular to the macro) level, holistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing. She teaches courses at the master’s level in clinical practice, critical social work practice, and human behavior, and at the doctoral level in arts-based, participatory action, intervention research and public scholarship. Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. As a theatre director, she co-founded La Troupe (Harvard) and Le Théâtre de l’homme qui marche (Paris, France). She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014) and Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021). She is a coleader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. She has also published articles on contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the under- and unrepresented. Photo credits: Tomi Tsunoda. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Daniel Irizarry. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Solana Chehtman. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Alexis Jemal. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria By Alex Lefevre Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The Puzzle is a new original musical with music and lyrics by Alex Lefevre, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University and libretto by Marybeth Berry, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of South Carolina: Lancaster and received its European premiere in the Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy as a part of the La MaMa Spoleto Open curated by La MaMa Umbria International in June 2025. The musical debuted in a developmental reading at Coastal Carolina University as a part of their new works series in May 2024. This production in Spoleto, Italy marked the first fully staged production of the musical. The Puzzle takes place in Berlin, Maryland and tells the story of Jenna Adams, her mother Nanette, her six-year-old son Jake, and his two aunts Erica and Susan. In the opening number, “One Day”, the characters go through their daily routines until Jake’s father and Jenna’s husband, Scott, is killed in a car crash. Jake, overwhelmed by grief, is unresponsive until Jenna creates a song to accompany an old puzzle of Scott’s which serves as a breakthrough for the young boy. Nanette, the town busybody, sets up Jenna on a blind date with Taylor, a florist new to town. All goes well until Nanette suddenly bursts into their date and proclaims that her dog Mitzi has been injured by one of Jake’s puzzle pieces striking her in the eye. As a result, Nanette throws the puzzle in the trash, sending Jenna and Taylor on a date in the dumpster to successfully retrieve it. At the town’s fall festival, Jake begins to play the puzzle song by ear at the keyboard which Jenna attributes to the musical ability of her late husband and seeing it as a sign to move on. Through the course of the song “I Can Teach You”, Jenna and Susan convince Erica to teach piano lessons to Jake and over a decade passes highlighting major events including Taylor’s proposal to Jenna, the death of Mitzi, and Jake’s acceptance into NYU. At the end of Act I, it is revealed that Susan will be taking Jake to New York City and moving there herself as a part of a separation from Erica. Act II begins with a married Taylor and Jenna now working together at the flower shop and Jenna sharing a secret passion: writing children’s books. Jake, a sophomore music major at NYU, is unsure that he wants to continue studying music as he feels he is living in the shadow of his deceased father. Susan travels with Jake to Maryland for spring break and is served divorce papers by Erica. At an explosive family dinner, chaos ensues when the impending divorce is revealed to the family along with Jake’s plan to take a gap year in Africa. Erica and Jenna storm out with Susan and Jake following behind. Susan takes responsibility for leaving and the couple vow to find a way forward, while Jake apologizes to Jenna who gives her unconditional love to her son. In the final scene, five years have passed, and Jake is now married with a child on the way. Erica and Susan are living in New York together, Jenna is a successful writer, Taylor has hired a new store manager, and Nanette has tragically passed away. Susan speaks at the opening of her latest art exhibit based on her family, gathered in support, entitled “The Puzzle”. Marybeth Berry and I began writing The Puzzle in January of 2021. COVID-19 had crippled the theatre industry, and the world, and writing this show became our creative escape. We would meet weekly on Zoom to work and create weekly writing goals. We would start by discussing the characters and what we would ideally like to happen during a scene. The next meeting, we would read through the newly written scene, and I would choose moments that I felt would “sing” and began work on crafting a song. As our show is entitled The Puzzle , we attempted to shine the light equally on our different characters so that it was a true ensemble piece with each one of the characters representing a piece of our figurative puzzle. In the words of librettist Marybeth Berry, “It had been years of laboring to create the characters, the relationship dynamics and ultimately the story. Similar to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Puzzle focuses on life, loss, grief, love pain, triumph and survival. We can all see ourselves in this piece and we can all relate to a character, relationship, or simple moment because, in the words of the show, ‘it’s often in the mundane that we find the momentous.’” Songs and scenes were constantly being tweaked but by the start of 2024, we had a strong working draft of the libretto and score. Coastal Carolina University selects a new musical every May to be developed as a reading in their New Works Series and The Puzzle was honored to be the selection for 2024. Adam Pelty, Associate Professor of Theatre, helmed the reading as the director and Micah Young was the Music Director. Through the course of one week of rehearsals, new songs and scenes were implemented and seeds of ideas for the Spoleto production were planted. In the original CCU reading, the character of Scott had already passed as we started our prologue. Pelty suggested that there would be great power if the audience could experience the death first-hand. After being accepted into the Spoleto Festival, a new opening number was written with the car crash and funeral embedded