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Watch Transindigenous Assembly by Joulia Strauss at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Transindigenous Assembly At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Joulia Strauss Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 5:15pm. 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 Germany Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film About The Retrospective This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. About The Artist(s) Joulia Strauss, artist and activist, lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings, and video works have been displayed in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, in Berlin, and at the Tate Modern, in London, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and documenta14, among others. She plays a reconstruction of an Ancient Greek lyre and sings healing songs in Ancient Greek, Mari, and many other languages. Strauss practices Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu and is training for her fourth stripe. In 2024 she founded Avtonomi Akadimia, a durational artwork and grassroots university that she organizes in the Akadimia Platonos, Athens Get in touch with the artist(s) jouliastrauss@gmx.de and follow them on social media www-joulia-strauss.net http://joulia-strauss.net/2024-transindigenous-assembly/ 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

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

Cailyn Sales Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Cailyn Sales By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida , by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Karen Jaime’s love letter to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a primarily spoken word venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moves the reader toward an aesthetic practice aside from, but also part of, the Nuyorican identity marker. She marks the café’s history extensively in a single passionate breath, hopping from moment to movement in a stunning analysis of Loisaida, the “Spanglish version of ‘Lower East Side’ by the neighborhood’s then [the 1970s] predominantly Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking residents,” (14) as a physical, mental, and cognitive space of bicultural existence. Thus, she suggests a lowercase n for a ‘nuyorican aesthetic’ that both subscribes to the fundamentals of providing critical and cultural space for Puerto Ricans living in New York, as intended in its founding, yet also expands the framework to include other pejorative subjects interacting within that metaphoric and literal space. By keeping the word “Nuyorican” within the named aesthetic modality and lowercasing the n , Jaime signifies the expansiveness she sets out to express while also preserving respect for the primary function of the term as it relates to and ignited the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s beginnings. The combination of acknowledging Nuyorican as a specific ethnic identity marker —and former pejorative—while simultaneously exploring the aesthetic’s capabilities to diversify and hold more stories from marginalized communities is emblematic of the entire book. Jaime’s Introduction proposes a nuyorican aesthetic subsumed by “recombination, positionality, gesturality, and orality,” (5) as formed by queer and trans artists who have moved through the Cafe’s history not unnoticed but, rather, buried in the sea of masculinist heteronormative chronicles. It seems pertinent to acknowledge that though this book is introduced as a means of restoring a largely concealed queer history, Jaime is regularly visiting the intersection between racial and sexual identities as a celebration of the Café’s queer artists of color’s aesthetic and artistic journeys. The argument laid out in the introduction is further developed by the book’s following four chapters, which serve as case studies of Jaime’s vision of nuyorican aesthetics. Through a focus on four specific sites of racialized queer and/or trans artists who have lived and breathed the space, Jaime poses how this Nuyorican aesthetic practice supports the Café’s founding principles without reducing the place to a specific ethnic narrative. Persuasively , the book analyzes the founding and obscured queer history of the Nuyorican Poets Café, challenging scholarship that frames the Cafe’s history in a purely heteropatriarchal context. In this, Jaime joins, or rather interjects into, the lively debate between Pedro Pietri and Bob Holman. Yet as she criticizes their debate, she claims that her scholarship “underscores the theorizations, the poetic formulations, the call-and-response interactions, and the histories and argumentation encoded in Nuyorican and nuyorican aesthetics.” (5) Oddly, she neglects to outline that debate. Perhaps she imagines a target audience of specialists who already know the context of their debate, which readers can surmise. Perhaps, the larger stakes she challenges relate to semantics more than historiography. One concept driving her argument of nuyorican aesthetics emphasizes recodification, which reinforces the survival technique of minoritized communities who reclaim terms that intend to demean and further marginalize them. Historically, she explains, the term “Nuyorican” was once used to condemn New Yorkans of Puerto Rican descent for their use of Spanglish, but co-founders Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero re-coded it with the Café to evoke shared identity. Recodification is further expressed, and extended in chapter two’s Regie Cabico, expressed by the way he “camps up his racialized ethnicity and his Filipinoness” (72) and in chapter four’s Ellison Glenn via their stage name and persona of “Black Cracker.” Anyone who rejects the efficacy of minoritized subjects reclaiming slurs or words that carry belittling historical connotations may doubt this crucial element of the nuyorican aesthetics Jaime analyzes. Nonetheless, most readers will laugh and recognize the activism of Ellison Glenn as Black Cracker performing their audacious poem about the homophobic and classist policies of the George W. Bush administration. Jaime’s metaphorical imagery in each chapter effectively paints the physical space and atmosphere of the Nuyorican Poets Café, making this book riveting to read. We not only feel like we are in the room but also that we are initiated into the deep connection and love to/of the space that Jaime shares. Despite this pleasurable non-linear narrative—which proudly displays a queeronology (a ‘not straight’ timeline) to intentionally center performance experience and marginalized aesthetics—the organization of this book somewhat obscures the thesis. Ultimately, each separate chapter operates as a love letter to its subject, while the entire volume resembles a museum, curating concealed performance history and genealogies of culture. The Queer Nuyorican has the potential to make readers hopeful for a queer future through its particular connection to the queer past. The book’s chapters, organized by artistic subjects, make for a gratifying read for specialists, as well as more general audiences, allowing for a more queer, and racially diverse, view of the field. Jaime’s intervention in performance scholarship is niche, in ways, yet also models a travelling aesthetic practice. It is easy to see how this book might supplement a course on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or histories of hip-hop and spoken word, or even cultural diversity in the Americas. Certainly, its discourse on expansive aesthetics as a site of queer of color critique adds significance. Although her rendering of ‘nuyorican aesthetics’ might be read to pigeonhole minoritized subjects into political existence, Karen Jaime nevertheless reminds us how our bodies, and therefore identities, are implicated in performance. The Queer Nuyorican reminds us that when we analyze performance rich sociopolitical histories interact alongside the words, gestures, and bodies of respective artists; thus, the volume advances our grasp of performance’s body politics and Latinx cultural studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CAILYN SALES University of Colorado-Boulder Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

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

DeRon S. Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. DeRon S. Williams By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches . Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches is an exceptional addition to the field as it turns the spotlight on “Black/African ritual, processes, and methodologies to acting” (1). Rather than focusing on situating black performers in traditional acting methodologies, Luckett and Shaffer engage performance pedagogy that goes beyond the Euro-American canon through a series of ten essays, which provide a wide array of viewpoints on actor training grounded in Afrocentrism. They conclude with thoughtful commentary from notable practitioners who present insights on working with performers of color and/or performance texts/modes rooted in black culture. In the introduction, Luckett and Shaffer grapple with the origins of theatre and performance practices. They acknowledge that most U.S. acting programs operate from the perspective that theatre started with the Greeks; however, they point to evidence suggesting that many humans on the continent of Africa participated in theatrically driven rituals earlier. They then emphasize the book’s overall purpose, which is to: “1) honor and rightfully identify Blacks as central co-creators of acting and directing theory by filling the perceived void of Black acting theorists, 2) uplift, honor, and provide culturally relevant frameworks for Black people who are pursuing careers in acting, 3) provide diverse methodologies for actors and teachers of all races and cultures to utilize, and 4) provide diverse methodologies for actors and practitioners’ labor in social justice issues and activism” (2). Luckett and Shaffer subsequently chart the book’s overall structure of “Offerings” instead of chapters, as they feel “this term is more appropriate to our alignment with Black/African customs and culture, as the notion of giving is innately in the ‘fiber of our being’” (5). The first section of the book, “Methods of Social Activism,” concentrates on approaches that motivate societal change with and in largely black/African American communities with primary emphasis on women and at-risk/underserved youth. Luckett and Shaffer begin by sharing their experiences working with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta and the “Hendricks Method.” This approach manifests social activism and engages spirituality, devising, and hyper-ego, a concept that encourages fearlessness and “getting someone to believe they are ‘the shit’” (31). Offering two, authored by Cristal Chanelle Truscott, outlines “SoulWork,” which uses neo-spiritual or a cappella musicals as “an aesthetic tool for creating space and experience” (39). Individuals looking to establish ensembles or create communal performances would find Truscott’s approach highly useful, as it “shifts actors’ focus away from ‘me’ to ‘ours’ and rescues the audience relationship from ‘them’ to ‘all of us’” (39). Rhodessa Jones’s essay traces her work with the Medea Project, a teaching methodology that focuses on empowering incarcerated women of color. Through an arts-based approach to reducing recidivism, the Project “utilizes self-exploration techniques on an ensemble comprised of inmates, as well as community and professional actresses who stage material derived from the prisoners’ own stories” (51). Similarly, Lisa Biggs introduces readers to “Art Saves Lives,” an improvisational practice cemented in black feminism. Although she does not discuss processes or techniques, Biggs does highlight how the actress-playwright-teacher Rebecca Rice “practiced improvisation as sacred play to affirm Black women’s right to respect and to a future” (73). While the work of social activism is necessary, the offerings included in the second section, “Methods of Intervention,” target the core issue of most acting programs by emphasizing the necessity to locate plays in a cultural context in the rehearsal room. Justin Emeka’s essay is a real standout in the volume because it considers casting actors of color in classic white plays, concentrating heavily on the works of William Shakespeare. He lays out examples of how many people ignore race and its relation to the classics, and he contends that acknowledging race can augment audiences’ understandings of productions. Of all the essays in the volume, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates’s is the most enlightening, suggesting that traditional acting classrooms have alienated actors of color in their development and training. In recapping her personal training experience in Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Grotowski, Pettiford-Wates explains how this Eurocentric pedagogy has prepared her physical body but disenfranchised her spirit and soul as a black actor. For example, traditional analysis failed to connect her to the culturally steeped characters in for colored girls…. Considering this, she presents a series of useful exercises she calls Ritual Performance Drama “as an alternative methodology that directly addresses the specific needs of the black performing artist in studying the dramatic form and developing into self-actualized and empowered creative artists” (108). The work of Chinesha D. Sibley concentrates on Afrocentric approaches to directing new theatrical works where the playwright’s voice remains dominant while also honoring the interconnections between the playwright, actor, and director. She explains interconnectivity through the process of recalling culturally specific experiences and “embracing the physical and psychological traits of a people” (132) within the text and performance. “Methods