Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In fall 2021, after three semesters of Zoom instruction, I returned to the classroom to teach my Advanced Dramaturgy course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the University at Buffalo – SUNY (State University of New York). As a practicing choreographer and dramaturg, I teach across dance and theatre undergraduate and graduate curricula, and many of my courses focus on composition through both textual and kinesthetic modes. As I continue learning, developing, and implementing antiracist and culturally responsive teaching practices, I connect these principles to how I generally teach script and movement analysis via a method that emphasizes the imbrication of form, content, and means of production. [1] I offer here a reflection on teaching an Asian American dramaturgies unit within my Advanced Dramaturgy course in order to practice critical self-reflection; model the composition of this unit and acknowledge its limits and affordances; and advocate for the use of theoretical contributions like Dorinne Kondo’s “reparative creativity” as pedagogical tools. I am chagrined to admit that though I taught this course previously in 2015, it took the anti-Asian violence in the US during the COVID–19 pandemic for me to incorporate and name Asian American dramaturgies in the course. I shared this with my students as evidence of my complicity with racism and its impacts on my pedagogy (was it the prevalence of the model minority myth that led to the absence of Asian Americanist critique in my 2015 syllabus?) and to model solidarity and justice as pedagogical tactics in need of constant energy and commitment. I share it here to practice accountability as a white educator. Kondo’s reparative creativity, a theory of performance’s worldmaking capacities toward liberation, is developed through her own artistic practice as both a dramaturg and playwright. In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , Kondo includes a variety of writings, from reflections on her experiences as a spectator and artist, to scholarly analyses of racial capitalism, to her full-length play Seamless . Thinking across these modes allows students to integrate script analysis with sociocultural structural analysis, to understand stakes as not only present in a script as a matter of dramatic structure but also vital to our decisions about season selection, marketing and promotion, educational programming, and audience outreach—to the myriad ways that performance functions as worldmaking. Kondo’s work has inspired this special issue of JADT , the summer 2022 Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) conference theme, and my own research on racialization and embodiment. I wanted to give students this concept as one of their theoretical tools to think and make with as dramaturgs. Part of my responsibility as an educator, as I have learned from Felicia Rose Chavez’s teachings on antiracism in the creative classroom, is to clarify and name explicitly for my students that we are tracing power dynamics and their impacts on the historical development of dramatic theatre as we move amongst units. [2] While in this reflection I single out our unit on Asian American dramaturgies, I want to clarify that my approach to structuring the syllabus names each unit out of a desire to counter what Kondo characterizes as “power-evasive liberalism” and its “cousins,” “humanist multiculturalism” and color blindness. [3] My approach may, at first glance, appear as cultural tourism, where we spend a couple of weeks on each identity category and leave whiteness unmarked. [4] Instead, our class analyzed racialization as a project of all production, for example how Lisa Kron, Jeanine Tesori, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home engages with whiteness. This structure intends to counter a traditional drama pedagogy in higher education wherein, as Kondo writes, “the majority of plays are white but rarely marked as such.” [5] My goals for our collective thinking through this unit were threefold: to introduce more contemporary Asian American playwrights to myself and my students, to model some kinds of research that a dramaturg working on a production of a particular text might need to do, and to locate theatrical production in a vibrant practice of Asian Americanist critique. Our contemporary Asian American dramaturgies unit comprised four sessions addressing the following materials: Lauren Yee’s 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman ; Kat Chow’s journalism on the history of “Ching Chong” as a racial slur; Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts” in our textbook, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy ; selections from Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 memoir Minor Feelings ; Kondo’s play Seamless and her chapter “Racial Affect and Affective Violence”; and Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance.” [6] As a way of establishing the experiential knowledge in the room, I asked students to reflect individually, by writing, on two sets of questions: What do you “know” about Asian Americans? How do you know it? What stereotypes have you encountered? How have you participated in stereotyping? [7] Can you name an Asian American playwright? Have you seen an Asian American playwright’s work produced? If so, who, where, and when? Have you encountered Asian American characters onstage? If so, who, where, and when? Students were given the choice regarding the first cluster of questions as to how much of their individual reflection they wanted to share in the group discussion. I also participated in the reflection and sharing. No students in this course self-identified as Asian American. Had this been otherwise, I would rethink this exercise – not eliminate it, but consider possible harms to Asian American folks in the room and reconsider the format given my own whiteness and its impacts. I did instruct students that if they wanted to share with the group, they needed to share through “I” statements. I emphasized that while in their personal reflections racial slurs may be part of their experience of Asian American stereotyping, we would not voice those slurs in our group discussion, a continuation of a class policy we had used all semester based on Koritha Mitchell’s teachings about discursive violence. [8] I found that the first set of questions produced predictable responses in the sense that racialized minoritarian identities are perpetuated through resilient stereotypes, here of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” as non-conforming to white US American ideals of masculinity and femininity, as linguistically “other,” and as pursuing academic achievement no matter the cost. Students had quite a bit to say in response to this first set of questions, which made the relatively short discussion of the second set of questions stand out. In our brief discussion of the second set of questions, two concerns for me as the instructor emerged: the first was a general conflation of Asian with Asian American. [9] Given the paucity of Asian American representation on US stages, I wasn’t exactly surprised that my students listed any Asian character they had encountered in a US production. The vast majority of characters on this list were defined through the violence of colonial encounter and compulsory heterosexuality, such as King Mongkut from The King and I and Kim from Miss Saigon . My second concern resulted from the dominance of male playwrights on the students’ lists: David Henry Hwang and Qui Nguyen were the two most frequently cited playwrights. One student mentioned Young Jean Lee, but otherwise female Asian American playwrights were not represented. Through this discussion, I realized that I had organized our Asian American dramaturgies unit without consciously attending to gender dynamics, so my selections provided a serendipitous, but nonetheless necessary, corrective that, in the future, I would be more intentional about framing. Rather than giving a sequential account of how these four sessions went, I want to emphasize some unexpected, rich, and welcome connections that emerged through the confluence of these readings. I firstly note that these authors, while all identifying as female, represent a range of Asian American identities (with the exception of Carpenter) that are taken up in their respective texts, including Chinese American, Japanese American, and Korean American communities. This turned out to be a particularly needed intervention into the generalization of “Asians” that students had experienced. The pairing of the two dramas—Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman and Kondo’s Seamless —demonstrated the breadth of dramatic possibility that Asian American dramaturgies explore, and both plays read wonderfully on the page. Yee’s play is a laugh-out-loud comedy, filled with linguistic and physical humor, that moves at a rapid clip through the Wong family’s expert assimilation into US American tropes of “Chineseness.” Kondo’s play, a family drama, proceeds at a steady, more meditative pace, and takes up painful histories of Japanese American incarceration, as it stages the lead character’s confrontations with familial and national pasts. While Yee’s play is more realistic, both texts incorporate stylistic tactics of realism and non-realism and allowed for comparison with other texts throughout the syllabus. I felt it was important to begin this unit with a comedy in order to continue our discussions of the importance of affirming the right of minoritarian actors to have fun onstage, to appear and labor without the necessity of staging trauma. Both of these plays open with the staging of a family portrait (another connection to previous texts in our course like Fun Home ). In Yee’s comedy, the Wongs are attempting their annual Christmas card portrait as they deliver rapid-fire dialogue satirizing the US cultural hegemony of Christmas. The characters freely stereotype Chinese Americans, white Americans, and Christians in hyperbolic prose; the scene ends with a camera flash, directly preceded by patriarch Ed Wong’s line, a cue to racial alienation: “Everyone open their eyes nice and wide now.” [10] Kondo’s play likewise stages a family portrait that ends with a camera flash. Unlike Yee, Kondo opens with direct address to the audience, as the characters introduce themselves and provide a running commentary on each other’s characterizations. Characters occasionally share sentences, each speaking a fragment, in contrast to Yee’s realistic dialogue. The scene ends: KEN: Because you see. MASAKO: We’re a very. BEN: Happy. DIANE: Family. [11] Paying attention to the opening beat of a script is standard script analysis training for the dramaturg. Comparing Kondo and Yee countered the collapsing of distinct Asian American identities into a homogenous group as we traced how these playwrights depart in their dramatic structures following their shared set-up in order to articulate differential experiences of US racial projects. Another serendipitous cluster of inquiry emerged around critical race theory and affect theory as tools the dramaturg might bring to bear on structures of composition and representation. Our initial discussions about Asian American stereotypes on- and offstage were paired with discussion of Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts.” In this essay, Carpenter introduces the term “racial scripts” to indicate the interconnectedness of racial projects, i.e., plays ostensibly “about” race, with racial projects , i.e., the systemic distribution of resources according to racialized hierarchies of identity as defined by critical race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. [12] Carpenter’s work affirms Kondo’s dramaturgical approach wherein “Instead of asking what race is , I ask what work it is doing, when, for whom?” [13] Carpenter’s account of dramaturging Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2012 production of Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man at Center Stage in Baltimore compellingly models how the dramaturg navigates both kinds of racial projects. This reading became critically important to how our Asian American dramaturgies unit unfolded because Carpenter’s terminology of racial scripts allowed our class to reflect back on our initial discussions about stereotypes and characterization, to see how systemic critique is often pushed aside in favor of psychological critique (particularly in the US American theatre and its obsession with psychological realism), and to acknowledge how an incessant focus on individualized racial identity avoids recognizing the structural workings of racial projects. A second cluster of ideas around feeling was another example of an effective, though accidental, compositional choice for our unit. I included, respectively, Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow” in order to tie back to our previous unit on musical theatre, Dorinne Kondo’s “Racial Affect and Affective Violence” because of its readability and complexity, and selections from Cathy Park Hong’s memoir Minor Feelings to engage with contemporary Asian Americanist critique written for a general audience. These readings shared an investment in feeling, or affect, as evidence of racial projects and formed a primer in affect theory for our class that was sited in the seats of the theatre. They also share a grounded, first-person address that is integrated with textual analysis and cultural critique. Our discussion of these texts emphasized another of the course’s through-lines: that artists are not geniuses whose creative production is somehow above or below the political and the social. We are responsible for our content and to our audiences. I’d like to offer a teaching tool related to sharing dense scholarly texts. For Galella’s essay, I asked students to prepare a 3-2-1 assignment: identify 3 main points, choose 2 significant quotations, and propose 1 question to the class based on the insights of the reading. [14] Shared with permission, here are a few of their insights: There is a lot of hidden emotional labor that we ask of people…amplified through the work of marginalized groups—white folk need to take on educating themselves, rather than asking those within the group to explain. Why has it taken this long for creators, designers, and writers to notice the problem in this industry? It seems like all of a sudden every regional theatre developed a “new plan of action” for equal opportunity and diversity on stage, which is fantastic, but it seems like they are only doing it because everyone else is. Commonly selected quotes included: “A theory of feeling yellow makes visible how white supremacy preserves pleasure for the privileged in order to preserve hierarchy” and “While quiet dissent may not move the majority, loud laughter moves the minoritized. Racialized representation can make the spectator of color painfully conscious of racism even in anticipation of a performance.” [15] When I reviewed the students’ 3-2-1s, I observed that moving from Carpenter to Galella, as we moved through the plays, helped students identify connecting personal responses to dramatic material to structural critiques of US culture as dramaturgical work. We turned this theoretical discussion toward the concrete realities of season selection at our institution. Season selection was happening concurrently with our course and discussing a hypothetical season proposal that included both Kondo’s and Yee’s plays made space for students to be self-reflective, in terms of considering their roles and investments in our department, and also to engage in institutional critique, particularly of the commonplace, incorrect, and violent excuse of not selecting particular texts because “we don’t have the actors for that.” [16] Students noted the reappearance of this logic in our discussions, as we had previously analyzed texts that called for primarily Black and African diasporic casts and primarily Indigenous casts, in relation to the demands placed on minoritarian playwrights if they wish to see their plays regularly produced. Rather than lumping together racialized “others” through our course units, we used our tools from this unit’s authors, particularly those of systemic critique, to understand these plays as being in a relation of solidarity within racial projects that structure performance-making in North America. In this way Drew Hayden Taylor’s Berlin Blues and Yee’s Ching Chong Chinamen are similar not because they are comedies centered on people belonging to particular minoritarian identities written by playwrights belonging to these communities (and thus checking a set of diversity boxes) but because they are composed, produced, and received in a