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 .

Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jennifer Mogbock and company in Toni Stone at The Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Prayer for the French Republic Joshua Harmon (7 Sep-2 Oct) Fat Ham James Ijames (22 Sep-22 Oct) The Band’s Visit Itmar Moses and David Yazbeck (10 Nov-17 Dec) The Heart Sellers Lloyd Suh (21 Nov-23 Dec) Yippee Ki Yay Richard Marsh (27 Dec-31 Dec) Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight John Klovenbach (20 Jan-23 March) John Proctor is the Villain Kimberly Belflower (8 Feb-10 March) Toni Stone Lydia R. Diamond (17 May-16 June) In July 2023, Christopher Mannelli became Executive Director of The Huntington, following Michael Maso’s forty+ year run as Managing Director. Mannelli took over a strong organization, fully recovered from the pandemic, that offered an extensive season performed in three venues. The Huntington’s first full season with Loretta Greco as Artistic Director opened on the main stage in grand style. Prayer for the French Republic is an expansive three-hour journey across five generations of French Jews. Everything about The Huntington’s production matched the play’s ambitions that began with full color, enlarged (8.5”x11”) program books at a time when some theatres shifted to QR codes. The set featured a rotating dining table that provided critical clues to following the sprawling story. Tony Estrella, as the narrator, delivered historical context directly to the audience, while the remaining cast enacted their private trauma. Carly Zien, as Elodie, delivered an astonishing stream-of-consciousness monologue that illustrated humans’ complex discrepancies. Meanwhile, at The Calderwood, 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner, Fat Ham served up a comedic rap on Hamlet at a Black family backyard barbeque in the American South. Each character bears attributes of their Shakespearean equivalent, plus invented twists. Juicy: misunderstood; moody; and contemplative as any Hamlet, was also obese and gay. The production shredded the fourth wall, fed off our familiarity with Shakespeare’s play, and then skewered it with potato salad, sausage, and pulled pork. The comedy was often broad, always inciteful. Juicy’s karaoke number began so badly it was hilarious, until it turned chilling. Standouts among the cast included Lau’rie Roach as Tio and James T. Alfred at Rev/Pap. Shaken with laughter, I wondered how Fat Ham could mirror Hamlet to the end. Let it be said that death visits the barbeque in ways both funny and fitting. “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect,” Dina, an Israeli kibbutznik, suggests to Tewfiq, the Egyptian band leader. The sentiment encapsulates the simple pleasure of The Band’s Visit . The Huntington, in collaboration with Speakeasy Stage, delivered unexpected beauty in this musical that infuses traditional Middle Eastern music with a Broadway sound. Director Paul Daigneault highlighted music and broad comedy over the slim plot of this feel-good confection, where scenes unrolled as cross-cultural vignettes that elevated shared humanity over political differences. The Huntington celebrated a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers emphasizes comedy over pathos when Filipino immigrant Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Korean immigrant Jane (Judy Song) come together on this strange holiday in a strange land in 1973. When Luna utters, “So, we’re the lucky ones,” with a profound sigh, she pierces the comic surface of baffled immigrants trying to cook a frozen turkey to reveal two lonely souls. The set was remarkably appalling: a messy studio apartment lined with glossy wallpaper, boxed in a black frame, elevated above the stage. One wall incorporated a sliding glass door, the only opportunity for variable light. Whenever they dreamed of a larger life, the women drifted toward the light. An equally unconventional holiday gift, Yippee-Ki-Yay , is part reenactment of the classic 1980s film, Die Hard ; part confessional of a Die Hard geek; part stand-up comedy; all unspooled in awful meter. Uninitiated audience members were probably perplexed by Darrel Bailey’s zany performance: fluffing imaginary big hair from his bald head; turning the bloodthirsty villain into a pirouetting diva. Those of us familiar with the source, however, anticipated every corny cliché and witty takedown of the movie’s profligate confusions. I received an email a few days before Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight , directing me to enter the theatre through the back alley. Street construction, I figured. On a drizzly January night, one stark light from a small door illuminated the dark alley and beckoned me up two flights and into the rear of the Michael Maso Studio, littered with dusty furniture, clouded mirrors and consignment-quality rejects. Eventually, an old man walked among the clutter and began. Several times. Each diversion was humorous. When wiry, wonderful Jim Ortlieb proclaimed such witticisms as, “Two pots near each other never boil. Make pasta in the space between,” I understood this as a play about nothing. Turns out, the back-alley intimacy was critical to the show’s success, so willingly did supposed grown-ups participate in silly hijinks. It might seem a stretch to legions of high school students burdened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that John Proctor could be the villain. Yet playwright Kimberly Belflower makes a convincing case that John Proctor is the Villain . This remarkable resetting shifts witch hysteria in seventeenth-century Salem to a twenty-first century Georgia high school, where coming-of-age girls are treated as suspect while male authorities are exalted, despite whatever horrifics they’ve performed. The ensemble cast featured five outstanding women drowning in adolescent torment and triumph. Their friendships and jealousies ricocheted around the stage, exposing the emotional complexity of becoming adults. Yet, the stand out was Benjamin Isaac as Lee Turner, the school nobody, whose character realizes the greatest emotional growth. It was pure delight to watch this man-boy (potentially the next generation’s adulterer) find new understanding of himself and his relationship to women. Toni Stone , the season’s finale, was a hit. The Huntington’s long affiliation with playwright Lydia R. Diamond ( Stick Fly, Smart People, The Bluest Eye ) scored in this funny, poignant bio of Toni Stone, the first professional female baseball player who played in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. As Toni, marvelous Jennifer Mogbock told us straight up she’s no good at telling stories in the right order, then launched an opening monologue that fast pitched the joys of baseball. She also held her own against the supporting cast of ten men playing an array of characters. The second act made a few errors, perhaps because accurate biography doesn’t align with theatrical climax. Two production numbers, fabulously choreographed by Ebony Williams, provided the buoyancy of a Broadway musical, while Diamond’s sparkling script and crisp direction beautifully modulated the euphoria and struggles befitting a lonely woman playing in a dwindling league. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PAUL E. FALLON is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 62-65 Hanna Eady’s Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is a haunting work of memory and moral reckoning, a four-character play that moves fluidly across time, psychic space, and geopolitical terrain. Rather than a straightforward historical drama, Eady constructs a piece that unfolds “in the Palestinian memory, in Gad’s head, in Israel, in Palestine, and on the site of Deir Yassin.” The result is a play that refuses temporal linearity and narrative comfort, embodying instead the fractured condition of a history too long repressed. In this production, the living and the dead share the stage as the massacre’s silenced testimony presses insistently against Gad, a former soldier who was present at the massacre, and his faltering attempts at justification and forgetting. Seattle-based Dunya Productions deepens the resonances inherent in the text by situating it in the former Cherry Street Mosque, a nearly century-old building that has served at different times as a Jewish school, an Islamic school, and now as the emerging Cherry Street Village—a joint endeavor among interfaith and arts organizations. As the city’s Central District undergoes rapid transformation, the effort to restore this building as a community hub becomes an act of preservation and imagination, resisting the erasures that urban development often produces. Set on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the work insists that memory is not past; it is a present tense, a haunting that continues to shape those who survive and those who inherit. At its center is Gad, an aging Israeli man tormented by visions and memories he cannot control. He is the last surviving member of his military unit, which had been involved in the Deir Yassin massacre. His psychiatrist, Dr. Levi, accompanies him to the site of the former village, now a mental institution, in an attempt at therapeutic exposure and in preparation for a celebration honoring him at that site. Instead of resolution, the visit collapses the fragile border between hallucination and haunting, seemingly summoning Amal and Zidan, a father-daughter duo who initially appear as ghosts, but gradually reveal themselves as embodiments of history and truth. Amal uses poetic and incantatory language to cut through Gad’s rationalizations as he denies his past acts. Her exhortation, “Come out of the darkness… show your bloody hands,” is both an accusation and an invitation to confess. As an audience member, I was not certain to what extent Amal was real; she seemed to always occupy a liminal space that defied categorization. Was Amal both a living 70-year-old woman and a ghost who haunted Gad? In my interpretation, she was simultaneously a ghost, a memory, a witness, and a child. To have the main Palestinian character occupy this opaque space seemed odd, as the Israeli characters seemed to occupy very specific characterizations. Dr. Levi, a representative of institutional authority, attempts to manage Gad and his deteriorating mental state, offering medication and rehearsing the script he is expected to recite at the ceremony honoring him and his military unit. But her own encounters with Amal destabilize her certainty. Her insistence that Gad focus on his own mental well-being, divorced from historical reality, reveals the limitations of psychological frameworks that avoid political truth. The past demands to be confronted, through the presence of Amal and Zidan. The script’s interplay between the psychological and political gives the play its charge. The dramaturgical structure slowly builds toward the play’s devastating reversal: Zidan, the elderly Palestinian man we think is Amal’s father, confesses that he is not what he seems. He reveals that he was once a Jewish Irgun fighter who participated in the massacre. Zidan was shot and abandoned by his fellow fighters, only to be rescued by Amal’s father, who placed a keffiyeh around his neck before being killed moments later. Mistaken for a Palestinian because of the keffiyeh, Zidan adopted a new identity, “Zidan Yassin,” raising the infant Amal as his daughter. Zidan’s confession thus resonates as both personal tragedy and collective indictment, exposing how violence reverberates across generations and identities. This revelation reframes the relationship between the two characters and transforms Amal’s presence onstage from that of a protected child into a living embodiment of the history Zidan carries. Amal’s final proclamation, “HOPE! That’s my name,” echoes through the theatre not as naïveté but as an insistence on memory and the continuity of Palestinian presence. Dramaturgically, this shifts the audience’s attention from the perpetrator’s confession to the persistence of Palestinian life, positioning Amal’s declaration as both a reclamation of narrative and a gesture toward the future. Eady, who grew up inside the Green Line, belongs to a lineage of Palestinian theatre that uses fractured temporality to counter attempts at erasure. [1] Yet Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is distinctive in its focus on interrogating the psychological architecture of denial among its Israeli characters. In the United States, there has been a necessary dialogue on the representational discourse of plays from and about the SWANA world. While essential, these frameworks sometimes sidestep deeper questions of historical responsibility, narrative control, and the ethics of staging political trauma. Eady’s play pushes these conversations further. It challenges audiences, particularly American ones accustomed to consuming stories about the Middle East through a humanitarian or apolitical lens, to confront the structural and historical specificity of Palestinian dispossession. Visually, this production was simple but striking. The stage was dominated by a single bare almond tree, its branches twisting upward like an arrested gesture. Leo Mayberry’s projections animated the tree in slow, subtle transformations; blossoms emerged, trembled, and fell. Mayberry expanded the visual field with images of Palestinian landscapes—terraces, stone walls, olive groves—and later with horrifying scenes from Gaza. These projections anchored the story within a broader continuum of violence. They reminded viewers that the ghosts of Deir Yassin are not relics of a distant past but part of ongoing dispossession and massacre. Image 1: Nabra Nelson as Amal and Tom Wiseley as Gad. Photo Credit: Samia El-Moslimany. The performances were uniformly strong, with Nabra Nelson’s Amal at the center. Nelson brought extraordinary depth to the role. Clad in a richly embroidered Palestinian thobe, she embodied Amal with paradoxical stillness and volatility: Her gestures were small but precise, her shifts between tenderness and accusation seamless (Image 1). Her voice, resonant and controlled, carried the weight of generations. She was not just a character; she embodied a lineage. Tom Wiseley’s portrayal of Gad was also compelling. He captured the character’s oscillation between rationalization and collapse, his voice revealing layers of denial, fear, and yearning for absolution. Wiseley also designed the lighting and served as production manager, a testament to Dunya Productions’ collaborative ethos. Alyssa Norling’s Dr. Levi brought sharpness and restraint to her role, making the character’s clinical rationality feel both chilling and heartbreakingly inadequate. Bradley Goodwill’s Zidan, with his quiet gravitas and understated emotionality, grounded the play’s final confession with devastating clarity. The sonic landscape, composed by renowned Palestinian musician Habib Shehadeh Hanna, enriched the production. The music was aching, ritualistic, and melodic, and it served as both emotional undercurrent and narrative guide. It marked shifts in time, underscored moments of confrontation, and imbued the performance with the weight of ceremony. Dramaturg Ed Mast provided accessible and essential context for audience members unfamiliar with Deir Yassin, available both in the program and in the lobby; this helped situate the play within a broader political and historical frame. On opening night, the post-show conversation led by organizers from No Tech for Apartheid extended the production’s reach, connecting the themes of historical complicity to contemporary technological infrastructures that enable state violence. The conversation echoed the play’s refusal of closure. It demanded that audiences remain unsettled, recognizing that the past is not dormant but animated, always insisting on return. In the end, Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin offers no catharsis, nor does it attempt to redeem its characters through forgiveness. Instead, it insists on truth-telling as the precondition for healing. It invites audiences to bear witness not as passive observers but as participants in an unresolved story, one that continues to shape the present through its echoes, absences, and persistent calls for justice. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] “Inside the Green Line” refers to the territory that Israel took control of after the Nakba, demarcated by the 1949 Armistice Line, which was often drawn in green ink on maps. References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Interstate by Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Notes from the Choreographer: When I first heard Interstate by David Lang, it immediately conjured images in my mind-- images of steps, stairs, locomotion-- a sense of on-going-ness and infinity that stairs imply. I heard the music in parts-- six parts, and thought of the dancer/ filmmaker Jennie Liu as the right collaborator, and her family as part of the film. As the invitation to work on Lang'sInterstate was during the heart of Covid, working virtually was the only possibility, so the fact that Jennie lived in LA was fine; we could work on Zoom. The world was slowed down, and our process was a slow one taking place over an eventful year. The domesticity of Covid, the home entering our work was inevitable, and we welcomed it, so when I asked Jennie to show me some staircases in her neighborhood, Jennie zoomed me in to some around her home in LA, and we presumed these staircases would be our stage. But a few months into our process, Jennie traveled to England, to her mother's home, wondering if she should stay there with her children, and we started to reimagine the piece danced on a long, narrow carpeted staircase in her mother's home in England, and it felt warm, nostalgic and domestic. Then suddenly, Jennie moved to Hong Kong and the visual plot thickened for Interstate. Interstate was now set in Hong Kong, and the dance was on an entirely different world of staircases, a completely different urban landscape-- literally around the world from the original site of LA. Inevitably, to deepen the truth of the film, Jennie's family became the cast. So like most things made during the pandemic, making Interstate is a story of adaptation, family and distance, and of course, music and dance. Annie-B Parson, April 2022 The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Interstate At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Theater, Dance This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 6 minutes Year of Release 2021 Notes from the Choreographer: When I first heard Interstate by David Lang, it immediately conjured images in my mind-- images of steps, stairs, locomotion-- a sense of on-going-ness and infinity that stairs imply. I heard the music in parts-- six parts, and thought of the dancer/ filmmaker Jennie Liu as the right collaborator, and her family as part of the film. As the invitation to work on Lang'sInterstate was during the heart of Covid, working virtually was the only possibility, so the fact that Jennie lived in LA was fine; we could work on Zoom. The world was slowed down, and our process was a slow one taking place over an eventful year. The domesticity of Covid, the home entering our work was inevitable, and we welcomed it, so when I asked Jennie to show me some staircases in her neighborhood, Jennie zoomed me in to some around her home in LA, and we presumed these staircases would be our stage. But a few months into our process, Jennie traveled to England, to her mother's home, wondering if she should stay there with her children, and we started to reimagine the piece danced on a long, narrow carpeted staircase in her mother's home in England, and it felt warm, nostalgic and domestic. Then suddenly, Jennie moved to Hong Kong and the visual plot thickened for Interstate. Interstate was now set in Hong Kong, and the dance was on an entirely different world of staircases, a completely different urban landscape-- literally around the world from the original site of LA. Inevitably, to deepen the truth of the film, Jennie's family became the cast. So like most things made during the pandemic, making Interstate is a story of adaptation, family and distance, and of course, music and dance. Annie-B Parson, April 2022 Choreographed by Annie-B Parson in collaboration with Jennie MaryTai Liu Music by David Lang Video by Jennie MaryTai Liu Camera by Richie Fowler and Adam Ruszkowski Performed by Jennie MaryTai Liu Special appearances by Lavender, Orlando, and Andrew Gilbert Costumes by Suzanne Bocanegra Hong Kong Video Producer- Nelson Ng Chak-Hei Produced by: Bang on a Can and Big Dance Theater About The Artist(s) Jennie MaryTai Liu (filmmaker/Annie B Parson) is an artist working across performance, video, writing, and education. She has recently received commissions and presentations from Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, New York Film Festival/Currents section, Crossroads/San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources LA, The Mistake Room, Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo Arts Colony, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting.org, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. Funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation and in collaboration with The Box and Pieter Performance Space, she curated Knees, Schools, Urges - an exhibition and performance program engaging ten LA based artists to respond to histories of 20th century modern dance and embedded embodied histories. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group. Since 2021 she is based between Los Angeles and Hong Kong where she runs Center for Artists in the Making, an art education program engaging young people in methods and practices from multidisciplinary art making towards the development of their own work and platforms. Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of OBIE and BESSIE award-winning Big Dance Theater, which she co-founded in 1991. Outside of her company, some of the artists she has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan-Lori Parks, Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, and Jonathan Demme. Additionally Parson has created two large scale works for the Martha GrahamDance Company, and for the Sadlers Wells Company of Elders.. Parson choreographed and did musical staging for David Byrne’s American Utopia, a world tour that ran on Broadway and won a Tony, and was made into a film by Spike Lee. She choreographed Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love, on Broadway, as well as his tours with Brian Eno, and with St. Vincent. She also choreographed two concert tours for St. Vincent. Parson recently choreographed two operas: Candide at the Lyon Opera, and The Hours at The Met. Parson’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, and The Paris Review; her recent book The Choreography of Everyday Life is published by Verso Press. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bessie Awards, The Jacobs Pillow Dance Award, a USA Artist Award, The Doris Duke Artist Award, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, two Lucille Lortel nominations, and an Olivier nomination. She has been honored by Danspace and by PS122. With Thomas F. DeFrantz, she is co-editing a book entitled: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study. Founded by Molly Hickok, Paul Lazar, and Annie-B Parson in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired synthesis of dance, music, text, and visual design. The company’s work ranges from pure dance pieces, to dance/theater works with sources from found text, literature, plays, or an alchemy of wildly incongruent source material, weaving and braiding disparate strands of text and theatrical elements into multidimensional performance. Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Twain, Tanizaki, Euripides and Flaubert, and dance is used as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings. For 32 years, Big Dance Theater has worked to create over 25 large-scale dance/theater works, generating each piece over months and years of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving family of actors, dancers, composers, and designers. Big Dance Theater has been presented at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On the Boards, UCLA Live, Spoleto Festival USA, and Tanz Im August, Berlin. Internationally, the group has performed in France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, and the Georgian Republic. Commissions have come from Les Subsistances in Lyon, Chaillot Theater in Paris, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Walker Art Center, Wexner Arts Center, Carolina Performing Arts, American Dance Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, The Kitchen, La MaMa, Onassis Foundation, Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, NCCAkron, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Old Vic/Dance Umbrella, London. 7 Most recently, the company premiered The Mood Room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will tour this work to The Walker in 2024. Other works for BAM include Supernatural Wife, which played at the National Theater in Paris, and Alan Smithee Directed This Play which premiered at Les Subsistances in Lyon, France in 2014. The BDT production, Man in a Case, featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and premiered at Hartford Stage and toured to Berkeley Repertory Theater, Broad Stage in Santa Monica, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Big Dance Theater received two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010, and the company was awarded an OBIE in 2000. Additionally, BDT company members have received 5 distinct “Bessie” Awards and an OBIE award for their work with Big Dance. In 2007 the company received the first-ever Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. In 2024, Big Dance is co-publishing Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study with Wesleyan Press and Dancing Foxes, co-edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson. Get in touch with the artist(s) Big Dance Theater and Bang on a Can and follow them on social media https://www.bigdancetheater.org https://www.jennieliu.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 by Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the film “Revolution 21” we are introduced to Theatre 21, a Warsaw-based professional theatre group which has been staging performances for the last 17 years. Founded by Justyna Sobczyk, a theatre teacher and director, it consists solely of actors with Down syndrome. They start work on a new performance entitled “A Revolution Which Never Was There”, using the protest of the disabled in Polish parliament as their inspiration. Able-bodied actors are also invited to take part in the performance. Nobody receives any special treatment. Full commitment is required from each member of the cast, everyone is treated equally. The work model in Teatr 21 is very innovative. Most of the rehearsals rely on acting improvisations on the subject set by the director (revolution, sexuality, independence, political cabaret, rehabilitation, etc.), accompanied by live music written by the band POKUSA. This working process arouses heated discussions between the actors on the subject of nudity on stage, the involvement of theatre in politics, the limits of privacy and the courage to ridicule themselves on stage. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 Theater, Documentary This film will be screened in-person on May 20th and also be available to watch online May 16th onwards on the festival website for a period of 3 weeks. About The Film Country Poland Language Polish Running Time 53 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the film “Revolution 21” we are introduced to Theatre 21, a Warsaw-based professional theatre group which has been staging performances for the last 17 years. Founded by Justyna Sobczyk, a theatre teacher and director, it consists solely of actors with Down syndrome. They start work on a new performance entitled “A Revolution Which Never Was There”, using the protest of the disabled in Polish parliament as their inspiration. Able-bodied actors are also invited to take part in the performance. Nobody receives any special treatment. Full commitment is required from each member of the cast, everyone is treated equally. The work model in Teatr 21 is very innovative. Most of the rehearsals rely on acting improvisations on the subject set by the director (revolution, sexuality, independence, political cabaret, rehabilitation, etc.), accompanied by live music written by the band POKUSA. This working process arouses heated discussions between the actors on the subject of nudity on stage, the involvement of theatre in politics, the limits of privacy and the courage to ridicule themselves on stage. DIRECTING: Martyna Peszko SCRIPT: Martyna Peszko DOP: Magdalena Mosiewicz EDITOR: Olga Kałagate MUSIC: Zespół POKUSA SOUND: Martyna Peszko, Adam Buka, Konrad Wosik PRODUCTION: Fundacja Teatr 21 COPRODUCTION: Mazowiecki i Warszawski Fundusz Filmowy, Katarzyna Tymusz About The Artist(s) Martyna Peszko » Graduate of the National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow and the DOK Pro workshop at Wajda School. She studied at Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique in Paris, Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, and Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. As an actress, she was associated with Teatr Ludowy and Stary Teatr in Krakow, National Theatre and Drama Laboratory in Warsaw. She received the Jan Machulski prize for the best actress. She debuted in 2020 with the short documentary "Tell Me More". AT FESTIVALS: 65th International Festival of Documentary and Animated Film DOK Leipzig, Germany, 2022 (competition) 10th Tripoli Film Festival, Lebanon, 2023 (competition) Get in touch with the artist(s) m.sulecki@teatr21.pl ; a.mahmud@teatr21.pl and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/revolution21film Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch The Great Grand Greatness Awards by Jo Hedegaard at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Great Grand Greatness Awards At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jo Hedegaard Circus / Movement, Film, Mime, Multimedia, Music, Performance Art, Spoken Word This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Denmark Language English Running Time 57 minutes Year of Release 2023 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. Starring: May Lifschitz, Goyo Pomphile, Mirza Poturovic, Andrea Marcellier, Anne-Marie Curry, Kirsten Kamp Cadovius, Connie Hedegaard, Malik Grosos, Troels Thorsen, The Waiter, Makaia Salomon, Anette Støvelbæk, Søren Mühldorff, Jan Elle, Nana-Franciska Schöttländer, Jordan Jackson, Tomas Skovgaard, Jesper klinge Christen, Jacob Andersen, Jo Hedegaard. Written, directed and produced by: Jo Hedegaard Editor: Nicolaj Monberg Editor assistant: Jasmin Falk Jensen Sound design: Kristian Møller-Munar Photography: Peer Jon Ørsted, Lasse Gottlieb Karstensen, Ivan Cuevas, Daniel Leeb, Mark Grotkjær Lauritzen, Menno van Winden VFX: Kristian Møller-Munar, Ricardo León, Alexander Hjalmarsson, Esther-Sofie Hede CGI: Michael Vrede Colourgrader: Morten Pelch Graphics: Jo Hedegaard Post production: Jo Hedegaard Post production consultant: Mia Bang Stenberg Artworks: Jo Hedegaard, Hartmut Stockter Best boys: Martha Jes, Johan Sarauw, Kamma Hansen, Christian Hedegaard Music by: Kristian Møller-Munar, Casper Christiansen, August Campeotto, Andreas Svendsen, Bill Gross, Leonor Rib, Christine Raft, Daniel Nicholas Mølhave, Fredrik Hjulmand, Erik Danciu, Jo Hedegaard. Music mixing: Kristian Møller-Munar, Luiz Karlsen About The Artist(s) Jo Hedegaard (b. 1994) is a multi media visual artist working in film, sculpture, drawing, coagulated poetry and (public) performance. He has lived and worked in London, New York and Amsterdam, but is now based in Copenhagen, where he runs an art studio and makes visual work, experimental films and theatre. Get in touch with the artist(s) johedegaard@hotmail.com and follow them on social media www.johedegaard.com https://instagram.com/johedegaard_sunmanstudios Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Philip Brankin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! By Cole Escola Directed by Sam Pinkleton Lucille Lortel Theatre New York, NY March 5, 2024 Reviewed by Philip Brankin Thinking about Oh, Mary!