in the opening number. While the original lyrics of the opening number “One Day” were kept for the start with each of the characters describing their everyday routines, it now ends after the funeral with the characters singing lines like “One Day is just like the others until one day it’s not” and “One day I will wash his coffee mug, right now I can’t put it away”. For the production in Spoleto, three new songs were implemented as well as significant cuts to the book to streamline our storytelling. While The Puzzle runs two hours and 30 minutes including a fifteen-minute intermission, with our Friday night Spoleto performance starting at 9:30pm, ensuring that we were maintaining our running time was essential. Reflecting on the process of putting up this production, Shelby Sessler who played Erica says “Watching pieces get moved, added, and cut from the reading to the production itself was fascinating to watch. We were experimenting with how each scene read even up to our opening to find the right tone to tell the story. It felt like a whirlwind of creativity.” There was no better place to experience this whirlwind than La MaMa Umbria. Full Cast of The Puzzle La MaMa Umbria is described on their website as a “non-profit cultural center and artist residence founded in 1990 by legendary theatre pioneer, Ellen Stewart.” Even with seeing all the photos available online, nothing can prepare one for the sheer beauty of this remarkable theatre space. Lisa Neal Baker who played the role Nanette shares “Every time we would return from an outing or a day of work, it felt like we were walking back into a serene fairytale- flowers blooming, birds chirping, butterflies everywhere with majestic mountains as your backdrop. With only eight days to come together to put this incredibly touching story together, having the calm, quiet serenity of La MaMa made it that much easier to focus, create and develop our characters and how their individual stories touched each other.” Actor Zach Hathaway, who played Jake, had previously performed at La MaMa Umbria in another production with Marybeth Berry. He states “Returning to La MaMa Umbria for the second time has been an incredibly special and fulfilling experience. There’s something truly magical about being in a space so deeply committed to nurturing artists and celebrating the craft of performance. Ever since my first time here three years ago, I’ve longed to return to that creative atmosphere, where collaboration and artistic exploration are at the heart of everything.” The staff of La MaMa Umbria ensured that our experience would be a positive one. They welcomed us with open arms, provided phenomenal meals with ingredients often plucked out of their on-site garden, and even splashed our bus with buckets of water as we pulled out of their driveway as a symbol of safe travel and hopefully an eventual return. Kenley Juback, who played Susan, echoes this sentiment: “Not only is the scenery irrevocably beautiful but so are the people. The love, friendship and artistry that finds you here from the La Mama Umbria staff is rare.” In fact, our performances of The Puzzle were filled with staff from La MaMa Umbria who came to support our work and promote new musical theatre. Known primarily for producing experimental theatre, La MaMa Umbria embraced our show in an astounding way. Director Jason Trucco, who was also in residence at La MaMa Umbria with us stated “I think the most experimental thing that can be done at an experimental theatre today is a Broadway musical.” Performing in a festival brings its own set of unique challenges, especially when it comes to the technical aspects of performance. In order to create the different locations, present in The Puzzle , we decided to turn to projections to set the scenes in addition to basic set pieces. According to Hans Boeschen, our stage manager and technical director, “The idea of projections arose from the challenge of visualizing the final scene which reveals an art gallery. The idea of this gallery installment is so unique that a projection was really our only option to capture the symbolism and heart of the moment. Using various A.I. tools, I worked to create backgrounds that not only helped identify the setting, but, hopefully, reflected the aspects of the characters and underlying themes of the book.” The use of A.I to create backgrounds was not a simple process as rarely did the computer outputs match what we as a team had in mind artistically. However, there were some happy accidents that occurred in the creation of the projections. Boeschen explains “Unintended interpretations from the computer could lead to some interesting deeper symbology. For example, Susan’s character struggles to connect with her art early in the production. I had asked A.I. to include blank canvases lying against the wall. Instead, it gave me an image where all the canvases were turned away and all we saw were their backs, almost as though Susan couldn’t bear to look at them.” The final projection of Susan’s art gallery display proved be the most difficult. No matter how precise the description we provided the computer, it could not produce anything with the necessary heart to culminate our piece. In the end, it was the original paintings of our cast member Shelby Sessler who played Erica, that we were able to scan into the computer to create the final images of Susan’s art instillation. Even with a simplified set, transitions between scenes still proved to be a challenge. We initially had our actors dragging tables and chairs from backstage before and after every number. Not only did this prove to be laborious, but also time consuming. Director Jared McNeill, also in residence at La MaMa Umbria, came to one of our early runs and provided the suggestion that we leave the set pieces on the side of the stage and allow our audience to see the actors putting together the set as they would put together the pieces of a puzzle. This brilliant suggestion not only helped us to facilitate our transitions in a more efficient way, but it also aided in our storytelling. Our actors began to see the transitions not just as necessary stage business but as extensions of their characters. Actor Alex Cowsert who played Taylor says “It was important for me to continue the story forward when assisting with scene transitions by remaining in the correct time period for the show. For example, if I was helping with a transition in the second