of Cultural Plurality,” the final section of full essays, explores how individuals can be co-constructors of theatrical performances using techniques rooted in an Afrocentric perspective. Unlike most of the other offerings, Daniel Banks provides concrete exercises that readers can follow to develop stories and performances. Additionally, he examines Hip Hop as a globalized art form of social justice and provides a pedagogical framework through his work with the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative. Kadogo Mojo’s work is both an Afro-centric and trans-global directing methodology, linking the performance stylings of black Americans and the aboriginal people of Australia. The process formerly known as Kadogo Mojo combines “anthropology, dance, poetry, music, theatre, travel and cultural encounters” (169). Although Mojo’s essay is interesting, it simply chronicles her inspirational working modes. The section’s final offering authored by Kashi Johnson and Daphnie Sicre discusses the difficulties black students face on predominately white campuses and the ways in which they have cultivated the students’ “interest in creating an inclusive, productive pedagogical space” to develop performance techniques that “engage and empower Black students” (184). Like Banks, Johnson and Sicre bring together the traditions of Theatre of the Oppressed with the cultural aspects of Hip Hop theatre. Luckett and Shaffer conclude the book with short writings from distinguished black directors, including Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, Paul Carter Harrison, Tim Bond, Walter Dallas, Judyie Al-Bilali, Sheldon Epps, and Talvin Wilks. This unique group of practitioners offers insights on working with Afrocentric plays; personal experiences navigating the American theatre; and rituals, processes, and methods rooted in an African sensibility. An introduction to acting methodologies rooted in Afrocentrism, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches samples multiple approaches and foregrounds a necessary pedagogical and theoretical framework for academics and practitioners. The inclusion of additional acting exercises would have made the book even more user-friendly within acting classrooms. Still, just like the prevalence of Eurocentric acting methods, the offerings in this book can—and should—be explored by individuals from all backgrounds and cultures, especially those marginalized groups such as Latinx people who have experienced similar structural oppressions in American theatre training. The text is ultimately an excellent resource to better enfranchise performers of color, particularly those who work at Predominantly White Institutions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERON S. WILLIAMS Eastern Connecticut State University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

By Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka | An innovative collection of plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Decadent Histories: Four Plays by Amelia Hertz Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka Download PDF Translated and Edited by Jadwiga Kosicka Born in 1878, Polish-Jewish playwright Amelia Hertz wrote in the early twentieth century innovative plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. She created a tightly controlled theatre of cruelty-set in decadent periods of ancient history–that confront extreme situations and pose “no exit” ethical and existential dilemmas. Hertz died in the notorious Pawiak Gestapo prison in Warsaw in 1942, a victim of the Nazis. Ysolde of the White Hands, Fleur-de-Lys, The Destruction of Tyre, and A Great King, which make up this volume of Decadent Histories, deal with fin-de-siècle subjects rife with perverse sexuality and violence: the Tristan myth in revisionist guise from a female perspective; the serial child-murderer Gilles de Rais and his young daughter who develops a taste for murder herself; the Prophet Ezekiel as he visits the ruins of Tyre; and the decline of Byzantium under Justinian and his general Belisarius during a time of conspiracies. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Forms of Restraint will manifest both as a static installation—composed of paintings, photographs and sculptures—and as an immersive work of live performance, in which the sculptures double as restraining devices. Aesthetically, the work will synthesize two tendencies: the sense of cool ambivalence exacerbated by the technology of classical lines and minimalist forms in minimalist space; and the heat of the sex-danger phantasm that haunts the live performance scenes and images. More philosophically, it will engage topics such as time, the relationship between dance and visual art, gender and sexuality, partnering, representation and self-identification and the mechanics of the gaze. The ensemble performance focuses on Rope bondage and elements of the slow-moving dance technique known as Butoh. These forms will be intertwined and further merged with visual art, music, and dramaturgy. As a whole, the performance will function as a research laboratory for exploring these practices’ possibilities of cross-pollination and the opening of questions around entangled identities. Furthermore, it will establish a field in which to raise questions, challenge established binaries (such as dominance and submission), subvert normative expectations, and explore issues of agency, consent, and the fluidity of identity. The creators are interested in two modes of presentation for this work: 1) within an event structure that includes performance dates and times; 2) as emergent from within the unmediated temporality of an exhibition PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Forms Of Restraint David Michalek and Ensemble Performance Art, Theater, Other English 60 minutes 11AM EST Sunday, October 22, 2023 The Club at LaMaMa; 74A East 4th Street, 2nd floor Free Entry, Open to All Forms of Restraint will manifest both as a static installation—composed of paintings, photographs and sculptures—and as an immersive work of live performance, in which the sculptures double as restraining devices. Aesthetically, the work will synthesize two tendencies: the sense of cool ambivalence exacerbated by the technology of classical lines and minimalist forms in minimalist space; and the heat of the sex-danger phantasm that haunts the live performance scenes and images. More philosophically, it will engage topics such as time, the relationship between dance and visual art, gender and sexuality, partnering, representation and self-identification and the mechanics of the gaze. The ensemble performance focuses on Rope bondage and elements of the slow-moving dance technique known as Butoh. These forms will be intertwined and further merged with visual art, music, and dramaturgy. As a whole, the performance will function as a research laboratory for exploring these practices’ possibilities of cross-pollination and the opening of questions around entangled identities. Furthermore, it will establish a field in which to raise questions, challenge established binaries (such as dominance and submission), subvert normative expectations, and explore issues of agency, consent, and the fluidity of identity. The creators are interested in two modes of presentation for this work: 1) within an event structure that includes performance dates and times; 2) as emergent from within the unmediated temporality of an exhibition Content / Trigger Description: David Michalek was born and raised in California. He lives and works in New York City. Michalek's body of work ranges from photography, drawing, video/sound installations and live performance to site-specific works of public art. His focus over the past ten years has been closely tied to his interest in the contemporary person, which he explores through the use of performance techniques, storytelling, movement and gesture. His work in video has been focused on capturing marginal moments —carefully staged — that with minimal action develop density through the interplay of image, sound and most especially time. Exploring notions of durational and rhythmic time (as opposed to the referential time used in cinema) in both form and content, his works engage in intimate yet open narratives. His recent work considers the potentiality of various forms of slowness alongside an examination of contemporary modes of public attention. https://tdm.fas.harvard.edu/people/david-michalek 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 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) By Kalina Stefanova Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF “Once upon a time there was a festival, and when its time came it went out into the world to seek its fortune” Liviu Timuş With all its natural givens, Piatra Neamt—a city of 80,000, ensconced in a beautiful valley surrounded by the lusciously green mountains of North-Eastern Romania, with a river running through it and a lake where flocks of swans nest all year round—could well be a thriving resort town and home of rich theatre institutions and events, like the Shaw Festival at the Niagara-on-the-Lake or the Shakespeare Festival of Canada at Stratford-on-Avon. Instead and, most surprisingly at first glance, Piatra Neamt is a home of a festival of an entirely opposite type: focused on poignant social and political issues of both national and international scale. It is the oldest international festival in Romania—an institution of a very rich and awesome biography which stands out even against the background of the festival-rich contemporary Romanian theatre scene. Let me just mention two of the other international festivals in the country: the one in Sibiu, which ranks already third in size and clout in Europe, after those in Edinburgh and Avignon, and the one in Craiova, specializing in Shakespeare, which has established itself as the must-see showcase for productions of the Bard’s oeuvre from all over the world—the first having turned 30 this year and the second to celebrate the same age in 2024. Romanians at the Gate of the World . Photo: Adrian Nita. Romanians at the Gate of the World . Photo: Adrian Nita. The Piatra Neamt Theatre Festival is run by and has its headquarters in the Youth Theatre—the only institutional theatre in the city. It belongs to the county of Neamts and is, thus, a theatre of a regional rank. At the same time, it is considered as “one of the most important Romanian cultural institutions,” as the leading Romanian critic Maria Zarnescu puts it. The theatre’s building is very special, both in terms of its architecture and of its location. Although built about half a century later than the impressive old houses in the city--in the 1930s and 1940s—it has something of their combination of shy grandeur and modesty. It is beautiful and quite big, and, while one goes up the slightly steep street leading to it, it looks even awesome. Yet, since it stands literally in the outskirts of the hill, where the main square is located, and only its upper floors are on the level of the square, once you are already in front of the theatre you have a feeling as if it holds its hat off in reverence to the beautiful old buildings above it. This exuding of humbleness, of full awareness of its place in the city landscape’s hierarchy, and of paying due respect, is further enhanced by the special glitter of the dark brown-to-black tiles of the roof, typical of the city’s roofs, as if after rain—a type of glitter celebrating nature and our modest place in it, so different from the lofty shine of the usual gilded facades of the old grand theatres. All this lack of ostentation makes the Piatra Neamt Youth Theatre’s building stand organically in sync with the general atmosphere of the city. The theatre started functioning as such only in 1959 but got its name nearly a decade later, in 1967, and soon afterwards, in 1969, the Festival had its inaugural edition. During its first seven editions (then as a biennale) it was and it wasn’t international – all at once! That is, in terms of participating productions there were no foreign ones in the selection, yet there were many invited foreign guests and the special milieu created for discussions about theatre on such an international scale substantially contributed to opening up the horizon of the Romanian theatre. So it was in effect only in 1992, when, being revived after a long pause, the Festival became de facto international and substantially grew up in size, formats and programs. The 2017 edition turned out to be a new turning point in the Festival’s development. And this was so not only because the edition was part of the celebrations of the Youth Theatre’s 50 th anniversary but also because the Festival acquired a number of very important upgrades of its profile. After-show discussions between the casts and the audience, a new workshop entitled “The Spectator as a Critic,” a photo exhibition Theatre of Youth Actors and Spectators , a jury consisting of high school students from Piatra Neamţ … And soon afterwards another novelty was added to the list: an award for overall contribution to the theatre art given to a female Romanian theatre-maker. Romanians at the Gate of the World . Photo: Adrian Nita. Romanians at the Gate of the World . Photo: Adrian Nita. Initiator of all these substantial quality changes was the new head of the Youth Theatre and the Festival, whose very appointment was in the first place a pioneering development. For, in their already considerably long history, the two institutions got for the first time a female theatre-maker at their helm! And a very special one at that: Gianina Carbunariu, the enfant terrible of contemporary Romanian theatre. Gianina Carbunariu. Photo: Dorin Constanda. Born in Piatra Neamt, but having left it to study theatre in the beginning of the millennium, Carbunariu actually came back there with an already large collection of firsts. She was the first female director to win the Romanian Association of Theatre