–– a play set during the close of the American Civil War––I cannot help but conjure up a line from the comedic persona Philomena Cunk as she ruminates on the life of Abraham Lincoln in the BBC mockumentary Cunk on Earth. In her noted droll style, she deadpans, “Lincoln’s story didn’t have a happy ending. Five days after the North won, a terrible fate befell him. He was forced to go to the theatre to watch a play.” This is the level of dark-humored irreverence found in Cole Escola’s sold-out smash hit that opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City and is now about to open on Broadway. But in this play, Lincoln is not the subject, only the by-product. Everything about the play and its production is meant to center Mary and highlight its star’s feral talent. Cole Escola (they/them) has created a career-defining production after years of paying their dues on a spectrum of stages from YouTube to Joe’s Pub at New York’s Public Theater. The production of Oh, Mary! is seemingly an autobiographical study of sorts of Escola’s own self-perception as a fledgling cabaret talent told through the removed lens of a mock biography of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in the events leading up to the death of her husband, President Lincoln. The queering of this momentous history is enacted through turning the lens on the First Lady, re-positioning her as an ahistorical antiheroine, and essentially making every character/historical figure homosexual or utterly camp, particularly when revealing their true selves on stage. Escola’s gag is to make Mary’s super-objective to be a cabaret star, or rather, to make a comeback to the stage as the star she sees herself as. Escola’s artistic license is fully on display in this production as they present a queer revision of history. Mary’s boredom with her life, fueled by alcoholism and an inflated ego, are exacerbated by her husband’s barely veiled homosexuality. Lincoln is her distant, bewildered husband who we learn early on is more beleaguered by Mary’s obsessive fixation on stage stardom, fueled by alcohol, than the War. Abe indulges her by hiring an acting coach in the form of none other than his secret (and jealous) lover John Wilkes Booth. So, everything is in service of Mary. The program conspicuously lists the cast all not by their names but their relation to Mary (i.e. Lincoln is listed as “Mary’s husband”). Despite this, the casting is consequential. Both Lincoln and Booth are played by stars of the all-queer helmed film Fire Island , another recent entry for queer comedy. Booth convinces Mary that he has secured for her an audition for none other than the fateful production of Our American Cousin , the play the president would later be assassinated at while watching from his box seat. But this bit of history is immaterial to the audience as we are following Mary’s journey towards stardom or self-destruction. I have been following Cole Escola and their career since the early days of content creation on social media, the place I consider to be the birthplace of their dexterity as a character actor and comedy writer. Escola’s work has always focused on queering culture and historically minded camp sensibilities. After years of digital shorts, pithy tweets, and one-person shows in cabaret spaces, this production feels like the culmination of Escola’s ability to fully realize their singular vision. As Mary Todd Lincoln, Cole Escola sets the same tone for the play from her first line. She desperately cries to Washington’s portrait in the Oval Office, “Oh mother! Why did I marry him?” Oh, Mary! is as much concerned with queering sacred American history as it is with queering other deconstructions of history on Broadway, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton . Oh, Mary! is a testament to the current generation of mad, queer excellence and those who might find kinship with the idiosyncratic Escola. The play takes the historical subtexts of Mary and Abraham and blows them campily out of proportion, centering the marginalized aspects of their personalities, such as Mary’s mental health or Abraham’s sexuality. By showing these characters navigate those blatantly erroneous identities and making all the wrong choices, the production frees the audience of expectation or the normative urge to conceive that anything could or should be thought of as sacred. Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! might be one of the most offensive comedies to play Off-Broadway, but its subversiveness plays like a labor of love for the idea of the overshadowed and oft-misunderstood First Lady, or any woman that sits at the fulcrum of history. Though the play was delivered with a massive laugh greeting nearly every single line, in a work helmed by Escola there usually comes a moment when an earnest truth is allowed just enough room to peak through and catch the audience off-guard. Diehard fans of Escola will recognize this nuance from the recent digital short film Our Home Out West in which Escola plays a Gold Rush-era Madam, in Belle Watling drag––paradigmatic of the Escola oeuvre––and works as a felicitous, subdued counterpart to their high energy Mary Todd. At one point in the film, the brothel owner’s orphaned ward asks her, “Why do people hate you so much?” In contrast to Oh, Mary! ’s atmosphere of scatological farce comes an eschatological homily on the nature of bigotry. As Cole explains, “I think because life is basically not very fair and so people like to make up their own little rules… they believe that if they follow their rules nothing bad will happen to them. So, when they see someone who’s not following their rules and doing just fine makes them scared that their rules don’t really matter and when people get scared, they get mad.” Oh, Mary! harkens back to past texts of queer import like Charles Busch’s Die, Mommie, Die! (a drag, psycho-biddy send-up of Aeschylus’ Oresteia ) or Split Britches’ Belle Reprieve (a drag satire of A Streetcar Named Desire ). All of them share a similar approach to remixing history and the historiography of Western drama. The play has some structural similarities to Roxie Hart’s journey that leads to the final, triumphant stage number that rounds out the story in the denouement of Chicago . Yet, when watching the “madcap medley” of Mary ’s grand finale, the ludicrous joy of watching the play is more akin to seeing “Little” Edie Beale of Grey Gardens finally become the singer and dancer she always said she could be (technical talent be damned!). Little Edie and Mary are both characters steeped in American (presidential) history by association, yet who enjoy basking in their own self-made mythologies. The production is a celebration of an anachronistic, gonzo-style approach to historical fiction on stage. For one thing, the setting predates what we understand and refer to as cabaret, and the cabaret finale includes music from over one-hundred years later, including the kitschiest hits of the 1970s and 80s, all while twirling and dropping a baton. Though Escola and director Sam Pinkerton are not at all interested in fidelity to dramaturgical accuracy, the production creates a consistent vision of this pivotal moment in American history. That consistency is defined in the program as “the lens of an idiot.” Escola has stated that they “wrote the show from the point of view of the audience, which is our collective third grade understanding of who Mary Todd Lincoln was.” The curls in Mary’s wig are not meant to resemble the true style of the period, but are there to accentuate her every manic move. The set, by in-demand designer dots, is meant to resemble the Oval Office, yet evokes Our American Cousin pastiche in childlike, broad strokes with blown-up proportions and spurious designs contrived from a capricious imagination. For example, the books are all clearly not real, except for the one hollowed out and hiding the hooch. The saloon setting in the latter half could be pulled from a shooting gallery in a Western theme park. Did the DC-area have saloons with swinging doors and player pianos at this time? The answer is likely “Who cares?” but more importantly, “Look at Mary go!” Everything acts as a campy gesture to the past—right down to the mock gas footlights. But the gesture is always purposefully pointing in the wrong direction and with a middle finger. Tony Macht, Bianca Leigh, and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Everything feels very correct in its incorrectness —a kind of purposeful queer failure à la J. Jack Halberstam. The show embraces its own failure to grasp historical accuracy and dramaturgical dignity. The camp of Oh Mary! lies in its ability to resist the normative desire of biographical texts that prop up the sedate figure of sober greatness that stands behind every great man. There’s an alienation in camp fit for Brecht. But the Verfremdungseffekt is most potent for the queer initiated of the audience. We are meant to be alienated from canonical history. Escola’s success represents a generation of queer alt-comedians with origins from social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, or X (formerly known as Twitter). These queer performers have carved out spaces and followings for themselves that slowly but surely gained them due recognition that they could parlay into the more dominant or traditional spaces of culture. In a time when queer subculture and counterculture are becoming the culture, what’s lost along the way may be up for debate. But what is clear from Oh Mary! is that it is leading the queer vanguard and delivering mainstream audiences a high priestess of camp. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Philip Brankin is a Visiting Professor of Theater Studies at Emory University and a doctoral student in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Georgia where he received an MFA in Dramatic Media. His research involves queer performance cultures in digital media, focusing on social media platforms as a locus for queer identity formation today. As a practitioner, he has worked as a director, producer, actor, dramaturg, writer, and media designer. A Chicago native, he has worked with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Second City, The Piven Theatre Workshop, About Face Theatre, Bailiwick, Chicago Opera Theatre, and Nothing Without a Company, among others. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch MUSE by Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. An intimate journey with the founder of a one-of-a-kind circus space hanging on by a thread in Brooklyn, NY. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents MUSE At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films Theater, Circus / Movement, Documentary, Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 10 minutes Year of Release 2024 An intimate journey with the founder of a one-of-a-kind circus space hanging on by a thread in Brooklyn, NY. Director/Producer/DP: Pete O'Hare Editor: Raven Dahlin Score: Forest Christenson About The Artist(s) Pete O’Hare is an Emmy-nominated Director and Cinematographer based in New York City, born and raised in Cleveland, OH. Coming from a musical background, he loves how a well-composed frame can transport you to another place. Pete directed the mini documentaries "A Day In September" and "Baby Boy A", and has filmed for ESPN+, Netflix, McDonald’s, General Electric, 3M, New York Knicks, NBC, MTV, National Geographic, Samsung, Verizon, Sprint, Whole Foods, and Vogue Italia, among others. Get in touch with the artist(s) pete@warehousefilms.com and follow them on social media https://www.peteohare.com/, https://vimeo.com/peteohare, https://www.instagram.com/pete_ohare/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch "talk to us" by Kirsten Burger at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Hardly anyone speaks in 'speak to us of'. It is rather the eyes and gestures of the 4 protagonists that speak, like in the finest silent film tradition. Their natures seem isolated, their actions form a kind of fabric. It seems as if they are the sum of a single soul in its longing, its love lust, its loneliness. "No one hears me scream, my fears are discreet, but now, in the midst of the strongest of ocean swells, I keep my eyes wide open, and under the spray, I can make out shapes, then I am the medusa, the little daughter of the earth and the sea.“ Many stories from two world wars have not been told until today. And yet they are inscribed in the deep tissues of the body, are passed on and want to be explored. A journey of images that invites us to wander through this landscape of souls. My grandfather is a Stalingrad survivor. In 1945 he escaped from the encirclement of the embattled city and made his way back to Vienna on foot. For the rest of his life, he not only had to cope with physical war wounds, but also suffered from the mental consequences of the war: he hardly spoke to people and only communicated with his horses. This pain and the great silence was transferred to my father, who also has difficulties talking about it to this day. And this in itself has an impact on me and my life. In "Talk to us", I have tried to explore these transmissions and the unspeakable, the barely comprehensible. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents "talk to us" At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Kirsten Burger Theater, Circus / Movement, Film, Mime, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 93 minutes Year of Release 2022 Hardly anyone speaks in 'speak to us of'. It is rather the eyes and gestures of the 4 protagonists that speak, like in the finest silent film tradition. Their natures seem isolated, their actions form a kind of fabric. It seems as if they are the sum of a single soul in its longing, its love lust, its loneliness. "No one hears me scream, my fears are discreet, but now, in the midst of the strongest of ocean swells, I keep my eyes wide open, and under the spray, I can make out shapes, then I am the medusa, the little daughter of the earth and the sea.“ Many stories from two world wars have not been told until today. And yet they are inscribed in the deep tissues of the body, are passed on and want to be explored. A journey of images that invites us to wander through this landscape of souls. My grandfather is a Stalingrad survivor. In 1945 he escaped from the encirclement of the embattled city and made his way back to Vienna on foot. For the rest of his life, he not only had to cope with physical war wounds, but also suffered from the mental consequences of the war: he hardly spoke to people and only communicated with his horses. This pain and the great silence was transferred to my father, who also has difficulties talking about it to this day. And this in itself has an impact on me and my life. In "Talk to us", I have tried to explore these transmissions and the unspeakable, the barely comprehensible. "TALK TO US" a Film by Kirsten Burger / Aska: Laura Vogel / Alina: Cox Ahlers / Zola: Franziska Pack/ Lola: Clara Gracia / Directed by Kirsten Burger /Screenplay by Kirsten Burger / Produced by Cox Ahlers / Editor Daniela del Pomar /Cinematographer Anne Braun/ Music Composition Mabe Fratti / Production Manager :Cox Ahlers, Kirsten Burger, Alice Greenhill / Sound Design Olaf Giesbrecht / Voices: Laura Vogel, Cox Ahlers, Olaf Griesbrecht /Sound Recordist:Milian Vogel /Sound Editing : Milian Vogel, Matias Santos /Set Design and Costumes Franz Reimer /Set design and Make-up Adriana Fiedler /Colorist Till Beckmann /Title Design Alessandra Leone/ Text inspired by: Aglaja Veteranyi, Kahlil Gibran, Adelaide Bon / „Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media." 2022 About The Artist(s) Kirsten Burger, born 1975 in Heidelberg, works as an experimental filmmaker, theatre director, author and actress in Berlin. From 1996 -1998 she studied free arts and graphics with Prof. Adolf Frohner in Vienna and interdisciplinary studies in Hamburg with Johannes Süttgen, a student of Joseph Beuys, among others. The idea of Beuys' 'expanded concept of art' and 'social sculpture' still influence her work today. Influenced by Viennese Actionism as well as by works by Grotowski and other performative and political forms of expression in public space, she became increasingly interested in theatrical interventions. 1999 - 2002 she completed her Bachelor's degree in Physical Theatre in Berlin. 2003 -2006 she worked as an actress, among others: Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Deutsche Oper, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin and at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich. From 2006 she was a founding member & conceptual director of the collective 'Oper Dynamo West', which staged new music theatre in the public space of Berlin's City-West. Within the collective, Burger created numerous productions of her own in public space until 2011. From 2012 onwards, Burger created theatrical interventions, experimental and essay films in various contexts and with people from a wide range of backgrounds. She won several international prizes for her cinematic work, including for her film 'Das Große Glück'. In 2022 she directed her debut feature film 'Speak to Us of' wich was planed to be a thetaer peace. The main feature of her artistic work in film is an examination along the border between reality and fiction and their overlapping. Her entire work is characterised by relating this to different forms and media of artistic expression. Since 2022 she has directed the young Rambazamba Theater Berlin, which is the most important inclusive theater in Germany. In 2023 she founded the young ensemble there, which celebrated its first premiere in 2023 with "raving" in the Humbold Forum Berlin. Get in touch with the artist(s) mail@kirstenburger.de and follow them on social media www.kirstenburger.de Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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

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.