white supremacist theatrical environment that seeks to constrain their meanings. As I prepared this reflection for publication in early 2022, the Public Theater in New York produced Out of Time , a monologue project “written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over age 60.” [17] Days later, an Asian American performer who was headed to the Public to perform as part of a Lion Dance program before the first preview of Lloyd Suh’s drama The Chinese Lady was assaulted in a public act of anti-Asian violence. [18] This assault was a material consequence of anti-Asian racism experienced simultaneously with increased visibility for Asian American theatrical production within white cultural hegemony. This concurrence, as both a contemporary outcome of white supremacy and as related to long histories of violence against racialized “others” in the US, reflects the urgent stakes of the classic dramaturgical question “why this play now?” Asking this question of each play on our syllabus and in our season points to the necessity of centering minoritarian artistic production as an ethical pedagogical and dramaturgical practice. How does this play serve our students, our audience, and our worldmaking, be they harms or reparations? Kondo’s reparative creativity, as well as its intersection with other theoretical tools like critical race theory and affect theory, gives students language with which to answer these questions. I hope that readers who do not already engage with Asian Americanist dramaturgies will incorporate these readings into not only their own courses (and they certainly resonate beyond the dramaturgy classroom) but also the systems we teach with and inside of, like auditions, admissions, casting, season selection, internship placement, hiring, and guest artist residencies, among others. References [1] This tripartite focus (form, content, means of production) is inspired by the “grid of politicality” theorized by Ana Vujanovi´c, after Randy Martin, as the multidimensional space where we might register the politics of performance. For this theorization, see Vujanovi´c, “Notes on the Politicality of Contemporary Dance,” in Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, Vol. 1 , ed. Stefan Hölscher and Gerald Siegmund (Zurich: Diaphenes, 2013), 181-191. [2] In her book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), Chavez writes, “It’s our responsibility as workshop leaders to verbalize our anti-racist agenda for them [students], in clear, unapologetic language, language that opens doors instead of closes them” (24). [3] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131. [4] I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer who encouraged me to better clarify the structure of the course and the possible reading of cultural tourism. [5] Kondo, Worldmaking , 169. [6] Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing Racial Scripts On and Beyond the Stage” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy , ed. Magda Romanska (London: Routledge, 2015), 145-150; Kat Chow, “How ‘Ching Chong’ Became the Go-To Slur for Mocking East Asians,” Code Switch , New York Public Radio, NPR, New York, NY: WNYC, 14 July 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/330769890/how-ching-chong-became-the-go-to-slur-for-mocking-east-asians (accessed 18 August 2021); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings (New York: One World, 2020); Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77; Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ; Lauren Yee, Ching Chong Chinaman (New York: Samuel French Acting Edition, 2011). [7] The emphasis on stereotyping in this set of questions relates to a broader throughline in the course about how identity-based stereotyping impacts dramaturgy as both composition and representation, and builds on prior discussion in the course about gender stereotypes in musical theatre and colonial stereotypes about Indigenous peoples in a previous unit on Indigenous dramaturgies and comedy. [8] Mitchell’s ideas and policies about discursive violence in the classroom are also available as a podcast at http://www.korithamitchell.com/teaching-and-the-n-word/. [9] I thank Donatella Galella for drawing my attention to Lisa Lowe’s formulation of “forever foreigners” to characterize this common racist experience ( Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996]). [10] Ching Chong Chinaman , 8. [11] Worldmaking , 242. [12] Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing,” 145-146. [13] Kondo, 169. [14] This tactic revises a popular K-12 teaching strategy wherein at the end of a class, students complete an exit ticket and identify 3 things they learned, select 2 things they want to learn more about, and formulate 1 question. [15] Galella, “Feeling Yellow,” 71, 73. [16] In future iterations of this course, I plan to include additional reading around the casting conversation, including the work of Brian Eugenio Herrera in his essay “‘But Do We Have the Actors for That?’: Some Principles of Practice for Staging Latinx Plays in a University Theatre Context,” Theatre Topics 27, no. 1 (2017): 23-35. [17] Matt Stevens, “Shared Stories in Asian American Voices,” New York Times , 20 February 2022, AR9. [18] Leah Putnam, “Asian American Artist Attacked During Commute to Perform at The Public,” Playbill , 25 February 2022, https://www.playbill.com/article/asian-american-artist-attacked-during-commute-to-perform-at-the-public. Readers can find ways to take action against anti-Asian violence at www.StopAAPIHate.org. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ariel Nereson is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies and Director of Graduate Dance at the University at Buffalo – SUNY. She is the author of Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022). A recent Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she researches racialization, embodiment, and movement-based performance. She is also a choreographer and dramaturg. I thank Donatella Galella and the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous challenges and affirmations provided in their feedback. I thank my students for being in conversation with me and for understanding our classroom as a space of worldmaking. 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 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Al Límite Collective's work Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Newtown Creek Alliance. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Al Límite Collective Interactive Theater Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn Meet at the entry near 59 Paidge Ave. Newtown Creek Alliance Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event Walk along the banks of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk with this community-engaged theater performance while hearing the stories and visions of local residents and activists who dream to topple their neighbor, a giant fracked gas depot, and imagine what the landscape could be if National Grid's site was decommissioned and the land rehabilitated. * With text from interviews with: Margot Spindelman, Katherine Thompson, Kier Blake, Anna Tsomo, EW Fye, GiGi Niesen, Kevin LaCherra, William Vega, Kim Fraczek, Willis Elkins, Eric Kun. Al Límite Collective Leah Bachar is a performer/producer/director/experimenter. Fascinated with human connection, Leah is drawn to public performance and unique, interactive situations that create an open arena for spontaneous experiences and promote no barriers between the spectators and performers. With a deep interest in ritualistic theatre and the healing properties of the arts, she combines her passion for guerrilla theatre, different cultures, the written word, surreal stagings, entering trance states, dancing, radical artistic collaboration, social experiments, and curating happenings where performance art and human healing intertwine. Realizing the powerful social and political message that the arts emit, Leah is interested in initiating conversations and introducing people to one another who wouldn’t normally meet in order to help facilitate a greater universal discourse between artists and their communities. Monica Dudárov Hunken is an activist, storyteller, and teacher who creates docu-adventure plays inspired by her international bicycle voyages. Monica is touring a solo performance with music called Mt Rushmore, developed at her artist residency in SPACE on Ryder Farm and the Fish Factory in Iceland. She has performed it in the On Women Theater Festival at Irondale, NYC’s Exponential Theatre Festival, The Brick Theatre, MKE Fringe, Charm City Fringe, International Festival for Making Theater in Athens, Greece. She is a current CulturePush Fellow and is developing a traveling Drag performance and participatory Drag transformation project called DragCycle in Brooklyn in 2023/2024. As a repeat recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Fund, she co-devised an outdoor, site specific piece along the route of the North Brooklyn Pipeline with theater company, Al Límite Collective, a company she co-founded. Al Límite Collective completed a tour across Europe summer 2023 leading workshops in storytelling, street performance and remounting the Living Theatre show, Electric Awakening, and then were invited by the historic Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine for their second annual Feminist Festival in September 2023. https://www.monicahunken.com/ Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the entry near 59 Paidge Ave. Newtown Creek Alliance Here are some transportation possibilities: Bus: Take the B43 Bus to the Manhattan Ave and Clay Street Stop then walk 8 minutes on Clay street over to the end of Paidge Ave to the Nature Walk entrance. Train: Take the G train to Greenpoint Ave stop, walk 13 minutes on India Street to Provost St to Paidge Ave Citi Bike: Drop off a Citi Bike at the 371-383 McGuinness Blvd station or the 1164 Manhattan Ave station The Newtown Creek Alliance is a community-based organization dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalizing Newtown Creek. The Newtown Creek Alliance works to restore the Creek by securing mitigation and remediation of known environmental hazards – both in the neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek and in Newtown Creek itself – reporting ongoing sources of pollution, and preventing new pollution. To restore the ecological functions of the waterway, the Newtown Creek Alliance supports investments in green infrastructure, bioremediation, and habitat restoration. The Newtown Creek Alliance endeavors to reveal the Creek by conducting tours by foot, bike, bus, and boat that educate the public about the history of the waterway and current activity. We also work to nurture and expand open spaces along Newtown Creek to enable public access to a waterway which has few public access points and we partner with educational institutions to teach Newtown Creek-based curricula. The Newtown Creek Alliance helps revitalize watershed communities by playing a leadership role in area-wide brownfield redevelopment planning, creating programs that improve the environmental profile of industrial businesses, and engaging in workforce development to create local green jobs. Our work supports environmental, economic, and human health. Visit Partner Website

Elliot Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Dead Outlaw Elliot Lee By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Left to right: Thom Sesma, Andrew Durand, Dashiell Eaves. Photo: Matthew Murphy. Dead Outlaw By David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses Directed by David Cromer The Audible Theater New York, NY April 13, 2024 Reviewed by Elliot Lee The first song in Dead Outlaw, a new musical by David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses, prepares its audience to make peace with the inevitable: “Your mama’s dead / Your daddy’s dead / Your brother’s dead / And so are you,” the singers wail. “Balzac is dead / Tupac is dead / Anne Frank is dead / And so are you!” Directed by David Cromer at the Audible Theater, the musical recounts the life of nineteenth-century outlaw Elmer McCurdy, narrated through gritty country rock played by an onstage band. Halfway through the musical, McCurdy dies. The rest of the show traces his afterlife, from the coroner’s office to the discovery of his shriveled, orange spray-painted remains among the décor of a defunct rollercoaster ride. In the first half of the play, Andrew Durand gallivanted around an ever-shifting wooden frame, evocative of a barn strewn with fairy lights. As the titular outlaw, Durand executed impressive feats of vocal and physical prowess, climbing, pushing, and hanging upside down from various parts of the frame while singing. After his character’s death, Durand spent the rest of the show standing stock-still, carted around in an uncovered coffin as other characters sold and mistreated his dead body. The story transforms from an outlaw tale into an unsettling exposé of how entertainment immortalizes, profits, and desecrates memory. On Audible Theater’s stage, Dead Outlaw ’s message about exploiting the dead became a self-referential jab at the popularity of biographical musicals on and off Broadway. Biographical musicals take inspiration from historical figures, tracing a life from childhood until death. Dead Outlaw falls into this genre but takes it one step further into McCurdy’s afterlife. However, while biographical musicals tend to be linear, Dead Outlaw is more experimental in structure. In form, it is a concept musical, a genre stitching together songs driven by theme and character. Specifically, Dead Outlaw ’s vignettes are tied together by McCurdy’s physical body, initially offering snapshots from his life, and later, depicting the various people and places his corpse encounters. At the Audible Theater, the absurdity of these vignettes brought the audience into a more self-conscious relationship with McCurdy, transforming him from a character into a symbol. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it to subvert expectations of the biographical musical as well as (metatheatrically) question commercial theatre’s obsession with dead people’s lives. Dead Outlaw thus exposed the exploitative nature inherent in a genre that profits from history. “Now I’m an entrepreneur . . . Death is a business to me!” While other biographical musicals pick and choose from scattered life events to create a palatable narrative, Dead Outlaw does not build McCurdy up as a hero or a villain. Instead, the production made McCurdy realistically mediocre, in personality and in outlaw work. In the character’s short life, Cromer created equally arresting vignettes of magic and despondency. In one moment, McCurdy twirled his first love under glittering fairy lights. In the next scene, drums echoed the familiar rhythms of McCurdy downing drinks at the bar. Not only was McCurdy abrasive, racist, and flighty, but he also proved to be an incompetent outlaw in Cromer’s well-timed comedic sequences. In one sequence, McCurdy and an army friend hatched a plan to steal from townsfolk, only to be arrested before committing a single crime. In another, McCurdy sang a stirring number about robbing a train carrying a royalty payment to the Osage nation, only to end up on the wrong train. Dead Outlaw also critiques a theme often at the heart of the biographical musical genre: legacy (one famous example is Hamilton ’s titular character, obsessed with the legacy of his political work to the point of neglecting his familial responsibilities). As an ambitious young man, McCurdy is no exception, but Dead Outlaw ’s story extends beyond his life to show the disturbing consequences of legacy through the ordeals of his corpse. After cycling through various professions in a Pippin -esque pursuit of purpose, McCurdy finally achieves fame upon dying. When nobody retrieved his corpse, the coroners displayed him as an attraction, singing, “See the dead outlaw! ... Something from nothing at all!” Crowds spin McCurdy’s deeds into grand tales of cowboy daring in show-stopping ensemble numbers, admiring him as a relic of a bygone West. Once on display, McCurdy’s body mummified in the heat of the coroner’s office, staged through a sequence in which Durand contorted inside his coffin. Exploited, sold, and paraded around the stage in pastiches of sideshow grit and glamour, McCurdy’s corpse was passed from owner to owner. Lastly, rotting away as a beachside attraction, staff wired shut McCurdy’s jaw, silencing Durand for the remaining half hour of the show. Dead Outlaw tells the story of McCurdy getting the legacy he wanted and the grim consequences of being remembered forever. This message was most effective when stark shifts in design and impressive physical acting allowed the show’s dark irony to give way to a total confrontation with the abject. For example, when McCurdy’s mummy was forgotten in a storage facility, Durand stood in an entirely dark theatre for an uncomfortable minute of total silence. Sitting with Durand in the darkness elicited both uncomfortable laughter and sobbing from the audience. These moments served as a reminder of the cadaverous quality that could elude any living, breathing portrayal: decay, evoking both repulsion and recognition. Through these moments of theatricalized abjection, McCurdy’s corpse physicalized the desecration of memory. The production turned the horrific implications of legacy into something tangible and vile. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it not simply to criticize its own genre, but also its audience. Concept musicals can use the affective delight of song and dance against the audience before implicating them in their uncritical enjoyment of the material. As audiences clapped along to country rock, they realized too late that the musical in front of them was the latest in McCurdy’s tortures. By encouraging musical biographies to be retold, the audience became complicit in keeping McCurdy’s legacy alive. Dead Outlaw thus makes itself the biographical musical to end biographical musicals. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELLIOT LEE (he/him) is pursuing his M.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama. He holds a B.A. in English from Princeton University. His work focuses on experimental musical theater and portrayals of violence in performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Devika Ranjan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress. Elizabeth Son. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 267. Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings focuses on activism by and around “comfort women” in disparate settings in South Korea and internationally. Through four case study chapters, Son’s empathetic ethnography depicts how reparations need not be institutionalized but can thrive in the hands of everyday people—namely, the survivors of military sexual violence and their supporters. The first study of the embodied practices of “comfort women,” Son’s award-winning book demonstrates the power of performance to enact presence, protest, and acts of care as a means of social healing. Son’s interdisciplinary perspective draws on cultural studies, performance theory, and intersectional feminist analysis to create a powerful, multifaceted portrait of restitution. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military enslaved about 200,000 girls and young women; the majority were between 14 and 19 years old. The girls and women were trafficked to rape camps to serve the Japanese military, where they were sexually abused by between 10 to 40 men daily. Even after the war, survivors faced shame, ostracization, chronic injury, and lifelong trauma. Son holistically analyzes the redress movement in Korea and survivors’ complex post-war identities as “victim, survivor, living witness, halmeoni, history teacher, and peace protestor” (17). Many “comfort women”—Son uses this term in quotes to indicate its euphemistic and problematic nature—advocate for the “Japanese government’s acknowledgement of Japanese military sexual slavery, an official apology, and reparations” (xviii). The survivors’ demand for apology goes beyond monetary reparations; they have committed to donating any money to international survivors of sexual violence (18). Rather, their advocacy works to resolve “han, the Korean concept for the knotted feelings of resentment, sorrow, indignation, and injustice that built over years of hardship and oppression” (11). Son argues that activist-survivors’ “redressive acts,” or embodied practices, center their self-narratives within public space for multiple audiences, restoring their social status and commemorating their history. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth ethnography of the Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, the “longest running political demonstration in South Korea and one of the longest ongoing protests in the world” (28). The Wednesday Demonstrations, which take place in front of the Japanese Embassy, enact a weekly protest to uplift the survivors and their demands for apology from the Japanese government. Although there has not been official redress since the protests started in 1992, Son argues that the Wednesday Demonstrations meaningfully allow survivors an “opportunity to express their visceral feelings of han and to join others in calling for justice (29)”; they also counteract societal shame around “comfort women” by providing a visible platform for recognizing the victims of sexual slavery in intergenerational settings. Through sonic and physical disruption, the Wednesday Demonstrations provide “redressive acts,” staging protest, education, release, rejuvenation, critique, and international solidarity. In Chapter 2, Son discusses the Women’s Tribunal, a “symbolic international human rights tribunal” (71) created by feminist and human rights organizations. Held in Tokyo in 2000, the Women’s Tribunal aimed to restore survivors’ political and social status and dignity by giving them a legitimized day in court. Centering the testimonies of 33 survivors from North and South Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and East Timor, international judges created a “legal case against Japan and produced a more complete history of Japanese military sexual slavery” (68). During the Tribunal, survivors challenged existing and limited legal frameworks through their embodied reactions such as fainting, revelations of scars, demonstrations of physical pain, and tears; their vulnerability and embodied practices prompted the court to consider “how to honor victims and their needs while judging guilt via traditional court processes that are not always friendly to victims” (68). The Women’s Tribunal attracted thousands of attendees who bore witness to the stories of the survivors, presenting redressive measures outside of normal state jurisdiction in legitimizing survivors’ experiences. It also created a model for a culture of public accountability for sexual violence during armed conflict, directly inspiring the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala (1960-96). In Chapter 3, Son compares three theatrical productions that focus on “comfort women” around the world. In Comfort Women / Nabi / Hanako (the name depends on the place and time of production), a grandmother must confront her repressed memories of being a “comfort woman” when her granddaughter introduces her to two survivors in New York. The play encourages transnational identification, indicates the ongoing nature of shame around “comfort women,” and suggests multiple survivors: some who hide their history from their own families, some who are public advocates. Trojan Women, a play by Bosnian-born director Aida Karic, brings Euripides’ tragedy in conversation with the “modern history of sexual violence against women and girls by the military of Imperial Japan” (121). The play used pansori, survivor testimony, movement, Euripides’ classic text, and ritualistic elements to invite European audiences to identify patterns of sexual violence throughout history. Finally, Bongseonhwa directly critiques Korean society for its silence, shame, and abuse of “comfort women” through its intergenerational story. Each performance emphasizes different aspects and cultural contexts of survivors’ experiences, yet all invite audiences to witness, reflect, and connect to how sexual violence against women recurs in wars and ripples across society. Chapter 4 analyzes international memorials to the survivors of military sexual slavery. The Bronze Girl, a statue that sits in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul highlights the age and vulnerability of the survivors who were abused in “comfort stations.” It also commemorates survivors’ years of activism for the Wednesday Demonstrations. The Bronze Girl is cared for by visitors who dress the statue for the weather, leave her gifts like shoes, flowers, and food, and touch her in reassurance. Son describes similar acts of care at memorials in the United States, including the Bronze Girl in California and a memorial in New Jersey, where visitors leave bouquets, tidy the lawns, or water shrubbery. These acts of care demonstrate international support, carrying on the protests against sexual slavery after the survivors pass away. While official apology from the Japanese government may never come to fruition, Son’s Embodied Reckonings demonstrates how redress can extend beyond state or institutional acts. This book’s transpacific lens considers how activism and performance, education, memory and community-building can teach subsequent generations about sexual violence, restore survivors’ dignity, and reimagine reparations, more broadly. In a world in which international politics often offers symbolic gestures in response to systemic and personal injustices, I am inspired by the embodied actions of “comfort women” to advocate, educate, and heal locally and internationally. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch next...II (Mali/Island) by Janne Gregor at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents next...II (Mali/Island) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Janne Gregor Dance, Documentary, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Island, Mali, Germany Language English, French, Bambara Running Time 50 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? Credits Artistic Direction: Janne Gregor, Artist Bamako: Kettly Noël, Artist Iceland: Charmene Pang, Camera Bamako: Salimata Tapily, Camera Iceland: Omra Harding, Music: Moritz Thorbeckebased on the song „Vex“ by Sigrún including Ngomi tracks played by Yacouba Sissoko and voice tracks by Sigrún, Editor + Advice: Lutz Gregor, Production: Sina Kießling, Iceland location scout: Dísa Hulda Árnadóttir, Revision Subtitles: Anke Nehrig, Nora Amin Thanks to Thomas Schaupp, Arnbjörg María Danielsen, Nah Kamaké, Erna Ómarsdóttir, Oumou Diarra, Nassiga Coulibaly dit Coumba, Kolo Traoré dit Tènin, Mariam M. Traoré, Mariam K. Traoré, Fatoumata Traoré, Maminata Traoré, Yaya Traoré, Boubacar Gakou, Djelika dit Mama Traoré, Amberscript, Anti Logic Mastering. Research Phase 2021/ 22: Created in the context of GOETHE MORPH* ICELAND, with the support of the Goethe-Institut. Project Realisation 2022: Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Minister of State for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance. About The Artist(s) Janne Gregor born in Berlin, is a choreographer, performer and was a team member of the steering group of the dance mediation centre Berlin. She studied physical theatre and completed her MA Choreography at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin – HZT in 2017. Her intergenerational and interdisciplinary works have been shown at various theatres since 2006: e.g. Nordic House Reykjavík/Iceland, Radialsystem, TD Berlin, Donko Seko Bamako/Mali, Houseclub des Hebbel am Ufer – HAU Berlin, LOFFT Leipzig, Junges Staatstheater Braunschweig…, Junges DT/Deutsches Theater, Schwankhalle Bremen, Fringe Festival/Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Orangerie Köln, Tanzfabrik, Tanzkomplizen, Theater o.N., Uferstudios Berlin. As a performer she has worked with, among others: Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Micha Purucker, Willi Dorner, Kiriakos Hadjiioannou, Michael Vogel (Familie Flöz), Theater Duisburg, Theater Strahl Berlin, Consol Theater Gelsenkirchen, Jule Gruner (Schauspiel Dortmund). Get in touch with the artist(s) mail@jannegregor.de and follow them on social media www.jannegregor.de Facebook: Janne Gregor Instagram: Janne Gregor Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Jesus and The Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Jesus and The Sea At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Ricarda Alvarenga Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film showcase) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language non-verbal Running Time 4 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture. About The Artist(s) They are a professor in the Dance undergraduate program at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais; a Ph.D. candidate in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and hold a master's degree from the Dance Graduate Program at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) in Salvador, Bahia. Their work mobilizes actions and compositions in performance, contemporary dance, photography, video, installations, and writing — inferring and interfering with life as a work of art. Get in touch with the artist(s) provisoriocorpo@gmail.com and follow them on social media @ricardalvarenga Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Cover Photo provided by DARUM Ranging from restagings of historical dance pieces to AI driven work as well as completely new works and interpretations of classical works by top level world directors, the 62nd Annual Berliner Theatertreffen presented productions that displayed the incredible variety of the contemporary German stage. The “Ten Remarkable Productions” considered several levels of reality; three productions considered artificial intelligence, many could have been considered musical works, several others were driven by language, and all were defined by strong, clear directorial styles. As has been the case during the recent history of the festival, top level world directors and highly developed, company-driven works contribute to the success of the Theatertreffen; the 2025 version provided exceptional insight into the solid artistic environment that dominates the landscape of the current German and especially Berlin stage. Despite the numerous cuts to funding and occasional pessimism expressed, the German Stage has once again responded with historically significant work and the future of the Theatertreffen only looks to be more positive. Unfortunately, given the nature of production scheduling in 2025 it was nearly impossible to see all ten productions live. Thankfully, at least three were available to watch on German Television (3SAT) for much of the Summer, and the number of performances and availability of theatre spaces had diminished somewhat. Most of the productions featured in the 2025 Theatertreffen have been considered in this review, however it may be that one or more will be featured in a later article due to viewing difficulties. Sancta Susanna was banned at its 1921 planned premiere at Stuttgart Opera due to its insinuation of lewd subject matter according to historical archives. Paul Hindemith’s 1920 opera considers the sexual awakening of a nun; the original libretto includes a scene that calls for the nun to take off her habit and stand naked in front of the collective in order to display her need and desire for sexual engagement. Fast forward 100 years to Mecklenburg, Germany, where Sancta had its 21st Century premiere. Directed by Florentina Holzinger, an artist known for her productions displaying naked female bodies, the work featured an entire stage full of naked women for the bulk of the performance and provided incredible commentary on the historical issues dealt with in the text as well as the state of the contemporary church, religion and the world in general for that matter. Sancta , staging by Florentina Holzinger. Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak. Holzinger’s work was incredibly well conceived and executed; it served as an incredible landmark for the German stage in the boldness of the creation of an original aesthetic – the reverence of the naked female form. While it was conceived at the Mecklenburgish’s Straatstheater, the legacy of Holzinger, an Austrian dancer/choreographer, has been at the Berliner Volksbühne and her work, better than any other contemporary director at the festival, seemed to embody that tradition of Frank Castorf and the incredible aesthetic and unparalleled “edginess” that was characteristic of Castorf at the Volksbühne. Because the work played in the theatre, there was an amazing fit between the challenges of the SANCTA, the elements of production previously realized on the Volksbühne stage, the nature of the way that the material was presented and the use of onstage as well as offstage and pre-taped video sequences. The single set included numerous challenging areas; basically, a stage “obstacle course,” because, in addition to the multimedia elements such as a multiple screens as well as actors holding cameras and recording onstage action, the elements of both a climbing wall as well as a competitive ramped skating velodrome were included into the stage design. All of those elements were complemented by a singularly unique device that is currently apparently unnamed. I have reached out to numerous sources and no one can provide a name to the amazing piece of machinery that consisted of an approximately twelve foot high solid base obelisk shaped figure that had a single working arm capable of lifting and displaying both very heavy as well as very light objects with incredible clarity and dexterity. Something of a robot-figure, the device was used throughout the production, lifting humans, small objects and numerous elements required by Holzinger’s telling of this miraculous story. The video elements were outstanding and included live time, onstage taping of numerous elements in addition to pretaped and historical video sequences. Characteristic of many previous Castorf works, the element of an arriving figure into the theatre via a video stream was utilized; however in this case the character of Jesus was realized as arriving late to the performance. Captured in a live time video sequence the scene was played by the incredible German actress Annina Machaz and after her arrival onstage she engaged in an elaborate onstage discussion with the audience, driven by the delivery of a comical sequence of events that resulted in a number of hilarious, comic scenes that also involved many of the naked women already onstage. The work also directed its attention to numerous actual stories of physical abuse and sexual activity (rape, physical groping, adultery) within the church. These were presented as “confessionals” utilizing the multimedia environment and several previously taped scenes were also included. Sancta , staging by Florentina Holzinger. Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak. The work included so many incredible scenes it would be a difficult task to list them all. However, during one sequence an actress “stood in” for the role of Jesus each evening of the three TT performances and an actual small scale operation took place. Apparently, during each performance a surgical procedure took place with each of the three actresses having a very small portion of their skin surgically removed and the entire process revealed on camera. The small, circular portion of skin was then actually fried live on stage in a small pan with the same video process recounting that as well. Later, the small fried piece of flesh was used to demonstrate the biblical phrase “this is my flesh..” More than any work I have seen at the Volksbühne in over 20 years, the work managed to forward the amazing aesthetic developed by Castorf and to really push the limits of theatrical production. The result was an amazing work that, in the spirit of Artaud, shook audience members to the very core of their being. Sancta established Holzinger as one of Europe’s most sought after directors. Unser Deutschlandmärchen was a Theatertreffen selection to celebrate the substantial Turkish community and the story of their long history in Germany. Based on the novel by Dinçer Güçyeter with dramaturgy and direction by Hakan Savas Mican the work had been produced by Gorki Theater as part of the 2023-2024 season. The setting of the piece was in Cologne, and involved the lifetime of a family from Turkey that had relocated to Germany and it involved a period of time through the 1980s and 1990s that involved the family’s life in Germany. Their view of Germany came from the standpoint of being immigrants to the country, and was central to the story yet the style of the work, somewhat Brechtian in form. Several musical numbers, most of which did not really advance the plot, were included in the show and the onstage band of five musicians played an important part in the production. The flow of the action and the telling of the story of the Turkish immigrants was the key element of the production and the goal was quite obviously to utilize a very audience friendly manner in which to make it happen. Many musical numbers in a somewhat concert style were included. The work utilized a Brechtian/concert style format and slides emphasized key chronological times during the family’s life in Germany. At the point when the story landed in 1999, having begun in the early 1980s, a musical number entitled “I Want More Hard Rock” was sung by the the work really highlighted the family struggles of immigrants and the difficulties that so many Turkish migrants to Germany had endured. The work should be considered a musical, and utilized many original as well as popular interpolated Turkish songs into the story. The work was a rock music revue and featured numerous individual performers and musical scenes that developed the story of the Turkish family and their struggles while living in Germany. The work begins and ends with letters from Dinçer to his mother and ends in the same format. The supporting elements of the Gorki Theatre made sure that the performance was given the strongest theatrical system. The production was extremely well realized and easily figured into the “Ten Remarkable Productions” as a representative production. Sesede Terziyan in Unser Deutschlandmärchen . Photo by Ute Langkafel Another nominated work that came from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (an incredibly rare occurrence) included Bernarda Alba’s Haus directed by Katie Mitchell. The Lorca original included numerous scenes of tension and implied violence as the dominating matriarch of the established Spanish family was intent on preserving the “honor” of her deceased father and the legacy that he had established. Mitchell’s world for the play recounted the 2002 case of the Tuchol family in Riverside, California, where the father and mother managed to quarantine a family of four girls until many were in their mid-late 30’s and had never had any meaningful contact with the outside world. Mitchell’s world as created for Bernarda Alba was unrelenting; the four daughters were allowed no contact with the outside world; groceries were delivered to the house to prevent them from leaving the house and the girls spent much of their time in a group sewing room where they made all of their own clothing. The guider of the oppression, played by Julia Wieninger was unrelenting in her portrayal of the controlling and incredibly violent matriarch that held her daughters captive for many of their formative years. Mitchell’s directorial style naturally pushed the world to its extreme and the world became a complete prison. The stage design, beautifully realized by Alex Eales allowed both the stage (and eventual) film audience to realize the individual scenes of distress and horror that were part of the house that had been created by Bernarda Alba. Mitchell’s reimagination of the text included a world of several male characters who lurked outside attempting to interact with the four beautiful daughters of Alba. This element was made possible due to the Eale’s “doll house” design that allowed the audience to see characters in multiple spaces simultaneously. It was particularly effective near the end when numerous violent actions took place in separate rooms; as Adele, Linn Reuse’s spectacular suicide scene was then countered by a group mass suicide as all of the daughters, with the exception of Amanda who managed to escape, were forced to take a deadly dosage of Fentanyl. The horrific ending to the story was “classic Katie Mitchell” and, as is typical of her work, managed to clearly define the Lorca classic into the contemporary world. Simultaneous scenes in Bernarda Alba’s Haus , as staged by Katie Mitchell. Photos by Thomas Aurin. Double Serpent is Sam Max’s fantasy play that presents a male dominated world devoid of any female influence and explores the reality of that oppressive environment in something of a video game style. Directed by established German director Ersan Mondtag and commissioned by the Hessisches Stadtsheater Wiesbaden who realized the work of the newly emerged New York based artist, the staging was guided by a movement style driven by a specific soundtrack so that many of the character’s movements were underscored by carefully timed sound or musical details, such as a walking steps or other repeated movements. The storyline centered around Connor, a young man and Felix, an established movie producer. However, so many other issues emerge as time is fractured in the work and Felix returns to his past where a game called “Double Serpent” was played for a short time on computers prior to it’s being banned. It was there that he played the game with his imaginary friend “Eric,” but a much larger issue emerged later in the work as it was revealed that at some point Felix drugged him and harvested his organs for use for some undisclosed reason. Clearly the work was realized in a highly surreal manner and seemed to come from the standpoint of a dream where many events occurred but often the events were unrelated and did not often make sense in a concrete manner. There was one scene where Felix asked Connor to stand mid stage and a chorus of four naked men facing upstage stood in front of him around a “hot tub” – the intent was a group sex act directed toward Connor to be watched by Felix but the scene was not played out to fruition. Double Serpent dealt with numerous issues related to nightclub and party culture. The use of K (short for Ketamin, a popular party drug) was referenced throughout the play. According to the writer Max the story is based in the world of teens who consistently engage in the world of online gaming and interaction. Also the ideas of masculinity were explored - Max correctly noted that typically male driven stories leaned into the world of thriller or even horror stories. This work explored a highly controlled world where the politics and ruling authority was gauged in another manner. The staging of Max’s imaginary world presented the many combined elements of a (perhaps) toxic male driven society, and the results were an emotionless, physically driven world that exhibited pure male power and control. Sam Max’s Double Serpent . Photo by Thomas Aurin. End of Life was a performance installation created by DARUM (Vienna, Austria) and written, conceived and directed by Victoria Halper and Kai Kröschoe. Engagement with this virtual production was both a difficult and emotionally demanding challenge. Given a specific time by the Festspielhaus staff, audience members were instructed to arrive early and to prepare for a virtual experience of approximately two hours. Once taken into space, each audience member was given a headset that basically removed them from their physical world and placed them into an environment that engaged them visually with a virtual world where they would occasionally be required to move, bend down and occasionally lean, but mostly just required to be present in a standing position. The nature of the story that developed led into a discussion about many elements: the future of humanity, our concern for the sanctity of life, and the nature of how we view the prolonging of life. Audience engagement in End of Life . Photo taken (with permission) by author. Central to that discussion was the case of a young woman named Lisa with whom each audience member was taken on a journey with. There were many stops along the way and choices were given to each audience participant in order to craft an individualized journey. The virtual world created by the production team was incredibly well realized, thus the nomination as one of the best performance experiences in the German world for 2024-2025. Produced in Vienna the work provided those who were able to experience the work with a once in a lifetime experience. As an audience member you were engaged with some difficult situations, encountered some scary characters and were taken on an amazing journey that is very unique and, in the end, quite beautiful. One’s journey with Lisa was genuinely personal, and the conversations seemed uniquely authentic. On many occasions the participant was alone with Lisa and her conversations and reactions were stunningly realistic. The production truly revealed the both wonderful but also horrifying realities afforded by the virtual world. Participants were forewarned about the physical demands of the production and there were drinks and food items available as participants finished the performance due to the potential physical reactions involved. End of Life, by Vienna-based DARUM. Audience members engaged. Photo provided by DARUM. Frau Carrar’s Rifles , produced by Residenztheater München was presented in the Probebühne, the smaller, more intimate space of the Berliner Festspielehaus. Directed by Luise Voight, Brecht’s play deals with a group of immigrants living in a war zone during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The work is generally considered to be an adaptation of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and in Brecht’s script focuses on Teresa Carrar who is seeking to protect her children during the difficult war times. The production aesthetic emulated a black and white 1930s movie, as the characters utilized dark costumes and white face makeup and the setting consisted of a single whitewashed room that included black and white furniture. The overall sense of the work was that of old cinema; however, the work primarily focused on the delivery of the text. In the case of this work it suffered from a reliance on the Brecht text to speak to a contemporary audience. The work was played in a very direct and filmic style and fell extremely flat on the night I saw it. Sadly, the work did not reveal a great deal of action so the static nature of the dialogue along with the lack of consistent movement and action made the work feel tedious. The visual style was an impressive element and the performers of the Residenztheater are always among the best of the German speaking stage. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg’s Die Machine Oder: Über Allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (sometimes translated as Time Machine) was conceived by French playwright/novelist George Perec and utilized Goethe’s famous poem “Wanderers Nachtlied” as the central focus of an AI driven experiment that revealed on the stage the working process behind a computer’s interpretation of a classic literary work and the many processes that differentiate the human analysis of words and semantic sequences to the analysis of those same sequences by a non-human AI based group of sources. Featuring five actors who emulated the nature of computer-like reactions and analysis of the poem, the performers, led by a supreme guiding force, were all involved in the consistent analysis, interpretation and (sometimes) negotiation of the meaning and relevance of particular words. The staging of the work, brilliantly arranged by director Anita Vulesica ultimately realized an incredible “machine-like” work and the actors movement’s, delivery and focus were all driven by their place in the machine. Discussions consisted of the analysis of grammar, the usage of certain words as well as an even further analysis of the usage of the number of vowels in a sequence of words. The main purpose was comedic but did reveal some very pertinent ideas about inconsistencies in written language (the work was directed towards both German and English) but the real comedic moments were revealed in both the spoken German text and the projected English subtitles. It was clear that the comedy was actually present in both languages, which is not always true. The real strength of this work lay in the precise timing and physical movement of the actors who truly engaged with the machine-like concept of the work, which looked back to the world of Expressionism and works like From Morn to Midnight and Machinal . Expressionist staging in Die Machine . Photo by Eike Walkenhorst Sadly, Ja, Nichts ist OK would be the final work of director Rene Pollesche at the Volksbühne Am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. Pollesche had just taken over at Berlin’s great public stage as Indendant following the turbulent years after the ousting of Frank Castorf, the longtime leader of one of Berlin and Germany’s great historic theatre companies. Pollesche died just after the mounting of the work, which was apparently somewhat autobiographical and revealed some of the many issues the theatre director, devisor, and writer had been dealing with during his many decades career on the German stage. The work was primarily a one man show that featured long-time collaborator Fabian Henrich’s, in a work that featured discussions and arguments among a number non present flatmates – questions that defined human existence such as Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech that was quoted. The text was a stream of