act, I wanted to keep my older Taylor’s glasses on so it wouldn’t seem I was ‘out of character’.” Being at La MaMa Umbria allowed us as a creative team to get input from international directors like Jason Trucco and Jared McNeill. Their creative questions and ideas sparked many conversations about the next iteration of this musical for which we as authors are incredibly grateful. Kenley Juback performs “Something To Fix” The final piece of the puzzle of any theatrical work is always the audience, which in the case of this production, was Italian. While there is a song with a chorus in Italian, “Bambola Mia”, The Puzzle is a musical that is performed in English. Adriana Garbagnati, part of the La Mama Umbria family and an enormous supporter of our show, suggested that we write a synopsis of the show and provide copies to the audience much as one would receive at an opera. Blaize Berry, son to librettist Marybeth Berry and technical assistant for the production, wrote a thorough synopsis of the show that I then translated into Italian. Though most of our audience had a basic facility with English, the synopsis proved to be useful as we noted many of our audience members following along as the show progressed. Even with the added challenge of the show being performed in English, our audiences were still able to be moved by the show as was evidenced by the sniffles and tears present during our run. Librettist Marybeth Berry states “The themes in this show resonate with all walks of life and all cultures. The language barrier taught us that our show has more to offer than just entertainment. It touches others deeply and profoundly. Audience members recognized their own loved ones and own life experiences in our creation. It was a gift that transcends all typical barriers because of its simplicity.” Katie Gatch and Alex Cowsert perform “Dumpster Diving” The Puzzle has had an incredible journey from our living rooms in South Carolina on Zoom to the stage of La MaMa Umbria as a part of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Actor Katie Gatch who played Jenna, said that working on a production of a new musical “felt like a door popping into existence in front of me, the threshold uncrossed, and I get to be the one to see what’s on the other side.” With the support of La MaMa Umbria, we certainly were able to see what’s on the other side, and it was thrilling. Writing and producing a new musical is a complicated process, but one that is ultimately highly rewarding. After this run, The Puzzle , or Il Puzzle as it was called in Italy, has only just begun to have its pieces assembled. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Alex Lefevre (composer/lyricist The Puzzle) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. He has played on Broadway in the orchestras of Aladdin, Anastasia, Beetlejuice, Cats, Newsies , and White Christmas , along with work Off-Broadway including The Fantasticks and Avenue Q and on national tour with Anastasia, Hairspray, and Irving Berlin’s I Love a Piano . An avid proponent of new musicals, Lefevre has music directed productions in both the New York Musical Theatre Festival and New York Fringe Festival as well as at 54 Below, The York Theatre Company, Primary Stages, and Ars Nova. As a composer, his work has been featured in the NEO Concert at the York Theatre Company celebrating New, Emerging, and Outstanding musical theatre writers as well as in the San Diego Fringe Festival, the Scranton Fringe Festival, the New Works Series at Coastal Carolina University and La MaMa Umbria. For the past three years, Lefevre has served as an opera coach for Varna International both in the United States and Italy, working on Mozart’s Don Giovanni , Puccini’s Suor Angelica , and Weill’s Street Scene . European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

This piece has glaciers breaking off under their own precariousness and secrets being whispered into the wind. We are seeing other sites with other sights. It is the background coming to the fore and the structure playing the lead role. Timescales intersect. It’s the big and small trying to understand each other on their own terms. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE other sights/other sites Erin Landers & Movers Dance, Mime N/A, English 30 min 6:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All This piece has glaciers breaking off under their own precariousness and secrets being whispered into the wind. We are seeing other sites with other sights. It is the background coming to the fore and the structure playing the lead role. Timescales intersect. It’s the big and small trying to understand each other on their own terms. Content / Trigger Description: ERIN LANDERS is a Brooklyn based director, choreographer, and performer. As an artist, Erin’s goal is to open the audience's awareness to the magic present in the world around them. She imagines her pieces as dreams, extended realities, portals that give permission to imagine things differently. She has presented work at Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco, CA), the Trust Performing Arts Center (Lancaster, PA), Alchemical Studios (New York City), ChaShaMa (New York City), the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), and MOtiVE (Brooklyn, NY) as part of the For the Artists! Residency Program. Website: erinlandersdance.com, Instagram: @air.in.the.land.of.water Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

LUCIANA ACHUGAR presents The Pleasure Practice at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 The Pleasure Practice LUCIANA ACHUGAR 6-8 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP I Dance... To soften the lines To breathe in To belong to the ground To know the ground To know it with my skin To let it in To receive Thank you ground Thank you skin Thank you skin Thank the skin Thank the eyes Thank the ground Thank the breath Thank the love in the ground with my skin With my breath Let the underneath in Know it under the skin Let the words appear from under my skin The new words for this new underneath world Let the spell be known from the ground to my feet I dance a new spell into being Thank you floor Thank you skin Thank you skin 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). luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. In her work theater is a space for utopia; utopia is a practice; practice is ritual; ritual is devotion; devotion is dance and dance is a practice of being in pleasure. She has received many accolades such as two Bessie Awards and one nomination, 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellowship, 2017 Alpert Award, 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work, Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, MAP Funds, Jerome Foundation, and NYFA Artist Grants amongst others. Her most recent work PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in November 2021 as a co-presentation with the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