Watch "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper by Ellen Callaghan at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Ellen Callaghan Documentary, Film, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 10 minutes Year of Release 2023 Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan About The Artist(s) Ellen is a queer director, editor, producer, and head of MAEV--a film production company operating out of Brooklyn, New York. She has conceptualized and created everything from music videos and TV commercials to documentary and narrative films. Her passion is film, and she hopes to use her filmmaking skills to help make a positive impact in the world. Get in touch with the artist(s) ellen@thisismaev.com and follow them on social media https://www.ellencallaghan.com/, https://thisismaev.com/, IG: @this.is.maev, IG: @classiccallaghan Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 29 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Editorial Comment Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson INTRODUCTION Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez ARTICLE Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Stephen Hong Sohn ARTICLE August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. James M. Cherry BOOK REVIEW Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Raimondo Genna BOOK REVIEW Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Joanna Mansbridge BOOK REVIEW Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Natalie Tenner BOOK REVIEW Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Peter Wood BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie INTRODUCTION Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch ARTICLE Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Lisa Jackson-Schebetta ARTICLE The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Milton Loayza ARTICLE Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Shelby Brewster ARTICLE Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May ARTICLE Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. David Coley BOOK REVIEW Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Deric McNish BOOK REVIEW Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Jennifer Joan Thompson BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

L. Bailey McDaniel Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation . Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. Julius B. Fleming Jr.’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation is an invaluable contribution to, among other fields, civil rights historiography, theatre studies, Black performance studies, and African American history. With painstaking documentation supporting shrewd analyses, Fleming maintains that the Civil Rights Movement was more than a fight for social justice, but additionally a conflict over temporality—a battle whose victors often violently decide(d) who must wait, for how long, and under what threat. Fleming provides an important rethinking of civil rights studies by locating Black theatre and performance as central to “the cultural and political fronts” of the movement (2). Including but also moving beyond understandings of performance as an abstracted concept encompassing marches, speeches, sit-ins, or media, Black Patience reveals how Black theatre functioned as an effective instrument with which artists and activists redefined a racialized notion of time, a framework shaped by the anti-Black projects of white supremacy. Rather than a neutral backdrop to history, Fleming’s construct of racialized time denotes deferral, delay, and gradualism, a chronology that dictates a “waiting” that is “weaponized as a technology of anti[B]lack violence and civic exclusion” (1). 1 Fleming’s central claim is that the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on immediacy — a theoretical and acted-upon notion of “Freedom Now” — is more than just a demand for equality and justice; it is a direct confrontation with a white supremacist temporal order he terms “[B]lack patience.” The ecology of [B]lack patience encompasses the long history of enforced waiting, deference, and all forms of endured suffering imposed on Black bodies from the Middle Passage to twenty-first-century Liberals’ calls for moderation. Black patience warrants attention, Fleming writes, because “the overriding ambition that drives the racial project of black patience is its singular desire for Black people to suffer, and to do so without complaint” (241). Black Patience confidently demonstrates how Black theatre achieved victories in the Civil Rights Movement’s (contingent and incomplete) battle by staging “now” not as a stagnant passage to an always-deferred future, but an immediate place to act, without waiting, and without patience. Working deeply across broad archives, Fleming considers Black theatre and cultural production across diverse geographies and theatrical spaces illuminating how Black theatre enabled civil rights audiences to feel political time differently and — at its best — cultivated collective action. Among the valuable sources included in his archive are the Free Southern Theater; works from Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington; and ephemera such as programs, oral histories, and reviews. Fleming’s Introduction establishes the book’s terminology and its multi-disciplinary stakes while unpacking a compelling methodology. He begins with an examination of Fannie Lou Hamer’s inspiring response to a 1964 performance of Waiting for Godot, during which “Hamer and . . . the actors used the body in performance to unsettle modernity’s racialized logics of waiting” (3). Fleming invokes a crucial theatrical moment that crystallizes the book’s arguments: anti-Blackness functions through forcible delay, and the theatre acts as a critical tool for rejecting white supremacist sanctions of Black patience. Chapter One effectively reframes the Emancipation Proclamation’s one-hundred-year anniversary as a temporal and political battleground. Investigating Emancipation’s centennial, Fleming argues that the 1963 commemorations revealed the white supremacist preference for deferral. Relying on a rich body of evidence that includes presidential speeches, pageants, and theatrical works, this chapter demonstrates how the centennial simultaneously 1) proclaimed freedom and 2) demanded Black restraint. In exposing this contradiction, Fleming argues that civil rights activism must be understood as a struggle over time itself . Building on his historicization of Emancipation as incomplete and temporally deferred, Fleming's second chapter performs a compelling case study in its examination of the Free Southern Theatre (FST) and productions across the south. Founded in 1963, the FST performed in churches, fields, and community centers under dangerous conditions of state and civilian surveillance/threat. Fleming reveals how the FST effectively redrew the spatial and temporal map of the Civil Rights Movement by bringing theatre directly into organizing spaces. He further outlines the ways that the FST productively reduced the space between art and activism in ways that presaged the political work of the Black Arts Movement that would follow and, as a result, enabled audiences to inhabit a revolutionary present. This chapter also provides a meaningful meditation on Fleming’s understanding of Afro-presentism . Alongside the call for “freedom now,” Afro-presentism concretizes a “refusal to accede to the temporal demands of [B]lack patience” (26). Fleming points out that “far from a cure-all for the violences of [B]lack patience,” Afro-presentism instead conjures “seizing and enjoying the good life in the here and now, knowing that in the context of anti-[B]lackness the future is always a zone of precarity” (128). Fleming impressively complicates his established analyses of racialized time with his third chapter, asking us to consider whose time counts more than others. Providing a needed intervention into queer temporalities within civil rights scholarship, Chapter Three rightly maintains that the temporal politics of the Civil Rights Movement cannot be separated from gender, sexuality, and embodied desire. With its consideration of Baraka and Paul Carter Harrison, among others, Fleming demonstrates how queer temporalities disrupted the respectability scripts that more typically accompanied anti-Black/white supremacist appeals for patience. Considering how desire, vulnerability, and intimacy potentially complicate, if not intensify, the (hoped for) immediacy of liberation, this chapter expands the archive of civil rights performance beyond heteronormative narratives. Turning to the “territory of erotic desire,” Fleming recognizes “that [B]lack patience not only engenders anti-Blackness but also (re)produces the cultural and political logic of heteropatriarchy” (133). Insightfully contrasting theater with photography and television, Chapter Four argues that the present tense of theatre can productively disrupt the (false/misleading) narratives of gradual progress that visual documentation can unintentionally reinforce. In addition to its stunning contribution to theorizations of racialized feeling, theatre, and visual culture, this chapter also identifies a parallel phenomenon to Black patience taking place as Black people are urged to be patient: white impatience — a tetchy temporal intolerance that can be seen in white critical reception, photography, and spectatorship. Fleming successfully maps the ways that white publics express irritation, fatigue, or hostility toward Black demands for immediacy. Or, as Fleming savvily explains, by reframing “the problem of race” as “a problem of whiteness,” Black theatre artists “recalibrated the visual economy of the Civil Right movement . . . and shift[ed] their audiences’ gazes from injured [B]lack bodies to white people” (37). Alongside its consideration of Hansberry, Baldwin, Childress, and Ward, this chapter reveals how Civil Rights theatre made racialized affect visually legible while it simultaneously critiqued the policing function of white impatience. With a performance analysis previously applied to live theater in earlier chapters, Black Patience 's final chapter examines the performance of waiting in live political events such as sit-ins. This (productively) strategic waiting seizes back temporal control and weaponizes the (deferred) time meant to discipline, exclude, and control Black bodies. With this pivot, Fleming maintains, Black protest effectively transformed patience into a consciously-employed, tactical practice during sitins, freedom songs, and jailins. This determinedly-invoked patience converts the notion of waiting into a mode of pressure and endurance that exposes the anti-Black violence of statemandated, white supremacist delay. In pointing out how activists also weaponized stillness/duration to force public confrontation with anti-Black racism, Fleming’s final chapter re-presents Black patience as performance that can both dismantle and repurpose temporal categories off the stage as well as on. Black Patience skillfully reframes the Civil Rights Movement as a performance-driven struggle over time, a struggle shaped by questions of how long equality and justice will take and how demands for patience (if not enforced waiting) work as tools in a white supremacist control of time. Challenging historiography that heavily credits civil rights momentum to photography and television, Fleming instead foregrounds the liveness, risk, and collective spectatorship of live performance as powerful engines driving political feeling and action. The book’s successful theoretical synthesis of dramaturgy, theatre history, geography, affect, and temporal theory offers a model for studying performance within social movements that will benefit educators, their syllabi, and scholars far beyond theatre or civil rights studies. Footnotes: 1. Throughout this review I capitalize the word “Black” when it refers to the culture, history, and people of a shared racial identity, as opposed to a color; any changes to Fleming’s original are noted with brackets. References Footnotes About The Author(s) L. BAILEY MCDANIEL is an Associate Professor at Oakland University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses from anti-racist and anticolonialist contexts. Her pedagogy and scholarship focus on African-American drama and performance, while also considering intersectional explorations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and (dis)abilities. Her first book (Re)Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama (Palgrave Macmillan) explores the discursive and material intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and performances of motherhood in US Drama. Her second book (in progress) investigates the furtive interconnectedness of trauma, resilience, and recovery as explored in African-American performance. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 28 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Editorial Comment Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson EDITORIAL New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Michael Y. Bennett STATE OF THE FIELD Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Kevin Byrne STATE OF THE FIELD Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Jorge Huerta STATE OF THE FIELD Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee STATE OF THE FIELD Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout STATE OF THE FIELD Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom STATE OF THE FIELD Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf STATE OF THE FIELD “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly ARTICLE Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Peter Zazzali ARTICLE Performing Anti-slavery Heather S. Nathans BOOK REVIEW American Tragedian Karl Kippola BOOK REVIEW Murder Most Queer Laura Dorwart BOOK REVIEW The Captive Stage Beck Holden BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer EDITORIAL Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters George Pate and Libby Ricardo ARTICLE Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio ARTICLE iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth ARTICLE Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler ARTICLE This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson ARTICLE Blue-Collar Broadway David Bisaha BOOK REVIEW The New Humor in the Progressive Era Cheryl Black BOOK REVIEW Stages of Engagement Steve Earnest BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Watch Snow White by Dr.GoraParasit at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In Snow White, director Dr. GoraParasit presents a powerful and healing interpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale set against the backdrop of glacial mythology. BDSM aesthetics allow us to question human nature while simultaneously highlighting the everyday myopia of society, our naivety, and social prejudices. Dr. GoraParasit’s performance explores a range of themes, including glacial ecology, the climate crisis, multilingualism, migration, hate, and social-gender dynamics. It also invites us to contemplate broader existential questions of the present and the future. By seamlessly combining different media – such as twerk dancing, video game logic, soundscapes by composer Sandra Kazlauskaitė, and club music – the