Professionals UNITER Award for Best Show ( For Sale , Odeon Theatre Bucharest, 2014). She was short-listed by the Romanian media as one of the 100 most influential women in Romanian society today. She was the first Romanian female artist whose works were included in the official selection of the Avignon Festival. Most importantly, all that was so, since she was so brave as to dare to challenge the status quo by raising up on stage issues and problems long overdue to be solved—issues and problems having to do with hypocrisy and double standards on a national and international scale. And she was doing it in a very artistic way, not just as an activist’s statement. In brief, in 2017, Carbunariu was already an established artist with an international reputation—as a director, as a playwright, and as an author of her shows alike—because of her ground-breaking work that was literally changing the face of the theatre both in Romania and abroad! I myself saw a stunning show by Gianina Carbunariu ( 20/20 ) several years earlier, in the very beginning of that decade, in 2011, and immediately knew I had come across a unique talent and tried to follow her work from then on. “Her greatest achievement is the remarkable balance between ethics and aesthetics,” Maria Zarnescu has written … “The audience ‘manipulation’ is done by artistic ways, not political, and the emotion keeps its own sense. So it seems that Gianina Cărbunariu found the alchemical secret through which she discovered the philosophical stone of the 21 st- century theatre.” The very acute social edge, markedly accompanied by openness for a dialogue and for finding ways to solve problems together, rather than with the imperative approach bordering on dictate, so typical for many a theatre activist today, is maybe the most important feature with which Gianina Carbunariu has endowed the Festival. In the same vein, the urgent need for ceasing the enhancement of division lines between people and for finding ways to genuinely understand each other and genuinely be together is what permeates the motivation of the theme of this year’s edition of the Festival— Safety Zone — as beautifully expressed by Carbunariu, its curator. Here’s part of her introduction: “The Safety Zone is a space of solidarity, not of polarization.The Safety Zone has room for the sort of real dialogue that TV discussions and online interactions often only mimic.In the Safety Zone, the authentic living of collective experience raises a question mark over the noise of ready-made ideas, of wrong turns that risk becoming the norm.In the Safety Zone, we celebrate together inspiration, generosity, irony, vulnerability, difference, courage, empathy, aesthetic risk-taking, and exchange of ideas. We celebrate life and trust that humanity will win in its confrontation with the absurd or with injustice.” Indeed, diversity was one of the features of the program of the Festival’s 34 th edition. It consisted of three sections—national, international, and local—in the framework of which altogether 35 productions were presented. They were works of state, regional and independently-run theatres. There were performances of huge casts and solo ones, inside –on the stage of the Piatra Neamt Theatre and on its second, so-called, “Mobile Stage,” at the other end of the town—and outside, on squares. There was drama, dance, performance art, puppets… There were shows closer to the traditional type of theatre, others having nothing to do with it, and third ones—a majority—which dwelled in the in-between area. Naturally, the most populous was the Romanian part of the program which displayed theatre from all over the country, as well as three shows of the host theatre. In keeping with the tradition of the Festival, the international program had a special Focus: European women artists (under the title Something to Declare ), and the six shows comprising it were created by female theatre-makers from Belgium, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Kosovo, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Notably, the diversity of the program did not translate into many-ness—this so unfortunate feature of our time. Well distributed in the framework of two weeks—from September 8 th to the 21 st —all, that theatre did not, so to speak, spill over and infringe upon the tranquil air of the town. This, to me, is a real asset of the Festival, since, the biggest festivals aside, a city can have its spirit genuinely enriched by an event only when it is not overtaken and exhausted by it. Of course, the very fine flair for keeping the right measure in the curatorial process on the part of Carbunariu doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, being in the first place a socially conscious artist, she very well knows that theatre could easily become a claustrophobic place, when theatre-makers snobbishly sniff at reality outside theatre’s walls and forget that this art is here for the sake of that very reality. So Carbunariu has managed very finely to steer and contain the Festival so as to make it feel like an organic part of everyday life and, thus, bring joy and be of potential help in the most unobtrusive way. And not only in Piatra Neamt at that! Some of the Festival’s shows are presented in two other towns as well (Roman and Târgu Neamț) and in rural parts of the Neamț county too. As a matter of fact this comes as an extension of the Youth Theatre’s profile actually, since it travels throughout the county catering to a population of 400,000. And one more aspect of the Festival’s program struck me: its truly egalitarian spirit. No genres or types of shows were there just as an addition “to fill in the picture,” or just “for atmosphere,” like confetti – a role in which, for instance, street theatre tends to be often cast at many festivals. Actually, it is exactly with a street show that the Piatra Neamt Theatre Festival started for me (as I attended its last six days) and it remained as one of the most memorable theatre experiences there. The two parts of Romanians at the Gate of the World (of the Maska Theatre, Bucharest) took place on the main square (above the Youth Theatre), which was arranged as a meeting point between us, today’s people, and eminent personalities from the time of the belle époque and the interwar period who have made great contributions in the science and arts fields. Each of them was allotted a separate small podium (about eight altogether in each part) and, like in a museum, was arranged seemingly as a wax statue, clad in a gorgeous costume of the respective time, standing or sitting on a chair, with just a few objects connected with their life and achievements placed on a small table or next to it. The invisible curtain of the show goes up when recordings of short texts about these personalities start sounding from loudspeakers next to each “small stage.” Simultaneously with the recordings, the statues gradually begin coming to life, with stiff movements at first—after all, so many years have passed since they have left our world—but with eyes full of curiosity, as if at once listening to how they are being presented to us and enjoying their visit to our world. At some point, some of them talk together with the loudspeakers, when there are quotes by them, or just sit and touch their objects. Then, as their presentation comes to an end, they “freeze” back in their initial postures. All this gets repeated many times nearly simultaneously, while the viewers move from one “exhibit” of the makers of Romanian culture and science to another and try to catch up with all their stories. In the beginning, while one is concentrated on acquainting oneself with the details about all these people and their achievements, the experience feels like a guided tour in a museum. Then one comes to realize that it is exactly to concentrate that is challenging here, since the square is not at all large and all the stories from all the stages resound loudly and at once, thus nearly overlapping and overshadowing each other. It is exactly then when this mixture of street art and traditional type of theatre, in terms of acting, gets the shape of a powerful contemporary theatrical installation which transcends by far a mere exhibiting of a past spiritual glory. It appears to be more about a juxtaposition of our world and the world of these personalities on the territory of the spirit. And the power of this installation stems, I find, from the stark contrast between the minimalism accompanying these people of great deeds, on the one hand, and the chaos and cacophony of our everyday environment, with stepped-up decibels and fights for attention, which make maintaining normality even on a small scale feel like a big achievement. No matter how vain and eccentric all these celebrities might have been in their time, compared to the ubiquity of noise and many-ness today, and the resulting lack of clear focus in the figurative sense of the word, they radiate dignified modesty and simplicity, and make one feel humbled at least for a short while. Interestingly, the topical issue of many-ness kept on reappearing in different ways in some of the next productions I saw. Not so much as an issue on focus, though, but rather as a temptation they had not fully managed to resist or vice versa—something which, either way, emerged as a factor for their overall impact. Naturally, the large-scale, indoor productions were most prone to succumbing to this so common temptation today. For instance, in The Dream (Reactor de Creatie si Experiment, Cluj-Napoca) the effect of the impressively good music, the talent of the actors and the very important issues in focus were slightly undermined by the too frequent repetition of the main refrains—a repetition that inevitably led to diminishing of their meaning. Or, in the hilariously funny Artists’ Factory (Teatrul Municipal Bacovia) the stereotypes of in-theatre relations and the scenes which look like quotes (e.g. at least close to the musical Hamilton , or the notorious case of David Merrick announcing the death of the director of 42 nd Street ) at one point piled up to an extent of going slightly over the top and threatening to exhaust the comedy. Or, in Operation “Firecracker” (Teatrul Nottara, Bucharest), while the mouse tails of the Securitate agents were an excellent phantasmagoric type of an extension of the characters, the adding of more puppet elements (mouse heads of these characters and a gigantic head of their female master) did not really contribute to enhancing the clout of the show. These ostentatious puppet theatre guest-elements as well as the projections on screens didn’t feel as if they were growing organically out of the preceding action and only overburdened the otherwise very clearly cut and well-acted production. These shows made me feel they needed some small editing for the sake of keeping the right measure. Operation Firecracker . Photo: Andrei Gindac . The most impressive of the large-scale shows to me was Magyarosauris Dacus (of Teatrul Szigligeti, Ordea), the newest work of Gianina Carbunariu. It tells the defying-imagination life-story of a much larger-than-life and truly encyclopedic type of a person – a Hungarian baron whose discovery of dinosaur fossils was just one of the impossibly wide diapason of his ventures and adventures at the turn of the 20 th century and onwards. Carbunariu’s directorial choice of having different actors and actresses play him in his different ages, endeavors, and, in effect, faces comes as an organic extension of this many-faceted personality and makes the show feel like an unassuming visit of our time to the universe of his life and, at once, as an invitation to him to peek at our world. The use of painted wings and of painted figures dropping from the ceiling while, at the same time, live music is played on proscenium further helps the mixing of times and makes references to poignant topics of the baron’s world sound strikingly contemporary—like the Western stereotypes regarding the Balkans and especially Albania, the place of women, anti-Semitism, etc. This unexpected topicality of the story happening over a century ago, of course, brings in a sad overtone about the state of our world. But can we imagine Gianiana Carbunariu doing a show even about something having happened millennia ago without a reason other than exploring our world and pointing at its problems, of course with both laughter and sorrow?! After all, she didn’t hesitate to invite even extra-terrestrials (in Planet Mirror , Piatra Neamt Youth Theatre, 2021) to make us think about ourselves and what we do to our world. Magyarosauris Dacus . Photo: Theatrul Szigligeti . There is one detail even of her show, though, which is not entirely spared by the influence of the many-ness trend: some of the costumes, more concretely the contemporary clothes of the actors. Most probably they are chosen to be very tawdry and eclectic as sort of an extension of the main character’s singular colorfulness and many-sidedness. Yet they tend to distract the attention from the very acting of the actors clad in them and, at times, even from the story itself. Their effect is similar to that of an excessive number of trailers and photos which intersperse a very well related story in a digital magazine literally getting into the way of the reader to fully enjoy the beauty of the narrative and see the depicted personality in its wholeness. La Fracture . Photo: Pauline Vanden Neste. The show that unequivocally grabbed my heart was the one that employed the most austere stage means of expression: Fracture , a 50-minute one-woman show of Yasmine Yahiatene (Little Big Horn, Belgium), where the concept, text (much less than ten full pages) and interpretation, as well the live drawings (on the stage floor) and their simultaneous animation on a screen are all created by her. The very powerful impact of this show is, of course, not a result solely of its frugality. It comes, in the first place, from the very brave associative and contrasting montage the