New York City’s performance world has always been advanced by independent creators pushing the boundaries of how, where and for whom we generate live-art experiences. This panel begins with a series of brief manifestos delivered by artists and makers fueling the next chapter of this story, followed by a moderated conversation. Curated and moderated by Jess Applebaum and Nic Benacerraf PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Future Visions: Provocations for the Next Performance Ecosystem Edge Effect Discussion English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All New York City’s performance world has always been advanced by independent creators pushing the boundaries of how, where and for whom we generate live-art experiences. This panel begins with a series of brief manifestos delivered by artists and makers fueling the next chapter of this story, followed by a moderated conversation. Curated and moderated by Jess Applebaum and Nic Benacerraf of Edge Effect Content / Trigger Description: Edge Effect is a “think and do tank” that creates participatory experiences for individuals to share knowledge across personal, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Each project unites a polydisciplinary coalition of humanitarians in the creation of works that address the harmful aspects of our profit-driven culture. EE’s process is deeply rooted in the edge-blurring practices of devised theater, which fosters consensual collaboration, a generous and joyful workspace, critical self-awareness, and healing through antiracist and anti-patriarchal action. The resulting collaborations take shape as live performances, broadly construed: immersive theater, hoax storefronts, dramatic concerts and lectures, and more—all designed to live at the intersection of analysis, enigma, spectacle, and delight. Jess Applebaum (she/her) is a dramaturg, community engagement coordinator, and public scholar whose 20-plus years of practice are rooted at the intersections of contemporary performance and social action. As a dramaturg, Jess works collaboratively with performance makers, academics, and activists to develop and facilitate creative processes. She believes that bodies perform knowledge, that process activates collective power, and that, together, they can inspire new pedagogical and civic practices. Jess is a founding partner of Edge Effect Media Group and an almost founding member of One Year Lease Theatre Company (OYL). Beyond these two companies, her artistic relationships include working with Panoply Performance Lab, composer/performance team Nathan Davis and Sylvia Milo, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat (KPB), directors Ashley Tata, Anna Brenner, and Simón Hanukai and choreographer Jody Oberfelder. Service to the community includes The Off-Off Community Dish, Brooklyn Commune, VP of Advocacy for LMDA, and conference committee member for CARPA8: Dramaturgies of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki, which took place in 2023. Jess holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University, a MA in Performance Studies from NYU and has a PhD in the works from CUNY Graduate Center where she was a PublicsLab Fellow. Her scholarship on dramaturgy has been presented at the Prague Quadrenille’s special convening Devising Dramaturgy in 2014 and the conference Alternative Dramaturgies held in Tangiers, Morocco. Nic Benacerraf (he/they) is a space-maker. As a director, scenographer, and scholar of live performance, he engineers consent-based systems and environments for genuine human encounters in theaters, galleries, concert halls, and streets. Nic is Founding Partner of Edge Effect Media Group, a polydisciplinary research and performance lab. For over a decade he was Founding co-Artistic Director of The Assembly, a Brooklyn-based theater collective dedicated to building slow-cooked works about pressing social issues. Nic’s scholarship uses dramaturgical strategies to unmask the field of Public Relations as the most efficacious genre of performance ever invented, and as the propaganda arm of the “capitalist, imperialist, white-supremacist patriarchy” (bell hooks). Currently, Nic teaches Directing at the Brown University / Trinity Rep MFA program. Nic received an MFA in Scenic Design from CalArts, and he is completing his PhD in Theatre & Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Images of his design work can be found at http://www.nicbenacerraf.com/. Ianthe Demos is the Artistic Director and a founding member of OYL, established in 2001. Ianthe’s work has received two Drama Desk nominations in NYC and a Stage Award in Edinburgh. Her directing work with OYL includes Kissing the Floor by Ellen McLaughlin, pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill, PEMDAS by Kevin Armento, and Balls by Bryony Lavery and Kevin Armento among others. Ianthe is a full-time professor in the International Performance Ensemble at PACE University and runs OYL’s acclaimed Summer International Program in Greece, Japan, and India. Ianthe has worked extensively in the arts management field managing dance companies on the international circuit as part of Selby Artists Management. Ianthe is currently working on a new adaptation of Medea by Meropi Papastergiou, a production of Ellen McLaughlin’s Oedipus, and a new work entitled WAKE written by Leon Ingulsrud and Brooke Shilling. Jesse Cameron Alick is a dramaturg, producer, poet, playwright, essayist, artistic researcher, and science fiction expert. Jesse has been working in the nonprofit theater world for over 20 years, starting out as Artistic Director and Producer at a small independent theater company for 10 years and eventually working at the Public Theater for over a decade, in the final years as Company Dramaturg. Jesse is currently the Associate Artistic Director at The Vineyard and an active freelance dramaturg