director exposes her own psychological vulnerabilities and those of contemporary society. With this production, Dr. GoraParasit invites the audience on a journey through the melting glaciers, using green screen techniques to prompt a transformative experience. We are encouraged to reflect upon ourselves through a magic mirror that unveils the reality of a world in the process of melting. And the heat is bound to intensify from here on... Erik Zielke (Theater Critic, Germany): The mirror still speaks at the Lithuanian National Theatre in Kaunas, director Dr. Gora Parasit attempts to disenchant and re-enchant the world with "Snow White" It is a long-standing misunderstanding: the old German fairytale treasure trove has made it into reading material for the youngest children. Blood, sex and crimes at the children's bedside. Attempted murders by jealous stepmothers, banishment of one's own children, secret visits from lovers, open-belly operations – all of them presented as bedtime stories. And yet what the bourgeois linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled in the 19th century is only the censored version of the stories that circulated among the population. All that remains are the traces of the metaphor-enriched, sexually charged tales of castrated folk literature. The announcement of the theatrical adaptation of "Snieguolė", as Snow White is called in Lithuanian, is marked "18+". No, we are not dealing with children's theater here. But it is good that art is still taken so seriously that moral guardians ponder whether it is reasonable for an underage audience. In Germany, after all, such age restrictions in the theater are virtually unknown. Nevertheless, here too, art is sometimes the victim of prudery. We are in Kaunas, the old capital of Lithuania, which, unlike the current seat of government Vilnius, does not flaunt with baroque impressions, but instead witnesses pan-European modernism – between Art Deco and Bauhaus. The local National Theatre, the oldest professional theater in the country, has its venue in the former "Metropolitan" cinema, an Art Nouveau building that – renovated in a socialist-realist style – is itself a reflection of an unsettled history. The National Theatre in Kaunas was able to recruit Dr. Gora Parasit, who comes from Lithuania yet chooses her working environment freely between London and Berlin, North America and old Europe, as a director of the two-hour production of "Snow White". She alternates no less freely between theater and performance, installation art and photography. However, her striking, radical formal expression is set. The visual impression is incredibly strong, without losing the sound and the movement, the language and the content behind it. She enriches the Grimm fairy tale "Snow White" with mythical motifs from all over the world – and of course with contemporary legends. As with folk tales from the past, we are still trying to come to terms with reality through stories. Mirror, mirror on the wall. The theater evening begins – white as snow – with a journey to the glaciers. The unmanageable landscape, itself a source of numerous legends, is disenchanting itself in the Anthropocene: The melting of the glaciers makes us all eyewitnesses to climate change. The unmanageable landscape is being conquered by man against his will. And suddenly not only the world but also mankind becomes smaller than it ever has been. This way, the staging rehearses the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world – and vice versa – with the audience and leaves them, trained by the fairytale, enlightened at best. Snow White is born, not through the devout wish of her mother, who dies during the birth of the child, but by means of medical technology. The last mysteries and wonders of mankind disappear and what remains is the barely explicable presence of modern man. Just as the evil queen looks into the mirror, all the actors in Dr. Gora Parasit's production look at the audience or into the camera, which uses green screen technology to send the players around the world and projects them oversized in the theater. Here, everyone speaks only to themselves and yet, painfully enough, to the audience. The fairytale adaptation is full of Chekhov moments: communication as an interweaving of different monologues. Everyone on stage is talking – in Lithuanian, German and English – yet seemingly only to each other; the addressee of their speech remains unclear. The director is above all an outstanding visual composer. Tableaux vivants emerge and dissolve. Quotes from pop culture and art history appear without imposing themselves upon the audience. The temporary freezing of the actors and the sequence of images become paradoxically dynamic. The scenic power is created not least by Sandra Kazlauskaitė's electronic soundscapes, which create atmospheres and transform them into club-capable music. Dr. Gora Parasit's artistic signature includes her latex costumes, which are more than mere accessories. The conservative audience – and there are quite some in Kaunas –, which can only be anaesthetized by tabloids, naturally takes offence at such stage performances. For them, sexual motifs should rather remain fabulously hidden. The highly artificial costume design reveals human nature more than any other material. The tension between art, artificiality and human nature becomes clearer in "Snow White" than in any other work of Parasit. Through the strangeness of her artistic language and the fantastic nature of the fairy tale, she comes astonishingly close to questions about what it means to be human. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Snow White At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Dr.GoraParasit Theater, Film, Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Lithuania Language English/Lithuanian Running Time minutes Year of Release 2023 In Snow White, director Dr. GoraParasit presents a powerful and healing interpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale set against the backdrop of glacial mythology. BDSM aesthetics allow us to question human nature while simultaneously highlighting the everyday myopia of society, our naivety, and social prejudices. Dr. GoraParasit’s performance explores a range of themes, including glacial ecology, the climate crisis, multilingualism, migration, hate, and social-gender dynamics. It also invites us to contemplate broader existential questions of the present and the future. By seamlessly combining different media – such as twerk dancing, video game logic, soundscapes by composer Sandra Kazlauskaitė, and club music – the director exposes her own psychological vulnerabilities and those of contemporary society. With this production, Dr. GoraParasit invites the audience on a journey through the melting glaciers, using green screen techniques to prompt a transformative experience. We are encouraged to reflect upon ourselves through a magic mirror that unveils the reality of a world in the process of melting. And the heat is bound to intensify from here on... Erik Zielke (Theater Critic, Germany): The mirror still speaks at the Lithuanian National Theatre in Kaunas, director Dr. Gora Parasit attempts to disenchant and re-enchant the world with "Snow White" It is a long-standing misunderstanding: the old German fairytale treasure trove has made it into reading material for the youngest children. Blood, sex and crimes at the children's bedside. Attempted murders by jealous stepmothers, banishment of one's own children, secret visits from lovers, open-belly operations – all of them presented as bedtime stories. And yet what the bourgeois linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled in the 19th century is only the censored version of the stories that circulated among the population. All that remains are the traces of the metaphor-enriched, sexually charged tales of castrated folk literature. The announcement of the theatrical adaptation of "Snieguolė", as Snow White is called in Lithuanian, is marked "18+". No, we are not dealing with children's theater here. But it is good that art is still taken so seriously that moral guardians ponder whether it is reasonable for an underage audience. In Germany, after all, such age restrictions in the theater are virtually unknown. Nevertheless, here too, art is sometimes the victim of prudery. We are in Kaunas, the old capital of Lithuania, which, unlike the current seat of government Vilnius, does not flaunt with baroque impressions, but instead witnesses pan-European modernism – between Art Deco and Bauhaus. The local National Theatre, the oldest professional theater in the country, has its venue in the former "Metropolitan" cinema, an Art Nouveau building that – renovated in a socialist-realist style – is itself a reflection of an unsettled history. The National Theatre in Kaunas was able to recruit Dr. Gora Parasit, who comes from Lithuania yet chooses her working environment freely between London and Berlin, North America and old Europe, as a director of the two-hour production of "Snow White". She alternates no less freely between theater and performance, installation art and photography. However, her striking, radical formal expression is set. The visual impression is incredibly strong, without losing the sound and the movement, the language and the content behind it. She enriches the Grimm fairy tale "Snow White" with mythical motifs from all over the world – and of course with contemporary legends. As with folk tales from the past, we are still trying to come to terms with reality through stories. Mirror, mirror on the wall. The theater evening begins – white as snow – with a journey to the glaciers. The unmanageable landscape, itself a source of numerous legends, is disenchanting itself in the Anthropocene: The melting of the glaciers makes us all eyewitnesses to climate change. The unmanageable landscape is being conquered by man against his will. And suddenly not only the world but also mankind becomes smaller than it ever has been. This way, the staging rehearses the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world – and vice versa – with the audience and leaves them, trained by the fairytale, enlightened at best. Snow White is born, not through the devout wish of her mother, who dies during the birth of the child, but by means of medical technology. The last mysteries and wonders of mankind disappear and what remains is the barely explicable presence of modern man. Just as the evil queen looks into the mirror, all the actors in Dr. Gora Parasit's production look at the audience or into the camera, which uses green screen technology to send the players around the world and projects them oversized in the theater. Here, everyone speaks only to themselves and yet, painfully enough, to the audience. The fairytale adaptation is full of Chekhov moments: communication as an interweaving of different monologues. Everyone on stage is talking – in Lithuanian, German and English – yet seemingly only to each other; the addressee of their speech remains unclear. The director is above all an outstanding visual composer. Tableaux vivants emerge and dissolve. Quotes from pop culture and art history appear without imposing themselves upon the audience. The temporary freezing of the actors and the sequence of images become paradoxically dynamic. The scenic power is created not least by Sandra Kazlauskaitė's electronic soundscapes, which create atmospheres and transform them into club-capable music. Dr. Gora Parasit's artistic signature includes her latex costumes, which are more than mere accessories. The conservative audience – and there are quite some in Kaunas –, which can only be anaesthetized by tabloids, naturally takes offence at such stage performances. For them, sexual motifs should rather remain fabulously hidden. The highly artificial costume design reveals human nature more than any other material. The tension between art, artificiality and human nature becomes clearer in "Snow White" than in any other work of Parasit. Through the strangeness of her artistic language and the fantastic nature of the fairy tale, she comes astonishingly close to questions about what it means to be human. Producer - National Kaunas Drama Theatre, Lithuania Director, playwright, set designer and costume designer - Gintarė Minelgaitė-Duchin Composer - Sandra Kazlauskaitė The artist of lights is Paulius Varonenka Videographer - Edgaras Jocius Choreographer - Ema Senkuviene Camera and editing assistant - Laura Pociūtė Curator and costume - Birutė Jašinskaitė Producer and directors assistant - Rokas Naudžius Directors assistant - Asta Mačiulytė Performing : Susana AbdulMajid, Dainius Svobonas, Agnieška Ravdo, Indrė Patkauskaitė, Mantas Bendžius, Miglė Navasaitytė, Motiejus Ivanauskas, Goda Petkutė, Ugnė Žirgulė, Povilas Jatkevičius, Pijus Narijauskas, Kamilė Lebedytė, Andrius Alešiūnas, Marius Karolis Gotbergas, Artūras Sužiedėlis, Ema Senkuvienė, Eva Kisieliūtė, Ignė Birškutė, Livija Andriuškevičiūtė, Karolina Jablonskytė, Gabrielė Bartkutė, Saulė Zokaitytė, Greta Balčiūnaitė, Daiva Kvedaravičiūtė, Ugnė Vasiliauskaitė, Edvinas Siurblys, Lukas Šimelis, Roberta Lukaševičiūtė, Viktorija Kuzabavičiūtė, Saulė Šeputytė, Kotryna Markevičiūtė, Monika Kvainickaitė About The Artist(s) Theatre artist, experimental filmmaker and designer Gintarė Minelgaitė (b. 1984) is better known by the pseudonym Dr. GoraParasit. The Kaunas-born artist graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2005 with a degree in acting, after which she went to London, where she changed her sphere of interest and undertook his second bachelor, this time in graphic design studies at School of Art, Architecture and Design, part of the London Metropolitan University. While studying design, Minelgaitė worked extensively with various publications, books and their restoration. She also applied her knowledge while working as an art director on the projects “Future Shorts” and “Secret Cinema”. However, soon Minelgaitė returned to the theatre and in 2013, graduated with a master’s degree in directing from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London. During her studies, she repeatedly participated in an international summer program at the Watermill Center founded by Robert Wilson in New York, USA. Dr. GoraParasit has already created and presented more than two dozen installations, theatre, film and other works, such as the performances 1001 Nights in America (2014), Tuk Tuk Anamnesis (2017), SELF-FLES (2017), the first part of “Kaip kine” (“Like in films”) series PSYCHO (2017), comic book opera Alfa (2018), live sculpture-performance Pipe Dreaming (2018), live sculpture Tristan and Isolde (2020), performance Tik Tok Shakespeare (2020). Apart from Lithuania, her works have already been presented in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Israel and Germany. Get in touch with the artist(s) tarpdury@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/dr.goraparasit/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Dancing Pina by FLorian Heinzen-Ziob at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch was one of the most important contributors to the modern Tanztheater in the 20th century. Dancing Pina celebrates the art of the legendary dancer and the people who interpret her work today. Two of her dance projects show how young dancers from all over the world are rediscovering Pina’s unique choreographic style: the venerable Semperoper in Dresden, Germany, and the École des Sables in a fishing village near Dakar, Senegal. The young dancers are guided by former members of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater company. But Pina is not someone who can simply be copied. The dancers have to re-live Pina’s choreographies with their bodies and their own stories. Like Sanguen Lee from South Korea, who was supposedly too tall to become a dancer. Or Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi of Nigeria, who uses dance to represent her fight for equality. Or Julian Amir Lacey from the US, who had to overcome homophobic prejudices. It is a fascinating metamorphosis: While the performers of street dance, classical ballet and traditional and contemporary African dance forms transform Pina’s work, Pina’s choreographies transform the dancers. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Dancing Pina At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Dance, Documentary This film will be screened in-person on May 18th. About The Film Country Germany Language English Running Time 111 minutes Year of Release 2022 Dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch was one of the most important contributors to the modern Tanztheater in the 20th century. Dancing Pina celebrates the art of the legendary dancer and the people who interpret her work today. Two of her dance projects show how young dancers from all over the world are rediscovering Pina’s unique choreographic style: the venerable Semperoper in Dresden, Germany, and the École des Sables in a fishing village near Dakar, Senegal. The young dancers are guided by former members of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater company. But Pina is not someone who can simply be copied. The dancers have to re-live Pina’s choreographies with their bodies and their own stories. Like Sanguen Lee from South Korea, who was supposedly too tall to become a dancer. Or Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi of Nigeria, who uses dance to represent her fight for equality. Or Julian Amir Lacey from the US, who had to overcome homophobic prejudices. It is a fascinating metamorphosis: While the performers of street dance, classical ballet and traditional and contemporary African dance forms transform Pina’s work, Pina’s choreographies transform the dancers. Fontäne Film About The Artist(s) Born 1984 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Florian Heinzen-Ziob is a freelance director and producer and co-founder of Fontäne Film production. He studied media arts and film directing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. As an author, director and producer he realized the three Cinema documentaries ORIGINAL COPY, GERMAN CLASS and DANCING PINA. His films have been shown at over a hundred film festivals worldwide, including Rotterdam Film Festival, Hot Docs Toronto, Sheffield DocFest and DOK.fest Munich, and have received several awards. He lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Get in touch with the artist(s) luisa.schwamborn@newdocs.de and follow them on social media https://www.newdocs.de/dancing-pina/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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 Grec Festival 2023 Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Anton Pujol Image Credits: Article As it does every July, the Grec Festival arrived in Barcelona, but offering more shows than ever before. Over the course of just one month, across various venues around the city, the Grec Festival presented over 90 shows, encompassing all genres and catering to all audiences. The 47 th edition of the festival had a unique opening this year. In celebration of the 200 th anniversary of Passeig de Gràcia, the emblematic Modernist thoroughfare in the middle of the city, the Festival extended an invitation to the French group “Les Traceurs.” Under the direction of Rachid Ouramadne, the tightrope walker Nathan Paulin crossed Plaça Catalunya en route to the Generali building at the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Gran Via, another major artery of the city. Nathan Paulin accomplished a remarkable feat by walking a 350-meter tightrope back and forth, suspended at a height of 70 meters. What made this performance even more captivating was that the spectators below could hear Paulin's thoughts being broadcasted. This unique addition allowed the audience to feel the nervousness and danger that the artist was experiencing in real-time. The spectacular opening served as a promising prelude to the successes that followed. Francesc Casadesús, the Festival's director, reported impressive statistics, with a 72% occupancy rate translating to over 130,000 spectators. Here is a recap of some of the highlights the Festival had to offer. The Australian cirque company, Gravity & Other Myths, had the honor of officially opening the Festival with their performance, The Pulse . Directed by Darcy Grant and featuring music by Ekrem Eli Phoenix, this Adelaide-based troupe collaborated with the Women's Chorus of the Orfeó Català. While the 24 acrobat-dancers constructed impressive human towers in various patterns, threw themselves into the air and onto the floor with mesmerizing fearlessness, and presented unforgettable tableaux, the 36-woman choir provided an eerie a cappella counterpoint to the company's death-defying acts. While The Pulse was undoubtedly a group effort, there were two standout moments that deserve special mention. On the musical side, Buia Reixach, the chorus conductor, delivered a solo performance, singing in perfect harmony with individual dancers' routines, creating an ideal fusion of music and movement. Another highlight was the solo by Dylan Phillips whose body contorted, tumbled, and bent to seemingly impossible degrees. With a runtime of just seventy minutes, the show also incorporated some clever and humorous moments. For instance, there was the 'human piano,' where the circus troupe arranged themselves in a semi-circle, and each emitted a grunt in various tones when one of the dancers stepped on their abdominals. Another noteworthy element was the exceptional lighting design by Geoff Cobham. It served as a unifying and indispensable component, introducing visual effects that enhanced the drama of the performance and seamlessly complemented the expansive open-space venue. The Pulse . Photo: Dancy Grant. Dance has always been at the heart of the Grec Festival, and this year was no exception, featuring several outstanding performances. Vessel is the culmination of a collaboration that began in 2015 between Belgo-French choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese visual artist Kohei Nawa. The performance begins on a pitch-black stage, and slowly, light begins to filter in. At first, the audience cannot discern what lies on the stage. Gradually, a white platform, reminiscent of an ice cap or a lunar surface, emerges from the darkness, surrounded by water. This striking centerpiece is encircled by three dense, quarry-like sculptures that, upon closer examination, reveal themselves to be composed of human bodies. These performers then begin to untangle themselves, slowly moving onto the shallow black pool that forms the stage floor. Throughout the performance, the dancers maintain a unique posture, with their arms positioned over the back of their heads, concealing their faces from the view of the audience. The performance creates a striking and disorienting effect, intensified by the reflection in the water, which keeps the audience from fully grasping the unfolding events. At times, the contorted bodies take on an otherworldly quality, resembling aliens, monsters, or creatures not yet fully human. This ambiguity persists until the end when, standing on this island-like platform, they extract a thick, white, and pasty liquid from the floor, pouring it over themselves. This act raises further questions about the nature of these enigmatic beings. Numerous hypotheses abound regarding the meaning of it all, ranging from the beginning or ending of the world to the existence of a parallel reality. Yet, meaning remains elusive, for as their bodies transform, so does our comprehension of the performance. Vessel is a truly hypnotic and captivating display that swiftly became one of the Festival's highlights even in such a dance-heavy program. Vessel . Photo: Yoshikazu Inoue. The dance troupe, Mal Pelo, presented Double Infinite: The Bluebird Call at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. Since its inception in 1989, Mal Pelo has emerged as a significant presence among Catalan and Spanish dance companies, boasting a portfolio of over thirty productions. In this showcase, the company's leaders, María Muñoz and Pep Ramis, graced the stage alongside three talented musicians: Quiteria Muñoz (soprano), Joel Bardolet (violin), and Bruno Hurtado (cello). The performance is structured around two dance monologues followed by a final duet: first, Muñoz, then Ramis, and finally, the two together. The stage is framed by colossal screens displaying black-and-white images of snow-covered forests—a desolate landscape that mirrors the unfolding narrative on stage. Muñoz initiates her solo performance with a discussion of longing, seamlessly transitioning into dance. It is remarkable to witness choreography designed for mature bodies, where Muñoz and Ramis skillfully incorporate the passage of time into their movements, crafting an arc of yearning that is both exquisite and profoundly moving. The concluding segment, The Bluebird Call , incorporates a poem by Bukowski (“there's a bluebird in my heart that/wants to get out/but I'm too tough for him,/I say, stay in there, I'm not going/to let anybody see/you”). While the ending takes on a more playful tone, Muñoz and Ramis guide the audience through a beautiful journey of recollection—technically impressive and achingly beautiful. It feels less like an ending and more like the start of something new and captivating. Rocío Molina, one of the most revered dancers in Spain, is known for infusing flamenco with a contemporary twist, revolutionizing this millennia-old art form. Her show, titled Carnación , alludes to the process of adding color to flesh in painting to make it appear more authentic, a metaphorical journey that unfolds on stage. She begins the performance in a stunning, vibrant pink chiffon dress. Molina climbs onto the back of a chair and violently drops herself multiple times, foreshadowing her rejection of conventional paradigms imposed on young women, regardless of how hard they might try to conform. It is evident that her interpretation and execution of flamenco defy its traditional rigidity, which may not sit well with purists of the art form. Soon, this doll-like figure sheds not only her dress but also her physical body and even her soul, with the assistance of Niño de Elche, another prominent singer in the world of contemporary flamenco. To describe her performance as 'raw' would be an understatement, as her physical metamorphosis transcends anything witnessed on stage before. While at times she dances solo, her body is often entwined with her partner's and that of Maureen Choi, a violinist who gracefully traverses the scene. Pain becomes the shared theme in their entanglements—they struggle against one another, vying for space and presence, as if asserting dominance over the other is the only means of survival. Yet, they ultimately converge in a spatial union where their diverse bodies can coexist. Towards the finale, Molina binds her body with ropes, drawing from the Japanese tradition of Shibari, which has applications ranging from torture to bondage and sexual pleasure. Molina's flesh is tightly bound; her ponytail is even tied to her toe. Her breasts, limbs, and body teeter on the brink of physical exhaustion, all the while undergoing a transformation in color before our very eyes. It is a personal ecstasy and a distinctive triumph that she achieves. Rocío Molina and Niño de Elche in Carnación . Photo: Simone Fratini. La Veronal needs no introduction. Directed by the wunderkind Marcos Morau, this company stands among the most sought-after dance troupes worldwide. The world premiere of Firmamento was a standout event at the Festival, although it did not receive the same ecstatic critical acclaim as their previous works, Opening Night (2022) or Sonoma (2020). Morau explained that their new piece was crafted with younger audiences in mind, particularly adolescents whose worlds are on the brink of significant personal and societal changes. As always, the technical aspects were impeccable. Max Glanzel (scenic design), Bernat Jansà (lighting design), and Juan Cristóbal Saavedra (sound design and music) created three distinct settings for the performance. The first part unfolded in a music studio, followed by a segment featuring a cartoon on a cinema screen. Eventually, the cinema screen revealed a stage for the final act. Deliberately, it seemed, the audience was left in a state of partial comprehension. Was it a dream or a chaotically reconstructed memory? Morau artfully incorporated a wide array of intertextual references borrowed from various genres, spanning cinema to Japanese anime, puppets, toys, and fragments of multilingual texts and songs. This mosaic reflected the intricate workings of a young person's mind—a delightful clutter that everyone must sort through before moving forward, though this is merely conjecture. What truly shines, however, is the whimsical imagination of La Veronal and the unwavering commitment of its dancers to continually push the boundaries of what the arts can achieve. Circus is another staple at the Grec. This year, two shows quickly became the critics’ and audiences’ favorites: L’absolu (The Absolute) and Sono Io? (Is It Me?) Created and performed by Boris Gibé, L’absolu was the perfect combination of space and spectacle. The performance takes place inside a towering silo, standing at an impressive twelve meters in height and with a diameter of nine meters. Audience members ascend the cylindrical tower and arrange themselves along its wall in a spiral configuration, leaving the central space free for the performer. Gibé leads the audience on a vertiginous and exceedingly perilous journey through the four elements. As the performance commences in complete darkness, the rumble of a storm fills the air, and at the very top of the tower, faint glimpses of plastic and soon human appendages emerge. The womb-like structure ruptures, and Gibé descends, secured by a rope. Further into the performance, at the tower's base, he appears to be swallowed by quicksand, sets himself on fire, and in the final segment, he blindfolds himself and ascends the cylindrical tower with minimal protection until he ultimately vanishes. Gibé's daring feats sharply contrast with the highly poetic and existential essence of the performance. The numerous allusions to Greek mythology (including Narcissus, Prometheus, and Oedipus), the strenuous struggle to free himself from the elements, and his eventual triumph all serve to question the inherent fragility of humanity. The audience is continually engaged in a seemingly futile pursuit to find significance. Circus Ronaldo came back to the Grec after a six-year absence with Sono Io? Danny and Pepijn Ronaldo wrote and performed this autobiographical show about fathers and sons, the passing