narrative is based on. It starts with footage from a football match with Zinadine Zidane, back in 1998, which Yasmine watches with her dad, and the Marseillaise proudly resounds, yet, oddly, the bloodiness of its text coming to the fore. Footage of her father and herself growing up follow on the screen—nearly all the time they are from parties, where he’s always with a cup in hand and invariably looks happy. And then, all of a sudden, in the projection her father cries and the story makes a rapid turn, as Yasmine says something as if out of the blue which does indeed have an effect of a bolt from the blue: when her father was eight, during the Algerian war, French soldiers entered their house in Algeria and told his mom to choose between her son and her brother--whom to save, the other one would be killed. The choice was to be done immediately. Yasmine relates this very calmly and it is in the same way that she very briefly describes the horror of the running away of a mother and a child through the desert and then up to Europe. The narrative then is back again to the area of the mundane, only now the father’s drinking is placed under question, as is the connection between it and colonialism, and two songs cut through the “normal” life in Europe, saying everything that is at the bottom both of the laughter in those previous parties and the tears that followed: “We’ll always be guilty of being Africa/ Mama, the moment has come, we’ve suffered too long.” I will not spell any more beans. Importantly, Yasmine doesn’t comment, doesn’t accuse or blame, she just lays out the outline of the story and doesn’t even get overtly emotional, leaving the emotions to the altogether three songs she has us listen to--the Marseillaise and the two songs of the second half of the show. These songs serve as sort of emotional pillars that hold the very brave construction of this show which feels like a suspension bridge over the chasm of failed humanity. There is something of the spirit of the ancient traveling storytellers in Yasmine’s way of relating the narrative. Only instead of a rebeck in hand, she has a camera, recordings and electronic means to set the houses in her drawings on the floor to flames and to make tears pour from her father’s face, drawn there and seen on the screen. Also she has the courage to mix cartoon-like drawing with tragedy--maybe in order to make it easier for us to understand, at long last. To understand both the past and the present of an, alas, still ongoing drama that so often turns out to be a tragedy. The eye-opening and heart-rending quality of this show reminded me of the remarkable works of the South African director Brett Bailey, especially of his Exhibit B series, the most powerful glimpse at colonialism I have ever witnessed the art of theatre to offer. Likewise, when Fracture finishes, one has a feeling one has lived through not only a family’s story but the plight of a whole continent. The Return of Karl May . Photo: Atdhe Mulla. For me, one of the most anticipated Festival shows was The Return of Karl May , a production of Qendra Multimedia, Kosovo, since I had never before seen theatre from there and also because of the implied by the title, always a sensitive topic of Western stereotypes of the Balkans, myself being from there. With all due respect to the creators of the show and their unquestionable talent, what struck me most were the striking similarities with the first shows of Oliver Frljic. I will never forget his Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland (2010) , his international break-through work, because of the powerful impact of its direct, in-face contact with the audience, the walking-on-the-edge mixture of facts and fiction, and the no-beating-about-the-bush when it came to problems that were in urgent need to be stated out loud, no matter if that would mean trespassing into the territory of illustration or getting into a literally declarative spirit. I still present it to my students as one of the shows that started a new wave of great overtly political theatre around the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium. And I have no doubt that the team of the Kosovo company has not been directly influenced by Frljic, since they said at the after-show talk that they have actually only seen his theatre once. The thing is that now this type of theatre has for a while already been in competition with a foretold end with the placard-ness and fixation on statements of social media and the internet on the whole, and has, thus, rather exhausted its means of expression and, consequently, its power, precisely because it has become just a part of the incessant declarative talking on a global scale. So, leaving Piatra Neamt, I came to wonder if the overt social and political theatre is not in need of reinventing, or rather re-imagining of itself. Especially, given the mighty impact of the other type of social and political theatre that does not simply name, spell out loud, and shock us with, the ills of our time and world but, by transforming them into (parts of) stories, manages to make them feel genuinely ours and, thus, make us genuinely care. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Kalina Stefanova , PhD, is the author/editor of 15 books on theatre and criticism. Five of them are in English: one with Palgrave Macmillan (co-editor with Marvin Carlson) and three with Routledge, launched in New York, London and Gdansk, and included in indicative reading lists in universities world-wide, as well as one with St. Kliment Orchidski University Press, launched in Wroclaw. She is also the author of 2 fiction books (published in nine countries, one of them in three editions in China). She has edited a two-volume anthology of Eastern European drama in China (China Theatre Press), the first anthology of spoken Chinese drama in Bulgarian (Bulgarian Bestseller) and a two-volume presentation of Bulgarian theatre in English (Routledge). She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the New York University (1990/1992) and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Meiji University, Japan, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, China, among others. In 2016 she had the privilege to be appointed as Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University, as well as a Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She has delivered lectures and lead seminars world-wide. She served as Vice President of the International Association of Theatre Critics for two mandates (2001/2006) and as its Director Symposia (2006-2010). She was the dramaturge of the highly acclaimed production of Pentecost by David Edgar, directed by Mladen Kiselov, at the Stratford Festival of Canada, in 2007. Since 2001 she has regularly served as an independent evaluation expert of the European Commission for cultural and educational projects. She is on the editorial board of a number of theatre magazines world-wide, among which Theatre Arts of the Shanghai Theatre Academy (since 2015), European Stages of CUNY, USA, (since 2016), DramaArt, of the West-Universität Temeswar, Romania, (since 2016). She is on the board of the International Theatre Towns Alliance, affiliated with Yue Opera Town, China. Currently she’s a Full Professor of Theatre Criticism at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. Among her main interests is contributing to the creation of cultural bridges between cultures. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, Daniel Gerould | The first English-language anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Czech Plays: Seven New Works Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, Daniel Gerould Download PDF Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-language anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution.” These plays explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and violence, political corruption and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and diverse styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on by democracy and globalization with characteristic humor and intelligence. Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, Daniel Gerould Foreward by Daniel Gerould Introduction by Marcy Arlin Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. 2025 Festival See the full lineup of films at this year's festival below. A selection of films will be screened in-person at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (and a few at the Anthology Film Archives) whilst others will be available to watch online on this website until June 8th 2025. SEE IN-PERSON SCHEDULE Festival Lineup IN-PERSON Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film IN-PERSON Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls IN-PERSON Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer IN-PERSON Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL ONLINE + IN-PERSON Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse IN-PERSON This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã ONLINE + IN-PERSON Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective IN-PERSON His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect ONLINE + IN-PERSON PACI JULIETTE ROUDET IN-PERSON Reas Lola Arias IN-PERSON The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir IN-PERSON Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss IN-PERSON Bila Burba Duiren Wagua IN-PERSON JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux ONLINE + IN-PERSON Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing ONLINE + IN-PERSON Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega IN-PERSON The Jacket Mathijs Poppe ONLINE + IN-PERSON Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu ONLINE + IN-PERSON Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga IN-PERSON Pidikwe Caroline Monnet ONLINE + IN-PERSON Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves ONLINE + IN-PERSON Theater of War Oleh Halaidych In-Person Screenings at The Martin E. Segal Center (365 5th Ave, New York) and Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave, New York) Google Maps Google Maps Thursday May 15 1:00 pm Resilience by Juan David Padilla Vega (Canada, 2024, 70’) U.S. PREMIERE 2:20 pm JJ by Pauline L. Boulba and Aminata Labor (France, 2024, 72’) 4:00 pm This is Ballroom by Vita and Juru (Brazil, 2024, 92’) 5:50 pm Transindigenous Assembly by Joulia Strauss (Greece, 2024, 86’) 7:25 pm Radical Move by Aniela Gabryel (Poland, 2023, 77’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE RSVP Day 1 Friday May 16 12:00 pm Bila Burba by Duiren Wagua (Panama, 2023, 70’) 1:20 pm Acting by Sophie Fiennes (UK, 2024, 145’) U.S. PREMIERE 3:55 pm The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Lebanon, 2024, 71’) U.S. PREMIERE 5:15 pm Brink of Dreams by Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir (Egypt, France, Denmark, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, 2024, 102’) Special section SPOTLIGHT ON BASINGA 7:10 pm Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu (Germany, 2024, 52’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE 8:10 pm Skywalk above Prague by Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves (Czech Republic, 2020, 51’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE RSVP Day 2 Saturday May 17 11:00 am SHORT FILMS PROGRAM Benjamin de Oliveira’s Open Paths by Bruno Esperança (Brazil, 2024, 37’) U.S. PREMIERE Peak Hour in the House by Blue Ka Wing (Honk Kong, 2024, 7’) Paci by Juliette Roudet (France, 2024, 33’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Jesus and the Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga (Brazil, 2024, 3’) Somber Tides by Chantal Caron (Canada, 2024, 12’) N.Y. PREMIERE Theater of War by Oleh Halaidych (Ukraine, 2024, 40’) U.S. PREMIERE Pidikwe by Caroline Monnet (Canada, 2024, 10’) U.S. PREMIERE 1:25pm Grand Theft Hamlet by Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane (UK, 2024, 90’) RSVP Day 3 Sunday May 18 3:00 pm SPECIAL FESTIVAL PRESENTATION AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003) Reas by Lola Arias (Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, 2024, 82’) RSVP at AFA Wednesday May 21 to Wednesday May 28 HIS HEAD WAS A SLEDGEHAMMER: RICHARD FOREMAN IN RETROSPECT AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES Guest-programmed by Andrew Lampert. The retrospective is co-presented by New York University Special Collections, home to the Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim Papers, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance. For full schedule of the retrospective go to this LINK . 3:00 pm SPECIAL FESTIVAL PRESENTATION AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003) Moi-Même by Mojo Lorwin & Lee Breuer (France, US, 1968/2024, 65 min, 16mm-to-DCP) followed by Q&A with Mojo Lorwin and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Frank Hentschker RSVP at AFA About The Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The 2025 festival is co-curated by Frank Hentschker and Tomek Smolarski, and supported by Gaurav Singh Nijjer on digital design. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries. For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalfilmfestival@gmail.com Meet The Team Tomek Smolarski Co-Curator Tomek Smolarski is a cultural manager, producer and curator with over 20 years of experience in production of international cultural events and extensive knowledge in cultural diplomacy. He has produced projects with leading U.S. institutions, including BAM, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, MoMI, Pacific Film Archives, Chicago Cultural Center and many others. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn

Get In Touch For inquiries, feedback, or any other information, please don't hesitate to contact us: Telephone: 212-817-1860 Email: mestc@gc.cuny.edu Address: The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5303New York, NY 10016-4309 Send Thank You for Contacting Us!