at various off-Broadway theaters in NYC, nationwide and internationally. Jesse studied writing with Adrienne Kennedy and has taught theater courses, lectured at classes, and mentored students at a myriad of programs, currently teaching at NYU. Chie Morita (森田千恵 | she/her) is a consultant, creative producer, and consummate tinkerer dedicated to retraining our inherited habits and engineering empowering new systems in the arts. She is a Co-Founder + Partner of FORGE, a boutique consultancy devoted to helping artists and organizations forge a path toward success. By leveraging the potential of proactive planning, holistic mentorship, and collaborative asking, Chie seeks to free makers (and herself) from historical hindrances, socialized stereotypes, and negative self-stories. In New York, she has worked with Tony-Award-winning Broadway Producer Joey Parnes (on A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, End of the Rainbow), institutions including The Public Theater, Third Rail Projects, The Musical Theater Factory, The New York Neo-Futurists (who, under her care, were awarded three Drama Desk nominations), TriBeCa Venue Town Stages (where she created, curated, and managed the Sokoloff Arts Fellowship Program), brands including The Macallan and Art Beyond The Glass, and such independent makers and ensembles as Heather Christian and the Arbornauts, Dylan Marron, Edge Effect, Empowered Artist Collective, Statera Arts Mentorship: NYC, UglyRhino, and Fresh Ground Pepper. Alongside her work with FORGE, she proudly mentors young makers through We Are Queens, and her alma mater, Northern Arizona University, and serves as a collaborating producer with the Wonderland Historical Society in New Orleans. Ximena Garnica is a New York City-based, Colombian-born immigrant working as a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, director, curator, designer, and teacher. With her partner, Japanese artist Shige Moriya, Garnica is the co-founder and co-artistic director of the arts entity called LEIMAY, which means “a moment of light in the darkness” or “a moment of transition” in Japanese. Part of their work is created with the LEIMAY Ensemble, and their embodied practice LUDUS transmits the lineage of butoh dance and experimental visual and performing arts. They are invested in the entanglement from which culture and art emerge, and they value relationality, collaboration, and resource-sharing as primary to their praxis. Their multidisciplinary works include dance, theater, sculpture, video, film, mixed media, and light installations, photography, training projects, stage performances, and publications. Their works have been presented at US venues such as BAM Fisher, the Brooklyn Museum, the Japan Society, the Watermill Center, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and internationally in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Colombia. They have maintained collaborations with renowned artists (Robert Wilson and Ko Murobushi) and they have received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, NPN, NYSCA, and NEFA, among others. They were nominated for Herb Alpert and United States Artists awards. They have been reviewed in The New York Times, TDR/The Theater Drama Review, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others. They are part of the theater faculty at MIT and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside. Their writing has been published by Routledge. Garnica is an advocate of affordable live-work spaces. Their activism was instrumental in effecting changes at the New York state level to protect live-work spaces in New York City. More recently, Garnica, through LEIMAY, co-founded the Cultural Solidarity Fund, which has provided over $1 million in $500 relief microgrants to NYC artists and cultural workers affected by COVID-19. With her partner, they continue multiple organizing efforts to sustain what they call the “entanglement,” a loose knot, cluster, or constellation of relationalities—an intention to live a life in poetry. Beto O’Byrne hails from East Texas and is the co-founder of Radical Evolution, a multi-ethnic, multi-disciplinary performance collective based in Brooklyn, NY. The author of 20 plays, screenplays, and original TV pilots, his works have been produced in and developed in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, and San Antonio. O’Byrne is an advocate and organizer interested in creating solidarity between labor, arts, and antiracist/anticapitalist movements. In addition to his theatre work, O'Byrne is the creator of the political punk rock outfit, A Revolutionary Chorus, and the World of Kir, a high fantasy creative writing project. Radical Evolution is a multiethnic producing collective committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of the mixed-identity existence in the 21st Century. We believe that visibility and representation for the fastest-growing demographic in our nation - those who identify as more than one race or ethnicity - is crucial to live performance. We incorporate people from a variety of backgrounds into our creative process, with a focus on people of color, to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theatre with practitioners that celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of the city around us. Through this approach, we work to assert a vision for cultural and social equity in our field, city, and nation. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad is a cultural worker, theater artist, educator, facilitator, and curator. Her acting and directing work have appeared on stages across the USA, in Philadelphia, NYC, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Maine, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Alaska. Marisol has worked as a teaching artist for many theaters, arts education initiatives, and community-based organizations across the country. She is a tenured teaching artist at the New Victory Theater in NYC where she developed The Seven Ravens Project as part of the LabWorks program for new works, and made her Off-Broadway directorial debut with Spellbound Theater’s Wink in the spring of 2023. As a member of TYA/USA’s BIPOCin TYA Advisory Board, Marisol co-facilitated spaces for members of the global majority working in TYA and supported the creation of TYA/USA’s Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Futures guide for the field. She has also served as Director of