of time, and intergenerational conflicts. The performance begins with Danny, seated alone in a bathtub, playing recordings of his past successes on a tape recorder. The setting paints a clear picture that his triumphs are now a distant memory. His son arrives after what appears to be a prolonged separation, sparking a friendly competition between the two. It becomes evident that the father can no longer execute his usual tricks, but his son, unbeknownst to the elder Ronaldo, secretly assists him in completing them. Simultaneously, the son attempts to showcase his own new set of tricks, but his father persistently undermines him, reminding him of the traditional ways practiced by the Ronaldo family for seven generations. This playful banter and rivalry weave through a series of astonishing classic circus performances. As the back-and-forth continues, the son ultimately takes center stage, unveiling his unique brand of circus artistry to the astonishment of both his father and the captivated audience. The show's narrative simplicity, emotionally charged conclusion, and its profound love for a profession that seems to be fading away culminate in a perfect evening, leaving the audience thoroughly enthralled and appreciative. Danny and Pepijn Ronaldo in Sono Io? Photo: Festival Grec. María Goiricelaya gained national prominence through her daring staging and widely acclaimed production of García Lorca's Yerma in 2021, performed both in Basque and Spanish. In 2022, in collaboration with Ane Pikaza, she ventured into the realm of documentary theatre with La dramática errante (The Wandering Theatre Troupe) as part of the Altsasu project. This project was a part of “Cicatrizar: dramaturgias para nunca más” (“Healing Wounds: Dramaturgies for Never Again”), led by José Sanchís Sinisterra and Carlos José Reyes for Nuevo Teatro Fronterizo. The initiative aimed to present five plays from Spain and five from Colombia, addressing issues related to Historical Memory—a topic of great controversy in Spain. Goiricelaya's work dramatizes the events that unfolded in the small town of Altsasu on October 15, 2016. At approximately five in the morning, a bar brawl occurred between a group of young Basque separatists and two off-duty Guardia Civiles (members of the Civil Guard, Spain’s rural police force). The altercation resulted in one of the police officers sustaining a fractured ankle. Initially, local authorities regarded the case as a typical alcohol-fueled altercation, not attaching significant importance to it. However, a few days later, the prosecution, acting on direct orders from Madrid and under pressure from right-wing parties and associations, reclassified the case as an act of "terrorism." The prosecution initially sought a 62-year prison sentence for one of the accused and 50 years for the other seven. Ultimately, these young men received disproportionately harsh sentences, ranging from three to nine years in jail. Crucially, the prosecution disallowed the use of footage from the fight, early statements made by the participants, and other key evidence. Goiricelaya presents both perspectives as objectively as possible, incorporating footage, depositions, and media interviews from all sides. However, the inconsistent verdict and several questionable episodes of misconduct during the trial procedures lead the audience to sympathize with the accused. With only a cast of four actors, two men and two women, the director and adapter narrate the story based on all the available information about the case. The actors take on multiple roles, with the two male actors seamlessly switching between playing the accused and the police officers simply by donning or removing a jacket. Towards the conclusion, Goiricelaya interweaves the regional tradition of “Momotxorroak,” which occurs during Carnivals and had been banned for over forty years. In this tradition, townspeople dress up as animals and smear their bodies with animal blood. The Altsasu case bears a resemblance to another significant legal drama portrayed by Jordi Casanovas in Jauría (2019), where Spanish Justice ultimately emerges as a flawed, antiquated, and ideologically influenced institution. Carolina Bianchi, a Brazilian playwright and performer, along with her company Cara de Cavalo, brought a highly controversial show to the Grec Festival. Her production, titled A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela (The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella) , serves as the inaugural chapter of her trilogy Cadela Força (Strong Bitch) . The show is characterized by two markedly contrasting parts that present the topic of rape in an unconventional and deeply unsettling manner. In the first segment, Bianchi herself addresses the audience, issuing a warning about what we are about to witness. She reveals that she was a victim of rape after being drugged with a date rape substance known as 'the goodnight Cinderella.' On stage, she prepares the drug and consumes it, acknowledging that she may lose consciousness before completing the first part of the performance. She assures us that her company is prepared to step in at any moment. Bianchi proceeds to read from a stack of papers, delivering a text that could easily pass as an academic conference paper. Her discourse commences with quotes from the initial verses of Dante's Inferno , showcases paintings by Botticelli, and delves into the significance of performance artists such as Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, and, notably, Pippa Bacca (1974-2008), an Italian performance artist renowned for her project “Brides on Tour.” Bacca, perpetually adorned in a wedding dress, embarked on a hitchhiking journey from Milan to Jerusalem, consistently accepting rides regardless of the circumstances. Regrettably, Bacca's expedition ended tragically when she was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in a town in Turkey. Before she loses consciousness, Bianchi utilizes Bacca's narrative to delve into the entrenched issues of rape and femicide within Western society. As she collapses, completely unconscious, her company members carefully relocate her to the side of the stage. In the second part of the performance, the company members engage in suggestive dancing, sing songs inside a car that later crashes, and share horrifying stories about rape in Brazil. One such story involves a soccer star who murdered his pregnant lover, subsequently feeding her remains to his dogs. Shockingly, this soccer star was later reinstated in his club, as if the heinous act had never occurred. Bianchi also invokes Roberto Bolaño's renowned chapter in 2666 , which addresses the ongoing femicides in Santa Teresa (a stand-in for Ciudad Juárez). The audience finds itself immersed in Bianchi's personal hell, and while it becomes challenging to discern specific actions on stage, one is undeniably witnessing sheer horror. However, Bianchi refuses to grant us respite. Toward the end of the play, two of her company members place her at the center stage, undress her, and insert a small camera into her vagina. A giant screen suspended above her slumbering body then meticulously reveals the actual space where the rape occurred—the precise location where the trauma began, creating wounds that can never truly heal. The phrase “No act of catharsis overcomes the damage” appears repeatedly on various screens, highlighting an unfortunate truth. As the lengthy performance reaches its conclusion, the effects of the drug wane, and a member of her company assists her in waking up. Yet, she remains silent. The audience is left to contemplate whether it was necessary to present such a vivid account of her story and whether reliving her ordeal with each performance is healthy. This production undeniably leaves a profound impact on its audience, the kind of play that lingers in one's thoughts long after the curtain falls. Carolina Bianchi in A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Experimental theatre held a significant place within the Grec Festival's diverse program. Often challenging conventional definitions, experimental theatre frequently thrives in festivals like these, where artists are invited to push the boundaries, blend genres, and challenge preconceived notions of what art and theatre should be. Works such as Riding on a Cloud by Rabih Mroué, One Night at the Golden Bar by Alberto Cortés, and Love to Death (Amor a la Muerte) by Lemi Ponifasio were prime examples of this trend, which the Grec sometimes categorizes as “Hybrid Scene.” Two of Spain's leading theatre companies also presented their new works. Una Illa by Agrupación Señor Serrano brought artificial intelligence (AI) to the forefront. Creators and directors Àlex Serrano and Pau Palacios embarked on an exploration of what a play generated by AI would look like. They allowed AI to generate text, music, images, and voices to shape the performance. The narrative commences simply enough, with a young woman engaging in a conversation with an AI device while practicing yoga. This seemingly mundane dialogue sets in motion a series of vivid yet lengthy scenes. The journey unfolds through a progression of pseudo-classical paintings, morphing lamps that transform into faces, and ultimately culminates with a group of young people dancing inside a large balloon until their escape. Upon reflection, after the extensive performance, it becomes apparent that the play created by AI, while visually captivating, falls short in terms of quality. Perhaps, in the end, this was the intended message all along—a commentary on the limitations of AI-generated art. Cabosanroque, an experimental group founded by Laia Torrents Carulla and Roger Aixut Sampietro, presented a trilogy of exhibits under the title of “A Trilogy of Expanded Theatre.” The works included are: No em va fer Joan Brossa (Joan Brossa Did Not Create Me), Dimonis (Demons) , and Flors i viatges (Flowers and Journeys) where they explore a particular aspect of Joan Brossa, Jacint Verdaguer, and Mercè Rodoreda; three influential artists in Catalan culture. Among the exhibits featured at the Grec Festival, only the one dedicated to Rodoreda was entirely new to the city; the other two had been previously presented in different editions. It is worth noting that the professional backgrounds of Torrents Carulla and Aixut lack any theatrical pedigree; one is an industrial engineer, and the other is an architect. However, their immersive installations are undeniably rooted in theatrical conventions, which they manipulate not merely to craft a dramaturgy or storyline but to evoke profound sensations. In each exhibit, designed for a limited audience of 15-20 people and featuring distinctive themes, viewers are invited to immerse themselves in the author's universe. In their Rodoreda exhibit, participants are seated on low stools, surrounded by screens and other enigmatic objects. On these screens, ten Ukrainian war refugee women read passages from Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War (1983) and Last Witnesses (1985), while fragments from Rodoreda's literary works resonate in the background read by Mónica López. Beneath the screens, mounds of soil undulate, resembling the rhythmic breath of the earth, or perhaps concealing the bodies of soldiers whose harrowing stories the women recount. The exhibit holds more surprises in store, ultimately submerging the audience in a sea of laser lights and fog, leaving them with a profound sense of melancholy and sadness. One of the last plays to open was also one of the best offerings of the Festival. Alberto Conejero’s En mitad de tanto fuego (Amidst So Much Fire) premiered at the Sala Beckett. Conejero draws inspiration from the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles in Homer's Iliad , transforming it into a poignant and passionate monologue that brings the often-overlooked Patroclus to the forefront. In the program notes, the playwright emphasizes that his interpretation is neither an adaptation nor a reimagining of Homer's text. Instead, it represents a deeply personal and intimate exploration of a story that has captivated him since his youth. Conejero avoids the usual euphemisms surrounding the relationship between the two warriors and places Patroclus, portrayed by the almost-possessed Rubén de Eguía, squarely in the throes of an intense and genuine love for Achilles. Clad in jeans and a plain t-shirt, Patroclus emerges as a man profoundly devoted to his lover, even in the face of his impending demise. Conejero's poetic text serves as a beautiful ode to unabashed love, which Eguía delivers as though it were an integral part of his being. Eguía's tour de force performance and Conejero's compelling and heart-wrenching text find exquisite balance under the direction of Xavier Albertí. Albertí, who also collaborated on the lighting design with Toni Ubach, effectively utilizes the unconventional space of the upstairs theater at Sala Beckett, an expansive hall with undulating walls, and guides Conejero’s text as if it were an aria, with its peaks and valleys, modulating every phrase as if they were sublime notes on a pentagram. Eguía positions himself squarely in front of the audience, engaging us with gestures and emotions that span from rage and anger to inner fortitude and, occasionally, serenity. He embodies a man teetering on the edge, driven by the need to share his version and have his voice heard, however painful it might be, before Hector enters and kills him. Throughout the play, a clever lighting design casts Eguía's formidable shadow on the worn walls, creating the illusion of a dialogue transpiring on stage—a simple yet highly impactful device. As the monologue delves into the horrors of war, Patroclus does not merely recount his own war experiences; he transcends them to address the perpetual backdrop of warfare in human history. This backdrop always leaves behind countless innocent victims, silenced and unable to share their stories. However, thanks to the effective combination of Conejero's text, Albertí's meticulous direction, and Eguía's compelling performance, Patroclus emerges from the shadows of a secondary character. He takes center stage, becomes the focal point and he is finally able to articulate his side of the story. This extraordinary play is destined to be performed and celebrated for years to come. Ruben de Eguía as Patroclus in En mitad de tanto fuego . Photo: Sala Beckett. References References About the author(s) Anton Pujol is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He graduated from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and he later earned a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in Spanish Literature. He also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, with a focus in economics and international finance. He has recently published articles in Translation Review , Catalan Review, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea and Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, among others. His translation of Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (National Book Awards 2020 for Poetry) will be published by Raig Verd in 2022. Currently, he serves as dramaturg for the Mabou Mines company opera adaptation of Cunillé’s play Barcelona, mapa d’ombres directed and adapted by Mallory Catlett with a musical score by Mika Karlsson. 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.