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

Support The Segal Center If you'd like to support our work to bring visibility to the performing arts through our programs, please consider making a donation to The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. We are a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit organization and all gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. You can also get in touch with other types of support, collaborations and partnerships. Get In Touch Donate Online Visit the link below to donate online. Under the field titled 'Designation', choose 'Funds for The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center' Proceed to fill in your details. Any and all amounts are welcome. You will receive an email confirmation immediately. We will send across a tax receipt (including the amount and confirmation the designation) shortly. Proceed You will be redirected to The Graduate Center Foundation CUNY donation portal (external link) Donate via Cheque You can also donate with checks. Payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc. Memo: MESTC or Segal Center Mailing Address: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Graduate Center CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016

PRELUDE Artist & Panellist Information Fill in your performance details for the Prelude 2023 festival organized by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center. Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival. The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance. PRELUDE offers an array of short performances, readings, and screenings — a completely free survey of the current New York moment and the work being prepared for the next season and beyond—as well as new commissions and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and performers. PRELUDE is a place to discover what voices are shaping the future of theatre and performance in NYC, to observe, engage, commune, and critique. PRELUDE 2023 October across New York City At the Segal Center: Oct 11-14, 16, 19 For more details and questions, contact: Ann Kreitman Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 ann4prelude@gmail.com 847-471-1550 Tayler Everts Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 tayler4prelude@gmail.com 480-313-2595 Your Name Your Email Address Your Title, Organization / Affliation Your Bio Your / Organization Links (Website, Social Media) Your Headshot (Please include credits in file name) Upload File Submit Thank you for submitting your information. We will be in touch soon!

The fellowships provide theatre and performance scholars the opportunity to conduct research in New York City for a period of 3 to 6 months. Fellows are given individual work spaces in the Segal Center offices at the Graduate Center CUNY Visiting Scholars Program 2025 GLOBAL VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM Marvin Carlson Fellowships Call for Applications The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY is currently accepting applications for its 2025 Global Visiting Scholars Program. Ten scholars of theatre and performance who are currently working outside of the United States will be awarded our new Marvin Carlson Fellowships. This diverse group of fellows will represent communities from a range of geographical areas, including but not limited to Africa; East, South, and South-East Asia; Oceania; Eastern and Central Europe; the Americas; the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Overview The fellowships provide theatre and performance scholars the opportunity to conduct research in New York City for a period of 3 to 6 months. Fellows are given individual work spaces in the Segal Center offices at the Graduate Center CUNY, access to libraries and archives across New York City, and opportunities to share their work in a community setting through monthly salons with other fellows, faculty, and students from the Graduate Center's PhD program in Theatre and Performance. The fellowships do not include financial support from the Segal Center. Fellows are expected to secure their own resources to remain in New York City for the length of their fellowship. Visas, if needed, are processed through the Graduate Center CUNY in accordance with US State Department requirements. These requirements include proof of financial security in the form of bank statements, proof of health insurance as well as documentation of current residency.* Scholars will not be able to teach or enroll in courses at any university while in residence. Application We are accepting applications on a rolling basis. For consideration please submit the following materials via email for review. • One sentence description of project • Name and address of host institution • A 500- to 1000-word project proposal • An academic CV • A writing sample in English Please submit applications and queries to to: segalglobalscholars@gmail.com Email application materials in a single PDF. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Response time: 2-3 months. *Important: For those requiring a visa, the estimated amount of monthly financial resources each fellow is expected to have is $2,000 per month for a single person, $2,500 for a family. In addition, scholars must have $100,000 in medical insurance for each illness or accident, not to exceed a $500 deductible for each illness or accident; $50,000 for evacuation on medical emergency; and $25,000 for repatriation of remains in the event of death. For more information on the visa requirements of the CUNY Visiting Research Scholars Program, see: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/provosts-office/visiting-research-scholars .

Fiona Gregory Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet Fiona Gregory By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1970 Judith Anderson, doyenne of the classical American stage, fulfilled a long-held desire to play the title role in Hamlet. Employing a heavily cut text and minimalist setting, the production relied on the power of voice to illuminate Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet most viewers were unable to see past Anderson’s seventy-three-year-old female body to the spirit of her Hamlet, and her performance was widely criticised. Anderson later described the experience as a “heartache and a tragedy.”1 Despite its disappointing reception at the time, Anderson’s performance merits recognition, and re-examination, as a notable event in theatrical history with significant aesthetic and social implications. Anderson’s Hamlet was an extraordinary exercise in boundary crossing—rejecting conventions of Shakespearean performance alongside those of age and gender. Furthermore it refused to be aligned with either classical theatre or avant-garde performance, existing in a state of otherness and demanding to be assessed on its own terms. Australian-born Anderson began her Broadway career in the 1920s, later balancing her stage work alongside steady employment as a character actress in film. Her career was transformed when she appeared as Medea in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s play. Anderson’s intense and archly theatrical performance met with popular and critical acclaim and enhanced her status, positioning her as “first lady” of the American stage. In the 1950s and 1960s she cemented this identity, touring both the full production of Medea and her program of excerpts from Medea and Macbeth in America and abroad. Although she continued to appear regularly on film and television, Anderson repeatedly figured the stage as her true metier. As well as lauding the performative freedom of the theatre, she expressed an understanding of the stage as a site that enabled communion with “genius:” “That’s why I like to do great plays—to be a part of greatness.”2 In the 1960s and 70s, Anderson became increasingly disillusioned not only with film and television but with the contemporary theatre. Her solution was to retreat into the classics: “There’s so little that is good. I would rather fail as Hamlet than succeed in something less worthy.”3 Anderson’s Hamlet, directed by William Ball and produced by Paul Gregory, performed predominantly at university theatres but also appeared at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall. Anderson’s performance, Ball’s direction, the supporting cast, and the design were all repeatedly deemed weak and ill-conceived by critics, but the production proved a commercial success: the two nights at Carnegie Hall sold out before rehearsals even commenced. [caption id="attachment_1124" align="alignnone" width="420"] Figure 1., Hamlet program, signed by Judith Anderson, in Author’s collection.[/caption] Anderson’s popularity suggests a nostalgic longing for the grand theatre of the past amongst some sections of the community during a period of immense change in America. The consequences of involvement in the war in Vietnam, the rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the gay liberation movement transformed American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These issues were explored in the work of avant garde troupes such as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company, as well as in more mainstream forms such as the rock musical Hair. Judith Anderson was removed from these trends; from the early 1960s, she repeatedly conveyed her distaste for modern theatre. In 1969, she told a journalist: “[there] isn’t anything that I want to see today. You hear about Hair and Oh Calcuatta! (sic) and it’s all disgusting to me. There is no quality or imagination in the theatre today [and] I object to the nudity.”4 She also raised her objections to “thrust” stages that brought the actors into the audience: “For her it’s too much reality . . . and not enough left to the imagination.”5 Anderson articulated a preference for performance that occurred inside the pictorial frame of the proscenium and maintained its distance from the audience. Yet despite her conservative outlook, her Hamlet was read as potentially radical, and she was obliged to deny that it held feminist intent or was an experiment in “camp.” Female Hamlets The desire to play Hamlet had been experienced and fulfilled by many women before Anderson, including Mrs. Furnivall, Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Inchbald during the eighteenth century.6 These women were led, Tony Howard suggests, by the desire to claim ownership over a role that was becoming identified as the greatest work of England’s greatest poet.7 Female Hamlets proved particularly popular in the Romantic age, a move attributable in part to changing conceptions of Hamlet’s character. Robin Headlam Wells notes the “age of sensibility invented a new Hamlet—sensitive, delicate, distressed,”8 and Elaine Showalter suggests this feminisation of the character opened the role to women.9 According to Tony Howard the first woman to essay the role in an American theatre was likely the touring English actress Mrs. Bartley at New York’s Park Theatre in 1819, closely followed by Fanny Wallack, Charlotte Barnes and, most notably, Charlotte Cushman.10 Departing from earlier models, Cushman privileged Shakespeare’s text in her production—she reinstated much of the play that was typically cut, as well as restoring her understanding of emotional “truth” to the Hamlet role, in a “conscious critique of what many men had done with it” before her.11 Anderson drew attention to the long tradition of actresses in the role and particularly cited Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, which the actress premiered in 1899 at the age of fifty-four, as a precedent for her own performance. Bernhardt performed her Hamlet within the tradition of “travesti” performance popular on the French stage. Actresses in travesti sought to create a stylised masculinity that male actors were thought to be unable to achieve in their representations of young men and boys. Gerda Taranow notes the object of travesti was not “androgyny.” Despite its insistence on the feminine within the masculine and vice versa, the aim of travesti was not to unite the sexes but to highlight difference through the contrast of female body and male attire. Female travesti “did not seek to intermingle opposite sexualities, but to emphasize, with delicate insistence, the feminine presence [of the actress in the male role].”12 Anderson, in contrast, would seek to direct attention away from her gendered identity and body when playing Hamlet. While many French critics applauded Bernhardt’s depiction of masculinity, some questioned the suitability of Hamlet for travesti performance, as they believed Hamlet’s feminine soul needed to be contrasted with a masculine body.13 English critics also objected to Bernhardt’s performance in terms of the body, finding it impossible to read this Hamlet as anything but a woman—specifically a very famous French woman named Sarah Bernhardt. In Max Beerbohm’s analysis, Bernhardt’s Hamlet “betrayed nothing but herself, and revealed nothing but [her] unreasoning vanity . . . her Hamlet was, from first to last, très grande dame.”14 The actress’s body and, more particularly, her celebrity, prevented critics from seeing the “real” Hamlet. The same phenomenon would attend Anderson’s appearance in the role. From Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, she appears also to have been interested in two lesser-known female Hamlets: Asta Nielsen and Esmé Beringer.15 These actresses demonstrate radically different readings of Hamlet by women in the twentieth century, and provide a counterpoint to Anderson’s own approach to the character. Nielsen played Hamlet in the German film, Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance (1920), directed by Svend Gade. The plot followed Edward P. Vining’s 1881 monograph The Mystery of Hamlet in suggesting Hamlet had been born female but was raised as a boy for political reasons. As the title suggests, this adaptation rejected the passive protagonist of Romanticism for an active avenger. Nielsen’s Hamlet is a young “man” of intellect and honour, troubled by “his” (inexpressible) love for Horatio and grief at the death of “his” father. The film disrupts traditional readings of Hamlet’s delay, or resistance to revenge, as a “feminine” trait. Nielsen had become renowned for playing freedom-seeking new women and enigmatic prostitutes, and Lawrence Danson contends that she brought the memory of these roles to her Hamlet, thereby aligning the character with sexual transgression. In Danson’s analysis, this Hamlet thus became a spectacle of simultaneous liberation and containment: “In Nielsen’s polymorphous sexuality a viewer could read the strong image of a conceivable freedom from gender restrictions, crossed with the pathos of that freedom’s bafflement by actual social conditions” as represented in the material circumstances of the play.16 Nielsen’s Hamlet demonstrates the radical potential of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare, a potential that would also circulate around Anderson’s Hamlet. Esmé Beringer played Hamlet in London in 1935 at the age of sixty-three, and later published an article in which she justified actresses playing Hamlet. She repeatedly figures the character in emotional terms: prior to the catastrophe he is “happy,” “highspirited” and “in love;” following it he is “grief-stricken,” and “runs the gamut of love, scorn and despair.” Beringer does not explicitly comment on the implications of cross-gender casting, but the aspects of the character to which she draws attention are those that seem particularly suited to female performers. She stresses Hamlet’s sensitivity, and finds his interpersonal relationships with Ophelia, Horatio, and Gertrude amongst “the most vital themes of the play.”17 Even within a normative reading of the play, and a conservative approach to theatre, Beringer implicitly validated actresses playing Hamlet. As an older woman performing Hamlet, Beringer also functioned as a precedent for Anderson. Had Anderson read the Times’s review of Beringer’s performance she would have seen that the actress’s age was ignored by the critics, but her ineffectual representation of masculinity and male behaviour, and her “monotonous, sing-song intonation,” were openly criticised.18 Anderson decided not to attempt a representation of masculinity in her reading, and to focus her performance on her greatest asset—her powerful and flexible voice. Anderson on the road to Elsinore In 1954, Anderson told an American journalist she wished to play the role of Hamlet.19 She reiterated this desire in the press that attended her appearance in Medea in Epidaurus in 1955.20 The opportunity to do so did not arise until 1969, a delay she attributed to the difficulty of finding a suitable director.21 Bernhardt had also stated that her desire to play Hamlet was long-standing but she had been delayed by production difficulties—in her case the search for an appropriate translation.22 This discourse of desire thwarted by circumstances beyond the actresses’ control has a number of effects: it foregrounds the actresses’ professionalism; inhibits reading their decision to play Hamlet as a “whim” or rash act of folly; and frames their eventual appearance in the role as in some way “destined.” Anderson’s trouble finding a director also suggests the limited commercial potential of a female Hamlet on the American stage in the late twentieth century. Anderson did eventually find someone to guide her Hamlet: William Ball, founder and director of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), based in San Francisco from 1965. Under Ball’s vigorous leadership, ACT presented modern classics by authors such as Chekhov, Pirandello and Tom Stoppard, rising to become “one of the most active and prosperous resident repertory companies in the country.”23 During the 1960s, Ball also directed John Gielgud, Edith Evans and Margaret Leighton in A Homage to Shakespeare, and worked at a number of America’s major Shakespeare festivals. The venture was produced by Paul Gregory, who had worked in Hollywood and the music industry in addition to the theatre. In 1953, he had produced John Brown’s Body, a dramatic reading starring Anderson, Tyrone Power, and Raymond Massey. In this production, Anderson had demonstrated two things above all else: her range, and her ability to build characters through voice—she created, through recitation, “anything from a great Southern hostess to a child of the woods.”24 In the Hamlet program, Gregory and Ball are described as initiators of the production and, if this was the case, it may have been Anderson’s creation of diverse characters through voice in John Brown’s Body that inspired the project.25 The program notes state Gregory and Ball have (like the actress herself) lived with the idea of Anderson as Hamlet for a long time: “It has been a long cherished dream of [Gregory and Ball] to bring Dame Judith back to the stage as the doomed heir of Elsinore, and when she became available, they lost no time in bringing it to fruition.”26 This comment “authorises” Anderson’s performance by framing it as the “brainchild” of two respected and experienced theatre practitioners, and forestalling its being read as the whim of an aging actress. The idea of Anderson as Hamlet held a popular appeal few might have anticipated. The actress herself stated she originally intended the play for university audiences (a decision she framed in part as a pedagogical exercise27), but Lewis Funke noted that when “the big city managers heard that she would be going out in the production they “demanded” that she play for them too, hence Carnegie Hall.”28 Anderson’s desire to remove the production from Broadway and other avenues of “high status” theatre suggests she was conscious of the risky nature of her venture. The managers’ insistence that she play Carnegie Hall shows the actress remained tethered to a position of status within the American theatre. This status meant Anderson was obliged to present herself as an item of consumption to the critics and patrons that would descend on Carnegie Hall—some of whom then read the “failure” of her Hamlet as a transgression of her status. While some reviewers (especially those from regional and university papers) supported Anderson’s performance, most were critical of her interpretation and of Ball’s production in general. Dan Sullivan, of the Los Angeles Times, found Anderson’s performance “so far off the mark in conception and execution that it is hard to know where to start to describe it.”29 Chris Curcio, of the California State University at Hayward, described the performance as “misconceived,” “monotonously boring,” and “awkward and contrived.”30 Nathan Cohen, of the Toronto Daily Star, suggested Ball had “done nothing to benefit Dame Judith or the play,” and the New York Times’s Mel Gussow described Ball’s Hamlet as “a bloodless production, with no power, poetry, or humour.”31 The reviews indicate the voice was the focus in this Hamlet. As Nick Milich noted in the Watsonville Register, the “point” of this production was “Shakespeare’s poetry, not action, not swordfights.”32 Indeed Milich and Cohen referred to the production as a “recitation,” and Gussow felt “it was almost like a concert reading.”33 In A Sense of Direction, his manifesto on directing, Ball lists “language” as one of the five basic elements of a play, alongside “theme,” “plot,” “character,” and “spectacle.” In any production, writes Ball, a director should identify one of these as the “predominant element;” this element then becomes the focus of the work.34 In keeping with a focus on language, Ball devised a minimalist production: “There are no props, and red velvet backdrops take the place of sets. All the characters except Hamlet wear variations of the same costume, deep red velvet and silk. In vivid contrast, Hamlet is garbed—boots, tights and vest—all in black.”35 Such costuming of Hamlet in black can be read as a further effort to erase the body, but with the set and remainder of the cast in red it is likely that it highlighted not only Hamlet’s body, but also the character’s singularity and Anderson’s star status. [caption id="attachment_1123" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Judith Anderson as Hamlet, production still. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.[/caption] A number of critics went so far as to describe the production as “stylised.”36 The actors used gestures rather than realistic movement, and there was little “action.”37 These factors enhanced the sense of a recital, although Ball also incorporated some more striking production choices, such as when “the ghost makes its entrance to the sound of amplified heartbeats.”38 The performance text was cut to run under two hours; it was in fact so abbreviated that one critic suggested “a more honest title would be ‘Gems from Hamlet.’”39 Anderson’s degree of input into the performance text is difficult to determine. In Ball’s 1985 manifesto on theatre, A Sense of Direction, he states that his preferred method was to cut the text himself and distribute the arranged script to the cast at the first rehearsal.40 Such a method was unlikely to appeal to Anderson, and Lewis Funke in the New York Times notes “[some] of the original pruning wasn’t to Dame Judith’s liking.” However, the text developed in performance, and Funke added that “things are better now [in November] than when the tour started out [in October].” Anderson later admitted: “[Hamlet] wasn’t done the way I wanted it done.”41 Yet, despite the friction between them, Ball and Anderson actually held the same vision for the production: the desire to focus on language, and a belief in the power of the voice.42 Anderson had played Gertrude opposite John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936, and this actor’s reading is likely to have influenced her. Gielgud evoked the character’s grief, sensitivity, intellect, and emotional connectivity to those around him. The actor himself described his Hamlet as “introverted,” and located his voice as his focus during the performance: “[I was] more worried about the inflection, the phrasing, and the diction [when I played Hamlet].”43 Anderson also used “grief” as a keynote of her reading, and one critic pejoratively described her as the “Melancholy Dame.”44 The actress conveyed grief through vocal effect: reference was made to her “frequent sobbing voice.”45 While some reviewers criticised her “blubbering” and “sobs,” another admitted, “nobody hovers on the edge of tears so thrillingly” as Anderson.46 In one of the few interviews discussing her interpretation of Hamlet, Anderson suggested she would “be a more emotional Hamlet than, say, Gielgud or Olivier. I might cry.”47 This seemingly innocent comment provides a clue to the critical reception of Anderson’s performance. As Tom Lutz notes, “the meanings assigned to tears are always compounded by the age and sex of the crier.”48 The performance of Hamlet by an elderly woman held the potential to radically destabilise the play’s accepted meanings. James W. Stone has explored Hamlet in terms of its ordering and expulsion of the feminine through language and action. In Stone’s analysis, the feminine is represented in the play in images of dissolution, of movement into water, and therefore in tears: “Whether tears . . . represent Niobe’s sincere expression of grief or Gertrude’s masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to define the bifurcated feminine.”49 Stone describes Hamlet’s journey in the play as a movement away from the feminine. Anderson’s decision to make Hamlet more emotional, to cry noticeably and often, had the potential to instead show him collapsing into the feminine. Such a reading of the text would unsettle critics by its unconventionality, and by its disturbance of the play’s symbolic function: the ordering and expulsion of the feminine. And while the focus on the voice in this production was to draw attention away from the body, the act of crying—a manifestation of the feminine—may have actually underscored the presence of the actress in the role. “She is Judith Anderson” Critic Dan Sullivan described Anderson in Hamlet as the “victim of three obdurate facts. She is a woman. She is a rather short woman. She is Judith Anderson.” For Sullivan, the actress’s association with performative evil through her appearances in Rebecca, Macbeth, and Medea prevented her from becoming Hamlet.50 Frank Hains found Anderson’s Hamlet in conflict with her celebrity, rather than her performance identity. He found he “was never able to associate in any way that Great Lady of the Stage before me with the character which my program told me she was playing.”51 In his review, Hains divides “Judith Anderson” into two personae: “Miss Anderson” and “Dame Judith.”52 “Dame Judith” is linked with Sarah Bernhardt, connoting celebrity, wilfulness, and performative excess. In contrast, “Miss Anderson” is linked with roles such as Lady Macbeth and Medea, which signify tradition, professionalism, and the craft of acting. Lady Macbeth and Medea are described as Anderson’s “property,” suggesting these roles form the basis of her “authentic” performance self. The appearance as Hamlet is a transgression of this self, or as the critic himself puts it, “madness.”53 We can also read Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and established identity in Chris Curcio’s response to her performance as “grotesque,” and Bernard Grebanier’s description of it as a “strange [undertaking].”54 For Grebanier, Anderson’s Hamlet became “strange” when considered alongside her “brilliant” performances in Medea and Macbeth.55 Like Medea, Hamlet explores the protagonist’s