Community Engagement for Shakespeare in Clark Park, and as Community Coordinator for Theatre Horizon's production of Town. Marisol is a volunteer performer, educator, and board secretary for Clowns Without Borders USA, who help build resilience through laughter with people experiencing displacement due to natural and human-made disaster across the globe. In recent years, she has been selected as a Colleen Toohey Porter Fellow with TYA/USA, a Jim Rye Fellow with International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow, and a Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow. Her work has received support from the Network of EnsembleTheatres, Cannonball Festival, Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation and Marrazzo Family Foundation, and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Marisol is a graduate of Princeton University and of Helikos International School for Theatre Creation in Florence, Italy. She was born and raised in NYC, where she continues to create and teach. She currently resides in Philadelphia. Photo credits: Jess Applebaum. Photo courtesy of the artist. Nic Benacerraf. Photo courtesy of the artist. Ianthe Demos. Photo courtesy of the artist. Jesse Cameron Alick. Photo courtesy of the artist. Chie Morita: credit Taylor Cooley_Katie LaMark. Ximena Garnica. Photo courtesy of the artist. Beto O’Byrne. Photo courtesy of the artist. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad. Photo courtesy of the artist. www.edgeeffectmedia.org IG: @edge.effect.media Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

The Exponential Festival is beginning its ninth-anniversary season with an intimate evening of artist-on-artist interviews to take place Tuesday, October 17th at 7pm at Brick Aux (628 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211). Founding Artistic Director Theresa Buchheister and Producing Director Nic Adams will introduce the hour-long event, which will feature interviews with David Greenspan, Marissa Joyce Stamps, Ben Holbrook, Lena Engelstein, SB Tennent, Cameron Stuart, Sleth Larson, and Tristan Allen! Join us for an evening of retrospection, artistic conundrums, and a dispatch from the heart of the enduring contemporary performance community. Streamed live on HowlRound (info coming soon) PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Exponential Festival David Greenspan, Marissa Joyce Stamps, Ben Holbrook, SB Tennent, Cameron Stuart, Sleth Larson, Tristan Allen, Lena Engelstein Discussion English 60 minutes 7:00PM EST Tuesday, October 17, 2023 Brick Aux, 628 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All The Exponential Festival is beginning its ninth-anniversary season with an intimate evening of artist-on-artist interviews to take place Tuesday, October 17th at 7pm at Brick Aux (628 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211). Founding Artistic Director Theresa Buchheister and Producing Director Nic Adams will introduce the hour-long event, which will feature interviews with David Greenspan, Marissa Joyce Stamps, Ben Holbrook, Lena Engelstein, SB Tennent, Cameron Stuart, Sleth Larson, and Tristan Allen! Join us for an evening of retrospection, artistic conundrums, and a dispatch from the heart of the enduring contemporary performance community. Streamed live on HowlRound (info coming soon) Content / Trigger Description: Ben Holbrook is a Brooklyn-based (originally from NC) playwright and filmmaker whose works have been produced, developed, or commissioned by: Fundamental Theater Project, Ruddy Productions, The New York International Fringe Festival, The Memphis Fringe Festival, The Motor Company, Voices of the South (TN), Ugly Rhino(LA), Seoul Players (SK), Holiday House, Find the Light (LA), The Irish Arts Council, and Paper Lantern Theatre Company (NC). He’s been awarded the Edward Albee Foundation fellowship, the Drama League Rough Draft Residency (partnering with Sam Underwood), Fresh Ground Pepper’s Playground Playgroup Residency, The New Concepts Theatre Lab at UNC-Greensboro, Magic Time at Judson Church. He is the inaugural recipient of the Peter Shaffer Award for Excellence in Playwriting and a winner of the 47th Samuel French OOB Festival. Cameron Stuart is a writer, composer, and performer. He self-produces his performance art as No-Brow Theater Company, which was formerly known as Saints of an Unnamed Country. With several friends, Cameron opened and managed The Glove, a DIY performance space located in Bushwick. The Glove was a participating venue in the Exponential Festival, which Cameron co-produced from 2017–2022. His plays Police in the Wilderness (published by A Freedom Books) and Germany, 1933 were part of the Exponential Festival in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Other works by Cameron have been presented at diverse venues and institutions, including: MoMA's PS1, JACK, The Brick, Vital Joint, Silent Barn, Secret Project Robot, and Tomato Mouse, among others. Born in Florida, Cameron now lives in Queens, NY. David Greenspan will return to The Brick in February for the remounting of Joey Merlo’s solo play, On Set With Theda Bara - originally presented in The 2023 Exponential Festival. He has appeared in his own plays, performed solo renditions of dramatic and non-dramatic texts and worked with many contemporary playwrights. Honors include a RUTHIE and six OBIES. Lena Engelstein is a Brooklyn based choreographer and performer. Since 2021, she has co-created and performed a series of duets– the first with performance artist Magda San Millan; the second with dancer Jo Warren. She has collaborated with and performed in work by director Lisa Fagan since 2017, and is currently the assistant choreographer/performer in the interdisciplinary performance collective CHILD. Other performance credits include: Third Rail Company’s Then She Fell, Falcon Dance, Brendan Drake, and work by Barnett Cohen, Alexa West, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, and Chafin Seymour. As a movement director, Engelstein has worked with the bands Lou Tides and Pleaser, comedian Sophie Zucker, and dance artist Nora Alami. She has taught at SUNY Brockport, Bard College, The Field Center, and Colorado Mesa University. Lena holds a B.A. in Mathematics and a minor in Dance from Colorado College. Marissa Joyce Stamps is a Black, Haitian-American, NYC-based Afrosurreal artist + educator. She’s the recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Playwriting