I. B. Hopkins Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Our Town I. B. Hopkins By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Shawn Sides CRASHBOX Austin, TEXAS November 15, 2024 Reviewed by I. B. Hopkins You would be forgiven for remembering Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as quaint. The Pulitzer Prize-winning staple of the American dramatic repertoire has so frequently been produced by schools and community theatres since it premiered in 1938 that its edge—at least in recollection—may have dulled somewhat from sheer exposure. The play depicts a small New Hampshire town going about its everyday routines in the early twentieth century and takes pains to stress its ordinariness at every turn. In their recent production, Austin-based theatre collective the Rude Mechs articulated a desire to neither reinvent nor see something new in the classic. Instead, the company rather puzzlingly advertised, “We’re gonna try as hard as we can to do it as Wilder intended.” This statement of intent acknowledges the company’s long history of remixing classics, such as their “fixing” Shakespeare series or locating transcendence in Tennessee Williams’s bit parts in The Method Gun . Doing Our Town “as Wilder intended” decidedly breaks from their punkish approach to adaptation, intimating that there may be more lurking beneath its inoffensive surface than audiences might assume. For director Shawn Sides and company, the appeal and enigma of Our Town seemed to be distilled in its first-person plural title. Situated in the intimate and unadorned CRASHBOX performance warehouse in Austin’s gentrifying Eastside neighborhood, the environment gratifyingly contrasted the traditional Americana of Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. The rural, church- and family-centered, and presumed white world of the play is ostensibly incompatible with the Texas capital’s progressive and multiethnic brand of urbanism. Far from tritely extolling the universality of love or family, however, the script effectively doubles down on local particularity by specifying that the actors portraying townspeople be verbally identified by their names. Inasmuch, the Rude Mechs’s gambit to fulfill Wilder’s intentions also highlighted casting choices that reflect Austin’s diversity, though this was more than just presenting an array of bodies on stage that vary along dimensions of race, gender expression, and size. In the context of the Performing Garage-like setting, the production’s execution of the script’s instruction to narrate actors’ names also points up Our Town ’s striking anticipation of later experimental theatre works and the long tradition of ensemble-driven, devised performances. The original play has famously absent scenery, but this production went further with rehearsal-quality furniture, no affected New England accents, and costume designer Aaron Flynn’s inconspicuous, contemporary choices. In her gray jeans and dark neutral top, for example, Mrs. Webb could easily have been out shopping at H-E-B, the local central Texas grocery store. Seeming to strip even the costumes of their costumey-ness announced a certain rejection of the play’s lingering pretenses, an escalation of Wilder’s first stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” This design scheme deviated notably from many productions, including both the 1938 premiere and the 2024 Broadway revival. In short, Sides and the cast worked to countermand any sense that Grover’s Corners might serve as an idyllic Anytown, USA or a parable for human experience. Without altering a word of Wilder’s text, they redirected abstract nostalgia to focus on the here and now simply by subtracting production elements that suggested early twentieth-century New Hampshire. What was left in the compact space was a room full of Austinites, many of them longtime members of the local arts community. This staging seemed to find the Rude Mechs attempting to manifest our town , the one to which they and the audience belong, and which has undergone such tremendous growth and changes since the collective formed twenty-five years ago. To that end, dividing the Stage Manager role among four of the collective’s co-producing artistic directors (Madge Darlington, Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, and Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw) most directly manifested the production’s sense of diffusion, the our -ness of Our Town. Even casting that resists the avuncular, “hat on and pipe in mouth” type indicated by Wilder affords a great deal of stage time and power to a single, starring role. By dividing these place-setting and contemplative monologues among a quartet of performers speaking in unhurried, matter-of-fact tones, this Our Town defamiliarized the warmth of small-town life, which continually brought the audience back to presence in the CRASHBOX. The Stage Manager, it is important to recall, is not nostalgic in the text, and the chorus of narratorial voices served to heighten their somewhat clinical distance from the emotional churn of the story even as they also amplified the poetic turns of Wilder’s language by rendering them less conversational. Functionally, they contrasted the diegetic events among the Grover’s Corners denizens, adding a layer of oblique commentary to elevate the townspeople’s lives. Correspondingly, the cast of eight other actors committed to a meticulous style of realism in their performances to cast the townspeople in relief. In this respect, Rommel Sulit (Doc Gibbs), Liz Fisher (Myrtle Webb), and Eric Ramos (George Gibbs) excelled in the precision of their psychologically rich, clearly motivated acting choices, providing a sharp distinction between the everyday world and the narration hanging above it. Ceremoniously presiding at a remove from the townspeople’s lives, the multi-voiced Stage Managers spoke directly to the audience with a gentle insistence that this is, in fact, their town. Their seated positions in the inner ring of the audience and sober tones underscored the emotional distance between the audience and the townspeople, the unbridgeable gap between past and present which is also famously dramatized in Emily’s return in act 3. Like Emily, the audience only gets a bitter glimpse at the quiet beauty of this community for a short time. Kira Small (“Emily”) and Eric Ramos (“George”) in Our Town. Photo courtesy Rude Mechs. There are limits, however, to just how much literalized community this interpretation of the script can manage. At select intervals, tertiary roles had been pre-distributed to willing audience members, who then read a few lines. Even when audibly delivered, this bid to draw the audience more tightly into the town also made Wilder’s script appear ungainly and overfull when the joke or the flash of poetry did not land. Staging the production in the round more effectively delivered on the aim to make the Austin community its subject, and Brian H. Scott’s lighting design complemented the arrangement by keeping most audience members’ faces visible as they sat alongside members of the cast. Simply repositioning a minimal number of chairs instantly placed spectators at eye level and quite close in (variously) a kitchen, a pew during a wedding, and, finally, the local cemetery. No flashiness nor trickery, just thoughtful staging. The straightforward theatricality of such gestures bespoke underlying faith in the principle behind the script’s iconic use of pantomime. If a certain action can represent stringing beans even when no beans are present, then the simple turning of a chair should just as effectively transport the scene to a new location. When artfully applied, this technique denaturalized the relationship between actors and their earthly trappings, suggesting that verisimilitude is not as vital as human striving in performance. Wilder’s fixation on what he has the Stage Manager call the world’s “straining” does, in fact, reach for the universal, and—intended or not—this urge’s tension with the reality of theatre’s constraints to here, now, and us characterized the production’s finest moments. Lana Lesley, for instance, as the town drunk and choir director Simon Stimpson, conducted the offstage choir in Act 1 with tremendous fervency down a corridor that left her visible to only perhaps a quarter of the audience. Later, when Simon spoke from the dead, his lines about “what it was to be alive … To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another” bit with particular ruefulness because Lesley’s zeal portrayed his ennobling passion for his art alongside his dependence on alcohol. The quick but bitter sensation that not every member of the audience could have seen this character so fully exemplifies the production’s refreshingly unsentimental take on the play’s plea to appreciate life while we can. On their website, the Rude Mechs write, “We’ll be using what we learn about Our Town to make a completely new piece in 2025/26.” Taken together with the stated goal of matching the playwright’s intent, we might best understand this production as a genuine experiment by one of America’s most consistently innovative performance collectives to systematically examine Wilder’s script, to understand its workings but also to find out through doing how the line between its familiar quaintness and its persistent darkness might be drawn. In the process, they may have discovered that the redrawing, the return, the perennial reperformance of Our Town is the very thing that keeps Grover’s Corners weird. References Footnotes About The Author(s) I. B. HOPKINS is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned his MFA in playwriting. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Michener Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Drama , Theatre Annual , Theatre Journal , and the E3W Review, as well as Austin arts publications. Hopkins’s dissertation, titled “Bad Actors,” explores the aesthetics of historical drama and adaptation in depictions of the U.S. South. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch GIANNI by Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The idea of GIANNI (originally: dzsanni) emerges from the vision of amalgamating theatre, film, and digital art to give rise to the innovative genre of Live Film. In the performance, we bring Puccini’s classical opera to the stage as a theatrical play set in a lavish scenery. Simultaneously, we are live-producing — recording, editing, and streaming — a film of the ongoing play onto a dimmable canvas integrated into the scenery. The artists employ voiceless lip-syncs to synchronize with the original opera in Italian, while subtitles are streamed onto the screen. The interplay of various art forms, genre characteristics, and cutting-edge technologies creates a dynamic and exquisite experience. GIANNI opens up new experimental avenues in the realms of performing arts, film production, and worldwide distribution of theatre. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents GIANNI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Theater, Film, Mime, Multimedia, Opera, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language Italian, with English subtitles Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2023 The idea of GIANNI (originally: dzsanni) emerges from the vision of amalgamating theatre, film, and digital art to give rise to the innovative genre of Live Film. In the performance, we bring Puccini’s classical opera to the stage as a theatrical play set in a lavish scenery. Simultaneously, we are live-producing — recording, editing, and streaming — a film of the ongoing play onto a dimmable canvas integrated into the scenery. The artists employ voiceless lip-syncs to synchronize with the original opera in Italian, while subtitles are streamed onto the screen. The interplay of various art forms, genre characteristics, and cutting-edge technologies creates a dynamic and exquisite experience. GIANNI opens up new experimental avenues in the realms of performing arts, film production, and worldwide distribution of theatre. TEAM & CAST: Performers: Gianni Schicchi —— Gergely Váradi Lauretta —— Natalja Maas Rinuccio —— Manuel Krstanovic Zita, La Vecchia —— Dominika Rezes Gherardo —— Sebastian Huber Nella, Maestro Spinelloccio —— Stefani Matkovic Betto di Signa —— Aki Tougiannidis Simone —— Mihály Bánki Marco, Ser Amantio di Nicolao —— Florian Dehmel La Ciesca —— Silvia Passera Buoso Donati —— Stephen Crane / Creative technicians: Technical operations, stream, and camera Patrik Macsuka Soma Varga Lázár Todoroff / Set design and costumes: Rebeka Zita Artim, Kudar Máté, Renáta Balogh / Director, Editor: Dániel Máté Sándor About The Artist(s) We are a group of young theatre artists and creative technicians with the ambition of creating a distinctive artistic language in theatre. In 2020, our studies at SZFE, the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest got disrupted by the pandemic and the politically motivated ‘model changing’ of the institution. In response, we founded an association called Budapesti Skizo Group in 2022, renting our own creative space in the old factory building of 4K (Kobanya Contemporary Cultural Center), Budapest. Since 2020, our group has created two live film performances: Budapesti Skizo and dzsanni (later: GIANNI). Budapesti Skizo was played on 20 m² in an apartment during the pandemic, from where we live streamed the performance on YouTube. In contrast, dzsanni premiered for an audience of 400+ people in a 250 m² storage room, complemented by the vast inner yard of the abandoned salami factory. The production involved 14 actors, a 60-piece symphony orchestra, 12 opera singers, and a technical crew of 5 people. After the initial premiere of dzsanni in June 2022, we hosted the Live Film performance an additional 13 times in our studio at 4K for a predominantly young audience of 60-80 people. To offset our rental costs, given the lack of funding, we collaborated with external partners to provide a more comprehensive cultural experience, including beer and wine tasting events, as well as a book reading. In addition to the live performances, we released the recording of dzsanni on a theatrical streaming platform called eTheatre between 27 and 30 October 2022. Moreover, we organized two screenings in Germany one of them at SETT2023. In 2023, László Bagossy, the artistic director of Theater tribühne, invited us to create GIANNI, the second version of dzsanni, tailored for German audiences in Stuttgart. This marks a significant milestone for our group, as, after three years of continuous work and development, we have had the opportunity to experiment and expand our technical apparatus within a professional framework. This advancement allows us to perform, record, and broadcast in full synchronization to any part of the world. The result of our cooperation is a theatre repertoire piece in the spring term program of Theater tribühne. Or partnership with László Bagossy is characterised by the Renaissance Workshop method, fostering mentor-student relationships and autonomous group work among creative contributors with diverse knowledge and physical locations — all united by a collective creative vision. As part of this working method, our group participated in the creation of 100 Songs at Theater tri-bühne in October 2023. Get in touch with the artist(s) sandordanmate@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/der_grosse_gianni/ https://www.instagram.com/budapesti_skizo_csoport/ https://segalfilmfestival.org/budapestian-schizo-by-daniel-mate-sandor/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou