Search Results

Jessica L. Peña Torres  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres By Published on May 8, 2023 Download Article as PDF Zapateado, burlesque dancing, and a mix of mariachi, son jarocho, and electronic music combine to create the world for MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED), a bilingual dance-theater piece that surveys three regions of México (Jalisco, Sonora, Veracruz) through a dramatization of the origins of ballet folklórico. With songs such as “Son de la Negra,” “La Bruja,” and “La Bamba,” the dancers of Coctel Explosivo present Mexico’s folkloric diaspora while inviting the audience to reflect upon a heritage that has been as appropriated as Carolina Herrera’s latest collection. MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED) unearths the politics and history of ballet folklórico, which has been presented as authentic Mexican culture for decades and puts it under the microscope for the audience to decide: should we keep these dances in the repertoire, or should we re-choreograph them to reflect their complicated histories? My Desilusión with Ballet Folklórico I saw the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández live onstage for the first time at the Strathmore Theatre in North Bethesda, MD in 2015. Even though it was a reach, I dreamed about dancing for Hernández’s company. That night in Bethesda, I became enamorada of the colors, the technique, and the professionalism of the most famous dance company in Mexico. The female dancers, all tall, very thin, and, significantly, light-skinned, looked like Barbie dolls to me. For days, I daydreamed of their high battements in “Guerrero,” the lightness of their faldeo in “Jalisco,” and their pas de vals in “Revolución.” A few months later, I moved to Mexico City to audition for the company, but a quick visit to their website shattered my hopes in seconds. The section “Auditions” listed under “requirements”: “Estatura minima: mujeres 1.68 m” (Minimum height: women 5’5’’) [i] . I was four inches too short. I thought about the dancers I had seen perform and could not help but compare my short height to their statuesque bodies. A month or so later, I was dancing with the Ballet Folclórico Nacional de México de Silvia Lozano, a sixty-year-old-company founded by a former dancer of Hernández’s, Maestra Silvia Lozano. In rehearsals, it did not take long for me to start hearing chisme (gossip) about what it was like to work for other major folklórico companies in the city. I heard rumors that teachers and administrators in Hernández’s company bullied dancers if they had darker skin or were “overweight.” More interesting, however, was criticism about how Hernández’s works were not “authentic” or “traditional,” but, rather, highly stylized. All of this chisme reminded me of the dances I had witnessed in Bethesda. The cuadros (dance suites) were very beautifully executed, yes, but the technique, including the port de bras , the battements , the forward-carrying of the upper body, the lightness of the feet, the emphasis on turnout, and the precision of the turns, resembled that of classical ballet companies. The press deemed Hernández “La Emperatriz del Tesoro Mexicano del Folklor” (the Empress of the Mexican Treasure of Folklore) who brought to the world stage the “incomparable culture of Mexico” [ii] . How does Hernández’s use of Western, classical dance factor into these achievements? Moreover, how does Hernandez’s company sell the image of Mexico to the rest of the world? How does this legacy shape Mexican understandings of what it means to be Mexican? If her dances are not particularly “authentic,” then what claims to indigeneity, if any, does she have? And how did she acquire the indigenous dance material she has adapted to the stage? These and more questions started to pull apart a tapestry in my head, one I had constructed in my time as a ballet folklórico dancer with the images I believed to be a true representation of mexicanidad . Because I had performed with ballet folklórico companies in both Mexico and the United States, I thought of Hernández’s choreographic work as the footprint for folklórico dancers everywhere; her legacy extended across borders and with it, the way audiences perceived Mexican identity. This tapestry, however, was unraveling and to replace it, I was weaving together many ethical issues that this dance form brought up. As an artist-scholar, I began to question myself: how could I even begin to address these problem as a ballet folklórico dancer? Authoethnography México (expropriated) [iii] –– in Spanish, México (expropiado) ––is the result of an auto-ethnographic project that I began in 2019. [iv] An original evening-long piece of dance theatre, this work—which premiered as a web project in 2020, during the pandemic, and on stage in Mexico City in April 2022—is my attempt to rechoreograph the ballet folklórico form as established by Hernández through Practice as Research methodology (PaR) as delineated by Robin Nelson (2013) and Vida Midgelow (2018) [v] . Utilizing cabaret, contemporary dance, folklórico, zapateado (footwork) , flamenco, burlesque, and text, México (expropriated) seeks to re-appropriate ballet folklórico’s problematic images and characters of three different cuadros:“ Jalisco,” “La Danza del Venado,” and “Veracruz.” In this article, I will discuss the (re)creation of one of the characters featured in “Jalisco:” la china poblana . Following José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification as described in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [vi] , I aim to complicate the politics of my mestizo body through my artistic work. Reflecting upon Muñoz’s theory on how identity has been “formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny ––cultural logics that . . . work to undergrid state power,” [vii] I argue that these same notions have been thrust upon Mexican identity. Inspired by Muñoz’s theory, I explore the social imaginary of what it means to be Mexican and actively use choreographic and theatrical tools to disidentify from these hegemonic notions, specifically as they influenced the creation of the ballet folklórico form. Since disidentification is a “strategy that works on and against dominant ideology,” [viii] I use it to challenge the traditional elements of mexicanidad [ix] . By disidentifying from the ballet folklórico form, I am “working on and against” [x] the cultural structures that I learned from a discipline that trained my body and shaped my artistic practices during my time as a professional ballet folklórico dancer in Mexico and the United States. Throughout the process of creating México (expropriated) , my cast and I considered “what is it to dance Mexican?” [xi] By exploring tropes and characters of Mexican folklore such as la china poblana , el charro , el Venado , el Negrito , and la Mulata , we investigated what it means to perform authenticity and who, in reality, were the characters that contributed to the nationalist project of the postrevolutionary period, specifically as Amalia Hernández featured them in her world-famous repertory. Lastly, I sought to reclaim agency as a former ballet folklórico professional dancer by offering an alternative interpretation of these characters, one that would provide audiences with a playful yet cutting critique of the way we perform ballet folklórico within and outside of Mexico. Because ballet folklórico was created to consolidate a national identity, it serves to reinforce hegemonic notions of mexicanidad. México (expropriated) subverts stereotypes associated with Mexican identity, performatively unveils the unethical and inauthentic practices of ballet folklórico, and actively rejects heterosexist, racist, and homophobic gender roles embedded in both traditions. This article describes and analyzes the recreation of the character of la china poblana , while also reflecting on the changes the piece underwent in several versions of the project. Originally, I planned to present the work on stage in Austin, Texas in spring 2020, with a cast of Latinx performers. (See figure 1) . However the pandemic forced me to reconfigure the work as an interactive website. In 2022, I was able to stage the work (with a Mexican cast) at Teatro Benito Juárez in Mexico City as part of the City’s Department of Culture annual programming. (See figure 2) . Over the course of its production history, the piece transformed by way of medium, cast, audience, geographical location, language (English/Spanish to Spanish-only), and time [xii] . Left: Poster for Mexico (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble. Photos by Juan Leyva. Design by Khristian Méndez Aguirre. March 2020. Right: Poster for Mexico (expropriado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Mona E. Avalos. April 2022 Synopsis It’s 1955 in Mexico City and Petra, a talented and well-connected dancer and choreographer, is starting a company to show the dances of Mexico as never seen before. In order to create her repertoire, she will need to teach the dancers of her company how to embody the characters that represent each of the different regions in Mexico. Jalisco Jalisco, a state in the Pacific coast, is the home of tequila, mariachis, and colonial histories. Besides being the “whitest” region of central Mexico, Jalisco’s folkloric dances have become the epitome of Mexican dance traditions. “El Jarabe Tapatío,” for instance, is one of the most frequently performed pieces in the repertoire of any ballet folklórico, from professional companies to amateur groups. Although these dances are certainly emblematic of Mexican identity, they perpetuate heteronormative gender roles through the characters of la china poblana and el charro. In this scene, we take these traditions and re-examine them through song and dance. Mexico City 2022 live performance script excerpt: PETRA David ¿Cuántas veces te tengo que repetir esto? ¿Qué es esto? Petra imita a David con movimientos burdos. PETRA Qué vergüenza contigo. Me hiciste pasar un momento muy difícil. El charro es macho. Con el pecho arriba. Firme. Seguro de su hombría. No con movimientos afeminados. Y Mary… ¿Sabes que estoy pensando? No. Claro que no lo sabes. Tantos años en un cabaret me hacen pensar que nunca podré sacar lo corriente de ti. La China Poblana es elegante, femenina… No me estés haciendo repetir las cosas. Ustedes saben muy bien lo que quiero. Quiero un baile bien ejecutado. No vulgaridades ¿No les da pena que los venga a ver un productor y ustedes bailen como amateurs de carpa? PETRA David, how many times do I have to repeat this to you? What is this? Petra imitates David with crude movements. PETRA How embarrassing of you. You put me through a very difficult time. El charro is macho. With his chest up. Firm. Sure of his manhood. Not with effeminate movements. And Mary… You know what I’m thinking? No. Of course you don’t. So many years in a cabaret make me think that I will never be able to get the ordinary out of you. La China Poblana is elegant, feminine… Don’t make me repeat myself. You know very well what I want. I want a well-executed dance. Not… vulgarities. Don’t you feel ashamed when a producer comes to see you and you dance like amateurs from a carpa? The choreography of folkloric dances in Mexico dates back to postrevolutionary times, specifically to the 1920s and 1930s. “Jarabe Tapatío,” known outside of Mexico as “Mexican Hat Dance” became Mexico’s national dance, with la china poblan a wearing tri-color hair bows (referencing the Mexican flag) and a colorful skirt embroidered with sequins depicting a national symbol (such as the eagle), and el charro in his mariachi hat. Most, if not all, professional and collegiate ballet folklórico companies have a version of the “Jarabe Tapatío” in their repertoire. The word “jarabe” means syrup, and “tapatío,” which comes from the Nahuátl word “Thapatiotl,” [xiii] is used to name people from the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital city. The dance originated from the “Guajolote,” a dance of the Huichol community where the male bird courts the female bird [xiv] . Similar to the “Guajolote,” in “Jarabe Tapatío” el charro , played by a male dancer, pursues la china poblana , played by a female dancer [xv] . “Jarabe Tapatío” is one of the works in ballet folklórico repertoires that perpetuates hegemonic gender roles in Mexican society. Maria del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón (2000) notes that la china poblana , as a symbol of Mexican identity, represented the “grace and virtue of the Mexican woman,” who served as the object of heterosexual male desire by balancing a dichotomy between wife or prostitute [xvi] . This character also appeared frequently in the writing of 19th-century authors who described her as a mestizo woman who did not conform to society standards but rather enjoyed the freedom of her love encounters. Similar to how la china poblana became a romanticized version of the Mexican woman, el charro became “the symbol of the ideal Mexican man” [xvii] . During the conquest, the Spanish brought horses to Mexico. Those who owned and knew how to ride these majestic animals were regarded as the upper class given their European ancestry. The hacendados (landowners) often knew how to break wild horses, ride them, and perform all sorts of tricks, a feat that reflected their male prowess and social standing. The patriarchal system of 19th century Mexico put men, regardless of class, in charge of women and children in the absence of the hacendado . As such, the vaqueros (horsemen) often learned how to execute these acts in spite of their socioeconomic class. This mixing of the upper, middle and lower classes in the charrería culture led to the formation of a male identity that denoted unity, an unbreakable code of ethics, and an unyielding bravery to defend the family and the hacienda [xviii] . After the revolution ended in 1920, a nationalistic discourse called for the romanticized construction of a specific image of el charro as a strong, skilled, hard-working man to represent male vigor. In ballet folklórico, this character came to represent masculine traits that were favored by the proponents of lo mexicano . As such, el charro often appeared “pursuing and ultimately capturing the woman” he partnered in the dance [xix] . To create material for my own iteration of the cuadro of “Jalisco,” specifically “Jarabe Tapatío,” the ensemble and I played with devised work. We created scenes that reflected the expectations that the social imaginary holds for Mexican women, especially as embodied by the character of la china poblana . The rehearsals led us into big and important discussions about the female body, as it relates to shape, size, and the color of the skin. For example, our work together inspired two of the 2020 cast members, Marina DeYoe-Pedraza and Erica Saucedo, to write a poem titled “Si yo fuera la china poblana” (If I was la china poblana ). Below is a short excerpt. MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would… Go Wherever I want kill and eat whatever I find. Grow into una montaña alta y vasta Too dangerous to climb ERICA If you took all of our bones, Our bodies together … bones piled on bones. Bodies bodies cuerpos Bodies that …are not ours Que no han sido nuestros cuerpos for hundreds of years… (Breath) it’s been a long time since these brown bodies could walk down the street Soft supple MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would be Un Escorpión. Defend myself by puncturing and poisoning those who try to smother me. Through vivid imagery, Marina and Erica explore the possibility of escaping stereotypes and reclaiming agency by becoming either a scorpion, a horse, or even a mountain, all too dangerous for men to dominate. Marina, for example, imagines her china poblana able to defend herself from all predators that mean to subdue her. Through this poem, the dancers overtly expresses their desire to be “whatever [they] wanted.” Embodying Marina and Erica’s words, the three women of the cast (who also included Venese Alcantar) dance solos that combine contemporary technique, footwork and tender yet assertive movement. They manipulate their skirts and play with the contrast of softness and coarseness through varied movements such as jumps and turns and small and big gestures. In the word “puncturing,” for example, the dancers put their foot down and squash one of la china poblana ’s metaphorical enemies. For the filmed version, we recorded the dancers’ voices reciting the poem and paired them with James Parker’s original music and filmed them dancing one at a time. We, then, played with video images of the three dancers (dancing as soloists), either one video of one dancer alone or sometimes two or three video/dancers superimposed. Since they often moved to the same choreography, the change from body to body, at times created the image of a palimpsest of the three women, generating the illusion that even though there were all different women, they shared common histories of oppression and a desire for freedom, and at times, revenge. (See figure 3). Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, Erica Saucedo and Venese Alcantar in México (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble Photo still from video by Michael Bruner. The Vortex, Austin, TX. October 2020. For the 2022 staged version, I wanted to incorporate the new cast’s experiences around female agency. In rehearsal, we talked about their desires to be “whatever they wanted,” and everyone wrote what that prompt meant for them. I gathered their responses and sent them to a friend and poet, Mercy Medina Gonzalez, who wrote a new Spanish-language poem for the dancers to perform. Similar to the 2020 version, the dancers recorded their voices reciting the poem. For the live performances, the dancers moved to their own voices and words, poetically arranged by Mercy but embodied by them. It was their words, their voice, their bodies that we saw onstage. Below is an excerpt of the poem: TODAS Mujer. La Mujer Mexicana que ama y crea. Yo soy La China Poblana. La que entre las cortinas de sus temblores, busca el viento para alimentar sus alas. MARY Toma el suspiro del mundo por los cuernos, y conoce cómo llevarlo hasta las raíces del alma, a todas las esquinas que nos hacen hermosas. Si yo fuera ella, me enterraría bajo la tierra para crecer como mazorca blanda y aprender el nombre de los truenos. Sería curandera y bruja, el esperpento hecho verbo. Esa mujer canta conmigo. Yo soy La China Poblana ERICA La que escarba para hallar el murmullo de la tierra blanda y consume el ardor de los que se rindieron. No le teme ni a la sangre ni a los muertos y busca el aroma de las montañas más altas las cumbres del cielo que no toca; araña. Porque el mundo le debe plenitud y contento. LOLA La que es cuerpo mío y ajeno cuerpos de cuantas nos hemos caído la que nace de huesos y de ríos yo soy La China Poblana la serpiente que deja el cuello al pico de las águilas y el veneno de la araña cuando ataca un caballo que no se monta, un cuervo que arranca los ojos de quienes nos violentan. TODAS La que conoce la amargura de la luna y carga con la sombra de los ciclos. Con su cuerpo mustio es el canal del eterno ir y venir de los vivos. No se aguanta, se transforma en la fuerza de todas las cruces enterradas en carreteras y montes. ALL THE WOMEN Woman. The Mexican Woman that loves and creates. I am La China Poblana. The one that between the curtains of her tremors, seeks the wind to feed her wings. MARY She takes the sigh of the world by the horns, and knows how to take it to the roots of the soul, to all the corners that make us beautiful. If I were her, I would bury myself under the ground to grow as soft cob and learn the name of thunder. I would be a healer and a witch, the grotesque made verb. That woman sings with me. I am La China Poblana ERICA The one who digs to find the murmur of the soft earth and consume the ardor of those who surrendered. She is not afraid of blood or the dead and seeks the scent of the highest mountains, the peaks of heaven that she does not touch; scratches. Because the world owes her fullness and contentment. LOLA The one that is my body and someone else’s bodies of how many we have fallen. The one that is born of bones and rivers I am La China Poblana the serpent that leaves the neck of the eagles beak and the venom of the spider when it attacks a horse that does not ride, a crow that plucks out the eyes of those who violate us. ALL THE WOMEN The one who knows the bitterness of the moon and carries the shadow of the cycles. With her withered body, it is the channel of the eternal coming and going of the living. She doesn’t endure, she becomes the force of all the crosses buried in roads and mountains. (See figure 4). Andrea Rubí Santillán, Samantha Romero Peña, Miriam Garma, and Ileana Díaz Manzur in México (expropiado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Ricardo Antonio Ramos. Teatro Benito Juárez, Mexico City. April 2022 In both the 2020 and the 2022 version, our recreation of the character of la china poblana aims to provoke the audience’s affect by simultaneously reproducing visual and aural performances of female agency. Through the evocative descriptions pronounced by the women of the cast through their bodies and voices, we hoped to touch the audience’s sensibilities and make them wonder what it would be like if women could, in fact, be whatever they wanted. Utilizing text and contemporary dance, I sought to to dis-identify from folklórico dance traditions, specifically those inscribed in performances of the character of la china poblana. Conclusion Colorful lights, elegant costumes, presentational smiles and headpieces that not even Lady Gaga could dream of… ballet folklórico offers its audience a taste of Mexico’s regional and cultural diversity. Through my auto-ethnographical project that explores, among other themes, the politics of my mestizo body, I conclude that ballet folklórico desperately needs to be re-choreographed to reflect its colonial history of cultural appropriation and exoticization . I believe that professional, collegiate, and amateur companies of the form should revisit the way they incorporate the pieces of the canon into their repertory if they wish to stop perpetuating racist, heterosexist, classist, and unethical images of the diverse regions of Mexico. When audiences think about Mexico, they often think of the distinct mariachi music, the strong charros , the beautiful china poblana , and many other images that were conceived as components of mexicanidad in postrevolutionary Mexico. These images, however, continue to paint a romanticized vision of Mexico that has never existed. As a millennial coming of age in Reynosa, Tamaulipas ––known for making the headlines of major newspapers as an incubator for cartel violence and drugs–– I think of an alternative image of Mexico to the one painted through a full-length concert of ballet folklórico. Just in 2020, for instance, the number of femicides in my home country increased to an alarming 10 per day. Ballet folklórico does not present this reality, nor the one lived by the many marginalized communities in Mexico; there’s no room for the bad and the ugly in this form. Through Mexico (expropriated) , I aimed to re-choreograph three pieces in the folklórico canon and complicate hegemonic images of mexicanidad. By deconstructing stereotypes of the nation as they relate to gender, race, and class, I aimed to dis-identify from the ballet folklórico form to complicate the discussion of what it means to be Mexican in the 21 st century. Borrowing from contemporary dance, flamenco, jazz, hip hop, and burlesque, I reclaim the agency of my own body to re-choreograph cuadros such as “Jalisco ” and recreate characters such as la china poblana. References [i] “Audiciones,” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. [ii] TheCharlieRoll, “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992,” YouTube, October 26, 2017, video, http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y [iii] My master’s thesis “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation, and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico,” which I authored in the Spring 2020 to graduate from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, explored the ballet folklórico dance form in imagining lo mexicano by focusing on Ballet Folklórico de México, Mexico’s leading and most influential company. I argued that BFM has helped the state and the social elite shape an exoticized Mexico for the consumption of foreigners and tourists, and has, within Mexico, offered a problematic embodiment of mexicanidad that reflects racial, nationalistic, class, and gender biases. In addition, I considered Hernández flawed ethnographic methodology which included appropriating and stylizing folk dances through the infusion of ballet and modern dance techniques. The company presents these dances as “authentic” to its paying audiences, and does not offer any reciprocity, support, or acknowledgment to the communities from which Hernández “borrowed” these dances. In addition, her legacy has and continues to permeate many dance companies who imitate BFM’s dances, inadvertently reproducing a colonialist model of exoticization and cultural theft. [iv] Very much inspired by Astrid Hadad’s 2019 performance of Hecha in Mexico , I developed México (expropriated) to satirize stereotypical notions of mexicanidad as imagined by Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. Like Hadad, I aim to make a feminist intervention in national discourses of mexicanidad as developed in the postrevolutionary period . [v] As Nelson explains, in PaR methodology the doing becomes the knowing . In other words, by dancing, choreographing, writing, and performing México (expropriated) , I am both researching and providing evidence of my research inquiry. As Midgelow suggests, a PaR approach allows artist/scholars to explore the process of creating work as just as significant as the performance of that work before a live audience. [vi] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [vii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 5. [viii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [ix] In Chapter 5 “La Moda Mexicana: Exotic Women,” of Imagining la Chica Moderna : Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 (2008) Joanne Hershfield explores the concept of mexicanidad , the state’s attempt to construct a national identity at the beginning of the 20th century. Exploiting the richness of indigenous cultures, she argues that intellectuals and politicians forged an “authentic” image of Mexico, the “domestic exotic,” rooted in stereotypes of indigenous communities, which the nation then used for capitalist consumption. [x] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [xi] I am influenced by my advisor and Professor Rebecca Rossen, whose book, Dancing Jewish (2014), includes three sections that describe an auto-ethnographic dance project for which she asked two of her subjects to make her a “Jewish” dance. Similarly, in México (expropriated) , I explore notions of mexicanidad, as I actively think over the question “what is it to dance Mexican?” Moreover, in Dancing Jewish , Rossen argues that Jewish choreographers negotiate ethnicity and gender in tandem, while challenging “traditional models for femininity (or masculinity); advance social and political agendas; and imagine radical new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews.” Similarly, I argue that mexicanidad is a construction of hegemonic images that contain complex syntheses of gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class. Through the process of creating and performing this work, we have been able to imagine new possibilities to stage mexicanidad . [xii] An important change from the filmed to the staged version is that we increased the number of roles from six to eight. For the filmed version, there were six performers including Venese Alcantar (“Veni”), David Cruz (“David”), Marina DeYoe-Pedraza (“Mari”), Jesus Valles (“EMCEE”), Erica Saucedo (“Eri”), and myself (“Pari”). For the staged version, we created three new characters, which featured Mexico City-based performers: José David Carrera Piñón (“Sebastian”), Miriam Garma (“Lola”), Daniel Losoya (”Narrador”), Ileana Manzur (“Veni” became “Vanessa”), Roberto Mosqueda (“David”), Samantha Romero (“Erica”), Andrea Rubí (“Mary”), and myself (“Pari” became “Petra”). Lastly, for the Mexico City live performance I was able to expand the creative team, which included costume designer Edurne Fernández, technical director Pedro Pazarán, and scenic designer Gisselle Gómez Rivera. Composer James Parker created the score for both versions. Another big change from film to stage was the narrative structure of the piece. The filmed version consisted of five separate viñetas (vignettes) following an episodic narrative form. Although the characters appeared through the different scenes, there was no unifying narrative between each separate viñeta. For the Spanish-only/staged adaptation, I worked with filmmaker and screenwriter Nina Chávez Góngora to re-develop the script for the staged version, which read more like a play with numerous dance pieces, often interrupted by the EMCEE, “Narrador.” Adapting the piece to include a unifying narrative throughout gave audiences a stronger chance to connect with the characters, which in turn led to a more effective way to communicate our critique. [xiii] Cashion, quoted in Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 55. [xiv] Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 58. [xv] Sydney Hutchinson, “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 209. [xvi] , María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 124. [xvii] Gabriela Mendoza-García, “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 319. [xviii] Olga Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro, ” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1994): 4. [xix] Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism,” 7. Bibliography “Audiciones.” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández. Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. Hershfield, Joanne. Imagining La Chica Moderna Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Hutchinson, Sydney. “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance.” In Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, edited by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Mendoza.García, Gabriela. “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 319-343 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Midgelow, Vida. Practice-as-Research. United Kingdom: 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nájera Ramírez, Olga. “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro .” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1, (1994): 1-14. Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts : Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances / Written and Edited by Robin Nelson, Director of Research, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Peña Torres, Jessica. “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation and Re- Choreography of Ballet Folklórico.” Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2020. Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. TheCharlieRoll. “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992.” YouTube. October 26, 2017. Video. http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y. Trujillo, Lawrence Alan. The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. Denver: Dart Publications, 1974. Vázquez Mantecón, María del Carmen. “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77, (2000): 123-150. Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA L. PEÑA TORRES (she/her) is a dance/theatre artist and emerging scholar focused on Mexican identity and performance. She graduated from The University of Texas—Pan American with a B.A. in Dance and Theatre and from the University of Texas at Austin with an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice, where she is now pursuing a Ph.D. At UT Austin, Peña Torres continues to study the intersection between nationalism and the performing arts in postrevolutionary Mexico. With her company, Coctel Explosivo, Peña Torres produces dance-theatre works that explore this intersection. 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

L. Nicol Cabe Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming L. Nicol Cabe By Published on May 14, 2023 Download Article as PDF On February 23rd, 2020, I performed my final in-person, physically co-present show of Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans , at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I did not know that would be my last in-person run – I had festival dates lined up throughout the rest of 2020. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theatres for over a year. During the first pandemic year, performing artists and fringe festivals alike pivoted to online spaces, exploring online platforms as “stages.” Fringes preferred pre-recorded video for submissions, so I made a very low-tech digital video of Effing Robots and sent it to several now-digital festivals, thus maintaining my identity as a fringe artist. I am now able to participate in fringe festivals without the time and financial expenditure of travel, housing, and other upkeep; but, there are components of the original production which I have sacrificed or radically shifted into a static digital film. Making the transition from live, in-person work to the static filmed performance required digital dramaturgy skills that I was just beginning to navigate. Remediating the Stage with Digital Dramaturgy Digital dramaturgy grew out of production dramaturgy, which is the process of investigating and translating core aspects of a performance like costumes, performer movement, and lighting design; these components’ interaction with each other; and how a modern audience will interpret the show. To these components, digital dramaturgy adds computer-based technologies. The former Digital Dramaturgy Lab at York University, for example, lists some of these investigations as “TOGETHERNESS - respect, live and mediated performing bodies, collaboration, interactive strategies between performers and audiences … in-betweeness, reality, virtuality, queerness, multi-dimensionality …” (Digital Dramaturgy Lab 2014). Digital performances both before and during the pandemic triggered a shift-change in the theatrical understanding of meaning-making between performers and audience as physical co-presence, full liveness, and audience togetherness became individuated components of a theatrical work, rather than inseparably aligned with the experience of seeing a play. Digital dramaturgy engages the process of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: “we call the representation of one medium in another remediation” (p. 45). While there are boundaries placed between media formats – Bolter and Grusin particularly interrogate painting versus photography – they are concerned with the cross-pollination between these forms. New media, like hypertext, draw inspiration from older forms yet simultaneously invigorate those forms through competition and creativity. For instance, photorealistic still-life paintings of cameras compete with photographs of cameras while also demonstrating innovation in still-life painting and referencing multiple media formats. Similarly, during the acute phase of the COVID pandemic, the theatre experience was expressed through archival performance films released online by the National Theatre in the UK, a process in which film remediates theatre by adopting many of its aspects; and, on the other end of the liveness spectrum, Zoom became a stage to remediate filmic tropes while retaining temporal liveness in performances like Richard Nelson’s fifth Apple Family installment, What Do We Need to Talk About? Remediation relies on immediacy, or novel emotive reaction during the process of engaging with the medium. The experience of immediacy occurs from the audience’s perspective, not from the performer’s – an important point when considering the translation of theatre into film, as the actors will not experience the audience’s reactions to their performance. Immediacy occurs through the conjunction of two points: the transparency of the medium, i.e., how the frame disappears from consciousness; and hypermediacy, i.e., how media can layer atop each other as commentary on the media viewing experience (Bolter and Grusin 2000: p 21). Some online theatre experiments in 2020 attempted to become transparent by overcoming the barrier of the screen: for some shows, this meant performing over Zoom so the performers could be temporally co-present, if not physically co-present, with the audience – as in What Do We Need to Talk About? . For others, this involved releasing pre-filmed pre-pandemic stage productions attempting to recreate the experience of being physically together in a theatre space – as in the National Theatre’s films. Although these may have resulted in a sense of immediacy, audiences were often just as aware of their computer screen as they would be of a proscenium arch. Cassie Tongue bemoaned in an article for The Guardian: When these live streams and filmed releases are passed out as a quick solution to a bigger problem and don’t account for medium or mode, they live in a ghostly in-between, creating empty fake stages that contain an echo where our breath should be (Tongue 2020). Theatre makers typically aimed for transparency that visually represented being inside a theatre space when making performance films (Castell 2014). These films considered the large cinema screen but did not consider the second proscenium arch of the computer screen which further alienated the audience from the production, creating a hypermedial work that emphasized what was temporarily lost, per Tongue. It was important to me, when translating Effing Robots , to avoid this audience alienation by creating something native to the digital environment. This meant I had to forego the traditional proscenium arch and focus on the online proscenium – a transparent show could not work for me. Yet I also wanted to ensure the fringe festival experience was retained, which meant I needed to focus on audience immediacy. Thus, Effing Robots adhered to digital fringe policies while transmuting into a hypermedial performance. Effing Robots Fringes Online Over more than 20 years, gaming live streams, vlogs (video weblogs), reaction videos, cooking and crafting how-tos, study timing streams, ASMR, and even 24/7 live streaming developed alongside streaming platforms including Ustream, Justin.tv, YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch (Lamare 2018). Streaming video is hypermedial, featuring quick edits, responses to audiences, music, film within film, written commentary within the video, and other media to keep the work immediate for the audience. When translating Effing Robots to an online environment, I aimed to retain both the narrative and the emotions of the live experience while integrating new media visual languages emerging from online streaming culture. I borrowed the language of online video hypermediacy to translate the solo narrative plot, which is a script format common in fringe shows, stand-up comedy, and vlogs. The process of remediating the show relied not only on my understanding of digital dramaturgy, but my subconscious creative influences, especially in online environments, and on my physical restrictions due to the nationwide lockdown in the UK. To translate Effing Robots between media, I considered four points: What are the important parts of in-person fringe shows that make them feel “fringe?” What components of my original, in-person fringe show did I want to keep, and how? What aspects of online streaming culture inspired me, and would they be an effective language for my audience? What were my production limitations for a filmed show? 4. What Were My Production Limitations? I faced a slew of limitations while filming Effing Robots in December 2020. I lived in Scotland while I attended the University of Glasgow; the United Kingdom was one month into a strict four-month, nationwide lockdown, so I could not use rehearsal space at the University of Glasgow campus, I could not rent their film equipment, and I could not meet with film students in-person for consultation or editing. Legally, I could not meet with more than one person, outdoors, at a time. On a student budget, I also could not afford to purchase my own filming equipment. I was limited to what was on hand: low-cost editing software, my phone’s medium-quality camera, a cheap microphone, and PowerPoint. In essence, I needed the language of online streaming culture, which also began with small-budget, computer-based solo work like vlogs. 3. Could Online Streaming Video Culture Be an Effective Language for My Audience? While I did not think about it actively at the time while editing, in later viewings I realized I had been inspired by popular YouTubers in my use of certain visual tricks. For example, my quick cuts were inspired by Jenna Marbles and Harto, while my text annotation was inspired by the Vlog Brothers and Simone Giertz. Their focus on engaging personal narrative supports the remediation of Effing Robots, as less-than-true personal storytelling, into an online space. I further leaned on Zoom tropes for two parts of the Effing Robots script which involved an audience volunteer joining me onstage. In the physically co-present show, the volunteer, unfamiliar with the script, plays “Me, Nicol, a sci-fi nerd trying to flirt with an artificial intelligence,” and I, the performer, play “Frankie,” which is what I named my chatbot (Cabe 2019). For the film, I Zoomed with Aiden Jakso (a colleague I met through Glasgow University) and Steve Brady (my long-time fringe co-producer and fellow sci-fi nerd). I wanted to retain the experience of the audience volunteer, so I asked Aiden to join without reading the script in advance; however, I also wanted to nod to Steve’s years of production support. The application of Zoom echoed shows like What Do We Need to Talk About? There are also two “burlesque” moments in Effing Robots : one is a routine mocking selfie culture, and the other is a short script written by my dear friend, Dr. Ashley F. Miller, on the topic of “sexbots” and sex worker abuse. Since releasing archived videos of in-person stage performances was common during the 2020 lockdowns, I used footage of these two sequences from the 2019 PortFringe film; I made this choice as a reference to the mass of pre-recorded theatre productions released by major companies, such as the National Theatre (NT at Home), during lockdown periods. 2. What Components of My Original In-Person Fringe Show Could I Keep, and How? Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans examines artificial intelligence functions, modern technological developments that call themselves A.I., and why humans fear these – all through a personal lens, framed by a conversation I had with a chatbot that I named Frankie, created by Replika. As the show leaned on an A.I. conversation, I wanted the script to feel like a conversation with the audience. I found during in-person shows, audience members often asked questions or inserted their own information – in fact, at my 2019 tour stops in Adelaide (South Australia), Fresno (California), and Portland (Maine), engineers in the audience knew about programming artificial intelligence and their contributions enriched the show. Although audience engagement became a core part of physically co-present Effing Robots , during 2021, I could not perform the show live at all (even virtually); instead, I leaned on hypermediacy to maintain emotional closeness with a geographically and temporally distanced audience. 1. What Makes a Fringe Festival Feel “Fringe” to Me? Returning to the first question, my personal experience touring fringe festivals hints at why this form pivots so easily: The fringe format has long involved multiple platforms (venues) across the city Each venue programs and hosts several individual shows over the fringe’s run Artists typically self-produce their shows (although larger festivals like Edinburgh and Adelaide also involve production companies funding multiple shows) Performers from all over the world participate in fringe festivals, especially the larger, famous ones My submission needed to be lightweight, short, portable, and self-produced. For a physically co-present fringe show, “lightweight” means I must be able to load the props, set, and costumes in and out of the venue myself; “short” means it runs about one hour, sometimes less; “portable” means I take it with me, as there is no storage space at the venue; and “self-produced” means I do the bulk of the show creation, including marketing. Similarly, with online fringe festivals, “lightweight” means the video is only a few megabytes making it easier to upload; “short” still means one hour or less; “portable” means I have many options for submitting the show, including a DropBox link, YouTube link, and zipped file; and “self-produced” means I am responsible for the work being completed, including how it is marketed. Remediating the Audience Experience of Theatricality Many of the visual production choices I made for Effing Robots (online) reference transparent films or theatre productions, but the overall experience is of hypermediacy rather than transparency . However, it is important to consider whether the audience experienced this work as immediate via this hypermediacy – and for this, I turn to my show reviews. Overall reviewers enjoyed the film adaptation; there are similarities between the in-person show’s reviews and the film’s reviews, which suggests the digital dramaturgical process was successful. However, some reviewers felt the audience dialogue moments and the burlesque moments were out of place. For instance, James Hanton noted for the Online@TheSpaceUK stream: “only certain sections [feel] like a misfire compared to them being live (the ‘audience’ interactions losing the spontaneity that makes them so memorable)” ( The Wee Review 2021). Annie Gray of The Indiependent agreed: Being an online show does cause some issues. Some past live recordings of sections are shown when the content is not possible to record on camera. Also, where audience participation would usually take place, there are recordings of video calls instead (2021). These reviews suggest that the static nature of film clashes with some immediacy in theatre. These film clips aimed for the transparency of the theatrical experience rather than hypermediacy of frames within frames. The bulk of my filmed performance did not take place onstage or reminisce about stage performance. I believe these moments took the audience out of the immediacy induced by the hypermedial frame. While my choices were purposeful, they did not retain the emotional impact from in-person to online. A key takeaway from both the reviews and analysis is to focus on form: traditional theatre defines itself on co-presence, and I do not view the film of Effing Robots as a form of theatre but instead a remediation of an experience shifted into a new medium. I focused on the theatricality within the narrative, but I could have considered temporal synchronicity with my audience by performing over Zoom. I could have retained the audience interaction through a livestreaming platform with a chat feature like Twitch. I could have considered the virtual embodiment of myself and my audience and created a version for Mozilla Hubs. To keep the show within the low-budget confines of “fringe,” though, pre-recorded, edited, streaming video was my best option to translate the immediacy of my story instead of remediating the general experience of attending fringe theatre. This remediation from a physically co-present, small show to hypermedial online video seems to be a largely successful process, based on reviews. In my Ph.D. research, I hope to continue exploring online theatre’s digital dramaturgy and its impact on audience experience, inspired by both my fascination with pandemic-era online theatre and my professional work in this field. References Footnotes About The Author(s) L. NICOL CABE is a digital dramaturg and scifi-inspired theatre artist who toured international fringe festivals, in-person and online, including Adelaide Fringe, Sydney Fringe, TheSpaceUK, Orlando Fringe Festival, Victoria Fringe, and Rogue Festival. She completed her master’s in pandemic-era digital theatre at the University of Glasgow in 2021, and continues her digital theatre studies focusing on post-pandemic online and hybrid performance as a PhD candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. She has also worked as a digital dramaturg and online theatre maker with Lava Kingdoms/Annex Theatre (Seattle, WA), OnBoardXR Season 3 (NYC), and DunnART Productions (Adelaide, SA). 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline By Published on April 29, 2023 Download Article as PDF (Re)Generation was developed with a faculty fellowship from University of Miami. Jessica Bashline and MK Lawson , the creators of (Re)Generation interview one another to document and archive the process of the piece as well as offer a model for those interested in engaging with an outdoor urban Tour-style performance outside of the traditional tourism environment. (Re)Generation follows two women and links their lives to the place they inhabit and the ghosts that surround them. One, a single mother living in contemporary NYC; and the other Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President. The First Act follows a playwright, Jessica, as she goes through her morning, walking through the park and trying to find a place to concentrate on preparing to pitch her play to a theatre company. While Jessica doesn’t speak out loud the audience listens to her inner monologue on their own headphones as they follow her through the park. Act One ends with a scene between Jessica and Victoria Woodhull sitting on a park bench having a conversation through time and space. The Second Act brings us back, physically, to where Act One begins—this time we follow Victoria Woodhull through the 30 minutes leading up to her scene on the bench with Jessica. And now the headphones come off. Act 2 happens in real-time with three actors speaking on the streets of New York City. The audience winds up on the same park bench, watching the same scene that ended Act One. The play is an exploration of time and space, reality and illusion, and the very real search for kindred spirits in a world that has become increasingly isolated. (Re)Generation was developed and performed in Washington Square Park in NYC in August of 2021. • MK: Hi- here we are, back on Zoom… Jess: I know, I hate it! MK: I figure we can start with me asking you a few questions since the piece originated with you, and then we will move forward from there. Sound good? Jess: Sounds good. MK: Ok- tell me where this piece began? Jess: (Re)Generation started as an amalgam of scripts I had been working on for a few years, originally imagined as traditional theatrical pieces. The first script started six or seven years ago as a monologue: a divorced single mother trying to write a lecture on place as a character in literature; specifically, New York City. Over the years I created scenes for this character that took place throughout her daily life, a convention that I played with a lot in the writing of that work initially was that the audience never saw the people our lead interacted with, her family and friends were always offstage, or just around the corner. The only real people she interacted with were the people she briefly encountered in the city. I was exploring isolation and loneliness in a city of millions. The piece never worked—and I put it away for years. A few years later, I became fascinated with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in 1872. I began to write about her, because her story is amazing, and played with the idea of intertwining the two stories—as they both seemed to revolve around New York City as a place of reinvention. But I could never find the right story to tell. So—into the dropbox of script pieces these stories went…Until COVID. I went back through my dropbox of script pieces and came across the writing I had about this single, divorced mom trying to figure out her life and career while feeling isolated and alone in a place so full of people; and Victoria Woodhull. I knew I wanted to play with a COVID-safe way of making this piece that allowed humans to connect in real life. I landed on promenade theatre, allowing audiences to follow actors through the city streets. And then I called you! MK: Yes you did. Jess: And I think I said—we are going to make theatre that doesn’t live on Zoom— MK : YES! Jess: And we were obsessed with trying to figure out how to create COVID-safe live performance that wasn’t just theatre outside, that allowed for the way the theatre was made and performed to be a part of the journey of the piece. MK: I loved the idea you had for creating two very different acts of the play. If I remember right- you came to me right away with the fact that you wanted Act 1 to exist in the character of Jess’ mind—it was her inner voice—and so the audience would be listening to her through their headphones. Jess: And then Act 2 would be more traditionally theatrical, with actors speaking out loud to a communal audience. MK: Yeah- that was exciting to me as a way of exploring isolation in two different ways. Jess: And in the park! MK: So the first act is about Jess, walking through a contemporary Washington Square Park, and the second about Victoria Woodhull, and takes place in 1872. Jess: And I really couldn’t conceive of the form this would take until I called you. And the beauty of the fellowship money I received from the University of Miami was that it was for research, about discovering something new. There was no pressure to have 700 people show up at a performance. Which was such a gift. MK: Right it was. We really did get to say, okay, Well, what might this look like? I remember thinking about how formless it was at the time. How part of the intrigue was we don't have to know what this is. We could just have seeds of ideas. Especially coming out of the pandemic. I can remember you asking a lot in our first call– What is the experience we want people to have? Rather than, what is the play we want to do? Jess: Yup- it felt really freeing to ask that question. And that is the question I am focused on a lot now. MK: The next thing I was gonna ask is about the historical piece: Victoria Woodhull. Because the idea that you had that really captured my attention was this idea that we could be somehow listening to someone's inside voice. We could get inside of someone, isolated from the world, by their own thoughts in this sense. And that kind of personal experience was really interesting. But then there was this historical piece. Can you talk a little bit about how the historical piece came in, and the importance of that. Jess: So the original piece was very heavily influenced by New York as a city. It started actually with this 4-page monologue about New York City and the architecture, and how the architecture told stories and spoke to her. And I, as a New Yorker, have always felt incredibly drawn to this idea that people come to my home, the place where I was born, where my family was born. People come to this place and create these huge lives for themselves here. But with that, we also have so many small, regular lives that live here. But you rarely hear about them. MK: Oh, yes, the juxtaposition. Jess: Yes- the juxtaposition of those 2 things: of this woman who is just trying to live her life and have a conversation with a human being, and Victoria, who lived an outlandish, amazing life, that she could only have lived in New York. She had to move to New York in order to become this thing that she became. MK: I was just thinking about all the different conversations we had about how this play was going to work. Once we made the decision of the basic ways we were going to hear Acts 1 and 2. Jess: It is so fun to go back on a process that I feel so far away from, and also for me, was a process that dated back even longer than that, years before you were involved. My favorite was bringing you a whole bunch of stuff that I'd written that was kind of incoherent and trying to find form. What if we follow her into a coffee shop? And what if things happen? And we plant people? And there are actors everywhere, and every interaction is staged? MK: Those were grandiose days. Jess: At one point we talked about her leaving her apartment, and we were going to have conversations coming from the building, but in all kinds of languages; all the conversations that might have ever existed on that one piece of land before, which is really interesting to me. Built in was always this idea of, what is this history? MK: And how is someone distilling it in her mind? Right? And how do we connect with each other across time? I feel like that's when time started to become a question in the process. And then there was a moment where we realized that Acts One and Two would happen in a parallel timeline. We would follow the contemporary actor through Act One. And then essentially, the audience would see that Act Two would be that same time Loop. Jess: That was the one thing that we kept from all that early writing. The scene between Victoria Woodhull and Jess is almost verbatim from an earlier draft. MK: Yes. That scene of the two of them, meeting across time and space, I think, became the thing we held on to, and it was like, how do we get there? Jess: I have a question for you. Talking about your dramaturgical and directorial process. Once we figured out the structure: the first act would be me walking through the park with an audience following me with headphones in; people listening to my inner thoughts versus the second act which was a more theatrical structure, what challenges did that present for you? Dramaturgically and Directorially, bringing audiences into those experiences? MK: I feel like from very early on the biggest challenge in Act One was almost logistical. Because what we had was sort of nothing but permission to try something that we weren't sure how to do. How do we record this thing? How do we even rehearse this thing? How do we take scripted text and let it become thoughts that we can hear? And in a public park that was being used by the public? No permits or rentals. Essentially all of the variables that you can control in a theatre. We had none of those at our disposal, aside from being able to design a track that people could listen to. I think some of my favorite memories were scouting locations. I’d never thought about location scouting for the theatre, and that became a thing we got to do. We got to think about what serves our story, what serves this format that we're creating as we go. And I remember walking around and thinking not only what is functional, but getting to dream a little bit. How might these characters move through this space, and could they have really been here? How might we be able to invite whatever is going to naturally occur in the creative process without knowing what even that was going to be. Like traffic? I’m having a memory of how to pull traffic into the scene with Victoria Woodhull, and thinking… What is traffic to them? It can't exist, but also as actors, they have to pay attention to the fact that they need to be heard over New York City traffic. I feel like we accommodated a bit of that in choosing location. Ultimately. Jess: People have asked me, if you had to categorize what this is. Would you call it a tour? Would you call it a promenade theatre? And I just don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that—but maybe MK does. MK: You know. I remember thinking about a conversation we had asking: what could this be? In other places, and with other historical figures. But a theatrical tour doesn't feel like it quite covers it. Because we were after something very different about human experience. Yes- you were going to cover some ground and learn something. But we wanted it to do the thing that theatre does. Connecting people to a place or another person, or even to an idea. If we lost the construct of time, what does it feel like for me to try to connect back in time? We were also constantly thinking about the theatricality. Thinking about what we could do in the next incarnation- Jess: With more money! And time! MK: Yes. And more members of the team. Jess: Is there a better word then? Promenade Theater maybe? MK: Maybe promenade-- But in terms of promenade I think, I'm gonna arrive somewhere and a thing is gonna happen then I'll arrive in a new place. (Re)Generation felt more fluid. Jess: What was so interesting to me was when we made the decision, and I I don't even know when we made the decision, whether I did, or you did, or whatever. But at some point we said- Well, clearly the scene with Victoria and Jess will happen twice. The same scene must happen twice, right? At the end of Act One, and then it has to have it again at the end. What we started talking about was this sort of circular nature? Each of them was trapped in this circle. And so I think I agree with you- promenade feels like it starts in one place and ends somewhere else. So maybe we made something new—a theatrical Dosey-doe! MK: I also think it’s important to say that we were also talking a lot about patriarchy and hierarchical structures in theatre making. And something about this circular structure also felt right for the way we worked together. Jess: Making this piece without a typical theatrical hierarchy. MK: Yeah. Can we just collaborate in a way that is egalitarian? Best idea in the room, or the best idea in the park wins. Jess: I will say, like as the person who brought in the initial idea, and did most of the writing. I felt so supported by the kind of lack of structure of our structure. We know each other well. So it just felt natural. MK: Yeah. Jess: Maybe it's because I came in with so little you know. I just remember you asking me about a million and a half questions. So what happens here? What happens here like? Why, Why, why, why, Why, why? And what if we do this? And what if we do that? And what if we did this? In the best dramaturgical sense. But then I felt like once we got a thing that was up on its feet– we didn’t have traditional actor/director/writer structure. There was so much give and take, because there I was- an actor in Act 1. If you can call it acting, walking around Washington Square Park trying to find a park bench to sit on while a group of people with headphones trailed me. And we would have to video my walks- so we could try to time them out to possible recordings of the script. Which meant we got to go back to the tape together, so we could really talk through everything that was happening. MK: Washington Square Park- no permits. I mean, what sort of ballsiness it took to even attempt such a thing. Jess: Had we known quite how difficult it would be to make it work- I don’t know if I would have. But I’m glad we did. MK: I don't know if you remember. But we did pick up audience numbers along the way- in rehearsals and performance. I want to say how much that means to me, reflecting on this, looking back on it. In talking about a play, the seed of which was about isolation, the fact that we picked up audience makes me remember that our first question was- what do we want people to experience? How do we get people experiencing other humans again? In NYC we are so isolated, I’ve got my headphones on, thinking about a million other things or ways I feel inadequate. Or things I didn't get done, or groceries I need, or this song that won't get out of my head, and I could so easily miss everything going on around me. And to think that what we were after was sort of manifested in the very idea that people were awake enough to go, hey- Something's happening here that I'm not expecting and I’m going to hop on the party. Jess: People got the link, put on their headphones and caught up with me. My favorite person who joined us was a lovely man, who was unhoused. He was sitting in our “performance” area, and stayed with us from the dress rehearsal. After the rehearsal he heard us talking about performance and he asked- Do you mind if I stay here and watch? And I was like, first of all, it's the park, you can do whatever you want. But also absolutely! And he wound up watching the whole thing. But he didn't have headphones, he was just watching people watch me! Which was fascinating! I will never forget that at the end of the piece, he said, Thank you so much, I see the musicians all the time, but I don't get to go to the theatre very often. MK: That's great. Because again we think of the back to this hierarchy -how restrictive and how much theatre is inaccessible at times. How do we dismantle that a little bit? This feels like a good place to ask something like what do you feel like you learned, and if you could just do the next incarnation this summer, what would you do differently? Jess: Well, I’m still really interested in isolation and the idea that place has memory. These are consistent themes for me. I would love to look at this piece again. I'd love to look at it now, not from a place of fear. (Re) Generation was created from a place of fear that we would never get back inside a theatre again. And I wonder about looking at it now, coming from a place of generosity from a place of opening that space- MK: because it deserves to be opened. Jess: Yes. What about you? MK: It makes me think of that Ann Bogart essay. Talking about that distinction between making something from a survival mode versus a gift-giving mode. It feels like you articulated that exactly. Jess: So, I think we can wrap this up by saying, what did you learn making theatre in Covid? MK: I have learned that we have become a species that isolates by nature, which is terrible because we are not a species that isolates by nature. We may have made it through an epidemic of COVID, but we’re still suffering from an epidemic of loneliness in a very real way. Jess: And the live performing arts, music, dance, theatre these are some of the last bastions of community storytelling and tradition that are non-religious. And I think you can look at the rise of religion right now as just people desperately needing connections. Why can't we get a rise in the performing arts in the same way? MK: Right, and being able to have communion with history. I think it's something again that this piece, if you wanted to call it a theatrical historical tour, you know, whatever name you give it, there's something about the communion with a historical figure that is an incredibly empowering experience. It’s something you can’t take away from someone, that experience. Jess: You know what? MK: What? Jess: Let’s do it again– another city, another park, another historical figure. MK: I’m game when you are. Jess: Amazing. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA BASHLINE is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Miami, where she teaches acting and theater creation. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of Strange Sun Theater , a theater company in New York City. Jessica is an award-winning playwright, director and actor currently touring her solo piece, Ann and Me: or the Big Bad Abortion Play . She has a BFA in Acting from Boston University and an MFA from Goddard College. www.jessicabashline.com MK LAWSON has been teaching, developing and directing theatre professionally for the past 15 years. She has directed and/or choreographed award-winning productions for Atlantic Theatre Company, Florida Repertory Theatre, and WPPAC among others. She has also developed pieces for the NY International Fringe Festival and the NY Children's Theatre Festival. An interdisciplinary performing artist at heart, MK is currently the head of Musical Theatre for the Hotchkiss School in Northwest Connecticut. www.mklawson.com 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ansley Valentine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of the theaters closed, many artists moved their work to digital platforms. While many disparaged these efforts, claiming that virtual performance was not legitimate performance, Pandemic Performance : Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times documents the work experience and creativity of primarily American theatre and dance artists who not only moved to digital and other platforms, but who also developed new methods of working through these platforms, thereby sustaining and growing craft through the pandemic. Pandemic Performance includes scholarship in a variety of modes—traditional research alongside artists’ reflections—which makes this book an important record of the field, as well as of myriad artists’ experiences in this time. The range and level of detail given will serve as an important historical record from the inside of the changes in process and communities that artists undertook to maintain their artistry. Pandemic Performance is one of the first books to chronicle “resilience, liveness and protest in quarantine times” so thoroughly. Editors Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese organize the book around three headings: PART I: America God Damn; PART II: Friction and Encounter; PART III: Building a New Future. In PART I: America God Damn , Capece and Scorese begin with the general societal upheaval that happened with the convergence of Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, and the death of George Floyd, framing how those critical events caused an awakening to systemic injustice in America in general and the performing arts, in particular. PART II: Friction and Encounter examines the difficulties artists and institutions faced as they tried to pivot to make art in different ways. PART III: Building a New Future shares views on how disruption and adaptation created models for sustained artist/community/institution realignment. This book focuses more on individual artists who document their reactions to disruption and how they’ve examined their own praxis. These artists developed performance models to supplement or replace their previous work, as the profession and society experienced crisis. Contributors focus on how artists shifted their relationships with institutions and ultimately became different artistically in light of the shifts in society. In fact, this book seems to be one of the first to gather a variety of sources that address the impact of marked societal shifts on the working artist from the perspective of artists documenting their metamorphosis. There are certainly other resources that highlight data such as the economic impact on the arts in the United States, the number of arts organizations that failed to reopen after the shutdown, and so on. What makes this book unique is its centering on artists’ voices relative to their work, whether written by the artists themselves as in (Re)current Unrest: The Fire This Time (Charles O. Anderson) or gathered through conversations such as Performative Allyship and the Foxes That Drool: In Conversation with Brittany Talissa King (Brittany Talissa King with Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese). Here, disparate artists share their individual responses to the shutdown, their reaction to the disruption to their work practices and places, but also how they pivoted to make art in a different way. For example, some detail how they discovered ways of making media practice a part of their performance model while trying to maintain the immediacy they found in their previous live performance work. While the idea of mediated live performance is not completely new, the ways these artists experimented with media are new, as are the contexts—and communities engaged, at times—demonstrating resilience. This book makes a cogent argument for the importance and practicality of these performances. Rather than simply being placeholder activities, Pandemic Performance makes a very clear argument for why these works actually discovered and explored new uses of performance theory. By necessity, the means of production were decentralized. In the absence of institutional support, the artists featured found new ways of creating their work. They also explored ways of working as collaborators while remaining in isolation. They took on new ways of using their work and artistry to support the change they saw around them. The result is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in how artists invested in community engagement and social justice, as well as the performing arts, struggled with and adapted to the Covid-19 challenges they faced. On one hand, it validates the experiences of thousands of performing artists who embraced this unstable time as an opportunity to create despite obstacles. On the other hand, this book can serve to challenge those who questioned the legitimacy of virtual performance and whether it was worthy of serious artistic consideration or critique. The volume’s case study chapters give detailed accounts of the processes and experiences of those who joined the digital performance space, determined to create and persevere. The research presented documents methods, analysis, and outcomes of the disparate projects. One should also note that Pandemic Performance shares perspectives of BIPOC artists who found new life and opportunities in the pandemic that had not existed for them before, reimagining the field’s practices and hierarchies. This book is important to the field because it captures in detail the seismic shifts that happened in performance. The writing is largely accessible and often very personal. Pandemic Performance can serve students, artists and scholars in performance studies, social justice, community development, and other disciplines. Some might question its scholarship because of the mixture of analysis and first-person accounts, however the volume is fascinating, instructive and can ground others’ future scholarship. Capece and Scorese critically frame the artists’ contributions effectively, moving from hypothesis to analysis via the Introduction and book structure. To an impressive degree, they also value the unfiltered voices of socially-engaged artists who helped to reimagine performance and work practices, making this an important primary source for scholars now and moving forward. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANSLEY VALENTINE Indiana University Bloomington 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Clay Sanderson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Clay Sanderson By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto’s collection of historical essays from a wide array of scholars may at first seem to retread familiar territory, but the editors are determined to make this volume original and relevant. In their Introduction’s first paragraph, the co-editors emphasize “an urgency to disrupt traditional historiography that perpetuates hierarchies of power and privileges overwhelmingly white male voices” (1), and for the most part, their disruption is successful. While American theatre in the second half of the twentieth century has been extensively recorded, the editors provide some new resources, deliberately highlighting the contributions of BIPOC and female artists; they also avoid the usual trap of forgetting that professional American theatre goes far beyond the island of Manhattan. Critical essays discuss relevant cultural history of each period, which frames what was happening on stage in the context of what was then happening in the United States at the time. This absorbing volume is broken into three parts: Commercial and Mainstream Theatre, The Regional Theatre Movement, and Experimental Theatre and Other Forms of Entertainment. Each section includes three to four essays, written predominantly by leading scholars of theatre studies. For instance, the first section includes Susan C.W. Abbotson’s chapter, “Broadway Post-1945 to 1960: Shifting Perspectives.” This exemplary essay outlines how after War World II, America adopted a new identity as a leading world superpower and boasted “a growing middle class determined to grasp a bright new American future” that was “modeled around the perfect nuclear family, while holding at bay the demons of communism, the atom bomb, and juvenile delinquency” (21). Simultaneously, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and subsequent Sexual Behavior in the Human Female book-length studies shocked people across the country with his revelation of a stark contrast between what conservative Americans believed their society to be and the reality of what their neighbors were actually doing behind closed doors. These contrasting ideologies, Abbotson argues, are partly responsible for the popularity of the work of such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, who titillated Broadway audiences with his frank portrayal of the sexuality of both those on the outskirts of society and those making up its family-based middle class. Abbotson references influential plays by Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and William Inge, as well as musicals by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, which featured the work of innovative producers, directors, and choreographers such as Hal Prince, George Abbott, and Jerome Robbins. Yet the editors’ mandate for a more inclusive theater history is modeled by this same chapter’s focus on female contributors to the Golden Age of Broadway. Abbotson includes artists such as Federal Theatre head Hallie Flanagan, acclaimed Shakespearean director Margaret Webster, musical theatre director Mary Hunter, and Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, among others. She also considers some of the African-American theatre that was happening Off-Broadway–including works by such playwrights as William Branch, Loften Mitchell, and Alice Childress who are frequently left out of New York theatre history. Thus, the Cambridge Companion reflects on how disparate theater-makers, communities in America and perspectives intersect. In Part II, the section on regional theatre, Elizabeth A. Osborne uses her chapter “Money Matters: Dismantling the Narrative of the Rise of Regional Theatre” to correct the accounts ofearly historians of the regional theatre movement such as Martin Gottfried and Joseph Zeigler, arguing that “(h)istoriographically…the existing narrative has gone largely uninterrogated for too long” (136). Traditional narratives chronicle regional theatre as an attempt in the 1940’s and 50’s to decentralize New York City within the professional theatre world, striving to give audiences amore avant-garde alternative to Broadway and its tours, only for many organizations to eventually succumb to the economic need to model commercial theatre’s values despite their non-profit status. Osborne argues that this narrative “oversimplifies a complex web of artistic goals, economic and administrative structures, and relationships with local communities” (138). Osborne centers women as the true forgers of the regional theatre movement, detailing the founding of Theatre ’47 in Dallas by Margo Jones, the Alley Theatre in Houston by Nina Vance, and the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. by Zelda Fichandler. Part II also includes an important essay by Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When and Where They Enter: Black and Brown Voices in American Theatre.” This wide-ranging chapter chronicles the Black Arts movement as propelled by Larry Neal, the Chicano Theatre movement as led by Luis Valdez, and the seminal work of BIPOC playwrights such as Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and María Irene Fornés. Carpenter nicely balances the importance of these artists’ contributions to the transformation of American theatre, noting that some of these writers (particularly Valdez and Baraka) were “products of their time” who “were not always inclusive in terms of intracultural representation”(161) such that their own biases upheld a male, heteronormative worldview. Part III’s focus on “experimental” theatre and beyond also finds meaningful ways to refocus history away from male-centered institutions. Although in Timothy Youker’s essay “Experimental Collectives of the 1960’s and The Legacies” we are treated to the requisite exploration of how the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud deeply influenced non-commercial and regional theatre collectives from the San Francisco Mime Troupe to the Living Theatre in New York City, eventually leading to such modern groups as Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre Project, Youker also chronicles the contributions of female-centric troupes suchas Anne Bogart’s SITI company and The Five Lesbian Brothers. This well-researched, more inclusive vision of the experimental theatre movement demonstrates the wide-range of non-traditional performances practices that have drawn in diverse audiences outside commercial theatre. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945 will benefit established scholars and theatre history students. It incisively summarizes the contributions of the most well-known theatre artists of the past seven decades, as well as many who history has overlooked. Framing diversity of representation as critical to scholarship, this volume considers previously underrepresented perspectives and players in theatre history scholarship. Equally, this volume practices theater historiography: questioning what we think we know, and reinvestigating it with an eye towards the future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CLAY SANDERSON Arizona State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Previous Next Attribution:

Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF What began as a peer-reviewed research paper naturally grew into a dramaturgical adaptation of chevruta , a centuries old Rabbinic approach to interpreting Jewish texts. The style of this paper mimics our process of multiple voices in conversation. In chevruta , dialogue is necessary as one voice can’t capture the depth of a text; we can only approach understanding through discussion and interpretation. Through this lens, we push against prioritizing finality (a deadline, production, or publication) which dictates a linear process. Rather, we hold space to return again, offering a process that spans a lifetime as both the people and art deepen and unfold. We share authorship below, identifying the writer above each section. Though our names signify what we initially wrote, through revision, our voices continue to overlap, always in conversation. As we consider how this lens is valuable for new work development, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we invite you to engage in our reflection of Fringe Sects’ script development as a fellow chevruta partner: our voice, your voice, and the text. JARED In March 2020, I was finally ready to write my “Jewish play” based on a Buzzfeed article a friend sent to me a year prior: “Finding Kink in God: Inside The World Of Brooklyn Dominatrixes And Their Orthodox Jewish Clients.” [1] This article complicated the stereotype of Jewish sexuality I saw being portrayed on stage and screen: Jews as less sexual and less desirable. Expanding what a Jewish “man,” “woman,” or “relationship” looked like felt important to my own understanding of Jewish queerness and an inquiry I could share with my community. COVID interrupted that plan as Jewish sexuality onstage was no longer an urgent exploration, instead it was the last thing on my mind. What we thought would be a few weeks of mandated isolation became months. As Passover approached, I felt detached from my Jewish identity without the ability to invite friends over for Seder. The holiday traditions, rooted in community, didn’t feel the same with only me and my two roommates skimming through the Haggadah. In August 2021, I moved to Tempe, Arizona to pursue an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Fear of isolation continued, and I wondered what I’d do for the upcoming High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah felt like an opportunity for a new chapter in the desert, but I wondered if anyone would be there to join me. BECCA That’s where our Research Methods course comes in; it was my first semester of grad school as well, beginning the MFA program in Theatre for Youth and Community at ASU. I had also just moved to Tempe from Chicago, and much to my delight and surprise the old song “Wherever you go there’s always someone Jewish” [2] proved to be true. I overheard Jared talking about Jewish dominatrixes and had to learn more. JARED As I discussed revisions to my research question, I vividly remember Becca leaning over to join the conversation. Another Jewish woman to discuss Jewish womanhood and femininity? Baruch Hashem! On that day, I was paired with Clara, whose Hebrew necklace had sparked conversation a class prior. Marissa would soon ask what we were doing for Rosh Hashanah. She too had overheard the musings of Jewish study and wanted to join. We had all worried that we’d be the only Jew in the program and were relieved to have found each other so quickly. BECCA Jared and I requested to be paired for the final round of peer review. What was scheduled to be a brief meeting about our papers over coffee became a multi-hour conversation relating our artistry to our values and our values to our Judaism. We intuitively worked as chevruta: a non-hierarchical dyadic practice of Jewish text study rooted in traditional methods going back centuries. A chevruta partnership is a meaningful and holy relationship through which we understand text, and our relationship to text, more fully. The word chevruta comes from the Hebrew root chet, vet, reish, chaver , meaning “friend,” emphasizing that this relationship is between more than peers or colleagues. In fact, it’s not just a relationship between two voices, but three: two people and the text. Scholarly discourse around Fringe Sects was a catalyst for our partnership, while genuine friendship became central to our ongoing collaboration. Jared was researching about Jewish gender and sexuality while more deeply connecting with Jewish ways of being through his writing. JARED Where do the stereotypes, roles, and ideas of Jewish women come from? Who perpetuates them within our community and how does that differ from what we see in the media? BECCA In my initial notes, I wrote about the importance of discoveries, using this play to reveal Jewish challenges and provide space for healing while weaving the Jewish with the universal– JARED Questions and themes that simultaneously drew me into Becca’s research. BECCA What is the relationship between creativity, identity, and values in Jewish artmaking spaces? Grad school was the opportunity to further explore our embodied knowledge through research and practice. JARED Research and practice exist over coffee as much as they exist in conferences and classrooms. I got to know Becca through her research, and I better understood her research by getting to know Becca. BECCA We spent the next semester together in a graduate Dramaturgy Workshop course. One of our first readings was from Geoffrey Proehl’s Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility ; I sent Jared a text, “Ok so I finally started the reading this morning and tbh I think a dramaturgical sensibility is just simply how Jews read Torah” [3] [4] . I quickly recognized in Proehl’s description of dramaturgical practice a kinship with Jewish ways of thinking, conversing, and analyzing. JARED “Isn’t there a Jewish thing about rehearing the Torah and the purpose of that? Helping me connect dramaturgy and Judaism again” [5] , I texted Becca as we continued to quip that “dramaturgy is Jewish.” It became our special segment in class where we reflected on how teachings from Jewish synagogue, camp, and school prepared us to analyze text as dramaturgs. Later that semester, I assembled a team for a staged reading of Fringe Sects at ASU: Marissa as director, Becca as dramaturg, and Clara, Matt (the only other Jew in our MFA program) and Sam (a non-Jewish MFA peer) as actors. The energy of the rehearsal room was immediately alive – BECCA Is the milk a reference to milk and honey? JARED I hadn’t even thought of that. BECCA What about the Binding of Isaac? JARED That sounds like BDSM. BECCA Our playful yet serious conversations around script development were contagious, or perhaps Jared had just gathered the perfect group for this week-long rehearsal process. We were more than Jewish artists chosen for a Jewish play; we were friends. In our first few months of grad school, we had already spent High Holidays, birthdays, and Chanukah together, discussed art that was important to us, and reflected on the ways our Judaism connected us even when it manifested differently. In fact, the different shades of Judaism were what we celebrated most: the variety of latke recipes, family and community traditions, or the way we pronounced “bimah.” Questioning, connecting, and respecting the multitude of text interpretations based on our diverse lived experiences were the foundation upon which the script could develop so significantly in such a short amount of time. Reflecting upon the process, it is clear that this ensemble intuitively worked from a place of shared values. JARED It was interpretive. It was direct. It was Jewish. BECCA Jared and I always bring these values into our creative practice. Through this process we affirmed that we practice those values creatively in specifically Jewish ways. Text Messages between Jared and Becca during Fringe Sects development. JARED Although I had been in a new work development space with other Jewish artists, I had never felt that a room was guided by a Jewish way of reading text in the way this process was. Sam’s active participation proved that anyone can engage with text in this way. Not only did this way of working benefit the script, but it was life-giving. I was no longer an isolated writer but an artist in the community. BECCA Going deeper into the etymology of chevruta, the Hebrew chaver (friend) derives from the Aramaic, chibor , meaning “to bind together.” In this process, chevruta partners’ understanding of text becomes bound together in discussion, creating something entirely new with what is on the page. Below is an example of a text study where a peer and I engaged with the very first Torah portion. The first translation you’ll read is a more standard version and the second is a collaborative translation discovered in shared study. While working with the text, I was drawn to the word “ ruach ” which translates to “wind” or “spirit” and my partner noticed “ pnei ” which can mean “surface” or “face.” We excitedly investigated more translations and read the text anew. Together, we uncovered a translation that neither of us would have found on our own. Hebrew words with multiple meanings are illustrated below in corresponding colors. I invite you to notice what is the same, what is different, and how these changes influence your understanding of the text. When God created heaven and earth, the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God fluttering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) When The Universe began to create sky and land, the land was without form and void. Behold darkness over the face of the abyss and the spirit of Creation floating over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) [6] Stereotypical depictions of dramaturgy seem so isolating– an image of a lonely scholar with their head in their laptop or a book comes to mind; it’s not so different from the rabbi locked in their study or b’nai mitzvah student up in their room, practicing their Torah portion alone. But these are all misrepresentations of reality. To be Jewish is to congregate. To make theatre is to congregate. In the process of working together we bond with one another and the work binds to the point where it’s sometimes hard to know where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. Jared and I intuitively did this work with our research papers, with everything we read in Dramaturgy Workshop, and with our collaboration on Fringe Sects . JARED Below is a visual representation of our chevruta-inspired conversations analyzing a paragraph from the opening monologue of the play, Rabbi Moshe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, which we’ve retroactively formatted in the style of rabbinic commentary of Talmud. Visual representation of chevruta-inspired conversation between Becca and Jared on Fringe Sects script text. BECCA Rabbi Adina Allen writes, “Like the parchment wound around the Torah handles, our reading of this story is not circular, but spiral. We move along the same axis, but drop in and down, unearthing new meanings in the cracks of our old stories” [7] . This concept of time provides repetition while acknowledging that with repetition comes a new depth of experience in the present. During our collaboration on Fringe Sects , Jared and I trusted each other to continue to drop in and down in the reading and re-reading, writing, and re-writing, talking and re-talking of the script. We built trust and a shared language through cultural understanding, shared values, and unearthing new meanings while the script developed. The play is set during The Ten Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we’re tasked with Tshuvah. Tshuvah means to “return:” to return to right relationship with one another, the world around us, and ourselves. We return to something old or familiar – an ancient practice, text, or question. We seek to find something new, not in hopes of the perfect answer or action, but to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning-making as part of the process. JARED Even in the process of writing this article, we return again. Remembering text messages we forgot we had sent, making notes for our next stage of development. BECCA (I still want Jared to add the shehecheyanu into that scene). JARED (I will). BECCA These conversations ground us because there’s always something new to uncover. JARED If chevruta is three voices, our process contains even more: playwright, dramaturg, director, cast, characters, script, research, prayer, Torah, and Talmud. If Jewish text, ancient and unchanging, contains such multitudes, we must listen to all possibilities as a new work finds its voice. To give a script agency is to understand that it will never actually be finished… BECCA …but it is always where it’s supposed to be. JARED Jewish values tell us that we too are not finished and that growth is a lifelong process. BECCA As the spiral continues to deepen, may we delight in moments of synchronicity and express gratitude for moments of divergence. JARED & BECCA As this article concludes, we invite you to bring yourself into our chevruta practice. In doing so you join us in community and together we begin again. References [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahfrishberg/dominatrixes-orthodox-jewish-haredi-kink-bdsm-brooklyn [2] Milder, Rabbi Larry. “Wherever You Go There’s Always Someone Jewish.” [3] Levy, Becca. Text message to Jared Sprowls. 23 Jan. 2022. [4] Proehl, Goeffrey. Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. [5] Sprowls, Jared. Text message to Becca Levy. 30 Jan. 2022. [6] This text study and my learnings on chevruta come from Becca’s time with the Jewish Studio Project . She has been participating in the Jewish Studio Process, a Jewish art-making and text study practice, with them since May 2020 and is currently part of their Creative Facilitator Training Cohort. [7] Allen, Rabbi Adina. “The Kernel of the Yet-to-Come.” My Jewish Learning , 21 Oct. 2022, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-kernel-of-the-yet-to-come/amp/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) BECCA LEVY is an arts educator and theatre artist who facilitates educational programs and theatrical productions that center community, celebrate culture, and foster creativity for people of all ages. Becca worked as a teaching artist, arts program manager, and stage manager in Chicago after earning her BFA in Stage Management from Western Michigan University. Currently studying for an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community at Arizona State University, her praxis explores the relationship between creativity and values, drawing from many years of work and play in Jewish arts programming and theatre teaching artistry. www.beccaglevy.com JARED RUBIN SPROWLS is a Chicago-based playwright currently in Tempe, Arizona pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. His work has been produced Off-Broadway through the Araca Project, as well as at Northwestern University and the Skokie Theatre. He is a 2018 O’Neill NPC Semi-finalist and has been a part of Available Light’s Next Stage Initiative, the New Coordinates’ Writers’ Room 6.0, and Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. He is a project-based staff member with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. He holds a B.A. with Honors in Theatre from Northwestern University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 18 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Marina Johnson Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Thamir Az-Zubaidy Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Hind Sabah Bilal Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Raeda Ghazaleh Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Hala Khamis Nassar Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Dia Barghouti Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Peyman Shams Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Sami Ismat Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Malek Najjar 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

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 21, Winter 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Marvin Carlson Report from Berlin Călin Ciobotari Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Timothy Koch Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Kalina Stefanova International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Ion Tomus The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage Amy Hamel Summer 2025 in London, England Savas Patsalidis Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Philippa Wehle Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Steve Earnest Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Steve Earnest Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

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. ISSN Number: 2376-1148 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines Resources People Contact Past Issues & Archive Curren Issue Current Issue Vol. 18, Winter 2025 Special Issue 'Performing Resistance: Theater in Conflict Zones and under occupation' Guest Edited by Hadeel Abdelhameed Fellow at Käte Hamburger Research Centre of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Email: h adeel.abdelhameed@lmu.de and Samer Al-Saber Associate Professor, Williams College Email: sa31@williams.edu Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Marina Johnson Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Raeda Ghazaleh Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Suzi Elnaggar Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Thamir Az-Zubaidy Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Hala Khamis Nassar Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Peyman Shams Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Malek Najjar Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Hind Sabah Bilal Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Dia Barghouti Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Sami Ismat Past Issue Curren Issue Past Issue Volume 18 Volume 17 Volume 16 Volume 15 Volume 14 Volume 1 to 13 Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at https://arabstages.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Spring 2023 Volume 14 Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Load More About & Submission Guideline About The Journal 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 does not seek to be exclusive nor to promote any nationalist or religion-based agenda. In strictly geographical and political terms, the journal will be devoted to theatre and performance material from the member states of the League of Arab States, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, but also diasporic literature from around the globe created by former residents of those states or their descendants. Moreover, both the operative adjectives Arab and Islamic should be understood here to demarcate, primarily, a general cultural area of scholarly exploration and negotiation. Investigations of material from the many non-Arab and non-Muslim communities located within the Arab/Muslim world are welcomed by the journal. Subjects can be drawn from all areas of theatre activity as well as from performance work that lies outside the traditional European concept of theatre. The journal will welcome essays of a scholarly nature, which will be submitted to peer review, also reports on current productions, interviews, and translations of plays and theoretical statements, and reports, notices and announcements of current and future productions and festivals or other matters of potential general interest to the readership. 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. Submission Guidelines Articles, interviews, and play translations should normally fall between 4,000 and 8,000 words. Performance and book reviews should fall between 800 and 2,000 words. We are especially interested in the studies and reviews of recent or contemporary work. Proposals or articles may be submitted to our editors at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu . Please include the author’s full name, institutional affiliation (if relevant), telephone number, and Email address. Contributors are also asked to include a) a short biographical note (no longer than 250 words); b) relevant images for publication c) a document detailing each image’s caption and credit. View Formatting Guidelines Arab Stages is seeking a new Associate Editor to begin Spring 2027. For more information or to self-nominate, email ted.ziter@nyu.edu . View Past Issues Resources This section is under construction. For suggestions and contributions, kindly email t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Open Calls More information coming here soon. Events / Festivals Bankstown, Australia - Arab Theatre Studio (http://urbantheatre.com.au/current-projects/arabic-theatre-studio/) Al Ain, UAE - Arabian Shakespeare Festival (http://www.arabianshakespearefestival.org/About_ASF.html) Liverpool, UK - Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (http://www.arabartsfestival.com/) Cairo, Egypt - The Egyptian National Theatre Festival (http://www.cairoopera.org/) Baghdad, Iraq - Hawler International Theater Festival (https://hawlerinternationaltheaterfestival.wordpress.com/) Grants More information coming here soon. Research The International Federation for Theatre Research (http://www.firt-iftr.org/) International Centre for Theatre Research (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/08/peter-brooks-international-centre-of.html) Communities Brussels, Belgium - Young Arab Theatre Fund (http://www.annalindhfoundation.org/members/young-arab-theatre-fund) Chicago, Illinois USA - Silk Road Rising (http://www.silkroadrising.org/) New York, New York USA - Noor Theatre (http://noortheatre.org/) USA - Middle East American Initiative (http://www.larktheatre.org/who-we-are/programs/fellowships-and-residencies/middle-east-american-initiative/) San Francisco, California USA - Golden Thread Productions (http://www.goldenthread.org/) Beirut, Lebanon- Ashkal Alwan (http://ashkalalwan.org/) Beirut, Lebanon - Maqamat Dance Theatre (http://www.maqamat.org/) Algeria - Companie El Ajouad (http://www.elajouad.com/fr/accueil) United Kingdom - MENA Arts UK (https://www.menaarts.uk/) Films Arab Film Festival Australia (http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/) Aan Korb: BBC Arabic Film and Documentary Festival (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26518011) Publishing Journal: Performing Islam (https://www.intellectbooks.com/performing-islam) Issued by Intellect Press UK in both print & digital Magazine: Brown Book (http://brownbook.me/) Published in Dubai Teaching Opportunities More information coming here soon. People Founding Editor Marvin Carlson Founders Marvin Carlson Frank Hentschker Editor Edward Ziter Associate Editor Katherine Hennessey Performance Reviews Co-Editors Aycan Akçamete Hala Baki Marjan Moosavi Michael Malek Najjar Book Reviews Editor George Potter Managing Editors Christopher Harder Alison Pascale Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web & Digital Producer Advisory Board Hadia Abd el-Fallah Ahmed Khalid Amin Dalia Basiouny Areeg Ibrahim Michael Malek Najjar Sonali Pahwa Babak Rahimi Nada Saab Samer al-Saber Mohammed Jafar Yousefian Contact Email For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu with the subject line Arab Stages . (Please note arabstages@gc.cuny.edu is no longer a functional email address. If you recently used this email address please resend your email to ted.ziter@nyu.edu .)

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 17 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi, Amir Al-Azraki, Jeff Casey Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! Amir Al-Azraki The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. Najwa Kondakji ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. Marina Johnson LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian Namrata Verghese SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Suzi Elnaggar Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Marina Johnson Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Tiran Manucharya 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

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 16 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Marina Johnson Performance Review: The Tutor Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Areeg Ibrahim Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Kari Barclay 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

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 19, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Duncan Wheeler A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Tamás Jászay (W)here comes the sun? Philippa Wehle Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Kalina Stefanova SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Klára Madunická International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society Gergana Traikova Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Marvin Carlson Report from Basel Steve Earnest Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Aljoscha Begrich and Christian Tschirner Fine art in confined spaces Dan Poston 2024 Report from London and Berlin Cindy Sibilsky Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 20, Spring 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Adam Pelty Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Steve Earnest Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Marvin Carlson Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Marvin Carlson Mary Said What She Said Alex Lefevre The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Thomas Irmer Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit Dan Poston The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Rahul K Gairola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle is an innovative and refreshing critical survey of gay Indian nightlife cultures in diaspora that anchors its theoretical trajectory around the monograph’s title. The book’s originality is announced from its very start, when readers encounter the front matter. The Acknowledgments section is cleverly organized as a playlist of songs that correlate to those who have helped to shape the book’s contents, thus immediately positing readers into a nostalgic past wherein we ourselves used to make mix tapes for friends and lovers. In the Preface, Khubchandani proclaims, “I fucking love drag queens…Drag artists assemble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools – dress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gesture, pose – we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din” (xiii). He further details that, years later, in the geographical and untimely “absence of drag, I turned to social dance floors to examine danced styles, what I call ‘drag labor,’ that engendered the socialities described above” (xiv). These ruminations coalesce around the author’s diverse experiences and field work at the Desilicious dance parties in New York City as well as Bollywood cultures, and, as such, the book is an important mash-up between gay cultural studies and South Asian diasporic studies. Khubchandani then gets to the heart of his scholarly intentions: “I am eschewing identity politics, attending instead to aesthetics and performance, to ask: what styles are given value; what are the politics, histories, and circulations of these styles; how do people perform in line with and against dominant stylistic codes; what new forms of relation are made when performances grind against the dominant aesthetics of nightlife?” (xxiii). Khubchandani’s deviation from identity politics, a realm wherein hegemonic queer cultural studies wallow, is an exciting one as it seeks to empower practice over representation while also eschewing the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that often attend, and unintentionally nourish, that critical realm. Rather, Khubchandani’s methodology presents an intersectional heuristic that demands attention to style and performance over appearance and dress, thus flinging the very real materiality of identity politics into kinetic moments that transform cultural meanings with every second. To this end, the author defines the meaning of “Ishtyle” as: “a playful and common South Asian (more particularly North Indian, and even more specifically Bombay) accenting of the English word ‘style’… I mobilize Ishtyle to work beyond its vernacular use and serve as shorthand for ‘accented style.’ Thinking broadly with accents allows me to analyze differences across borders and scales, but also to ask how brown bodies, regardless of cultural performance, are rendered accents” (6). Framing the embodied critical and political stakes of his research, he concludes, “I developed new intimacies with places I already called home, made new friends, and fell in love several times over. Nightlife, proximal to and imbricated in spaces of work, home, protest, and violence, feels present all the time” (27). To this end, the author organizes Ishtyle into three parts, which each contain two chapters. The first part’s two chapters take place and seize space in India’s tech hub, Bangalore. The first chapter, “BInaryC0des: Undoing Dichotomies at Heatwave, ” aims to demonstrate how attendees to Heatwave parties effectively resist binary identities that codify these parties in India’s “Silicon Valley.” Rather than defaulting to Western aesthetics (white, gay, cisgender, masculine, and middle-upper class), attendees resist, argues Khubchandani, corporatized gay culture in favor of accented stylistics of queer nightlife cultures. Its second chapter, “Dancing Against the Law: Critical Moves in Pub City,” focuses on legal restrictions of gay nightlife in Bangalore constellated around the postcolonial country’s notorious, Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This chapter speaks to the ways in which women, trans people, and other queer folx practice ishtyle despite the city’s 2006-2014 ban on social dance – exploring how these ishtyle agents of queerness “dance” around the law. Part II’s two chapters: — “Desiring Desis: Race, Migration, and Markets in Boystown” and “Slumdogs and Big Chicks: Unsettling Orientations at Jai Ho! ” — shifts Khubchandani’s ruminations on ishtyle to the gay environs of Chicago in the United States. Chapter three thus examines the LGBTQI+ neighborhood of Boystown as a marketplace for desi bodies where white gay men view them as ornaments for homonormative whiteness. Leveraging compelling interviews and field research, Khubchandani apprises readers on how “(c)olonial legacies have affixed race, gender, sexuality, linking hyperfemininity and Asiannness, hypermasculinity and Blackness, and passion and Latinidad;” this brings the gay desi male’s “brown migrant body into a kind of good gay gender” (85). In the fourth chapter, the author demonstrates accented cultural elements of Trikone-Chicago (a nationwide, pro-LGBTQI+ South Asian organization), which hosts a quarterly Bollywood dance party called Jai Ho! that definitively challenges the overt orientalism and subtle white supremacy of commercial bars and clubs. Part III examines nightlife choreographies as global accentuations that undergird resistant practices Khubchandani described in Bangalore and Chicago earlier. Yet the author extends analysis by delving into fieldwork that centers, in Chapter five, interviewees’ memories of nightlife, childhood, and, cumulatively, different articulations of “home” and ishtyle as cultural strategies of homemaking. This homemaking occurs in the context of popular Bollywood song-and-dance numbers like those of Hindi film sirens Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. Chapter six critically ruminates on ishtyle, analyzed through the intersectionality of class, caste, region, and, of course, gender and sexuality. Here, Khubchandani traces dappankoothu music and dance from Dalit communities, threading them through Tamil films and into a queer dance party called Koothnytz— wherein dappankoothu rejects both hetero and homonormative “respectability” by subverting propriety as another strategy of ishtyle. An award-winning volume, Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is as provocative as the cultural artifacts and films it analyses. The book is at once a glamourous explosion of queer critical cultural analysis that, like a pink-powdered Holi party, at the same time remains down to earth and exceptionally honest, based in Khubchandani’s painstaking field work and ethnographic recordings. Khubchandani has forged a fabulous, compelling comparative study of queer Indian subcultures that deploy ishtyle to subvert the normalized ways in which colonialist and white supremacist gay culture fetishizes Black and Brown bodies, as well as the English language, while lording over them in consumer cultures. While these consumer cultures are staged as celebratory steps towards gay visibility, Khubchandani convincingly urges readers to recognize that any study of non-white, contemporary queer culture is incomplete without a sober reckoning of ishtyle today. This study will be formative for students, teachers, cultural analysists, South Asianists, and general readers alike for the ways in which it encourages us to locate the inflected accents that reimagine ourselves and the daily environs that surround us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAHUL K GAIROLA Murdoch University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sarah Courtis Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Sarah Courtis By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical . Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020; 285 pp. Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity . Ed. Sarah Whitfield. Methuen Drama, London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019; 241 pp. For a relatively young form, musical theatre carries a long history of racism and white supremacy (among many other issues of identity and representation). Indeed, musicals often reflect the society in which they are written and performed, complicating the often naïve view of what the musical means or does by their expression of deeper political frameworks of creation, production and reception. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical was first published in 2014 in an effort to address the racially-coded history of American musical theatre as a form “by white people, for white people and about white people” (5). The second edition, published in 2020, builds upon this provocation by adding a new chapter on more recent blockbuster shows: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton . An important contribution to musical theatre scholarship, The Great White Way seeks to identify and combat white supremacy in musicals by tracing issues of race historically from Show Boat to Hamilton with a focus on ‘normative’ whiteness, which is often left out of the discussion in musical theatre literature. In an attempt to reveal and (eventually) deconstruct racist notions of white supremacy, Hoffman first endeavours to make it visible, noting that this is just the “ initial step ” to be taken. He acknowledges the context of this book being specifically about the American musical, joining many preeminent scholars in this narrow focus (particularly as he narrows it further to only successful Broadway musicals), leaving a rather large gap to be addressed elsewhere. The overture lays out the premise, challenging preconceived notions of the way race is constructed in musical theatre, particularly in works which don’t appear to be about race at all. Indeed, he notes that “their silence about race speaks volumes” (4) and that “community really means white community, while people of colour are often absent from the utopia that musicals represent” (6). Hoffman complicates the idea of race “revealing that racial meaning is sometimes located in the space between the text and the performers” (26). He interrogates and problematises the concept of ‘universality’ and addresses several myths of musical theatre which uphold normative whiteness, while critiquing nostalgia for ‘simpler times’ which can be found in the revivals of ‘Golden Era’ texts. Act One of The Great White Way consists of three chapters, with case studies of Show Boat , Oklahoma! , Annie Get Your Gun , West Side Story and The Music Man . These chapters consider the early classics which shaped the American musical, while acknowledging the wide field of criticism available and gaps still to be filled. Hoffman provides a close reading of each of these productions, often juxtaposing their use of stereotypes (as in Show Boat and Annie Get Your Gun ) and their silences on race (as in Oklahoma! and The Music Man ). These early texts don’t just portray “the creation, negotiation and consolidation of Caucasian identity” (56), they enact them and solidify normative whiteness through their silences on the topic. Hoffman challenges readers to take note of their own internalised prejudices by noting that “race is a category that affects everyone, whites included, regardless of whether they see themselves implicated in the discussion” (80). These case studies reveal the importance of historical and political contexts in the creation and reception of the original productions and their revivals, outlining the rise and fall of musical theatre through American culture over the last century. The second “act” consists of five chapters, tracing the history of Black and Interracial productions of white musicals and considering the inherent racism of nostalgia. It also includes case studies on A Chorus Line , The Book of Mormon and Hamilton : productions which take clear stances on race and casting practices. Hoffman considers the trend of Black versions of classic white musicals (most notably Hello, Dolly! ) and how they revealed “the way in which the supposed normativity of whiteness was made visible when non-white performers played roles assumed to be the domain of white actors” (112). He suggests that ignoring colour can be a form of whitewashing, and that more diversity in new shows is required. The American political context continues to be traced in the case studies, as A Chorus Line portrays a naïve expression of the American Dream; revivals and revisals are seen to have an economic rather than artistic focus and many of them reflect a nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times (which Hoffman connects to Trump’s slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’). Finally, Hoffman notes the inherent whiteness in The Book of Mormon and Hamilton , both of which (on the surface) appear to be race-conscious. Notions of colonialism and neoliberalism surface within the shows, however, they are subsumed with the musicals’ rather hopeful suggestion that these “are necessary steps on making the Broadway musical a more inclusive and democratic artform” (224). Reframing the Musical, a recent collection edited by Sarah Whitfield, picks up on many themes of The Great White Way , filling some of the gaps left by Hoffman. Whitfield brings together a series of essays by preeminent scholars in the musical theatre field, each focussing on reframing different productions through the lenses of race, culture and identity. In this more democratic format, multiple authors come from diverse backgrounds and bring fresh perspectives on popular musicals as well as shows which had limited runs (and perhaps a more limited impact). Whitfield frames the anthology’s approach by considering who is left out of the “cool white guy narrative” (xvii) consciously centering Critical Race Theory in order to challenge “expectations of default whiteness” (xix). Part one provides three chapters under the theme of reframing identity/identities. The first chapter, by Donatella Galella, considers The Fortress of Solitude (2014) and the power dynamics inherent in a text which “relies upon white authorisation” (4). Her chapter is a call to arms (often cited and taken up by the other authors) for white people to use “racial privilege to do anti-racist work” (5). Galella centralises the Black experience through this case study and notes the way the text mirrored the life of the creative team who were attempting systematic change, while benefitting from a racist system. Broderick Chow provides a personal account of viewing Here Lies Love (2014) as a Filipino, considering the impact of distancing for many audiences in contrast to his more personal gaze. Brian Ganger presents a moving analysis of The Lion King (1997) as both a Black and white musical. He complicates the ‘double event’ by considering the predominantly white creative team and Imperialist story being told by Black bodies, to a Black sound. Part two provides a more historical approach via five chapters aimed at challenging historiographies. Maya Cantu utilizes an approach of ‘recovery’ and “cultural acts of resistance” (67) by recognising the historical and cultural significance of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith. Arianne Johnson Quinn examines the legacy of Oscar Hammerstein II in Britain, while critiquing the white saviour complex. Sean Mayes calls for justice for the ‘invisible’ roles and contributions, particularly those of Musical Directors and Black people. He calls for more diversity in all shows as well as utilization of the Practice as Research methodology. Alejandro Postigo considers the history of musical theatre in Spain, focussing on the forms of zarzuella and revista . Phoebe Ramsy returns to the concept of ‘recovery as resistance’, highlighting the importance of choreography in Shuffle Along – Or The Making Of The Musical Sensation Of 1921 And All That Followed. This set of scholarly essays establishes the volume’s cross-cultural scope, as well as its activist contributions. Part Three moves away from race in order to interrogate musical structures in identity and social change over the final four essays. Rebecca Applin Warner discusses the musematic relations in Fun Home as a way of analysing Allison’s relationships with her family. Sarah Browne considers the counterculture musical Hair (1967) , providing two calls to action: firstly, to revisit and question older texts, and secondly, to develop and adopt approaches from other disciplines when analysing musical theatre texts. James Lovelock calls for a more nuanced approach to sexuality, noting the lack of representation of Bisexual, Asexual and transgender stories after analysing The Colour Purple, Yank!, Fun Home and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Wind Dell Woods concludes this volume through a provocative critique of Hamilton, focussing on the casting choices and the conflation of ‘immigrant’ and ‘slave’. These two volumes— The Great White Way and Reframing the Musical— complement each other well, taking up different approaches to topics of white supremacy and racial identity in musical theatre. While there are gaps in each, they are acknowledged; indeed it would be difficult to provide a comprehensive treatise on race in musical theatre (even forgetting the other intersectional identities discussed) in one, or even two, volumes. Each testifies to the centrality of this form of popular theatre in America, while raising important questions for scholars, for artists and for audiences. Their provocations are boldly presented for a new generation of artists and academics to continue building upon—so the initial step of making white supremacy and other issues of discrimination visible will no longer be the only step taken. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SARAH COURTIS Murdoch University/Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

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

Casey L. Berner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Casey L. Berner By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton . Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton takes a broadly sociological look at notable Broadway shows of the last 30 years, constructing a rough lineage from Angels in America ’s 1993 Broadway opening to Hamilton ’s runaway success in 2015-16. The book opens with a compelling prologue detailing former Vice President Mike Pence’s notorious visit to Hamilton only days after the 2016 election. Then, Rise Up! ’s fourteen chapters tackle one notable Broadway play or musical and an attendant event or movement in US politics (or within the larger theatre industry). Each chapter is titled for the year of the play’s Broadway opening from 1993 through to 2016 (with a notable gap from 2002-2007). In doing so, Jones builds an historical image of Broadway in which each show discussed represents a unique and important lesson or development that would lead, almost inevitably, to Hamilton as Broadway’s cultural and political peak. Jones’s clear journalistic prose takes readers inside the various Broadway houses where each show played. At its best, Rise Up! moves seamlessly from huge events of political prominence, to the local context of New York theatre, to the particular production on which the chapter is focused. The book’s first chapter, “1993: An Angel Lands,” does this beautifully, taking readers into the Broadway of the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, discussing Larry Kramer’s activism and artistry to serve Jones’s discussion of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America . Chapter twelve, which focuses on the notorious flop musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark , is similarly compelling, guiding readers through the backstage turmoil and the on-stage errors and injuries that plagued the production in a way that is both sensitively handled and entertaining to read without feeling sensationalized. At the same time, the book is mired by Jones inclination toward tangents that never quite weave back to his overarching argument. Hamilton serves as a prominent but ultimately weak binding agent for the history this book constructs; Jones mentions each featured play’s connection to the hit show, but the tone is more winking gesture than compelling narrative thread. In some cases, these gestures distract—chapter five contains a lengthy description of the historical duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, connected loosely to August Wilson’s King Hedley II via gun violence. Missed opportunities to more clearly cohere this narrative abound. I was particularly struck that Jones makes only passing remarks on Oskar Eustis, perhaps the figure who connects Angels in America most directly to Hamilton . Similarly, Jones discusses Frozen at length in chapter seven without mentioning that the show shared a composer with Avenue Q, the primary subject of that chapter. While Rise Up! is an enjoyable read, it presents readers with an oversimplified history without ever quite connecting its many dots. This often renders thinner analysis for theater historians and scholars. I was struck especially when chapter five, on August Wilson, ends with a comment that the playwright “did not live long enough to see the first show staged [at the August Wilson Theatre]: Jersey Boys ” (80). Some hint toward Jones’s perspective here would have been useful to me as a reader—was this an appropriate choice, given the show’s grounding in a specific location much as Wilson’s plays were? Or was it inappropriate to open Wilson’s eponymous theatre with a musical about a white doo-wop group performing in the early 1960s that largely evades the politics of the period? While Jones’s journalistic prowess makes the read interesting, the breezy tone allows him to evade deeper evaluation and critical analysis of topics. Some hint at Jones’s perspectives on these works and their cultural significance might have helped guide the reader and connect the volume’s disparate threads. My reader’s copy was also riddled with typos and minor factual errors—such as incorrectly naming The Little Mermaid in a discussion of Beauty and the Beast (59) or a reference to 2011 that, in context, must actually refer to 2001 to make sense (92)—that left me equal parts confused and distracted. These errors and misclassifications affect the very structure of the book; for instance, the seventh chapter is entitled “2002: The Pull of Vegas and the Rise of the Meta,” but the chapter details events set largely from 2004-2006 and in fact makes no reference to events in the year 2002 beyond the title. This was particularly notable, as the chapters jump from 2002 to 2007, and the contents of this chapter would fill that gap. While these errors may reflect on the editing or publisher as much as author, they raise concerns for me about the historical narrative that Jones’ book constructs when this narrative is at odds with the basic facts he presents. This book is perfect for those developing an initial interest in musical theatre or Broadway history, and could be used as a launching point for discussing commercial theatre and politics with undergraduate students, or as an entryway for further research into any one of the works included. It is also excellent for refreshing one’s memory of recent Broadway shows, especially musicals, as most major successful works since 1993 are mentioned in some capacity. Scholars aiming for a more rigorous investigation of these issues could pair Rise Up! recent volumes on musical theatre and US American culture; for instance, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past can provide greater insight into Hamilton as a cultural juggernaut, while Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America plucks musical theatre from New York City and examines it in the context of communities and societies across the US. Ultimately, Rise Up! is an enjoyable and sometimes insightful read that is simply not geared toward academic readers or audiences well-versed in either musical theatre or recent political history, but can be read, used, and enjoyed with that in mind. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CASEY L. BERNER City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dahye Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Dahye Lee By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America . Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Rebekah J. Kowal’s Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America emerged out of photos of “ethnic dance” that she stumbled upon in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Collection. By researching archives of this “lost chapter of American dance history” (19), Kowal investigates what it meant to put globalism into practice through “dancing the world smaller” in mid-century America. Kowal zooms in on the dance scene of New York City—the most heterogeneous city in America that emerged as the global cultural capital—as central to what she calls postwar America’s “globalist projects.” Throughout, she examines complications that existed in the staging of international dance as an important means of imagining both the United States as a new global superpower and a world with the US at the center. She compellingly reveals how mid-century universalist approaches to diversity and cross-cultural embodiment were characterized by “dueling impulses” towards “openness, multiculturalism, and multilateralism” on one hand, and “nationalism, containment, homogeneity, … and racist American cultural heritages,” on the other (8). Notably, she recognizes the contributions of dance artists whose work was produced in New York City, framing those underrepresented in dance history scholarship as indispensable to the formation of American modern dance as well as American globalism. Kowal presents rich archival research, analyzed through a close reading of materials ranging from programs, calendars, and contracts to interviews, letters, and autobiographical essays. Her writing weaves these materials together, bringing readers in. Equally impressive is her dexterity with explaining the political and historical contexts of mid-Century America that are all intermeshed. Consequently, the volume speaks to multiple fields of studies, from interculturalism and postcolonial studies to Cold War history and immigration studies, as it pursues dance history. Each of the book’s four chapters revolves around the work of an individual artist or a set of performances. While each chapter functions as a case study, they also interconnect, culminating in her discussion of the International Dance Festival in 1948 for New York City’s Golden Jubilee. (The fiftieth anniversary celebrated the unification of the city’s five boroughs to form the Greater City of New York). Chapter one, “Staging Integration,” focuses on Around the World with Dance and Song , a dance program at the American Museum of Natural History from 1943 to 1952. The series presented dance performances from forty-four countries, unparalleled for “its diverse offerings and expansive definition of international dance” (37). As Kowal shows, the series reflected mid-century globalist thinking and efforts to “put the city on the international map as a global center for international dance production and performance.” Set against the backdrop of the US entry into World War II and increased expectations that museums be “useful to society,” the program was ended because it was deemed not “serious and scholarly” enough (34). Guiding her readers through the innovative project’s arc, Kowal demonstrates that even though its efficacy in staging globalism can best be seen “as a substitution for or simulacrum of experience” or “armchair travel,” the program still made two important achievements: it contributed to a redefinition of ethnic dance in the mid-twentieth century and it “prompt[ed] Americans to look outward” (71). Chapter two, “Staging Ethnologic Dance,” centers on the work of La Meri, one of the most accomplished concert dancers of her time, named “the highest authority on ethnological dances” (74). The co-founder with Ruth St. Denis of the School of Natya, later renamed the Ethnologic Dance Center, La Meri was an “ambassador of dance,” widely considered an “intercultural mediator” (117). Kowal takes Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry to analyze La Meri’s eclectic dance practices that illuminate ambivalence at work (74). One important focus of the chapter is the dancer’s fraught relationship with St. Denis, with whom she was often compared. Kowal explores the complicated case of La Meri, who was at the intersection of enjoying cultural privileges as a white dance artist, given the benefit of doubt in terms of her work’s authenticity on one hand, and cast outside the mainstream as an ethnic dance artist, whose work was dismissed as “recreative” rather than “creative” on the other (102). Chapter three, “Staging Diaspora,” aligns Arthur A. Schomburg’s advocacy of vindicationist politics in early Black history and Michel de Certeau’s ideas about “the necessity for disenfranchised peoples to be their own historians.” Here, Kowal focuses on African dance festivals directed by Asadata Dafora, a Sierra Leonean-born dancer who became “the first African to put an African show [in] the American Theatre and concert halls” (123). Dafora worked under the auspices of the African Academy of Arts and Research in the 1930s and ‘40s, a significant era of African American concert dance, which afforded increased opportunities to artists of the African diaspora (124). Framing mixed critical receptions of Dafora’s work and its authenticity by writers including Zora Neale Hurston and John Martin, Kowal demonstrates how Dafora registered as a “transnational subject” whose ambassadorial work “[spoke] for Africa,” building bridges between African and American cultures (144). Both chapters two and three research liminal subjects—La Meri and Dafora—who moved both within and outside of the mainstream, invariably engaged in debates over cultural authority and authenticity. The fourth and last chapter, “Staging Diversity/Staging Containment,” circles back to the case study of the 1948 International Dance Festival. Kowal examines critical discourses surrounding three different companies that performed for the festival: the Paris Opera Ballet, Ram Gopal and his Hindu Ballet, and Charles Weidman. As Kowal reveals, the festival’s grand plan aimed to celebrate multicultural aspects of the city by showcasing a sampler of global dances. However, “much to [the organizer’s] chagrin,” only three out of the fourteen invited countries—one among them being America—responded to invitations (168). Juxtaposing Weidman’s success against the two “others”—Paris Opera Ballet’s director Serge Lifar, who was labeled as a “Queerographer,” and Ram Gopal, who played the role of a “foreign exotic,” Kowal asserts that the festival “crystalized ideals and contradictions of mid-century globalism” (199). In other words, the festival, promoting diversity and opposing differences simultaneously, exemplified the difficulties and complexities of staging globalism in America in the early Cold War years. Thematically, Kowal’s book revolves around dance’s intercultural potential—its ability to bring people together and bridge cultural differences. While demonstrating the contradictory political gestures at work in mid-century American globalism through her compelling case studies, this monograph encourages readers to understand how “dancing the world smaller” might become possible. Dancing the World Smaller is a valuable addition to global studies as well as dance studies, seeking to understand globalism from the perspectives of dance and performance as a practice, a performance, and as lived experience. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DAHYE LEE City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Laurence Senelick Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Laurence Senelick By Published on November 4, 2022 Download Article as PDF A striking phenomenon of American theatre in the late 1920s is the spate of revivals of Victorian drama which continued well into the next decade. These “reconstructions” were far from antiquarian. The texts were streamlined, the acting arch and the audience reaction uproarious. Spectators of the Jazz Age chose to guffaw at the ostensible innocence of the Gilded Age. These ventures had been prepared for by newspaper cartoons and memoirs that had drenched the “Gay Nineties” in an aura of roseate nostalgia. The new versions of nineteenth-century melodrama and burlesque were, however, greeted by the mockery of a generation eager to reject the values that led to the Great War. In this light, the revivalists of a past generation’s popular entertainment partook, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly, of the anti-Victorian sentiment endemic in the postwar period. Audiences applauded their own sophistication in having left such benighted attitudes behind. While these attitudes lingered, the more sober mood that accompanied the Depression led to a more affectionate retrospect of the recent past. The Gay Nineties The Gay Nineties is exclusively an American term for the last decade of the nineteenth century, a period known in Britain as the Mauve Decade or the Naughty Nineties, in France as la belle Époque and in Germany as die Kaiserzeit. Its coinage is attributed to the illustrator Richard V. Culter (1883-1929) who so entitled the series of pictures he first published in the Ogden, Utah, Standard Examiner in April 1923, and which were continued in the humor magazine Life from 1925 to 1928. A selection was published in 1927 by Doubleday, Page, as The Gay Nineties. An Album of Reminiscent Drawings. The sub-title is revealing. Culter’s line drawings belong to the genre of “the dear, dead days beyond recall” and depict the world as seen from the perspective of an uncritical adolescent. It envisages idyllic, small-town life, uncomplicated and innocent in its pleasures. An American adult who had lived in the 1890s might have recalled a less glowing scene: a decade bookended by the floods of Johnstown and Galveston, that endured the Panic of ‘93 and the subsequent three-year economic depression; the rise of the yellow press and gutter journalism; the spread of Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement and lynching throughout the South; the Spanish-American War and the advent of American imperialism; the reign of the trusts, child labor, brutal treatment of workers and dissidents; and various sensational trials, including that of Oscar Wilde. However, the differences effected over a mere generation had been so revolutionary that the pre-war past had taken on a romantic hue: a world dominated by the horse had become automated, radio had intruded into the home, and the European conflict had provided a sharp dividing line between what was considered bygone and what was thought to be up-to-date. The new decade was dubbed by journalists “The Roaring Twenties,” persuaded that their era was more urbane, dynamic and knowing than its forebears. Culter’s benign vision of the late Victorian period was quickly blurred by condescension. Bill’s Gay Nineties, a speakeasy with a parodic turn-of-the-century motif, opened on East 54 th Street in 1924, its walls covered with lurid pictures from the Police Gazette and similar period broadsides (the association of the 1890s with the growth of professional sports, especially baseball and boxing, became a commonplace). [1] The following year John Held, Jr. (1882-1958), famous for caricaturing the adolescents of the ‘20s as sheiks and shebas, [2] began to publish a series of linoleum cuts of the “Gay ‘90s” in the New Yorker . Unlike Culter’s rose-colored, mildly ironic interpretation, Held’s pictures with their crudeness and lurid captions were in tune with the newly-founded magazine’s vaunted sophistication. They implied that the world of our grandfathers had been absurd in its conventions, backward in its moralizing, and laughable in its notions of art and beauty. [3] These graphic mementos rapidly crystallized iconic signifiers of a period dimly if at all remembered by twenty- and thirty-year-olds: waxed handlebar moustaches and moustache cups, barber-shop quartets and singing waiters, the Gibson girl and wasp waists, sleeve garters and high-button shoes, straw boaters on men and ostrich plumes on women, sentimental piano ballads, horse-drawn vehicles and tandem bicycles, beer in pails and beefy chorines. As with the songs shoe-horned into the Hoboken revivals, specific decades became merged in a general impression of what was “Victorian.” [4] The earliest glimpse of this trend on Broadway would seem to be a sequence entitled “The Old Timers” in The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 . A quintet, including the female impersonator Bert Savoy, parodied singing waiters and parlor ballads. The rendition of “Good-bye to Dear Old Alaska” by the writer John E. Hazzard (1881-1935), in walrus moustache and ill-fitting dress suit, was reported to be one of the hits of the evening. [5] However, full exploitation of Victoriana had to wait until Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat (1927), based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel of the previous year. Its action moves from 1887 to the 1893 World’s Fair to the present, the most memorable moments taking place in the earliest period. Ferber herself had been attracted by show boating as “one of the most melodramatic and gorgeous bits of Americana” [6] that deserved to be memorialized. She concocted a pseudo-domestic melodrama The Parson’s Bride, which, in the musical, is turned into a mock play within a play. In his score for both the stage version and the 1935 film, Kern imbedded such gas-lit crowd-pleasers as “Goodbye, My Lady Love” and “After the Ball.” Yet the line in “Ol’ Man River,” “the land ain’t free” suggests an ante-bellum South. A general wash of Victorianism plays over the musical. Audiences are hard put to say, at any given moment, just when the action is taking place. The popularity of Show Boat may have inspired Mae West to capitalize on the Nineties in Diamond Lil, which opened on Broadway on 9 April 1928. West’s career was in a precarious position; her plays Sex (1926), The Drag (1927) and The Pleasure Man (1928) had been prosecuted and closed and she had even spent a brief time in jail. Respectable playgoers avoided her shows. At this juncture it may have occurred to her that moving her sinning protagonists to a dimly-recalled bygone era might provide just the quantum of distance to make them seem safely picturesque. Although Diamond Lil touches on such raw topics as white slavery and drug addiction, the class conflicts and seething confrontations that appear in her first draft were excised in the final version. Diamond Lil takes place on a Bowery refashioned to exploit modern New York’s fondness for its rough-and-ready past. Herbert Asbury’s popular history The Gangs of New York had been published in 1927, providing the creative team plenty of well-researched local color and anecdotal incident. [7] Effort was made to reproduce an authentic period barroom and a honky-tonk singer’s apartments, leading the English impresario Charles Cochran to declare “ Diamond Lil catches exactly the spirit of the Bowery as I first knew it in 1891, with its bosses, thugs, procurers and cops.” [8] The effect, reported the New York World , was the “garishness of a lurid lithograph seen under a flaring gas jet, and that is probably just the reason it was such good fun.” [9] What in its time might have been regarded as tawdry and objectionable, ripe for slum clearance, had taken on a sheen of glamor. The same mist of reminiscence that had softened the contours of the past in Culter’s vignettes now invested a crime-ridden rookery like the Bowery with an aura of innocent festivity. Few of the audience members would have been familiar with its gritty reality. The New York World report continued. For those of us few remaining New Yorkers who have a sentimental if somewhat hazy recollection of the Bowery, Diamond Lil contains a wealth of entertainment in the lusty and lewd enthusiasm with which it paints the under world of the ‘90s. Somebody with a genuine sense of that atmosphere has created those Bowery scenes of ten cent revelry with an authority just as honest as the Moscow Art Theater’s studies of Chekhov, and much nearer home.[10] There is a peculiar contradiction lurking in this statement. The reporter, while admitting his memory is faulty and roseate, nevertheless claims for Diamond Lil ’s ambience the psychological and scenic naturalism of Stanislavsky (he and the Art Theatre had visited New York in 1923). What the writer purports to remember as lived experience is informed by a sedulous but fictional reconstruction. As Marybeth Hamilton has put it in her study of West, in Diamond Lil the truth of this past had been “mediated by old-time popular entertainments, formed by melodramas, stories and song.” [11] (She might also mention the pictorial precursors). At this time books on popular ballads of the period by the musicologist Sigmund Spaeth were widely available, [12] so “The Bowery” from the Gilded Era musical comedy A Trip to Chinatown (1891) and the tearjerker “She Was Poor But She Was Honest” were sung from the stage of Diamond Lil. West had tapped into the brisk current of nostalgia, allowing her to draw her audiences from a diversity of classes and tastes. Diamond Lil raised her from a provocative pariah into a Broadway star and was the only one of her plays to be filmed. A Hoboken Idyll Show Boat and Diamond Lil were contemporary fictions that exploited the Victorian ambience. The first influential revival of an actual Victorian play took place in what might be deemed off-off-off-off Broadway. In the mid-1920s a quartet of men-about-Manhattan who styled themselves the Three-Hours-for-Lunch Club discovered Hoboken. They found that a short ferry ride to the New Jersey shore could bring them to a neighborhood rich in fine riverine views, hearty German cuisine and a potent beer neglectful of the Eighteenth Amendment. They dubbed the region, with a nod to Shakespeare’s faulty geography in The Winter’s Tale , “the last Seacoast of Bohemia.” [13] New York City in this period, with fourteen daily newspapers in English alone and seventy legitimate playhouses, could well support a flourishing subculture of talented bohemians. Of the well-connected members of the Lunch Club, Cleon Throckmorton (1897-1965) was the most closely associated with progressive dramatic movements; as a designer for the Provincetown Playhouse, he was celebrated for his scenery for plays on African-America themes: The Emperor Jones (1920), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1922) and Porgy (1923). The Club’s founder, Christopher Morley (1890-1957), bibliophile, novelist and gourmand, was a columnist for The New York Evening Post and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. British-born Harry Wagstaff Gribble (1896-1981 had been, from 1918, one of Broadway’s most-employed playwrights and directors, with a specialty in revue. The least of these was Conrad Milliken (dates unknown), a theatrical lawyer and dabbler in poetry. On one of their gastronomic jaunts to Hoboken Throckmorton ventured on to Hudson Street and came upon the old Rialto Theatre (pronounced Rye-alto by the locals), its nineteenth-century interior shrouded in dust. The four men, who had a soft spot for Victoriana, leased and restored, without renovating, the 750-seat playhouse. They decided to revive popular commercial plays that had recently closed on Broadway, without regard to expense, featuring a semi-professional stock company in one-week runs. In their publicity they played up the ease of reaching Hoboken, the lack of traffic, the plenitude of parking. [14] Their first venture was Kenyon Nicholson’s play of circus life, The Barker, which had ended its Broadway run in June 1927. It reopened in Hoboken on Labor Day, 3 September 1928, to a local audience and failed to make expenses. The enterprise was chiefly social, the performance followed by beer and pretzels, recitations of such parlor favorites as “The Face on the Barroom Floor” and “Dress Me Up Fair for the Ball, Marie.” After a succession of seven more lightweight plays, [15] increased word of mouth and ingenious newspaper advertising allowed the amateur impresarios to expand to two-week runs of Morley’s new satire on the League of Nations Pleased to Meet You, George Abbott’s recent comedy-melodrama Broadway and a sentimental chestnut of 1903 appropriate to the locale, Old Heidelberg, about the romance between a German prince and a beerhall waitress . An ambitious forty-week season was planned. The New Stagecraft had been prominent for a decade, promoting innovations in playwriting, design and directing. Names such as Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Craig, Appia and Copeau were bandied about by would-be theatrical progressives. News of the Provincetown Playhouse, the Washington Square Players, and the Neighborhood Playhouse filled the drama columns of newspapers and magazines. Although Throckmorton was associated with these movements, the Lunch Club regarded its Hoboken venture to be a counterblast to pretentious would-be reformers. It protested that it was preserving the American tradition of the ballyhoo producer, the Barnums and Belascos. In a contrarian mood, Morley proclaimed their enterprise to be “not a ‘little’ theatre, nor an ‘arty’ theatre nor an ‘amateur’ theatre in a cellar or a stable or a wharf or an attic,” for the Rialto was “a house redolent of the showman atmosphere.” [16] Almost unique among ‘groups of serious thinkers,’ our escapade had about it no flavor of Little Theatre or Drama League, no intention of uplift, or either shocking or improving Public Taste. Our subconscious notion was that the theatre had been improved entirely too much; that its essential ingredient of harmless fun had almost been forgotten.”[17] Even the watered-down symbolism of the French playwright Henri Lenormand, regularly produced by the Theatre Guild, was considered too highbrow for their repertoire. Having reveled in “crook plays” and light comedy, they were about to discover melodrama. After Dark One series of John Held’s linoleum cuts, called “When the Theatre Was Fraught with Romance,” offered cartoon versions of turn-of-the-century hits: Sapho, Ben Hur, The Heart of Maryland, Florodora and various vaudeville acts. The Hoboken team went even farther back in its exhumation of bygone drama. Throckmorton claimed that he had run across a lithograph of Dion Boucicault’s After Dark a Play of London Life (1868) in a second-hand bookstall and thought it might be an appropriate offering for the Rialto. (He had already revived Anna Cora Mowatt’s comedy Fashion [1845] for the Provincetown Players in 1925. [18] ) A sensation drama in which the hero is tied to the tracks and saved by a plucky girl from an oncoming locomotive, After Dark was already implanted in the recesses of the popular imagination. Finding a script was not easy; the only one available was a hand-written text in the New York Public Library which provided a photostatic copy. The fourth act was missing and had to be cobbled together from part-scripts. Morley tacked on a new subtitle, Neither Wife, Maid nor Widow, added jokes and changed English references to American ones. [19] (This last emendation would have been supererogatory if they had chosen Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight , which had served as Boucicault’s model, for it is set in New York.) [20] Nearly a dozen period songs were inserted, from the cloying ballad “Gentle Annie” and the uproarious “McSorley’s Twins” to a blackface minstrel troupe rendering “Stand Back, I Am Here,” as the audience joined in the chorus. The intention was to have After Dark run three weeks to be followed by Morley’s dramatization of his novel Where the Blue Begins . Morley later claimed that the Boucicault play had been meant as a Christmas gift to the long-standing working-class habitués of the Rialto. Tickets were distributed to factory workers and telephone operators and Morley praised the locals’ balanced response. At first, “the house, subconsciously perceiving the delicacy of the equilibrium, thrilled with laughter that had its overtones of fine appreciation, and even a sort of tender wistfulness for the old Currier and Ives era the play symbolized.” He always denied mounting the play tongue-in-cheek or encouraging the audience to mock the performance, although he had to admit that “Hissing the villain, and marking time to the songs with hands and feet, grew up spontaneously from the very first performance.” Throckmorton the director had told the actors, “Whatever you think about it, play it straight. Anyone trying to kid his part with get a notice at once.” [21] The reviewers duly noted the conscientiousness of the staging and the earnestness of the players. [22] The managers of the Hoboken Theatre Company were well aware that they were not inventing a fad but cleverly exploiting it. Morley even remarked in print that The Rialto has “the Bowery atmosphere of Diamond Lil .” [23] Even so, the entrepreneurs were surprised to find they had a hit on their hands. The smart set from Manhattan began to throng the Twenty-third Street ferry-boats, mail orders for tickets reached 2,500 a day, and calls for reservations were so demanding that six telephones had to be installed. Soon the problem arose of restraining audience exuberance which grew so unbridled it kept stopping the show. Any fat patron coming down the aisle was greeted with cheers. [24] The sensational railway scene provoked hilarity and calls for the locomotive to tip over. Tossing small change on stage had to be warned against by the character Old Tom lest actors be harmed, and to still the ever-increasing tumult, the program carried a printed slip calling on the spectators “to draw the line between appreciative merriment and mere noisy interruption.” [25] Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times attributed the runaway success to the festive nature of the evening and the absence of the usual taboos of theatre-going. Unwittingly, he suggested, the audience was echoing Morley’s dismissal of high-minded drama by revelling in the grandiloquent claptrap. Broadway, choked with “gutter plays” and eternal complaints of the theatre’s decadence, was being bested by the “good, clean fun” of the quartet’s initiative. [26] Historically, only the attendees of court or religious theatre had been constrained by decorum and protocol; public theatres had traditionally been sites of immediate and vociferous response. After Dark, in Atkinson’s opinion, was returning the dramatic event to its origins. Unswayed by such an objective analysis, the Hoboken Chamber of Commerce protested against “the unselfconscious conduct” of the “Park Avenue carriage trade audiences…rowdyism and the cheap buffoonery and crude witticisms of self-constituted wags…creating a source of annoyance to the serious and well-intentioned theatregoer…’hooligans’ in search of liquor and ‘whoopee’” which spilled on to the sidewalks and carriage-ways. [27] Considering that Hoboken had traditionally been the playground of sailors on leave and the working class on weekends, the bacchanalian excesses of the Rialto’s moneyed public must have been uninhibited indeed to call forth such objections. The element of class conflict can also be read in this complaint: the resentment of New Jerseyites against the chronic denigration of their state by New Yorkers. Morley responded that the experiment was so new that its effects had taken the founders themselves by surprise. He too deplored the invasion of touring “sophisticates” and the “prematurely knowing.” He later declared that once Manhattanites had made a fad of the revivals he ceased to take pleasure in them; the society crowd “could not appreciate the depth, the delicate charm and the sincerity of this old Victorian drama.” Their life is “so unhappy, so empty, so fatuous, that when they come to something homely and fine, they feel a compulsion to prove it something else.” Fortunately, he noted, three months in they lost interest, and for the rest of the run “we haven’t seen a real smart person in the house.” [28] Despite the aldermen’s complaints, the unlooked-for commercial success led to the quartet being solicited by Jersey City businessmen to set up shop there. Morley bought a foundry around the corner from the Rialto as the impresarios’ headquarters and issued passports to the Free State of Hoboken. He announced that in partnership with millionaire entrepreneur Otto Kahn he had plans to build an apartment house for artists and writers on the banks of the Hudson. [29] Relenting, in September 1929 the city fathers embedded a plaque in front of the Rialto commemorating the 335 th performance of After Dark . [30] Another unexpected development was a brief recrudescence of the prolific Irish playwright Dion Boucicault and the genre of melodrama. The actor Clarence Derwent staged two Sunday-night performances of The Octoroon (1859) with an interpolated scene from London Assurance (1841) to benefit the Eleonora Duse Fellowship. Publicity stated that it would be performed “in the manner of one given at the Old Winter Garden in 1859.” [31] Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, particularly in the theatre, Augustin Daly’s prototype for After Dark , Under the Gaslight (1867), opened at Fay’s Bowery Theatre in Chinatown in May; reporters on opening night noted the sharp contrast between “gaping hobos and bread-lines’ and “Rolls Royces, Hispano-Suizas and Isotta-Franschinis.” [32] Once again audiences flocked intending to split their sides when the cardboard train shot out of the wings. The admonitions to restraint from the stage were word-for-word the same as those at the Rialto. However, in contrast to Hoboken, the actors were prone to overdo the histrionics and the house’s high spirits seemed less than spontaneous. [33] A conventional response to Victorian melodrama was beginning to coalesce. Under the Gaslight ran only three weeks before the theatre burned down on June 5. The managers of the Rialto were faced with the quandary of what to put on if and when After Dark ever ended its run. They considered pursuing the Victorian line with a musical comedy like The Belle of New York (1897) or innovating with an adaptation of Anatole France’s satirical novel The Revolt of the Angels (1914) or bucking the trend with The Age of Consent, a new play about adolescent sex. [34] Regrettably, Morley admitted, the public identified the Rialto so closely with melodrama that other genres were foreclosed, so Boucicault’s The Streets of New York (1858) and Joseph Arthur’s Blue Jeans (1890, the one with the hero menaced by a buzz-saw), moved to the top of the list. [35] The Black Crook Meanwhile, the empire-building quartet took a lease on the larger, forty-three-year-old Lyric Theatre down the block from the Rialto, featuring The Black Crook as the attraction, although at first it was merely a name to the managers. In histories of American show business The Black Crook is invariably if erroneously cited as the first true musical comedy and, more accurately, as the progenitor of the “leg show.” [36] A jerry-built extravaganza of 1866, The Black Crook grafted troops of chorines in stockinette onto a creaky Faustian framework, added hummable music, and somehow created a long-lived, much revived blockbuster with a reputation for raciness. Morley drastically reduced the chorus and the libretto, inserted such anachronistic favorites as “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” and built up the special effects of a thunder machine and a great incantation scene. In his words, “this innocent old outrage, as quaint as a lacy Valentine, considered obscene in the 60’s and 70’s, is now a perfect bliss for children.” [37] The first night, 11 March 1929, played to standing room from 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., but the difficulty of getting home from Hoboken in the wee hours failed to discourage another storming of the box office. For all Morley’s disclaimers about the insensitivity of Manhattan playgoers, The Black Crook seems to have been tailored to their tastes and elicited the same vociferous response. As in an English Christmas pantomime, the playgoers shouted “Watch out” when the villain closed in on the hero. Isadora Duncan-style dancers, a classical ballet and a dog act were imported, while Morley placed Rabelaisian advertisements weekly to lure the suckers in. The reviewers complained that the actors were now lampooning the show. It was not “the ‘Black Crook’ revived or reproduced, or whatever you choose to call it, but a burlesque of the old ‘Black Crook’ with a lot of modern trimmings.” [38] The question arose, Is it worth the effort? The Hoboken enterprise was now such a notorious phenomenon that The Black Crook was immortalized by an Al Hirschfeld cartoon in the New York Herald Tribune for 3 March 1929 and in lithographs by Eugene Fitsch (1892-1972), an Alsatian-born instructor at the Art Students League. By June 200,000 spectators had seen the two revivals, and Morley was announcing an ambitious new season for the sister theatres, alternating drama, comedy and music, old and new. [39] Melodramas under consideration were English, Sims’ and Pettitt’s Harbor Lights (1888) and Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1879). A tour to Detroit and Chicago was contemplated once After Dark closed in Hoboken, and a similar road show to Boston was in store for The Black Crook . An intimate offering The Shoestring Revue was also in the works. [40] While The Black Crook was still running, however, progress on the ambitious projections of the Hoboken Theatrical Company hit a speed bump. The lawyer Milliken withdrew from the partnership and sued his erstwhile colleagues over royalties for After Dark, leading to appeals and protracted litigation. [41] When the 1929/30 season began, Morley and Throckmorton followed Crook with a less ingenuous piece of exploitation. A famous shipwreck of the Star of Bengal in 1908 had been made the centerpiece of a faked autobiography and a best-selling novel by the actress Joan Lowell (1902-1967) who falsely claimed to be the captain’s daughter and the only woman amid an all-male crew. Her husband (for two years) Thompson Buchanan (1877-1937) turned this farrago of mendacity into a dramatic vehicle for her. Although the reviewer for Morley’s alma mater Haverford reported an enthusiastic opening night audience and predicted success for his production of Star of Bengal , the professional press found it unfunny and an inappropriate successor to the Hoboken follies. Ironically, Variety labelled it “too old-fashioned” even to be picked up by the movies. [42] In interviews Morley then played up the Rialto’s new offering, a Civil War melodrama The Blue and the Gray, or War is Hell , [43] but audiences stayed away in droves. The critics thought it provided the same pleasures as its precursors but the public had been soured by The Shoestring Revue and Star of Bengal. Ultimately, the iceberg on which all these productions foundered was the same that proved fatal for society at large: the stock market crash of 29 October 1929. By February 1930 the Hoboken Theatre Company had to declare bankruptcy. Despite the munificent box-office receipts of the past year, lavish spending, the Rialto’s mortgage and the treasurer’s mismanagement all contributed to the failure. [44] The theatre was rented to one Patsy de Mensa, who staged Italian plays and musicals there until he bought the building outright in 1943. [45] Against the Victorian Grain Examined more closely, the popularity of these retrievals of Victorian artefacts has to be attributed to something more pungent than nostalgia, especially, as we have seen, the audiences for the most part were not retrospecting to a past they had experienced. Rather, the responses are ripples off the wave of anti-Victorianism that swept in as that period ebbed and that crested with the disillusionment of the Great War. The attack on Victorian values, part of a lack of confidence in society’s professed ideals in general, was spearheaded by social scientists. As a result of the cultural relativism preached by the Columbia school of anthropology, that bulwark of Victorian morality, the nuclear family, was seen to be crippling to the individual and subversive to progress. These academic ideas were disseminated in Middletown by Robert and Helen Lynd (1929), which revealed the heartland to be a hotbed of bad marriages, divorce and insufficient incomes; the book’s statistics bolstered the devastating fictions of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson. The literary historian Van Wyck Brooks, in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), cited the novelist as a victim of Victorian values, whose genius had been stunted by an antipathetic cultural environment. [46] Ideas developed in Europe bolstered this attitude. Overthrowing the Victorian establishment was a deliberate goal of the Bloomsbury coterie. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) served as an abattoir to butcher the most sacred cows of the British Empire, and he followed it with an irreverent biography of Victoria herself. His insistence that her society’s evangelical bent had led directly to the Great War stoked hostility towards the previous generation. Sigmund Freud read Strachey’s book to be a direct Oedipal attack on religion. [47] The impact of Darwin on the Victorians was replicated by that of Freud on their grandchildren, with the difference that Darwin had been resisted and Freud was enthusiastically welcomed. Touted by popular journalism, the Viennese doctor became a cultural totem worshipped even by those who never read a word he wrote: his ideas made it fashionable to discuss sex out in the open and to label the hypocritical virtues of the previous century as inhibitions and repressions. [48] In this respect, Brooks Atkinson’s analysis of the exuberant participation in the melodrama revivals was on target: audiences were throwing off the traces, turning the aisles of the playhouse into the kind of “wild party” normally fueled by bootleg liquor. They were proclaiming “ nous avons changés tout cela, ” making a declaration of independence from the black-and-white moralizing and Protestant ethics played out in the melodramas. Morley’s innocent merriment spilled off the stage to become the Saturnalia of the Roman games. The Wall Street crash did not immediately shock the American theatre-going public into a new sobriety or a fresh evaluation of the Victorians. A surprise hit of London’s West End in 1927 had been Marigold , a sentimental comedy by L. Allen Barker and F. R. Pryor, set in the Scotland of 1842. The philosophic critic Charles Morgan dismissed it as merely a pleasant way to spend an evening, “a welcome epilogue to a good dinner.” [49] Nevertheless, it ran for a year and a half in London and was seen by over 500,000 people, attracted as much by the quaintness of the crinolines as by its mawkish plot. New York audiences would have none of it. When Marigold was transferred to Broadway in 1930 it folded after thirteen performances. It would seem that the sentimentality of their great-grandfathers was still anathema to cynical New York playgoers. However, as the Depression settled in for a long stay, Americans slowly revised their opinion of their bewhiskered ancestors. The eminent Victorians whom Lytton Strachey had skewered were now apotheosized in biographical dramas. The Lady with the Lamp (about Florence Nightingale) and The Barretts of Wimpole Street (about the Brownings; both English, both 1931) were hugely successful in the same season that Marigold flopped. [50] Just as the New Deal was being legislated into existence and crowds were singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1935) made a star of Helen Hayes. Even Eugene O’Neill surprised the critics in 1933 with Ah,Wilderness!, a paean to the kind of small-town life the Lynds had excoriated but Culter’s pictures had idealized. Viewed from the depths of an economic disaster, the alleged simplicity of that horse-drawn, gas-lit world held great appeal. It should be noted, however, that these were modern dramas, written and performed in a style acceptable to contemporary playgoers. The demise of the Hoboken venture did not spell the end of burlesque revivals of Victorian melodrama entirely. Lawrence Langer (1890-1962), one of the founders of the Theatre Guild, opened his New York Repertory Company at the Country Westport Playhouse on 19 June 1931 with Boucicault’s Streets of New York , and moved it to the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre in October. The audiences, conditioned by its precursors, indulged in unbridled hilarity at the musty stagecraft and outworn conventions, but the press also noted how Boucicault’s thrusts at bankers and devalued stocks hit home. [51] Nor had Morley stabled his own hobby-horse. In November 1935, the Theatre of Four Seasons, a playhouse for wealthy suburbanites in Glen Cove, Long Island, was inaugurated with his adaptation of Edward Stirling’s The Rag-picker of Paris (1848) , a bowdlerization of Félix Pyat’s sensational Le Chiffonier de Paris . Morley’s “new revised and re-edited” version abridged the play even more drastically, gave it a subtitle The Modest Modiste and studded it with stale puns and anachronistic references, winking at the jaded playgoer he had once scolded. [52] Pyat’s original had been saturated with democratic outrage and attacks on capitalism; Morley’s adaptation was, however, a high society event, the well-heeled guests at the farthest remove from both les misérables of Paris and the proletariat of Hoboken. [53] However, the most enduring specimen of the mock-the-melodrama genre occurred during the depths of the Depression and a continent away from Broadway and the Jersey shore. With the repeal of Prohibition, a couple of actors who had been playing stock in New York and Pennsylvania, Preston Shobe (1897-1978) and Galt Bell (1900-1949), moved to the West Coast (Bell was a native Californian). They came up with the idea of staging the 1843 temperance drama The Drunkard or The Fallen Saved by W. H. Smith, seating the audience at tables where they could drink beer and eat from a buffet while hissing, cheering and joining in the chorus. [54] Hoboken’s Rialto and Lyric theatres had been traditional proscenium playhouses, but this effort was to be located in an actual beer-garden. After tryouts in Carmel and Santa Barbara, Shobe and Bell opened The Drunkard , at the Theatre Mart in Los Angeles on 6 July 1933. Plans for a future repertoire, including a socialistic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, never came to pass, because it sold out for weeks in advance. Perhaps the Hollywood crowd, many of whom had benefitted from the coming of sound to turn their backs on live theatre for work in the studios, enjoyed denigrating something they saw as passé . Whatever the case, The Drunkard became a must-see for celebrities: Boris Karloff suggested an ever-changing olio of songs between the acts and W. C. Fields made it a centerpiece of his movie The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) . Even the Federal Theatre Project jumped on the bandwagon, trucking its own variants around the country. Referring to another revival of The Drunkard at the American Music Hall on 55 th Street in New York, the reviewer John Mason Brown pinpointed the attraction: “Of course making fun of antique melodramas is no longer the sport it once was. But for those who like to hear the songs of a bygone era and enjoy the irony of drinking beer in comfort at the same time they are laughing at a ridiculous sermon on the subject of a drunkard’s degradation and redemption,” it makes for a pleasant evening. [55] It constituted an exorcism of Prohibition. The Los Angeles Drunkard ran for decades, serving as the American version of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1954), and closed only when the Fire Department insisted on a reduction in the size of the audience. No longer financially viable, The Drunkard closed on 17 October 1959, with a record of 9,477 performances. [56] On its twenty-first anniversary in 1953, the press had noted that it had beaten the record of the Broadway run of Life with Father . [57] Life with Father had begun as a series of comic reminiscences by cartoonist Clarence Day Jr (1874-1935) of his stock-broker father in the 1880s. The first piece appeared in The New Yorker in January 1933, and two years later a collection of the essays was issued. After Day’s untimely death, the musical-comedy librettists Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse wrought them in a play which opened at the Empire Theatre on 8 November 1939. The entertainment confected out of the magazine essays was a tintype of an upper middle-class New York family during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. The paterfamilias is a Republican financier of conservative, not to say retrograde, values. Although the comedy is gently subversive of its hero’s old-fashioned views, it allowed audiences to bask in the glow of prosperous domesticity while feeling superior to the autocrat of the breakfast-table. Eleven road companies brought it to two hundred and fourteen cities across the continent. Life in Father had, by its closing on 15 June 1947, chalked up 3,224 performances on Broadway alone. Once the record run had ended, it was made into a Technicolor film with William Powell in the lead. Although Life with the Father had not begun as a play, the values it enshrined were similar to those expressed in other contemporary dramatic recreations of the Victorian era. As an authority figure, Day senior and the mores of his well-upholstered milieu are subjected to ridicule tempered with affectionate forbearance. Explaining the work’s inclusion in a Best Plays anthology, the critic John Gassner wrote, “For all the pudder raised by dour anti-‘escapists,’ the remembrance of things past remains justifiable human indulgence, and I have often felt, as who has not, that what matters in escape is less what we escape from than what we escape into.” [58] When Life with Father opened, Pulitzer Prizes for 1938 and 1939 had been awarded to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a paean to the everyday as lived in obscure villages, and Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939), a tribute to frontier integrity. Coming out of the Depression and on the eve of a worldwide conflagration, American audiences seemed to be seeking in their none-too-distant past for positive values, moral and inspirational. These prize-winning dramas partook of and benefitted from the same psychological climate that produced the successful revivals and nostalgia plays dismissed or overlooked by critics. The long runs and commercial success of The Drunkard and Life with Father suggest that, on the US stage, anti-Victorian mockery and Victorian nostalgia had found a modus vivendi for co-existence. References [1] Bill’s Gay 90s stayed in operation until 2012. “Bill’s Gay Nineties – The History” . Bill’s New York City. Archived from the original on March 30, 2012. [2] Held’s cartoons, appearing as magazine covers, posters and advertising, were considered to be the graphic equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction, defining a jazz-crazed generation of flappers and ‘varsity Romeos. [3] Held’s drawings were collected in 1931 (New York: Ives Washburn) and reprinted by Dover Books in 1972 as The Wages of Sin and Other Victorian Joys & Sorrows [4] A frequent example of this is the use of Offenbach’s galop infernale from Orphée aux enfers of 1858 to score cancans supposed to characterize the Gay Nineties. The practice is endemic in movies. [5] W. J. D., “Several Sparkling Song Gems Are Born with the Latest Edition of Greenwich Village Follies,” The Music Trades 44, 1 (1 July 1922): 42. [6] Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (NY: Doubleday, 1938). The chapter on Show Boat appears on 217-304. [7] It is also the foundational source for Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name. One historian’s complaint that Scorsese conflated three decades into one could be made of most show-business evocations of “the Victorian age.” Vincent DiGirolamo, “Such, Such Were the B’hoys,” Radical History Review 2004 (90): 123-41. [8] Quoted in advertisement for Diamond Lil in Variety (22 Aug. 1928): 71; in Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better. Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 107. [9] New York World (10 April 1928): 18, quoted in Hamilton, When I’m Bad , 110. [10] Ibid. [11] Hamilton, When I’m Bad, 117. [12] Barber Shop Ballads and How to Sing Them (1925); Read ‘Em and Weep and Weep Some More, My Lady (both 1927); and “Gentlemen, Be Seated!” (on blackface minstrelsy, 1928). [13] The chief accounts are Christopher Morley, The Seacoast of Bohemia (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929) and Born in a Beer Garden or, She Troupes to Conquer. Sundry Ejaculations by Christopher Morley, Cleon Throckmorton and Ogden Nash and Certain of the Hoboken Ads with a Commentary on Them by Earnest Elmo Calkins (New York: Foundry Press, 1930). Also see J. Brooks Atkinson, “Hilarities,” New York Times (11 Nov. 1928): 135; and “The Theatre in Hoboken,” TIME (25 May 1929). [14] “Christopher Morley Revives the Hoboken Theatre,” Scarsdale Inquirer 9,46 (5 Oct. 1928): 1. [15] What Anne Brought Home, The Spider (both 1927), The Squall (1926), The Last of Mrs Cheney , The Poor Nut (both 1925), Bulldog Drummond (1921) and The Octopus (1928). Two are comedies; the rest are thrillers or “crook” plays. [16] Morley, Seacoast of Bohemia, 9. Christopher Morley’s papers are deposited at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. [17] Morley, Seacoast of Bohemia , 20. Even their advertising pamphlet contained the disclaimer: “This is not a highbrow theatre, nor an arty theatre, nor a clinic for the exploration of the obscure woes of the nervous system.” [18] Kenneth McGovern, “Developing a Repertory Theatre,” Art & Decoration 23 (May 1925): 47, 80. [19] Cleon Throckmorton, “Putting the O.K. in Hoboken” and Morley, “She Troupes to Conquer,” both in Born in a Beer Garden , 62, 34-36 [20] The litigation over whether Boucicault had plagiarized Daly’s Under the Gaslight lasted for thirteen years. See Edward S. Rogers, “The Law of Dramatic Copyright II,” Michigan Law Review 1, 3 (Dec. 1902): 185-89. After Dark was never copyrighted, but William A. Brady, who had purchased the performance rights from Boucicault, tried unsuccessfully to enjoin the Rialto directors from producing it. “W. A. Brady Warns ‘After Dark’ Producer,” New York Times (5 Dec. 1928): 18. [21] Morley, “She Troupes to Conquer,” 37, 39. [22] “’After Dark’ revived,” New York Times (11 Dec. 1928): 40. [23] Morley, The Seacoast of Bohemia , 9 . [24] Compare the cry “Norm!” in the television sitcom Cheers . [25] “After Dark’ revived.” [26] J. Brooks Atkinson, “In the Free State of Hoboken,” New York Times (10 Feb. 1929): 113. [27] “Hoboken Criticizes Morley Audiences,” New York Times (12 April 1929): 22. [28] In a speech to a packed audience at Columbia University. “Morley Glad to Be Rid of New York Patrons, ‘Too Stupid’ to Appreciate Hoboken Revivals,” New York Times (23 July 1929): 21. [29] “The Theatre: in Hoboken.” [30] “Morley Buys Foundry to Aid Hoboken Drama,” New York Times (24 Mar. 1929): 20; “Tablet for Boucicault,” New York Times (3 Sept. 1929), 34. [31] “The Octoroon Revival,” New York Times (4 Mar. 1929): 24; “The Octoroon’ at 70 is still affective [sic]” New York Times (13 Mar 1929): 37. The Octoroon enjoyed a full month’s revival by the Phoenix Theatre in 1961, and then a radical rethinking by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as An Octoroon in 2016. [32] “Boucicault Redivivus,” New York Times (24 Mar. 1929): 133. [33] J. Brooks Atkinson, “Bowery Melodrama,” New York Times (3 April 1929): 36. [34] “Morley to resume acting. Will appear as Old Tom in ‘After Dark’ in Hoboken” New York Times (1 July 1929): 36; “War Play for Hoboken,” New York Times (29 July 1929): 36. [35] Morley, “She Stoops,” 42-43. After Dark finally closed in November 1929, nearly a year after it had opened. Morley played old Tom in the last three performances. “’After Dark’ to close,” New York Times (27 Nov. 1929): 34. [36] The legend began with its author C. M. Barras, The Black Crook. A Most Wonderful History (Philadelphia: Barclay, 1866). The historian of light opera Kurt Gänzl has devoted many of his Kurt of Gerolstein blogs to correcting the record; e.g., 4 Oct. 2016, 8 Oct. 2016, 17 June 2018, 18 June 2018, 20 June 2018. [37] Morley, “She Stoops.” 48. Also see Ogden Nash, “Up and Down the Amazons or, The Black Crook from Behind; a Travelogue” and Earnest Elmo Calkins, “Mr. Morley Writes His Own” in Born in a Beer Garden . [38] “’Black Crook’ Revived with Lovely Chorus,” New York Times (19 Mar. 1929): 33; “The Theatre: in Hoboken.” [39] “News and Gossip of the Times Square Sector,” New York Times (30 June 1929): XI. [40] “’Black Crook’ to Close,” New York Times (30 May 1929): 26; “’Black Crook’ Reopens in Hoboken,” New York Times (10 Sept. 1929), 38; “’Shoestring Revue’ in Rehearsal,” New York Times (3 Nov. 1929): 11. [41] “Hoboken Producers Face Royalty Suit,” New York Times (26 June 1929): 33; “Gribble v. Hoboken Theatrical Co.,” Court of Chancery 17 December 1929. [42] “Morley’s ‘Star of Bengal’ Scores Success in Opening,” Haverford News (30 Sept. 1929): 1; Variety (Oct. 2, 1929): 2; “Theatre: New Play in Hoboken,” TIME (7 Oct. 1929); Oakland Tribune (11 Oct. 1929): C3. [43] “Civil War in Hoboken,” New York Times (5 Jan. 1930): X2. Although Morley claimed it was written by an anonymous war veteran and offered a prize to anyone who could identify the author, it is likely that he devised it to fit the theatre’s needs. There is no independent record of such a play. [44] “Morley’s Theatre in Bankruptcy Plea,” New York Times (4 Feb. 1930): 22; J. Brooks Atkinson, “Hoboken Blues,” New York Times (9 Feb. 1930): X1. [45] “Hoboken Theatre Sold. Scene of Morley’s Plays,” New York Times (7 Dec. 1943): 1. The Lyric was sold in 1931 and demolished in 1959. [46] Stanley Cohen, “The Assault on Victorianism in the Twentieth Century,” American Quarterly 27, 5 (Dec. 1975): 604-25. He later expanded this as Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). [47] Todd Avery, “’The Historian of the Future’: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography Between the Two Cultures,” English Literary History 4 (Winter 2010): 841-66. [48] F. H. Matthews, “The Americanization of Sigmund Freud. Adaptations of Psychoanalysis Before 1917,” Journal of American Studies 1, 1 (Apr. 1967): 39-62; Ernest W. Burgess, “The Influence of Sigmund Freud upon Sociology in the U.S.,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (Nov. 1939): 356-75. [48] In 1917 the columnist Heywood Broun had speculated on what Little Eva’s death scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be like if Stowe’s characters had read Havelock Ellis and tried to interpret the child’s dream of angels by means of Freud. “What Mrs. H. B. Stowe Ought to Have Known,” New York Tribune (18 Feb. 1017): 40. [49] Charles Morgan, “The English Stage – ‘Marigold’ and Seymour Hicks,” New York Times (29 May 1927): X1. Also see Duncan Monks, “’The Return of the Crinoline’ in the Age of Anti-Victorianism, c.1918-39,” Academia . Marigold became the first play to be televised in the UK. [50] The Lady with the Lamp , about Florence Nightingale, was an English import which had opened in London in 1929, starring Edith Evans. [51] “Meet Mr. Boucicault,” New York Times (4 Oct. 1931): 110; “Laugh Gales Greet Revival of Old Play,” Women’s Wear Daily (7 Oct. 1931): I, 17. A musical version of The Streets of New York by Charlotte Moore opened off-Broadway in late 2021. [52] “Society Sees New Playhouse Opened,” New York Times (12 Nov. 1935), 23. Morley published the text (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937). [53] In 1937 Throckmorton resuscitated his revival of Fashion ; and a year later, the WPA presented Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) which ran only a fortnight in New York. [54] “Galt Bell, 49, revived ‘Drunkard’ on Coast.” New York Times (7 July 1949): 25. Ten Nights in a Barroom had been revived at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1932 but held the boards for only 37 performances. [55] John Mason Brown, “The Drunkard,” quoted in John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195-96. [56] “Theatre’s Seven-Year-Old Drunkard,” TIME (17 July 1939); “’The Drunkard’, L.A.’s Favorite Melodrama,” Los Angeles Daily Mirror (21 June 1947); “’The Drunkard,’ Final Curtain Falls After Historic 26-year Run,” Victoria (Texas) Advocate ( 19 Oct. 1959): 1; Larry Harnisch, “The Drunkard,” Los Angeles Daily Mirror (14 July 2008). [57] “’The Drunkard,’ 21 Years in Los Angeles, Still Off Wagon After 7,451 Performances,” New York Times (7 July 1953): 23. [58] John Gassner, “Introduction,” Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre Second Series , ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, 1947), xxix. Footnotes About The Author(s) LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of The American Stage in the Library of America and recipient of the George Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism. His most recent books are Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (2018), The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage (2022) and a translation of Balzac’s The Fraudster (2022). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF “ Ògún Yè Mo Yè !” Ògún lives! I live. E ku Ọsẹ̀ Ògún! At the time of this writing, it is a day to venerate the Òrìṣà of iron, mystic vision, destruction and creation. Ògún, the adaptable, force of will, and road-opening energy, commits to doing difficult but necessary work to bring about transformation. Ògún pursues justice, fairness, and equity in the distribution of resources. As Ògún opens the way, options, opportunity, and expansion becomes possible. Wole Soyinka describes Ògún as “the truth of destructiveness and creativity in acting man;” the one who surmounts “annihilation.” [1] Practitioners of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba are known to venerate Ògún and empower themselves through a call and response invocation of “ Ògún Yè! Mo Yè !” Ògún lives! I live! Through this potent force, a way will be made. Ògún—the metaphysical power and display of heart—has seen me through the forge that historically white universities (HWUs) can be for Black faculty. This past decade of my career has been shaped by hard work, trailblazing, radical changes, and indefatigable attempts to make pedagogical and production interventions in the face of systemic and cultural challenges within the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance (TSD) at William & Mary (W&M). Like Ògún, I have been a tireless proponent for operationalizing the possibilities for Black Theater pedagogy and production informed by the highest possible standards in pedagogy, practice, and spirit. As I reflect on the oríkì epigraph above, Ògún becomes a theory for thinking through and characterizing the means and circumstances through which milestones in Black Theater pedagogy and production have occurred at W&M, as well as a meditation for considering how to chart pathways for Black Theater through systemic challenges in similar settings. In Yorùbá creation stories it is the strength and dedication of Ògún’s pioneerism which enabled the gods to subsequently travel across the abyss of transition and reunite with humanity. Thus, Ògún is the force and energetic link which bridges the distance between effort and accomplishment. My W&M career has been marked by achievements. I am the first African American to be tenured and promoted in Theatre. Despite systemic challenges I have earned some of W&M’s highest awards for my teaching, research, and service activities and I now serve on the College of Arts & Sciences, Arts Visioning Committee at the invitation of my dean. Pioneerism highlights milestones, but also requires illuminating the context from which the landmarks emerge, and in this case, the labor of predecessors who dared to establish visions of excellence for the successful pedagogy and production of Black Theater. W&M was founded by James Blair in 1693 with profits of slave labor. [2] It is the second-oldest university in America and boasts several firsts, theatre related and otherwise. In 1702, W&M students performed a “pastoral colloquy” for the Royal Governor, the first recorded theatrical performance in America. Adjacent to campus, the first theatre in America—the Play House—was constructed in Williamsburg in 1716, and on the campus proper, the Bray School—the oldest standing schoolhouse in America—educated free and enslaved Black children from 1760-1774. In 1926, W&M became the first liberal arts college in Virginia to offer a “Play Production” course under the instruction of Ms. Althea Hunt, also credited with incepting the dramatic program. [3] 1964 was the earliest attempt to include Black students in mainstage productions. [4] Howard Scammon, directing Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life , cast Oscar Blayton, the first Black undergraduate admitted to the college. Blayton returned to the mainstage, under Scammon’s direction, as the Third Madman in Websters’ The Duchess of Malfi . However, although admitted to the university for study, segregation laws prevented Blayton from residing on campus. Disenchanted, he withdrew in his sophomore year and enrolled in the University of Maryland. While the college supported extracurricular Black Theater performances in the ‘80s ( Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1980), For Colored Girls (1981), the next two decades would see focused attempts by Theatre faculty to draw Black students to the Theatre department as well as the advent of curricular milestones. During his term as department chair Richard Palmer hired Omi Osun Joni L. Jones in 1982. Black Theater, as an institution at W&M, began under her leadership as she “successfully established and directed the [department sponsored] Black Thespian Society.” [5] It was “birthed from the will of the students” and her “desire to build Black institutions.” [6] One of their major public performances included The Harlem Renaissance Revisited , performed before Gwendolyn Brooks. [7] However, Jones left for Howard after just one year where “discussions of Africa and the African Diaspora” were “just a natural part of everyday talk.” [8] Jones also worked with Bruce McConachie on an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , called Goin’ Home to Freedom. But “he did not like what he saw,” said Jones. [9] Due to creative differences, McConachie completed the adaptation. In the Colonial Echo, Fitzgerald writes, “ Goin’ Home to Freedom proved to be an all too rare opportunity to appreciate the wealth of black thespian talent at William and Mary.” [10] From 1995-1996, McConachie collaborated with the Grass Roots Theatre Project and Hermine Pinson to collect oral narratives and write Walk Together Children ; the play explored race relations in Williamsburg during the Civil Rights Movement. Pinson, a creative writer in the English department, would be the first Black book writer produced on the mainstage. Pinson joined professors Susan Chast and Jacquelyne McLendon, in developing and co-teaching African American Theatre History and Performance. When I took the course as an undergraduate in 1996, I was inspired to attend graduate school for theatre rather than law school as planned. This ideation was further cemented by my participation in DeVeaux’s The Tapestry: A Play Woven in Two , in my senior year. The Tapestry became the first Black play on the mainstage. While meeting with the cast on opening night, DeVeaux told us, “You need to be doing what you know in your heart you need to do. In not doing so, you dishonor all of those who came before and showed the way which made it possible for you to choose.” DeVeaux affirmed what my own Orí spoke and intuitively introduced me to what would later become the ritual, ancestral, and aesthetic elements in my research to come. I returned to the “Alma Mater of the Nation” in 2010 as the seventh Black faculty member hired by the department since 1982. In diasporic formations of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba, seven holds significance for Ògún. For example, in Candomblé, seven symbolizes the “multiplication of àshe ” in the iron tools found in Ògún’s cauldron, as well as in oríkì such as, “seven iron signs of the god of iron.” [11] As “the seventh iron,” I returned to my undergraduate kiln with the expressed goal of revitalizing and more importantly, sustaining Black Theater pedagogy and production so it could be engaged on its own terms. The African American Theatre History and Performance course was offered sporadically, not at all, or aspects of it were included in other courses (e.g. Multicultural Theatre, Feminist Theatre, and Theatre and Society in the twentieth Century America). Several Black faculties with varying teaching appointments had come, labored, and left the university: Femi Euba, Martin Fonkijom Fusi, Marvin McAllister, and Jasmin Lambert. Some of these colleagues were former professors and colleagues and I knew some of the circumstances surrounding their departures. Yet, when I opened the doors of Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall, I was determined not to be disturbed by ghosts and experiences I had yet to encounter. And though challenges came, based on my curricular interventions, the TSD curriculum has expanded radically. In collaboration with Africana Studies, the department now offers courses on single author playwrights such as Katori Hall, August Wilson, Black Approaches to Acting, survey courses in Post-Racial Theatre, African American Theatre, Black Drama, and a course on theatre and community engagement called Reimagining Communities. Two or three of these courses have been in operation every academic year since 2016. However, the milestones in Black Theater production have been a much taller mountain to scale. By the time COVID-19 interrupted formal mainstage production, W&M had produced 366 shows since the founding of the program in 1926. Nine (less than 2.5%) of these shows came from the genre or methodological praxis of African American or Black Theater, respectively. I directed five of these shows, including Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean , the last production of the pre-COVID season. Gem represented the first time in the producing history of William & Mary Theatre that a collective of Black and award-winning leadership sat at the helm of a mainstage production. Our Scenographer was Patrice Andrew Davidson, the Scenic Charge Artist was Christopher Cumberbatch (who brought two Black professional scenic painters with him, Charles Mickens and Angel Smith), the Sound Designer was Mahmoud Khan, and the Stage Manager was Shawanna Hall. Overcoming the challenges of mounting this production demonstrate Ògún’s leadership and capacity to gather the forces in service of hewing passages through chaos. [12] The first audition pool for Gem was shallow despite my efforts to cast a wide net. Five women showed up for two roles and no men auditioned. As a result, the Director of Theatre advised the producer to cancel the show. Subsequently, I proposed an alternative work (for which we could not get the rights). However, although a limited number of Black students initially auditioned, the threatened cancelation of the show caused a stir among them. An Africana Studies major, Ashley Casey, through a cell phone—a modern science of Ògún—spearheaded a casting campaign via a social media app for Black students at William & Mary. One of the messages distributed read: The theater department already doesn’t believe this can be pulled off because it’s basically an all-black cast of men which hasn’t been done since 2012. We can’t allow this play not to be shown, this is significant to our community and changing the way black theater and approaches to acting are respected here at W&M. Casey’s leadership encapsulates the dual capacity of Ògún’s destructive/constructiveness. A (true) statement which could negatively impact the department’s reputation, became a productive intervention which inspired more student participation. What originally was meant to be a cast of seven became twelve, because I cast every student who responded to Casey’s advocacy and political labor, and because despite the departments’ priority in limiting production opportunities and resources to William & Mary undergraduates, my chair, Laurie Wolf, was willing to extend production opportunities to students of other universities and the community. Thus, I cast a Black alum and a Black theatre major from Christopher Newport University, looking for production opportunities in Black Theater. As a priest, I cannot help but think that ancestors and Òrìṣà, convened and interceded to ensure that a production on the verge of complete “annihilation”—one centered on themes of citizenship, self-rediscovery, and ancestral reconnection—could be reassembled. As a scholar, I recall of Harry Elam’s critical assertion that “the spirit of Ogun . . . suffuses and infuses the world of August Wilson.” [13] Thus, I am not surprised that at the height of my own enervation “in the face of forces inimical to individual assertion,” [14] Ògún, interceded, demonstrating that pathways for Black Theater education and production in historically white universities can occur within a humanizing and supportive structural arrangement. I do not advocate a ritualized manipulation of Ògún energy by non-practitioners of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba. [15] However, Ògún as a philosophical concept—the idea of concerted will towards carving a path towards justice, equity, and inclusion—can dismantle “diversity regimes” or “meaning and practices” that fail to “make fundamental changes.” [16] A pathway to institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production cannot be singlehandedly carved by Black faculty, nor can it be done without systemic shifts and resources. While educational theatres reimagine the possibilities for the field and simultaneously determine where to begin in actively and thoughtfully doing the work of equity and inclusion, HWUs looking to engage in sustainable Black Theater pedagogy and production, might reflect on how to create pathways through: Barriers to student participation : Sometimes Black students are anxious about being singled out (as Black) in historically white settings. Their exhaustion with being the “representative” in their classes extends to their involvement in the production season. The nature of the play risks labeling the student as political or puts them in the position of having to educate white faculty and students about Blackness. Black students also fear that auditioning is a waste of time as they will be limited to servants and sidekicks and/or will be cast “blindly” with no regard for their race or ethnic status. Barriers created by how new hires in Black Theater are conceived within the curriculum : Is the plan to position them primarily at the center of existing courses in the major? Or, will Black Theater courses be featured among major requirements and integrated throughout other classes? Barriers created through lack of understanding : There is a difference between African American Theatre and Black Theater (see Dominic Taylor’s “Don’t Call African American Theatre Black Theatre: It’s Like Calling a Dog a Cat” as a starting place: http://massreview.org/node/7537). Distinguishing between the two means differences in show selection, production methodology, and student learning outcomes. White faculty and students must surrender their tendency to locate and define African American Theatre and Black Theater within their understanding of whiteness and colorism. Barriers created by show placement within the season: Forgo limiting Black Theater production to the pressure points of the season (e.g. when the rehearsal period is five weeks or less and/or ghettoizing it within Black History month). First, this is a sure way to earn the distrust of the students the department hopes to attract as this is an obvious diversity act, unattached to any sustainable effort to institutionalize Black Theater making. Second, if underserved populations are new to the department, more time may be needed for acculturation into departmental practices. Third, in February, the entire campus is ablaze with Black programming and casting may be nearly impossible as students are busy being ambassadors for Blackness. Barriers created by isolation and a limited talent pool : Cultivating relationships with theatre departments at HWUs and any nearby HBCUs to leverage resources and talent can prove a productive strategy. Many HWUs suffer from the same maladies: a dearth of Black students, and an even smaller population of those interested in theatre (HBCUs have neither of these challenges). How might universities build pathways that cross among one another in mutually beneficial ways, towards institutionalizing Black Theater and engaging new stakeholders? Theatre educators limit the range of stories we tell as well as our artistic reach if our student population is not diverse, if our pedagogy and production is obligatory to upholding whiteness, and if our systemic praxis creates barriers to equity and inclusion. May Ògún support our efforts of systemic transformation. Ògún Yè! Ògún lives! May Black Theater pedagogy and production in historically white institutions live too. Àṣẹ. References [1] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 28. [2] Ibram X Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 64. [3] Althea Hunt, The William & Mary Theatre: A Chronicle (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1968), xvi. [4] Howard Scammon, The William & Mary Theatre (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1978), np. [5] Ronald L. Jackson and Sonja M. Givens Brown, Black Pioneers in Communication Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 195. [6] Joni L. Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March 2021. [7] Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March 2021 [8] Ronald L. Jackson and Sonja M. Givens Brown, Black Pioneers in Communication Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 195. [9] Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March, 2021. [10] William & Mary, Colonial Echo 1986 Yearbook , Swem Special Collections (Williamsburg: Graduating Class of 1986, 1986), 88. [11] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 57. [12] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 27. [13] Harry Elam, Jr., The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 172. [14] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 33. [15] For further reading on Ògún see, Barnes, Sandra, Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). [16] James M. Thomas, “Diversity Regimes and Racial Inequality: A Case Study of Diversity University,” Social Currents 5:2 (2018): 140–56. ISNN 2376-4236 Footnotes About The Author(s) OMIY Ẹ MI (ARTISIA) GREEN is a director, dramaturg, and Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at William & Mary. She is published in Continuum , the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Journal Peer Review Section, the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays (McFarland), A frican American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs (Greenwood), and FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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