Award, a member of Clubbed Thumb 2023-2024 Early-Career Writers’ Group, a Fall 2023 Mercury Store Lead Artist, a New Georges Affiliate Artist, and was named a Finalist for The National Black Theatre's 2023 I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency. Recent: …Twisted Juniper (2022 O’Neill Finalist), Being Up in Here… (Exponential Festival 2024; Princess Grace Award 2023; Brick Aux 2022), Blue Fire… (Exponential Festival 2022; Orchard Project 2021), Letiche… (Bushwick Starr SRS 2023), + deadbodydeadbodydeadbody (Ars Nova ANT Fest 2022). She’s collaborated with The Public, 24 Hour Plays, Fire This Time, Conch Shell Productions, Moxie Arts, The Anthropologists, Keen, BUFU, + more. Marissa serves as Literary Manager at The Workshop Theater. MFA Playwriting: Brooklyn College. Marissajoycestamps.com Sanaz Bita (SB) Tennent is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist & director of new works, musicals, and classics. Described as having a “deft directorial touch” (Culturebot), she has developed work with New York Theatre Workshop, Ars Nova, The Drama League, Clubbed Thumb, Civilians, BRIC Arts | Media, Mabou Mines, The TEAM, New Georges, Red House Center for Culture & Debate in Bulgaria, Prague Film & Theater Center, and others. Alumni of the Drama League Directors Project, NYTW 2050 Fellowship, Clubbed Thumb Fellowship, and Mabou Mines SUITE/Space Initiative. Artistic Director of the award-winning collective Built4Collapse with whom they devised NUCLEAR LOVE AFFAIR, which played to sold out houses in NYC, Prague, Rome and Krakow. @sbtennent A hardworking gemini with mischievous but kind eyes, Sleth (he/she) was sliced from the belly of a drowned Texas river horse sometime around June 1990. Sleth is a playwright, PowerPoint artist, projection designer and nightlife performer. She has enlightened audiences all across NYC including House of Yes, Three Dollar Bill, the Brick Theater, NYC Inferno, Club Cumming, Bartschland Follies and Play Now! Tristan Allen is a composer and puppeteer based in Brooklyn, NY. Tristan’s work employs the narrative power of instrumental music and puppetry to create an imaginary world. With a background in piano, bass, electronic music, and marionette theater, Tristan applies an experimental mode of storytelling to create rich works of wordless fantasy. Tristan’s ambitions to combine their music with puppetry is underway, beginning with a shadow puppet symphony named Tin Iso and the Dawn. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Kristyl D. Tift Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (2021) adds to the discourse on Black Radical Thought through its examination of the life and art of Lorraine Hansberry. This biography establishes her masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun (1959) as only part of Hansberry’s story. With its focus on a black family’s dream to acquire the fruits of capitalism, the play countered pervasive stereotypes of black people by humanizing the black nuclear family. Due to the play’s popularity and the conservatism of the 1950s, however, Hansberry is not widely considered a black radical writer. Colbert, however, proves that she was. The author’s in-depth analysis of Hansberry’s writings (published and unpublished) helps to tell a layered story of the playwright’s intersectional identity, radical activism, artistry, politics, and personal life. Colbert argues that Hansberry’s lifelong effort to “become free” in spite of racism, sexism, and homophobia has been overshadowed by her public persona as a pretty, passive, liberal, heterosexual, housewife compelled to tell the story of a black family’s struggle. Relying on archival materials, this book fills in gaps of the mainstream public’s perception of Hansberry. The introduction to this book highlights three significant events in Hansberry’s life—her father’s death (1945), the opening of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and her divorce from Robert Nemiroff (1964). Notably, Colbert ascribes Hansberry’s personal growth and identity formation; political and artistic development; and commitment to the collective pursuit of freedom for black people, women, and queer people in the U.S. and abroad as processes of “becoming free.” This notion is further explored in Chapter 1 as Colbert establishes that Hansberry’s writerly practice was an act of becoming free. Taking as evidence the ideas and images in Hansberry’s short and longform writings in the decade before Raisin, Colbert unpacks the influence of mid-twentieth century leftist thought, existentialism, feminist materialism, and black internationalism on her politics. Hansberry’s work as a reporter for Freedom and for the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ)—a woman-centered organization that situated black women’s experiences of oppression and resistance—are key. The author argues that Hansberry’s use of realism in her writing serves as an opportunity to represent everyday happenings while imagining change. Hansberry’s letters published in the The Ladder are offered as examples of her investment in her era’s gay and lesbian rights movement. Persuasively, Colbert asserts, “Analyzing Hansberry’s writing as both a practice of self-articulation and a political practice produces more nuanced and intersectional understanding of how to cultivate freedom and the self” (64). In Chapter 2, the author traces Raisin from idea to production. Colbert also addresses its critical reception. By providing ideological context for Hansberry’s playwriting choices, and by examining repeated instances in which she was misquoted in interviews, the author counters misinterpretations of the play and Hansberry’s intent—including Harold Cruse’s assertion that her positionality as a middle-class black woman in an interracial relationship led her to incorporate the theme of integration to forward a universal representation of the black family for white audiences. Revealing Hansberry’s pro-Black and Marxist thought, as established in other writings and interviews, Colbert argues that Hansberry’s focus on a black working-class family aimed to show the negative effects of racism on black economic growth and legacy, regardless of class. Chapter 3 foregrounds Hansberry’s boredom with Raisin and desire to resist the private and public (race, gender, sexual, economic, political) constraints that came with its success. Colbert writes, “In the three years following A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry created work that sought to invigorate once-degraded identities (Black, woman, lesbian) with potential. Her pursuit had personal consequences, as she continued to learn to live with her competing desires and commitments” (100). An analysis of the screenplay, The Drinking Gourd (1959), follows as an example of Hansberry’s critique of colonialism. The film was never produced because executives wanted to avoid controversy. While Hansberry’s success made it difficult to assert her political voice, she continued her activism. Hansberry’s active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement provides the focus of Chapter 4. Her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) put her “commitment to mass and collective movement[s] for change” front and center (137). Hansberry and the SNCC created a photo essay called The Movement to show the horrors of American racism and the trappings of American exceptionalism for black people. Being a humanist and a radical, Hansberry believed that black people should pursue freedom at all costs while working across racial and class differences. The author shows how she experimented with these ideas and other existential questions in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). Chapter 5 recognizes Hansberry’s hope and despair as she fought cancer in 1964 at the age of 33. Having delved into her diary entries with a careful eye and critical ear, the author captures the stress of cancer, treatment, and the possibility of death that loomed over Hansberry. All this as she completed Les Blancs (produced posthumously in 1970), a play which features Tshembe, who must choose between diplomacy and revolutionary action. Colbert asserts, “The position Hansberry faced at the end of her life, confronting the failures of the civil rights movement (a movement that made her life worth living), the shortcomings of independence movements, and her impending death, mirrors Tshembe’s impossible position, teetering between violent and nonviolent action or some combination therein” (205-6). The author closes the chapter with a comparative analysis of Les Blancs with Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and After the Fall (1964) to highlight the similarities and differences in these post-War narratives. It seems fitting to position these two American Theatre masters of realism in conversation with one another. In the inspiring epilogue, the author asserts that by envisioning acts of fugitivity, self-determination, and transgression for racialized, queer, and gendered persons in her work, Hansberry was essentially “writing herself into being” (226). This book, reviewed by The New York Times, is a necessary addition to interdisciplinary discourse and contemporary re-evaluations of Hansberry. Like Imani Perry’s award-winning biography, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), Radical Vision looks to Hansberry’s writing practice as a reflection of her radical, intersectional worldview. It contributes significantly to African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, and Theatre Studies by presenting Hansberry as an artist and activist whose realist work reflected an ongoing process of “movement.” Colbert argues that Hansberry’s art and activism reflected a desire to put focus on and ultimately change the state, communities, and cultures for the better. In this critical biography, Colbert effectively shows that Hansberry’s politics are written into the fabric of her writing; one need only read those works closely and intertextually to hear a black radical voice. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristyl D. Tift Vanderbilt University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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.

Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Kate Valk and The Wooster Group Discussion, Theater English 60 minutes 2:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. Content / Trigger Description: Kate Valk Kate Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979. Since then, she has performed and/or acted as dramaturg in all of the Group’s theater and media works. As a director, Valk has created three productions with The Wooster Group, all record album interpretations: Early Shaker Spirituals (2014); The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" (2017); and Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (2022-23). She is currently co-directing with LeCompte the Group’s new version of Symphony of Rats, based on Richard Foreman’s 1988 play. Valk founded the Summer Institute, a free three-week workshop for public high school students now in its 27th year. The Wooster Group The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make new work for theater and media. Since its formation in 1975, the Group has been led by director Elizabeth LeCompte. The Performing Garage, located at 33 Wooster Street in lower Manhattan, is the Group’s permanent home. The Group has created over 40 theater productions, and more than 25 works for dance, radio, film and video. Its projects have pioneered new artistic practices, notably through the use of video and sound technology in live performance. The Group has developed methods of composition that incorporate non-dramatic texts, autobiography, and documentary materials along with new readings of classic dramatic works. LeCompte's first compositions were based on Spalding Gray’s personal history (the “Three Places In Rhode Island” trilogy.) In 1980, LeCompte and Gray formally founded The Wooster Group, along with Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Peyton Smith. Since then, the Group has sustained a full-time working company with an evolving core membership, joined by dozens of artistic associates including performers, composers, choreographers, and filmmakers who work on a project-basis. In addition to creating and producing its own work, the company hosts visiting artists at The Performing Garage and conducts a free summer performance intensive, the Summer Institute, for New York City high school students. This fall and winter, The Wooster Group will perform two new works at The Performing Garage: "Symphony of Rats" in November and "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me" in January. www.thewoostergroup.org https://thewoostergroup.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on