desire for revenge that leads to murder, but does so via contemplation rather than hasty action, and through lyric, philosophic musings instead of raw and bloody dialogue. It is, paradoxically, a more “feminine” role than was usually associated with Anderson. In addition, unlike the wicked and wilful Medea and Lady Macbeth—Anderson’s most famous roles—Hamlet aims to do good and is obsessed with “right.” Hamlet thus exists at a considerable distance from Anderson’s trademark roles. Anne Davis Basting’s analysis of another actress’s return to Broadway helps us appreciate the transgressive effect of Anderson’s Hamlet. In 1995, at the age of seventy-four, Carol Channing played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, a role she originated in 1964, and with which she was strongly identified. Basting suggests the popularity of Channing’s 1995 performance resulted in part from its performance of “authenticity”—its nostalgic affirmation of a much-loved actress’s identity, and of a golden, “lost” period in Broadway’s history.56 Anderson’s Hamlet, in contrast, denied her authentic self, and was compromised not by the lingering presence of Medea or Lady Macbeth, but by their very absence. While critics figured Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and performance identity, I would like to suggest Anderson herself perceived it as an escape from her performance identity—an identity epitomised by the emotion and arch theatricality of Medea. Emerging as it did in the early 1950s, Anderson’s desire to play Hamlet arose in the midst of her journey with Medea. In 1969, Anderson reflected that playing Medea had been a physically and emotionally draining experience: “Medea consumed every bit of me . . . I saw nobody and did nothing, other than concentrate entirely on my work. It took everything out of me, including all my blood. I had to have a blood transfusion.”57 Anderson read Hamlet in distinctly cerebral terms and perhaps Shakespeare’s sensitive, reasoning Danish prince appeared to her here as a tantalising retreat from the physical onslaught of Medea. The body and its sufferings were at the centre of Medea, but Anderson’s vision for Hamlet virtually elided the body: the actress told Robert Feldman that the production “will be in chiaroscuro with lots of shadows,” and the “shadows will include everything from the waist down.”58 Anderson made this comment ten months before the production opened and it is not clear from the reviews and still photographs if her vision was realised in performance. What is apparent is that in Anderson’s approach to the text (she focussed on the poetry); in her performance style (she privileged the voice); and in her proposed design (she hoped to mask the body), she turned away from the mode that the physical had been configured in her landmark role, only to have it reinscribed by the critics. During the tour, Anderson expressed frustration at the media’s interest in her age. As she told the New York Times: “Sure I’m old . . . but I am sick and tired of you writers who keep dwelling on that. I want people to see me and not be thinking of how old I am.”59 In this conceptualisation of her identity, Anderson distinguishes between her essential self and her physical self. She spoke of Hamlet in similar terms: figuring the character as a “soul” rather than a “body.” In her vision for the production, Anderson denied Hamlet a physical identity, but she also denied him a gender identity. Lewis Funke noted that “she doesn’t think of [Hamlet] as being a man . . . She sees the role as asexual.”60 Anderson refused to align Hamlet with either male or female subjectivity. She asked a student reporter: “‘Well, what did you think of me as while watching the play? Did you think of me as a woman or as Hamlet?’” The student replied: “‘At first I thought of you as a woman . . . [but later] I thought of you as Hamlet.’”61 Hamlet is here not female but is also, perhaps, not male. For Anderson, Hamlet appears to have been simply “human” and “his” experience “universal,” and there is a suggestion here that at least one viewer shared her vision. Despite the negative criticism, there were other viewers who approached the play on Anderson’s terms. Nick Milich suggested the majority of critics were searching for the wrong production: “[this Hamlet] is very hard for a modern audience to take . . . [For the players] offered nothing else but the poetry; their production was stripped down to essence, to a dreamlike state.”62 Prior to its opening, Variety predicted Anderson’s Hamlet would dismay theatre purists.63 Most reviews suggest this prediction was realised, as does Bernard Grebanier in Then Came Each Actor, his 1975 history of Shakespearean performance, in which he lists Anderson’s Hamlet as a “total failure.”64 Yet for Milich, Anderson’s Hamlet did not fail. Rather it affirmed the significance of Shakespeare’s poetry and the power of performance to transform the written word. In addition, for several viewers it provided a glimpse of some universal human “essence” that transcended age, gender, celebrity and the body. It was for such transcendence that Anderson had essayed the role: to escape her seventy-three year old body and the yoke of established celebrity and performance identities, and become “part of Shakespeare’s riches and poetry.” Anderson seems to have received the most positive responses from students, her intended audience. The audience at La Crosse University, for example, was described as “rapt” in the production; they gave Anderson a standing ovation.65 Anderson told the New York Times she regularly received letters from appreciative students: “I had a three-page letter only the other day from a girl thanking me, saying ‘Thank God you exist, thank God I saw you’.”66 Grebanier refers to this letter in Then Came Each Actor. It had prompted him “to wonder whether or not the college girl had not already been enlisted in that branch of the woman’s lib movement which would like to see men unsexed.”67 He was not the only writer to suggest Anderson’s performance held some affinity with contemporary feminism. The New York Times told its readers not “to go running over the landscape in praise of Women’s Liberation . . . [as Anderson is] not the first and surely not the last of her sex to essay the Dane.”68 Chris Curcio admitted, “Women’s Liberation proponents may be astatic [sic] that Dame Judith Anderson is playing Hamlet, [but] theatre aficionados were dropping in the aisles.”69 In common with much contemporary media commentary on the women’s movement, these critics’ alignment of the production with feminism was done jokingly and/or disparagingly. Anderson herself denied any feminist agenda in her work, and described “Women’s Lib” as “a lot of tommy-rot.”70 And yet, although she seems unaware of it, Anderson’s Hamlet performed a destabilisation of gender distinctions that, like the discourse of women’s liberation, questioned gender boundaries. “I’m Not Going to Camp it Up”71 When Anderson announced her desire to play Hamlet, the media recognised the camp potential of such a project: a syndicated newspaper article published throughout America “predicted that [Anderson] would camp up the role.”72 “Camp” had entered the American mainstream with the publication of Susan Sontag’s influential essay, “Notes on Camp,” in 1964.73 Fabio Cleto notes that “within weeks” of this essay’s appearance, camp “exploded as a mass media keyword.”74 In 1970, as a consequence of Sontag’s essay and its application by the mass media, the word “camp” signalled excess, incongruity, and theatricality, and while recognised as an important part of gay culture was not thought of as exclusively “homosexual.”75 In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag describes an enormous variety of cultural moments, objects and persons as “camp,” and her essay has been criticised as “unsystematic” and “inconsistent.”76 Yet, due to its influence, Sontag’s essay provides a useful insight into how camp was perceived at the time of Anderson’s Hamlet. For Sontag, the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”77 Camp is thus found in excessive and/or incongruous displays of gender, age, class, or style. A number of Anderson’s performances prior to Hamlet can be identified as camp in their excess. In films such as Salome (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and in Hallmark Hall of Fame television productions, “Elizabeth the Queen” (1968) and “The File on Devlin” (1969), Anderson’s overt theatricality could not be contained by the camera. Her performances in the above productions were characterised by emotionalism and exaggerated gestures and movement. In his review of “The File on Devlin,” George Eres described Anderson’s “dramatics” as “out of all proportion” to the script and the medium.78 The implication here is that Anderson’s performance is not only “excessive” but also “passé,” belonging to an earlier, and superseded, style of performance. As Andrew Ross notes in an important definition, the “camp effect” is created “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.”79 Ross notes that the distance between contemporary and historical performance was highlighted by the “recirculation of classic Hollywood films on television.”80 Repeated screenings of Anderson’s intense emotionalism in Rebecca and Salome, and the theatricality of her television appearances, rendered her anachronistic in a culture influenced by the understatement of the Method. These performances, and Anderson’s performance and celebrity identities, were liable to be received as camp in Ross’s terms. The idea of such an actress playing Hamlet, especially at the age of seventy-three, was so incongruous that some sections of the media automatically presumed her performance would become camp. However, as Anderson had shown in films such as Laura and The Red House, she could produce restrained and realistic performances when necessary, and her relatively measured Hamlet did not become camp solely on the grounds of “excess.” Nor was its old-fashioned style purely to blame, despite Bill Marvel’s description of Anderson as “out of her depth” in “attempting to make the Bard come alive for members of the Woodstock generation.”81 Indeed, as discussed earlier, some of the most appreciative viewers of the production were university students. Anderson’s Hamlet is more completely read as an example of what Sontag terms “naïve” or “pure” camp, the “essential element” of which is “seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Sontag goes on to note that “not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”82 This Hamlet was expressive of each of these elements: “exaggeration” in its style; the “fantastic” in its casting of a seventy-three year old woman as a young man; “passion” in that woman’s intense desire to play the part; and “naivety” in her belief it could work. Ultimately Anderson’s experiment with Hamlet stands as an audacious, boundary-defying act, yet one that also demonstrates the very fixity of the boundaries it was attempting to cross. ------------------------- Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research on issues of celebrity representation and performance identity has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Australasian Drama Studies and Affirmations: Of the Modern. She served on the editorial board for Twenty-First Century Drama: The First Decade (Gale, 2012). She is currently undertaking a major research project on representations of the actress and mental illness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. ------------------------- Endnotes: [1]“A Heartache and a Tragedy,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1973. [2] Michael Clowes, “Dame Judith Anderson,” Adelaide Advertiser, 19 February 1966, 8. [3] Barbara Cloud, “Judith Playing Hamlet,” Pittsburgh Press, 3 January 1971, 19. [4] Louis Calta, “Judith Anderson Plans to Play Hamlet,” New York Times, 19 November 1969, 44. [5] “A Theatre Great is Still ‘A Country Girl,’” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1973, 2. [6] For a fascinating analysis of the history of actresses in the role into the twenty-first century see Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [7] Ibid, 36. [8] Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81. [9] Ibid.; see also Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 79. [10] Howard, Women as Hamlet, 43. [11] Ibid, 49. [12] Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 83. [13]Ibid., 85. [14] Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Greenwood Press, 1930), 36-7. [15] Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, boxes 10-11, Dame Judith Anderson Collection, PA Mss 6, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). [16] Lawrence Danson, “Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret,” Shakespeare Survey 45 (1993): 45. [17] Esmé Beringer, “Woman’s View of Hamlet,” 15 October 1953, unidentified fragment, UCSB. [18] “Miss Esmé Beringer in Hamlet,” Times, 22 January 1938, 8. [19] New York Herald Tribune, 18 October 1954, Judith Anderson Clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL). [20] Fragment from unidentified article dated 4 July 1955, NYPL. [21] Morning Telegraph, 11 August 1970, NYPL. [22] Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre (London: G. Bles, 1924), 139. [23] Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre across America: Approaching a New Millennium, rev ed. (New York: Applause, 1997), 78. [24] Power’s opening speech, page from Anderson’s script of John Brown’s Body, UCSB. [25] Nick Milich states Anderson “selected Ball to direct her,” in “Critics Missed the Point,” Watsonville Register, 13 October 1970, DJA. This does not preclude the possibility that Gregory initiated the project. [26] Hamlet program, in author’s collection. [27] Ibid. [28] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [29] Dan Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1970, UCSB. [30] Chris Curcio, “Anderson’s Hamlet: A Fiasco,” Daily Pioneer, 6 October 1970, UCSB. [31] Nathan Cohen, “Female Hamlet Never Satisfying,” Toronto Daily Star, 27 October 1970, UCSB; Mel Gussow, “Stage: A Lady ‘Hamlet,’” New York Times, 15 January 1971, 18. [32] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [33] Ibid; Cohen, “Female Hamlet;” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet.’” [34] William Ball, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1984), 27-8. [35] Bill Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother Plays Him,” National Observer, 5 October 1970, 17. [36] Frank Hains, “Dame’s Dane: Madness in Great Ones Must Now Unwatched Go,” Jackson Daily News, 17 November 1970, DJA; Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [37] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times. [38] Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother.” [39] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [40] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 99. [41] Robert Berkvist, “When a Great Role is Passed Along,” New York Times, 2 May 1982, NYPL. [42] Anderson referred to the “friction” between herself and Ball in an interview with Clyde Packer, in No Return Ticket (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984), 67. [43] Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (New York: Random House, 1967), 294. [44] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [45] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [46] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet;’ Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet.” [47] Robert Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park, Adelaide,” Bulletin, 27 December 1969, 54 [48] Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 151. [49] James W. Stone, “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Woman in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 76. [50] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [51] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [52] Ibid. [53] Ibid. [54] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Bernard D. N. Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor: Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise (New York: McKay, 1975), 262. [55] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [56] Anne Davis Basting, “Dolly Descending a Staircase: Stardom, Age, and Gender in Times Square,” in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 251. [57] San Fernando Sun, 19 November 1969, UCSB. [58] Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park.” [59] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [60] Ibid. [61] Fragment of article by Melinda Wojtasiak, circa 1971, UCSB. [62] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [63] Variety, 30 September 1970, NYPL. [64] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [65] Grant Blum, “Dame Judith Triumphs,” La Crosse Tribune, UCSB. [66] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [67] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 263. [68] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [69] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet.’” [70] Wojtasiak, “Dame Judith Anderson.” [71] Show, 20 August 1970, NYPL. [72] Kernan, “Dame Judith.” [73] Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was first published in Partisan Review in 1964 and reissued in Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). It is reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53-65. [74] Fabio Cleto, “Introduction to Section One,” in Cleto, Camp, 46. [75] See points 50-53 in Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 64. [76] Mark Booth, “Campe-Toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp” (1983), in Cleto, Camp, 67. [77] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 53. [78] George Eres, Long Beach Independent, 25 November 1969, UCSB. [79] Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp” (1988), in Cleto, Camp, 312. [80] Ibid., 310. [81] Bill Marvel, “One View of Will Shakespeare: Let’s Respect the Stories,” National Observer, 23 November 1970, 20. [82] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 59. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY presents Legally Bald at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Legally Bald LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY 5:30-6:20 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP This offering is a one-person staged reading exploring internalized biases. We’ll jump through time and space with a young artist/activist (and their child self and drag king alter ego) on a very important day for all three of them. Legally Bald is very much a WORK IN PROGRESS! Feedback/questions are so very encouraged. Written by Léoh Hailu-Ghermay Directed by Jake Regensburg 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). Léoh Hailu-Ghermay is a first generation Tigrayan-American, Black queer artist, activist, and law student living on occupied Munsee-Lenape and Canarsie Land (Brooklyn, NY). Select theater/performance art credits: Phyllida in Galatea (Flea Theater), Euridike in Antigonick (Playwrights Horizons), Bonzai/Husband in The Good Person of Setzuan (Atlantic Stage 2), Soloist in The Rave Revue (Prospect Theater Co.), Newmama in Letters in the Dirt (The Brick), Kunty Kracker Kyle in Chaotic Good (The Tank), and Mrs. Jennings in Episode (Metropolitan Playhouse). They’re thrilled to be showing their Work in Progress at Prelude! Jake Regensburg is an NYC based actor/musician/director. Acting credits include: Playhouse on Park: THE SHARK IS BROKEN , Argyle Theatre: BUDDY: THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY , IRT: BIRD PLAY , Soho Playhouse: ANNIE BROWN , ArtHouse: THE RIP , Atlantic Stage 2: SUMMERTIME . Jake also works as a dramaturg and has served as a script-reader for Rattlestick Theater, Egg and Spoon, and The New Group. BFA: NYU. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Rob Silverman Ascher Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Rob Silverman Ascher By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances . Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. The overlap of performance and evangelical Christianity is typically limited to analyzing preachers and passion plays. In Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances , Jill Stevenson extends the language of performance studies to immersive evangelical experiences she refers to as “End-Time Performances.” These performances, including Hell House , Judgement House , and Tribulation Trail , are semi-professional performances that explicitly preach to audiences that a sincere belief in Christ is the way to avoid the apocalypse in the End of Days. The bulk of Stevenson’s analysis, over five chapters and a coda, is built around the question of how a “dramaturgy of threat [produces] the future End of Time” through interactive performance and staging. The first chapter, “The Landscape of the End: Time, Affect, Threat, Absence” functions as both a sourcebook and a roadmap, effectively introducing the lenses through which Stevenson wants her audience to analyze the productions used as evidence. Stevenson provides a crash course of sorts on theological concepts such as pre- and post-millennial dispensationalism, performance studies concepts like affect theory, and the history of non-denominational American evangelical Christianity. This section is sufficiently informative on its own, enmeshing figures like Cyrus Scofield, author of the Scofield Reference Bible, and Jill Dolan, whose seminal writing on utopian performatives informs Stevenson’s analysis of the role of time in End-Time Performances. While Dolan’s utopian performative is a sunny and aspirational future proposed by the 1960s counterculture, Stevenson notes that the ‘utopian performative’ and evangelical Hell House alike ask their audiences to consider, in Dolan’s language, “that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression…. Lives a future that might be different.” The biggest difference argues Stevenson that an Evangelical future must take place in the afterlife. The core of Stevenson’s book uses three different End-Time Performances and the stand-alone Ark Encounter Museum as case studies. Nearly all of these are performed on or near church property annually. Hell House is the exception, as it has been licensed by churches and theatre groups across the country, including the New York City-based Les Freres Corbusier. That company performed a “sincere staging” of Hell House , following kits published by Pastor Keenan Roberts, leader of New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado. This homegrown ethos is central to the ethnographic work that Stevenson puts at the core of Feeling the Future . Stevenson, who writes in detail about her experiences as an attendee at the End-Time Performances, takes care to note the age ranges and racial makeup of audiences at these performances. Stevenson notes that the majority of End-Time performance attendees are white and between the ages of 18 and 36, with the exception of Tribulation Trail . This piece had an age-diverse audience comprised primarily of Black and Latine attendees, which fits some creative choices. Notably, in Tribulation Trail , a Black performer portrayed Jesus in the portion depicting the slaying of Satan, aligning with the largely-Black congregational makeup at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, the producers of Tribulation Trail . Many of the performances with predominantly white audiences take on a much more political bent. Attendees are rushed through an apocalyptic landscape besieged by a One World Government with technocratic ideals, installing the Mark of the Beast in the form of microchips. Stevenson keenly observes the political contexts through which she and her fellow audience members receive the dramaturgical information woven into these apocalyptic landscapes. After all, these End-Time Performances are proselytizing tools. Nearly all of them conclude with a moment of prayer and an invitation to their audience to accept Christ as their savior. Some of these calls to action are profoundly intimate and offer their audience members opportunities to speak with a member of the ministry, while others merely warn the audience to keep Christ in their hearts in the face of the coming Rapture. Stevenson slyly juxtaposes the political context and ticket price of a given show with how intense these proselytizing moments are, quietly casting doubt on the theological integrity of various ministries. Stevenson’s central argument on the dramaturgy of threat and futurity asks readers to hold the content of these performances alongside the emphasis on futurity inherent in evangelical Christianity. A message of Christ’s power as a savior immediately follows vivid images of lakes of fire, piles of clothes, and scenes of abortion and grotesque violence. If, she supposes, the audience is given the opportunity to accept Christ as their savior after being inundated with the End of Days and sins of man, they will take scripture less out of sincere belief and more out of panic regarding “impending futurity.” A focus on the inevitability of Christ’s return or some sort of holy deliverance has roots in medieval British theatre, to which Stevenson devotes a section of her first chapter. Statement of belief is not always sufficient, however, as several of the End-Time Performances feature purportedly Christian characters who were not raptured due to a lack of sincerity. The book concludes with a two-part Coda, written in June 2020 and January 2021, analyzing, in brief, the beginning of the COVID epidemic, the 2020 election, and the January 6th insurrection through the lenses Stevenson has set up for these contemporary End-Time Performances. Shockingly, much of the imagery baked into the apocalypse narratives she has been analyzing has since become central to life in 2021, as COVID is treated as a hoax and evangelicals proudly storm the Capitol. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances is a compelling text for casual readers, not only scholars, as Stevenson’s writing is clear, concise and vivid in description. Yet, it is also valuable as an educational text, shedding light on the dramaturgical integrity of a mode of performance ignored by the theatrical establishment. Stevenson makes a compelling case for End-Time Performance as a uniquely American form of performance, with roots in the York Mystery Plays, aesthetic references to zombie movies, and a clear sense of theological didacticism. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances applies theological and performance-theoretical frameworks to an underexplored form, leaving its audience of readers with a dense and rewarding dramaturgical text. This work is important for an array of fields, including Theater and Performance Studies, American Studies and Religious Studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER University of Iowa Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1879, nineteen-year-old Pauline Hopkins's musical slave drama, The Underground Railroad, flopped. Reviews panned the production, suggesting the plagiaristic knock-off of Joseph Bradford's Out of Bondage "lacked interest and was devoid of plot." Audiences noted the lackluster performances, asserting "the company can't sing like the Hyers sisters" (the pioneering African American sister act who had performed in Out of Bondage only a few months earlier). Even the play's leading man, Sam Lucas, accepted the production's failure [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700003 key=key-wx0gvnnrb7bq62uslcn mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.