consciousness work that was often directed at the audience with the assistance of a hand-held microphone. As the sole performer, Henrich often took moments to speak directly to the audience about his personal and life issues and to engage in live comic banter with the audience; a few smaller and supernumerary characters eventually appeared as the performance concluded with numerous figures from his past joining him on stage. In the spirit of the Volksbühne it was clear that these individuals were not trained performers but random individuals brought onstage for the work’s short ending each evening. The most striking element of the production was the setting. A classic Volksbühne setting with a revolve, the onstage house included a small swimming pool and could be rotated in 360 degree format to reveal the home interior as well. With the addition of a rock band (typical at the Volksbühne) the underscoring of the physical action of the piece, which was much more prominent than the use of language in the work, was a unifying element of production of this primarily movement based work. The work included an onstage pool (common in Volksbühne productions) and in several scenes Henrich took very violent falls into the pool to indicate various moments in his life and story. Photo provided by the author. One of the most anticipated and best received works was Pina Bausch’s masterpiece Kontakthof: Reflections of 1978 , restaged by her longtime assistant Meryl Tankard and utilizing numerous company members from her many decades career as a choreographer. Numerous individuals stood outside with signs requesting an opportunity to witness the work live as all three Theatertreffen performances were totally sold out. However, it was possible to see the work in an upstairs overflow environment at the Festspielhaus. Having seen it the night before, I was so hypnotized and attracted by the work that I was willing to pay for an overflow ticket to see it a second time. There was not a comparable work that I have seen at the Theatertreffen to match the incredible aesthetic and nostalgic feel that this work was able to produce. The work was performed in a classic Bausch setting – an open space that looked like a cross between a classroom dance space and a space where people who lived in a retirement community might meet and gather. It was an open space with a number of chairs lined up around the walls of the space but it also had a small, curtained stage directly upstage center, which made it appear to be something of a community performance space. Utilizing both frontal and rear screens for projection of video and images, the performers, incredibly seasoned European and American professional dancers aged from 62 – 80, physically recreated the scenes staged by Bausch in 1978, Thankfully, the staging was not unusually technically challenging from a professional dancer’s standpoint, and the scenes all took place in a community setting among young people attending a general social gathering. Simplicity, pedestrian style and repetition were defining elements of the work, and numerous key repeated gestures really drove the style; in a singular sequence these consisted of a smile to the audience, rotation of the hands in the front of the body, and then hands placed on either side of the head. This was done in a repeated fashion for at least 15 minutes during one sequence and the nature of repetition and the matching of the live performers with video sequences was mesmerizing. The real beauty of the work was the story told of the past experience and the incredible nostalgia of the moments shared among the individuals who lived the experiences of the time. The time was portrayed as one of a beautiful world when people were happy and life was grand; however, it was a clearly male dominated world and Bausch’s original staging reveals many of the unpleasant elements like the incredible loneliness of the female characters and times when they were treated with disrespect or even groped by the male figures. The music was unparalleled; classic music from the 1920’s in Germany revealed a time of great hope and prosperity, and featured traditional songs from Berlin swing era composers like Ralph Bernatzky and Leo Monossen whose “Im Rosengarten von der Plata” and other classic Berlin tango-like musical numbers were used. The connection between the younger characters in black and white video on the numerous screens contrasted with the much older live dancers who matched or complemented the visual dance scenes and the result was a high degree of artistry. The fact that these seasoned dance individuals revisited this world and presented it to a contemporary audience made the work something of a masterpiece to be seen once in a lifetime, and, amazingly, it met that challenge. Just before the intermission of each production, the actors came and sat before the audience, each delivering a short speech about themselves and their career, focusing on some trivial aspect of life such as Lutz Förster who stated “each day my wife gets up and makes me breakfast and I wash the dishes.” Kontakthof: Echoes of 1978 was a defining work of the 2025 Theatertreffen as it sought to explore multiple times and places utilizing a variety of means to transport audiences into both past and future spaces of reality. Cast of Kontakthof: Echoes of 1978 . Photo by Ursula Kaufmann. The 2025 Theatertreffen was both a festival of the exploration of new means of production as well as one that included and reimagined the past. Diverse and innovative voices were realized throughout the festival, and the work of numerous directors, performers, designers, other artistic figures, and theatre companies once again brought forth many ideas and theatrical forms that expanded the possibilities of the world stage. Numerous individuals were recognized at the Festival’s completion: Carmen Steinart was given the Alfred-Kerr-Acting-Award for her performance in BLUTBUCH (not reviewed here), Christopher Rüping received the Theatre-Award-Berlin and the 3sat Award was given to Anita Vulesica. Consistently, the German stage drives world theatre in terms of content/ literary material as well as its display of technical innovation through many mediated sources. The Theatertreffen remains a treasure that presents the most prolific theatre production that the German speaking world has to offer. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

SKELETON ARCHITECTURE presents Skeleton Architecture at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Skeleton Architecture SKELETON ARCHITECTURE 6:30-7:20 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Skeleton Architecture is a vessel of Black womyn and gender non-conforming artists rooted in the rigor and power of the collective. In practice, Skeleton Architecture engages in embodied research towards the vital building of our Black collective. The body, the practice, and the corporeal and cognitive legacies in the room will inspire a diverse range of group activities and offerings to the public wherein we seek to define our work together further. As Black improvisers, we are eager to share our ongoing "research with the body." Presenting at PRELUDE: Davalois Fearon, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Angie Pittman, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, and Tara Aisha Willis. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). The Skeleton Architecture collective was formed from the Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found in a singular, Bessie Award-winning evening called “the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds,” curated by guest curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa. The performance included: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Edisa Weeks, Ni’Ja Whitson, and Tara Aisha Willis. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Dora Arreola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Dora Arreola By Published on May 30, 2014 Download Article as PDF Mujeres en Ritual: An Invitation to Transgress There are many ways to perceive Tijuana: as the first corner of México, or the last, or as the doorway to Latinoamerica, or to los Estados Unidos.1 I grew up in the hills above the city, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the San Diego skyline, watching the border patrol cars and helicopters chasing migrants who were trying to cross to the USA, every day. The border was literally in my back yard, in my face—a horrible stretch of rusting metal, leftover from the first US Gulf War and recycled in México as a fence to stop the perceived infiltration of Latinos into the United States. As a child, this non-metaphorical, very concrete border fence reminded me every day that I was considered inferior, poor, dirty, criminal, that I was not wanted, that I could not cross. As an artist, as I grew, that fence invited me to transgress. The border between Tijuana, B.C. (México) and San Diego, California (US) is the most frequently crossed border in the world, with an estimated 300,000 legal crossings per day. As described by anthropologist and folklorist Maribel Alvarez, the border includes: Millions of workers essential to the economic machines of North American agriculture, tourism, and industry: farm workers, low-tech labor, dishwashers, gardeners, maids . . . but [it's] also a military machine of low-intensity conflict: Homeland Security helicopters, Border Patrol agents, infrared cameras, detention centers, books of regulations . . . Violence and death are dimensions of everyday life in the border.2 In addition to non-sanctioned border crossings, these deaths include feminicide,3 the trafficking of women in the sex trade and labor, as well as deaths related to untenable working conditions and toxic illnesses caused by pollution from maquiladoras.4 Tijuana's maquiladora industries and sexual tourism industries are among the largest in the world—both predominantly controlled by men, but fueled by the exploitation of (predominantly) women workers. All of this systematically diminishes the image of Mexican women in the global imagination, and thereby normalizes and renders violence against us permissible in a region where every woman is potentially seen as a “puta.” The stigmatization of my identity, as a woman and Tijuanense, also invited me to transgress. In November 1999, I founded a company with a group of women artists from the community, as a response and resistance to the systematic oppression of women at the México-US border—a way oftransforming the perception of women, as well as our perceptions of ourselves, from object to subject. Our first production was titled Mujeres en Ritual (Women in Ritual), which became our name. After nearly three years as a participant in Jerzy Grotowski's WorkCenter in Pontadera, Italy, I had returned to México with a deep desire to investigate and create theatre from the roots of my own culture.5 With grounding in traditional dances and rituals of México, Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro developed a rigorous training process, drawing from three techniques that complement each other and sustain the concept of precise movement: Suzuki Technique, Butoh, and the theatre tradition of Jerzy Grotowski (specifically “Objective Drama” and “Art as a Vehicle” phases). The intention of embodied practice is to eradicate the vestiges of oppression in the bodies of women. The physical training process liberates blocks in the body and voice to allow greater levels of expressivity—which often means breaking silences, and confronting or expressing our traumas. It helps us deconstruct conventional stereotypes of femininity, to perform strength and agency. Mujeres en Ritual de-objectifies women of the border region by demystifying our desires—by breaking myths that, as women of color, we choose oppressive systems, or “like it like that,” or want to be in positions in which we are dominated. Through our creations, we disrupt stereotypes and false perceptions to expose the systematic exploitation of women. In our creative process, we explore the sources of creativity, ritual structures, the “internal pulse” and the creation of actions (as described by Thomas Richards).6 We work from the impulse of the performer that comes before the manifestation of an expression or movement. Impulses have no gender, and are not confined by realism. This is significant because to break the paradigms of traditional Western theatre, and the Euro-American concept of realism (which has dominated theatre since the mid-1800s, and typically re-inscribes a 'reality' created and controlled by men) is to break the social constructions of gender and representation, and to begin a process of decolonizing our creativity. Thus, interdisciplinarity is profoundly important in the work of Mujeres en Ritual. We often devise our own texts, re-interpret plays, or use no text at all; we employ poetry and prose, narrative and abstraction, evolving our aesthetic through a seamless exploration of diverse forms. We do not subscribe to divisions or categories of form, discipline, or genre, which create artificial “borders” between human modes of expression. Further, the company pushes the boundaries of sexuality and gender representation by performing a spectrum of identities, including male, female and transgendered characters. When women perform male characters (an act historically considered “deviant”), several things happen: catharsis, parody, political commentary, and discovery of the freedom of transgressing assigned gender roles or taboo gender expressions. Our practice, then, becomes an embodied testament to the performativity of gender, as described by Judith Butler: The various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis . . . Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.7 Theatre critic Sergio Rommel8 describes the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting “in the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions,” such that the company's “transgression of borders in multiple ways” constitutes a form of transgenero performance—meaning both transgender and trans-genre. In an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of transgenero performance, and its aesthetic and political significance, this chapter explores in detail the creation and production of one of our representative works, Fronteras Desviadas, or Deviant Borders, with special attention to how transgeneridad is manifested in those processes. Because Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders involved collaboration with US-based, Arab American writer and performer Andrea Assaf, this exploration also reveals the complexities of such border-crossing collaborations between queer women of color from two very different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.9 Devising Fronteras Desviadas: The Creative Process Figure 1., Andrea Assaf and Dora Arreola perform in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, Tijuana, Mexico, 2005. Photo by Mercedes Romero. In 2004, Mujeres en Ritual sought to explore these issues from multiple points of view, to arrive at a more complex perception of the experiences of women on both sides of the national and cultural borders that join/divide México and the United States. Our goal was to create new work that deconstructs dominant images of the women of Tijuana, to stage representations that were not condescending, illustrative, simplistic, stereotypical, or didactic. We began with research and site visits to uncover the history and conditions of the region (most of which were very familiar to me, but previously unknown to Assaf). When we first conceived of the project, we began with the theme of “women's bodies at the border,” not knowing where it might lead us. We knew we wanted to investigate the maquiladoras, and the Ciudad Industrial where most of the factories are located. Our first step was to participate in an Environmental Justice Tour10 of communities affected by the pollution from the maquiladoras, and to investigate the inhumane conditions for women workers. As we journeyed deeper into our research, however, the connections to, and immensity of, the sexual tourism industry began to overwhelm our thoughts. Amidst an ocean of information in Border Studies, news and media archives in Tijuana and San Diego, and in the internet, we found a particularly valuable resource in Tijuana La Horrible: Entre la historia y el mito, by Mexican writer Humberto Félix Berumen. He exposes the founding of Tijuana by Americans in 1916 as an adult entertainment center for US tourists, and the creation of its border as a state apparatus to regulate the flow of US citizens in to México in the era of Prohibition. He describes in detail how the association of Tijuana with sex, drugs, “deviance” and illegality (the “Leyenda Negra” as it's called in México) was not only constructed in the US imagination, but also promoted by American casino owners to attract their own people as consumers. Félix Berumen further explains how this legend persists: People have a stigmatized image of Tijuana, as it can be perceived through radio, literature, film, written press, television, songs and many other discourses (oral, visual and written). That image is a social creation and a collective image formed by the syncretic amalgamation of platitudes, legends, stereotypes, prejudices, sociograms and clichés . . . Tijuana is a city-symbol, the emblem, by definition, of perversion and vice. A myth that has been revealed with a great capacity to renew itself continually.11 But rarely is there an acknowledgement of US responsibility in creating the political and economic conditions that make this image, and the markets it relies upon, flourish; rarely is there any accountability for the exploitation and violence that accompanies these markets. The Zona Norte, the commercial sex zone of Tijuana, continues from its American origins as the most active “red zone” in México—a country in which sex work is officially illegal, except for “zones of tolerance” where tourism is valued above even the “morality” laws (under which individuals exhibiting “homosexual behavior” can still be arrested, in states such as Baja California). Poverty, lack of opportunity and trafficking force thousands of women, children and transgendered people into sex work. As José Esteban Muñoz described in Disidentifications: Late capitalism represents the dwindling of possibilities for the racialized working class. Under such hegemony, women of color compete over low-wage positions within the shrinking service economy. Individuals who reject this constrained field of possibility often choose to survive by entering alternative economies involving sex work or the drug trade . . . [This] move into the illicit coliseum represents a dystopic vision of what the continuation of late capitalism will mean for Latinas and other people of color.12 In 2004, there were more than 8,000 registered sex workers in the Zona Norte alone (an area of about four square city blocks), and likely hundreds more who were not registered. Today, the bars and prostíbulos of the Zona Norte are owned by Mexican, American and multi-national owners, as are the maquiladoras. Empirical research was equally important to our process, which included site visits to the Zona Norte13 to observe the dynamics of gender exploitation, particularly with US tourists filling the bars and alleys. This history, along with its contemporary reality and the ways in which it implicates the United States, had to inform our work. Our creative explorations began with a series of community-based workshops with women on both sides of the border, a process that ultimately generated text for the performance. Andrea Assaf brought a writing process to the workshops rooted in methodologies from the US community-based arts movement; I brought improvisations, movement composition, and physical vocabulary techniques that Mujeres en Ritual had developed through the years. The workshops alternated writing or storytelling exercises (depending on the literacy level of the participants), with movement and dialogue. This interweaving of approaches led us to design a means of shared facilitation and methodologies for community collaboration. We replicated this process in three very different locations. A group of women artists in Tijuana, including Mujeres en Ritual company members and independent artists, met in studios and cafes to explore our three central prompts: Soy mujer cuando . . . /When do I experience myself as “woman”? What is deviance? and What is on “the other side”?14 Next, we worked with a community in crisis, named after activist leader Maclovio Rojas: Maclovio Rojas is a community of maquiladora workers halfway between Tijuana & Tecate, México. As part of the NAFTA process, the Mexican constitution was modified and poor families began to be forced from their ejido lands. A few defiant communities, including Maclovio Rojas, resisted. Maclovio happens to now sit on prime industrial real estate, sandwiched between maquiladoras who very much want their land. The Mexican state has [made] many attempts to evict them.15 There, we held a Story Circle16 in La Casa de la Mujer (the women's center) focused on the question, “Soy Mujer Cuando?” The third group was in San Ysidro, California, just across the US border. At a community development agency, Casa Familiar, we worked with a “Parenting Class” for convicted parents whose children had been taken away by the state (all Mexican or Latina mothers, except for one Mexican father who was there with his wife). With this group, we explored the notion of “deviance,” particularly from cultural and state norms in the context of the criminalization of recent immigrants. The results were texts and phrases of movement charged with meaning, intensity and complexity that reflected the life experiences and visions of women in these communities. At the end of each workshop, we invited participants to contribute their writing, stories or movement phrases, if they wished, to the creative process of developing a script and movement score for the performance. Every single participant chose to donate his or her work to the project. Through a process of multiple translations,17 from Spanish to English and back again, Assaf then edited the texts into collective poems, rich with abstraction, symbolism and metaphor, layered with double meanings and the women’s surprising encounters with atrocity. These voices were often contradictory, and yet we felt it was important to keep the multiplicity. The following is an excerpt of the “Soy Mujer Cuando” series that illustrates this aesthetic of overlapping realities, which privileges the bilingual listener/reader: Soy mujer cuando me lanzo como colibrí, y entiendo cuan corta la distancia a la muerte. I am a woman when I spin infinity Soy mujer cuando giro al infinito y me desvío . . . and deviate . . . Soy mujer cuando cruzo las piernas. I am a woman when I cross my legs. Soy mujer cuando atravieso el miedo. I am a woman when I confront desire. I am a woman when I cannot speak, Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños and my reflection brings me to myself Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños once and once again. I am a woman when I am hit. I am a woman when I attend a man. I am a woman of breasts and vagina fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning cogiendo y lavando, cocinando y limpiando fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning Soy mujer . . . when I pass through fear Soy mujer. . . when I feel my dreams Soy mujer . . . when I vibrate with joy for nothing more than being alive18 In tandem with the community-based process, I began studio explorations to develop a movement vocabulary for the piece. My challenge was to uncover the appropriate aesthetic forms, as if they were sleeping, or waiting for a means of expression to emerge. As the director, I chose to focus on popular rituals that women are expected to pass through, from birth to death—such as quinceañeras, weddings and funerals—which gave us a structure for the journey of the play. Ritual is a complicated source. Rituals can be oppressive or transformative. They can be male-centered, and function in society to reinforce patriarchy; or they can invert social roles, gender norms, and so-called “morality.” On the other hand, ritual is also a form of performance that is pre-colonial, often circular, and highly symbolic. It can create an open, holistic, participatory space, or even a radical separatist space. With Mujeres en Ritual, we identify and deconstruct rituals that perpetuate the oppression of women, and explore inversions, such as casting women in traditionally male roles.19 This creative interrogation, subversion, and embracing of ritual—this process of deconstruction and (re)invention—is central to our aesthetic. I decided to create these ritual representations as independent vignettes, without trying to tell a story, utilizing celebrations well-known in Mexican culture but transposing them to the socially deviant contexts of exploitation, prostitution and feminicide. The most certain choice was to select vignettes that could link the three themes of the writing—what it means to be a woman, deviance, and what is on “the other side”—with the history of Tijuana. The workshops gave me many images and metaphors to draw from: transformation (transition, passing); rites of passage, journeys; doors, borders, thresholds; trespassing, transgression; and death. Although there was no explicit narrative, I took as a base concept the journey of a woman who travels from South to North, with the intent of crossing to the United States; but when she must find work in Tijuana, she is drawn into this liminal zone of the border, the Zona Norte. The actions and choreographies, developed with the company, sustained the metaphors of transgression and transformation throughout the play. The poems were then layered in to the movement composition, as live and recorded text. Parallel to the journey of the women, Andrea Assaf wrote the character of “El Chamuco” from found text on the internet, as an examination of the male gaze, and popular US perceptions of Tijuana women. As Octavio Paz describes in El laberinto de la soledad, “Americans have not looked for a México in México; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests—and these are what they have found.”20 Based on research into actual English language websites promoting sexual tourism to Tijuana, Assaf created the fictional site “sex-mex-chilitas.com” and its virtual-turned-flesh tour guide, Hank Screwell III, a.k.a. “El Chamuco” (which is Mexican slang for the devil). This character is not a pimp himself, but claims to be a self-made millionaire who capitalizes on the commercial sex industry via the web, and markets his services to English-speaking tourists. In globalization's commercial arena of intersecting webs, both geographic (such as human trafficking rings) and virtual, identities are continually reinvented in order to escape accountability, while male desire and illegal consumption are normalized. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out in Feminism Without Borders: In each of these webs, racialized ideologies of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality play a role in constructing the legitimate consumer, worker, and manager. Meanwhile, the psychic and social disenfranchisement and impoverishment of women continues. Women's bodies and labor are used to consolidate global dreams, desires, and ideologies of success and the good life in unprecedented ways.21 The objective of juxtaposing El Chamuco with the women's voices was to establish a discourse of the double realities of the border, and to implicate US responsibility in the conditions and exploitation of women in this region. Figure 2., Raquel Almazan performs “El Chamuco” while the two women dancers are played by Maria Vale and Dora Arreola. New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen. El Chamuco was the final element to be integrated into the sequence of scenes, creating a narrative bridge, and at the same time, a rupture—a continual interruption of the women's journey. He conducts the audience, his “clients,” on a trip through the Zona Norte, creating, apparently, a double spectacle: two different “shows” simultaneously, with two different relationships to time and space—one the passage of a life cycle, the other a passage from night to day. Dialogue does not exist in the conventional sense; there is no one defined relationship between the women characters, but many relationships that are constantly changing (as in dance). In the beginning of the play, their encounters are not by choice, only coincidences that propel them forward. One initiates, or prepares the way for the other to advance, or they pass each other. Chamuco’s actions, in moments, coincide with actions in the women’s structure, without a direct relationship to the characters. In other moments, an encounter occurs, which startles them. Alternating between these two “worlds” brought us to an aesthetic of syncretism and juxtaposition, a collision of diverse cultural elements and political realities. In the mise-en-scene, we utilized various icons of Mexican and American cultures: a disco ball, the National Hymn of México, America the Beautiful sung by Elvis Presley, Disney’s It’s a Small World, a Mexican Quinceañera waltz, the traditional Wedding March, and signs used in Catholic ceremonies. With Chamuco, US icons emerge, through characterization and costume choices: a rock star, a corporate executive, a televangelist, a mafioso. An immobile, unchanging set of pink-sequined curtains (as one might find in a strip club or drag bar) transports us to various spaces. Objects in the performance are used in multiple ways to create different contexts—a kind of over-use or recycling that suggests a maximum economy in sharp contrast to the excess of production in maquiladora zones that renders human bodies disposable, just as the sex industry renders women’s bodies, and body parts, disposable. This idea is explicitly manifested in the scene we called, alternately, the “Quinceañera/ Maquiladora Waltz” or the “Pink Piñata/Paso Cruzado.” As the women performers emerge from a table dance grotesque, they place the enormous plastic body parts (buttocks and “bras with prosthetic painted breasts”22) that they were wearing in yellow plastic bags. These bags, which most Mexicans from Baja California will immediately recognize as coming from the local grocery superstore chain, Calimax, are emblazoned with the logo, “Has la cuenta, y date cuenta!”23 The music of a traditional Quinceañera celebration begins, as an announcer's voice introduces the young woman of the day: ANNOUNCER: Ahora, recibamos con un fuerte aplauso, a la quinceañera! Ella, que hoy a llegado a la edad de las promesas e ilusiones. Ha dejado de ser niña, para ser mujer. Ella celebra sus quince primaveras. presentandose ante la sociedad . . . y ante las maquiladoras!24 What begins as a seemingly normal introduction to a “coming out” party for the belle of the ball suddenly becomes her unsuspecting introduction into the world of maquiladoras. The movements of the dancers become increasingly mechanical, and at the same time deathly, as the announcer proudly proclaims the long list of multinational companies that actually have factories in Tijuana. As the list continues, seemingly endlessly, to the tune of the waltz, a poem by Assaf is overlaid to further complicate, and illuminate, the meaning of the scene: When the little dyed– blonde girl piñata in the pink dress bursts open, what falls from the cavity? a thousand nude plastic babies 5000 used condoms 100 tamarind candies covered in chili champagne and confetti cigarette butts wet thumping organs chilis rellenos border patrol military rifles vaginal fluids 30,000 widgets some used car parts a blue baby blanket contaminated water bright yellow lines the moon and the ocean and herself as a child in that same pink dress . . .25 As these multiple texts overlap and collide, one dancer lifts the other and continues the steps of the waltz, while the suspended dancer, legs spread-eagle, looks off in the distance with the blank stare of someone already dying inside. The announcer concludes triumphantly, “que la esperan con los brazos abiertos!”26In this universe of juxtaposition, unseen “gentlemen” are the owners and promoters of “businesses,” and invisible accomplices in a world of death and impunity, sustained by both countries. The bodies of young women are thrust into these global markets, even before they've had an opportunity to assert their own adult consciousness. Figure 3., Dora Arreola lifts Maria Vale in the “Quinceañera/Maquiladora Waltz” at New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen The journey of the play thus becomes a journey to voice and agency, in which only an encounter of queer possibility, of deviance from the norm, lights the way out of patriarchal oppression. In the final image of the performance, the women connect in a moment of intimacy, at last arriving at a true encuentro, a possibility of transgression, and begin to transform their pain into hope, together.27 The Complications of Cross-border Collaboration What is on the other side? is the contradiction of this side a subaltern river. un río subterraneo. Just the old with a new dress – the masquerade of contemporaneity. El pájaro está en otro lado, pero las plumas caen aquí where little of me donde un poco de mí . . . remains. . . . permanece.28 As Rosa Linda Fregoso suggests in “Gender, Multiculturalism and the Missionary Position in the Borderlands,”29 the political position of México in relation to the US is one of submission to a “masculinist colonial fantasy that authorizes and privileges the white man's access to brown female bodies.” México itself is feminized as the “bottom” that must submit to the US position of domination. How, then, is it possible for artists from the United States and México to collaborate equitably? Does this power relationship change if the two subjects in question are both woman-identified? Mohanty states that “Sisterhood”—or, to queer this metaphor a bit, perhaps partnership—“cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis . . . Feminist discourses, critical and liberatory in intent, are not thereby exempt from inscription in their internal power relations.”30 One might argue, as Marxist Jazz scholar and poet Fred Moten has, that equitable cross-racial collaboration is impossible given the brutal inequities of our shared global histories. Yet creating—which is to say, inventing and constructing—equitable processes, and means of working together in mutual support, is in fact central to the project of feminist activism by women of color. As artists, we are constantly inventing new structures. Our approach was to confront the inherent power relationships in the creative process, and invert them in relation to patterns of historical disempowerment. For example, the director is generally the most powerful collaborator in the artistic process, having the final decision in the ultimate representation of images on stage. For this collaboration, therefore, it was significant that I—a Mexicana from the border region—was the director of the performance. Assaf's texts, informed by a community-based process, were approached as raw material in the construction of a world on stage. As professional artists conducting workshops in marginalized communities, we also had to be conscious of power dynamics, and to be very clear about our practices and intentions. As Butler advises in “The Question of Social Transformation:” Feminists as well must ask whether the 'representation' of the poor, the indigenous and the radically disenfranchised . . . is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to somehow avow the conditions of translation that make it possible, avow the power and privilege of the intellectual, avow the links in history and culture that make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and . . . writing possible.31 I believed it was important for us not to engage in “missionary art” or anthropological study, but rather to create a means of genuine collaboration with other women of color. “Missionary art” enters with the idea of wanting to “save” communities, a fundamentally paternalistic approach; while “anthropological” art positions the artist as a falsely objective observer or “expert,” and usually creates a situation of appropriation. As facilitators, instead, we were full participants in the creative process, opening spaces by sharing our own experiences and stories of violence. We were collaborating with other women in order to journey back into our own histories and reveal the complexity of multiple oppressions together. For example, I was born in a marginalized community, and grew up in poverty. My family migrated to the border region when I was very young, and lived for many years in a precarious position. When I was only thirteen years old, I tried to get a job in a maquiladora, because it was the only way I knew to get money, but I was not able to sustain the work. I then worked in a restaurant in the Zona Norte, as a waitress and dishwasher, until I was fifteen. Assaf came from a history of domestic violence, and was exploring her voice as an Arab American artist in the post-9/11 climate, in which mobility and border crossing had dramatically changed. We were not there to speak for others, but to work together to tell a collective story. Mohanty discusses the ways in which scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcon, Honor Ford-Smith, and Doris Sommer have challenged liberal humanist notions of subjectivity: In different ways, their analyses foreground questions of memory, experience, knowledge, history, consciousness, and agency in the creation of narratives of the (collective) self. They suggest a conceptualization of agency that is multiple and often contradictory but always anchored in the history of specific struggles. It is a notion of agency that works not through the logic of identification, but through the logic of opposition.32 This notion of the logic of opposition emerged as an implicit organizing principle in the aesthetic of our work, and in the collaboration process for creating Fronteras Desviadas. This meant we had to confront the complex power dynamics in our own relationships—our own internalized racism, Euro/US-centrism, classism, and fears about sexual violence. We had to be willing to implicate each other and ourselves in the expression of what we found. While the writers Mohanty mentions may emphasize the multiple subject (and an ethic of multiplicity is certainly present in our aesthetic), our experience of the environments we were investigating, and of ourselves as women in those environments, was perhaps more aligned with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conception of the fractured subject. The journey of creating the play was, for us, a journey of acknowledging, re-membering, and perhaps healing those fractures, within ourselves and within the group. Working from a post-colonial and feminist perspective, the creative process strengthens our capacity for connection, for building relationships across the perceived borders of class, race, national, and sexual identity. “We should not think,” as Butler cautions, “that this transit is smooth, since it takes place via a rupture in representation itself . . . what emerges from this translation, however, is a political vision that maintains . . . the possibilities of long-term global survival.”33 Audiences & Impact: Deviant Becomings After premiering with a tour to four cities in Baja California, the first English-dominant version of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was presented in Amherst, Massachusetts by New WORLD Theater (Summer Play Lab 2005). Comparative literature scholar Kanchuka Dharmasiri wrote a review that highlighted the question of cultural translation. Noting that the concept of “the other side” is relative to where one stands, she wrote: Some of [the women's] culturally specific gestures remained incomprehensible to audience members who were not familiar with Mexican rituals . . . [H]ow can a director make the audience comprehend culturally specific signs in live theatre? How does a play based on a particular socio-cultural milieu translate to a different context? . . . Or, does this space (which is not immediately decipherable) become a necessity in a process that is intent on creating awareness of a different cultural and socio-political condition?34 While the bilingual script interchanged lines of Spanish and English in the women’s text, the Chamuco was predominantly in one language, depending on the country in which we were performing. Presenting the show to audiences in diverse places—some geographically far from the political, socio-economic and cultural situations in which the work was created—required a process of cultural translation as well as linguistic. In México, actress Maria Vale interpreted El Chamuco as a Mexican American from California, thereby implicating men of color in their participation in the exploitation of Mexican women. In the United States, however, as performed by a Latina actress, Raquel Almazan, the character became a Texan, with the particular inflections, tones and expressions of men from that state—which had a different political resonance, given that the performance was touring during the presidency of George W. Bush. Different publics may have recognized different symbols and icons, as well as the rituals and cultural elements particular to each country. Even though Dharmasiri raised these questions of legibility, she did acknowledge that the post-show discussions, even in Amherst, stimulated community dialogue on sex trafficking, locally as well as globally: Arreola and Assaf perceive the performance as a form of activism, to create awareness among the spectators about the situation in Tijuana . . . While problematizing the dichotomy (here/there, self/other), the play likewise questions the political power structures that continue to oppress and exploit certain groups of people . . . The play made spectators question and think. It opened up a space to discuss issues related to contemporary political power and how they affect the lives of women on a global level.35 The use of abstraction and symbolism, as well as a kind of farce that pushes hyper-realism to absurdism, creates a political theater that is not narrative or didactic, and gives audiences the work of interpretation. The audience is called to make sense out of juxtaposed realities in which power is constructed, gained, and deconstructed in vastly different ways. Further, in Fronteras Desviadas, the audience is cast in multiple ways—in one reality as male, and in another reality as female—and left to reconcile the constant, unpredictable shifting between those polarized identifications. With Chamuco, the audience is cast as a group of male “johns” or clients, implicating all present as silent participants in a system of misogyny and exploitation. In the movement structure, the woman-identified characters cast the audience as women (as in the women-only workshops in which the texts were created). Meaning is realized in the audience’s perception of, not only what they have seen, but also who they are. In North Carolina, where we performed excerpts of Deviant Borders at the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting for artists and activists, the piece sparked a heated debate about agency in sex work. A queer audience member from San Francisco argued for a more “sex positive” vision. Another audience member countered, “This performance is not about sex, it's about exploitation.” In this way, we were able to facilitate a deeper dialogue about the various contexts of sex work, and the extent to which agency exists with regard to class and location, as well as to differentiate between voluntary sex work and human trafficking. In a very different context, in Managua, Nicaragua, a review in La Prensa celebrated both the unusual aesthetic strategies and the audience impact of the play, particularly regarding the power of embodied knowledge and expression: The International Festival of Theater [presented by Teatro Justo Rufino Garay] brought us a unique play this time. Fronteras Desviadas . . . left the public impacted. A rare mix of dreamscapes and allegories teaches us more than any research essay on prostitution in Tijuana, México . . . There are objects with phallic dimensions, reminiscent of copulation, receptacles as an allegory for the vagina, and very surprising solutions for visualizing the world of the brothels . . . The play is a denunciation of the complicity of the authorities that ignore what happens behind the curtains in the red zone of Tijuana, where prostitution reigns and tourists are received with open arms in every sex bar, where [men] haggle the price of the feminine body.36 While critics affirmed the clarity of the play's intention, it is important to raise the question of activism, and where its true impact lies. Certainly work of this nature raises awareness of political issues. In this way, performances can support the work of local organizers in engaging concerned constituents and mobilizing for action. On an individual level, perhaps, the deepest impact is found among the women who actually participated in the creative process, including those who identify as artists, and those who participated as community members. This is the arena in which we bear witness to actual transformation, on a deeply personal level. The women of Casa de la Mujer in Maclovio Rojas, for example, attended the performance at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Tecate (January 2005). By working with organizers from their community, we were able to arrange transportation and tickets for them to attend. Many of them had likely never been to a university, and had never seen their stories spoken or represented on stage. After the performance, they gathered with us to reflect on their experience. This simple act created some small measure of access, by beginning a relationship between an academic institution and a community in crisis only a few miles from their campus. This project also began a multi-year relationship between Maclovia Rojas and Mujeres en Ritual. Perhaps more importantly, it left the participants with the experience, perhaps for the first time, that their stories were of value, were worth listening to, and had a place in the public sphere. In the classic womanist text This Bridge Called My Back, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga described embodied theory in this way: A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience . . . We do this bridging by naming ourselves and by telling our stories in our own words . . . This is how our theory develops.37 By speaking a story that has never been told before, by embodying an experience for which words are not sufficient, by seeing oneself represented on stage for the first time, or allowing oneself as a performer to break the taboos of gender representation on stage for the first time—these are the intimate locations where voice and agency begin to manifest. These are the ruptures in the status quo, where possibilities emerge through “deviance” from the norm. And once lived, they can never be forgotten. Transgeneridad and The Question of Social Transformation Theatre critic Sergio Rommel has described the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting within “the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions.”38 Writing specifically of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, he has argued that “the transgression of borders in multiple ways (transgeneridad) is not only the central theme of the play, but at the same time the most effective vehicle for reassigning meaning to all the elements and signs of the performance . . . the same phrases contain an additional charge [double meaning] that in some way alludes to the theatre of protest . . . theatre-dance, anglo-latina . . . Spanish-English . . . sexual diversity (heterosexuality-homosexuality-bisexuality) . . . geographic borders. Like this, successively, other frontiers are deviated or transgressed throughout the performance.”39 Rommel's 2008 analysis led us to understand and articulate the work of Mujeres en Ritual in a new way—as transgenero performance. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asks, “Is the symbolic eligible for social intervention?”40 Yet this is precisely what artists do: performance and cultural production work to intervene in the symbolic, by working in the imaginary and subconscious realms, and creating alternative identifications. Even Butler asserts that “Fantasy structures relationality, and it comes into play in the stylization of embodiment itself.”41 As one might ask about the efficacy of symbolic interventions with regard to gender, the same could be asked of the “Leyenda Negra” and the real-life conditions of Tijuana. Is social intervention possible? “What operates at the level of cultural fantasy,” Butler writes, “is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized.”42 Fronteras Desviadas is one of these interventions, or in Butler’s words, “moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable.”43 Transgenero performance opens spaces for symbolic intervention, not only in the binary of gender, but also the binary of the Tijuana vice/American virtue. Like gender, and the “Leyenda Negra” of Tijuana, the United States’ image of itself as “the greatest country in the world” is reinforced by its own “incessant and panicked” repetition, in the way that Butler describes heterosexuality: “That [it] is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it ‘knows’ its own possibility of becoming undone.”44 Trangeneridad, then, enters into the political field “by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted.”45 If we can imagine—moreover, embody—these new modes of reality, and envision how they might be instituted, perhaps we could transform the conditions that exist for women, and woman-identified people, at the most frequently crossed border in the world. --------- Dora Arreola is the founder and artistic director of Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro and currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of South Florida. Arreola has more than twenty years of professional experience as a theater director, choreographer and performer. She has taught, directed and performed in México, United States, Nicaragua, Canada, Poland and India. She was a participant at Grotowski’s Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy (1987-89), and holds a MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Arreola has received grants and commissions from the Ford Foundation, Cultural Contact, National Performance Network (NPN), and more. --------- [1] With special thanks to Andrea Assaf for assistance with translation and contributions to the English version of this essay. [2] Maribel Álvarez, “The Border is . . .” (Guest lecture presented in New WORLD Theater's “Knowledge for Power” series, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 2006). [3] The term “feminicide” here refers to the over 900 unprosecuted cases of female homicide in Juárez, Mexico, which has come to be understood as a gender-based genocide of women. Although there are precedents for the use of the term “femicide” in English dating back to 1801, Mexican anthropologist and feminist Marcela Lagarde coined the term feminicidio in 2004, to include “the impunity with which these crimes are typically treated in Latin America.” [4] Maquiladoras are factories or manufacturing operations, generally unregulated and owned by multinational corporations, in so-called “Free Trade” zones in México, which were created in 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As of 2012, it's estimated that more than 3000 maquiladoras line the US-México border, with 937 located in the state of Baja California; estimates range from 560-800 in greater Tijuana. [5] Virginie Magnat, in Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women, discusses my work in the lineage of Grotowski: “Arreola, who [has] chosen to research [her] own cultural heritage, provide[s] non-European role models for this younger generation of women . . . in the post Grotowski era . . . creative research influenced by his legacy will mostly likely expand in unforeseen directions well beyond its European lineage . . . the modalities of such expansion are already operational in women’s current creative research, precisely because the latter focuses on performance processes open to change and transformation . . . these artists support an alternative performance paradigm in which cultural, traditional and ritual practices significantly contribute.”(New York: Routledge, 2014), 165. [6] Thomas Richards, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (New York: Routledge, 1995). [7] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 273-275. [8] Sergio RommelAlfonsoGuzmánis a theatre scholar and President of CAESA, the Council for the Accreditation of Higher Education in the Arts, México (at the time of printing), as well as a former Dean of the School of the Arts, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California(UABC), Mexicali. This is a translation of Rommel's Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: UABC, 2008), which I will later return to for further discussion. [9] The creation of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was supported by Contacto Cultural (US-México Foundation for Culture), which allowed Andrea Assaf to be an artist-in-residence with Mujeres en Ritual Danza Teatro in 2004. [10] The June 2004 tour, organized by the Environmental Health Coalition, a leader in the environmental justice movement based in National City, California, included the communities of Colonia Chilpancingo, Colonia Murua and Nueva Esperanza, adjacent to Tijuana's largest Maquiladora industrial complex. www.environmentalhealth.org . [11] Humberto Félix Berumen, Tijuana la horrible: Entre la historia y el mito (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2003). Quote translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf. [12] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 187. [13] We did talk with some sex workers in the Zona Norte, and invited them to participate in interviews for the project; however, even when they expressed initial interest or enthusiasm, they did not show up for the interviews. Our assessment is that the conditions of their work are so dangerous, that they either were not allowed or dared not risk participating. Pimps and owners are the sector of this economy that no one talks about, and research is virtually non-existent. [14] Assaf was fascinated by the Mexican expression “el otro lado” as slang for the United States; she was interested in exploring the multiple meanings of “the other side” and “crossing” in both cultures, with reference to the border, gender, and death. [15] “Border issues incl. Maclovio Rojas press accounts,” 2002, http://www.sjcite.info/maclovio.html (accessed 5 April 2014). [16] Story Circles here refers to the community-based methodology developed by the Free Southern Theatre and Junebug Productions. [17] Tijuana-based poet Laura Jáuregui assisted Assaf with the translations. [18] Andrea Assaf, “Soy mujer cuando” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005). [19] I am currently developing a performance based on the Dance of the Deer, which is traditionally performed by men only. I first performed this work as a solo, “Yo, Rumores Silencio” based on Telares (o el olvido) by Fabiola Ruiz, at the Grotowski Institute in 2009, and am developing it into full-length ensemble work. [20] Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solidad (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). [21] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 5th edition 2006), 147. [22] As described in a review by Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una funcion impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaraguenses (Managua, Nicaragua: Septemer 28, 2006). [23] This phrase, literally, means “count how much/many, and become aware!” In its original marketing context, this slogan suggests that if you count how much money you save at Calimax, you'll always want to shop there. However, in the context of the performance, our intention was to signify the consumption of women's body parts, while suggesting that if one were to count how many women were being exploited and murdered, in Tijuana and Juarez for example, there would be no choice but to be conscious of the urgency of the political situation. [24] Translation: “And now, let us receive with strong applause, the belle [celebrating her 15th birthday]! She, today, has arrived to the age of promises and illusions. She has left behind being a child, to be a woman. She celebrates her 15th spring. We present her to society . . . And to the Maquiladoras!” (Assaf, unpublished script, 2005). [25] Ibid. [26] Translation: “We await her with open arms!” (Ibid.) [27] For a video clip of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, visit https://vimeo.com/channels/doraarreola. [28] Andrea Assaf, “Que hay en el otro lado?” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005). [29] Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana encounters: The making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). [30] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 24 and 108. [31] Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 229. [32] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 82. [33] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 229-30. [34] Kanchuka Dharmisiri, “What is on the Other Side?,”The Organization of Graduate Students in Comparative Literature (OGSCL) Newsletter, Fall 2005, 6. [35] Ibid. [36]Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una función impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaragüenses (Managua, Nicaragua: La Prensa, September 28, 2006). Translation by Dora Arreola. [37] Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd edition(New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 23. [38] Sergio Rommel Alfonso Guzmán, Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2008). Quotes translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf. [39] Ibid. [40] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 213. [41] Ibid., 217. Emphasis mine. [42] Ibid., 214. [43] Ibid., 216. [44] Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories(London: Routledge, 1991), 23. [45] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,”217. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

NIALL N JONES presents - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - NIALL N JONES 5-5:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP A recitation on turbulence and beauty and heartbreak. Much more and less a postlude than a prelude, or simply an inter... a refraction of performance's troublesome ghosts. Much more and less than a flamboyant flash, something other than vast material weight even though I can't catch no man Hangin' out at a discotheque But I believe in the boogie Oh, but the boogie don't believe in me ! ! ! ! He wanders around, as if to finish setting up .. “You ready?” AN OUTCAST TO BE CAST OUT They might be talking to himself. Acts as if he were alone, moving equipment, listening to his music. MUSE ICK CUT But he also calls out light and sound cues to suit shifting moods. REPEAT*NOISES/ Occasionally, he dances. He drags, it sounds heavy. crashes.symbols jackhammer chatter clanging He slips, and he bumps “...as if I’d lost my center of gravity.” (Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes) They smile ... < : • |\ LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall works within a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices that move across dance, performance, sound, text, photography and video. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to the sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement, and in/completeness. Recent performance works by Niall include: Sis Minor , in Fall (2018) at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; Fantasies in Low Fade (2019) at the Chocolate Factory, New York, NY; A Work for Others (2021) at The Kitchen @ Queenslab, New York, NY; Open Studio (2021) at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; In the Efforts of Time (2022) at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, DE; dark de luxe: a mess for body, shadow, and other rogue im/materials (2022) at Jack Art Center, Brooklyn, NY; a n u n r e a l (2022) at The Shed, New York, NY; C O M P R E S S I O N (2022) at Performance Space New York, NY; Hahaha (2023) as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3, in Philadelphia; and JohnsonJaxxxonJefferson (2024) at Danspace Project, New York, NY. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Bruce McConachie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF The term “Anthropocene” entered general scientific discourse in 2002, when chemist-geologist Paul Crutzen published an article in Nature advocating that his colleagues adopt this name for the current geological epoch to emphasize the central role of humankind in shaping the earth’s biosphere and geology. Crutzen’s Nature article, which argued that the previous Holocene epoch had effectively ended at the industrial revolution, was widely read and cited; “the Anthropocene” began to appear in numerous articles and books. Many scientists agreed with Crutzen on the name for the present epoch, which derives from the Greek and means, roughly, “the human era.” They recognized that our activities as a species are now becoming the single most important cause of planetary change – from punishing weather patterns, to vanishing coastlines, the killing-off of thousands of species, and the threatened deaths of millions of human beings. Several scientists, however, emphasized different evidence than Crutzen and chose other starting points for the epoch. At this writing, the members of the International Union of Geological Sciences have yet to determine the beginning of the Anthropocene, but many geologists now favor a date after WWII, which accords with the “great acceleration” of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and radioactive Plutonium fallout around the world from the testing of thermonuclear bombs. Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy is right to note, however, that determining the start of the Anthropocene “is not a statement of fact as much as a way of organizing facts to highlight a certain importance that they carry.” [1] For authors Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, writing in the introduction to their anthology, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis (2015), this new geologic epoch organizes facts around two compelling claims. First, state the authors, the Anthropocene “claims that humans have become a telluric force, changing the functioning of the Earth as much as volcanism, tectonics, the cyclic fluctuations of solar activity, or changes in the Earth’s orbital movements around the sun.” As a result, natural history and human history are now thoroughly interwoven. They add: “Modern humanities and social sciences have pictured society as if they were above material and energy cycles. . . . Now they must come back down to earth.” [2] “The second claim is that the human inhabitants of our planet will face, in a time lapse of just a few decades, global environmental shifts of an unprecedented scale and speed, not [seen] since the emergence of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. . . . It means inhabiting an impoverished and artificialised biosphere in a hotter world increasingly characterized by catastrophic events and new risks. . . . Reinventing a life of dignity for all humans in a finite and disrupted Earth has become the master issue of our time.” [3] With these realities in mind, I crafted a CFP that invited submissions from scholars to consider the past, present, and future of American theatre and performance through the lens of the Anthropocene. Working with Cheryl Black, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, I also selected an editorial board for this Special Issue of JADT that I knew could help those scholars adventurous enough to investigate the intersection of a particular North or South American performance with an aspect of this new geological epoch. My thanks to all of those who helped me and the authors to put together this extraordinary group of essays. I am pleased that our Special Issue begins with an essay by Theresa J. May, who coined the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010 and has been a tireless advocate for its practice ever since. In “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy and the AnthropoScene,” May examines two plays, Harvest Moon (1994) and Burning Vision (2003), and the continuities and changes regarding ecological concerns and possible solutions advocated by each play. As you will read, Harvest Moon affirms the sustainable values of family and community as a viable source for progressive resistance to ecological disruption, whereas such sustainability is no longer possible in the broken, post-nuclear world of Burning Vision . May joins the somewhat divergent ideas of scholars Donna Haraway and Jeremy Davies to argue that American theatre and performance must “stay with the trouble” of the Anthropocene’s increasingly impoverished biosphere if we are ever to realize social and ecological justice. Have you tasted the pollutants in smog? Performance artists at The Center for Genomic Gastronomy have offered smog meringues to international customers flavored with soot, sulfur, and hydrocarbons to capture the content of smog in Bangalore, Beijing, and Mexico City as a means of calling attention to one of the invisible consequences of industrial food production. Their meringues taste terrible. Shelby Brewster writes about Smog Tasting and two other “speculative” performances, The De-extinction Deli and Planetary Supper Club, that the Center has been producing since 2010 in her essay, “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene.” As Brewster relates, The Center is attempting to realize Bruno Latour’s vision for a progressive common world in the Anthropocene, available to all, including a biosphere in which human food production, preparation, and eating are ecologically responsible. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta has authored the first of the next two articles that feature performances in Latin America. As her title suggests, “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” examines the entrance of a seventeenth-century Viceroy through two decorated arches that depict the watery surroundings and lake-bed foundation upon which Mexico City was built. Taking up historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine our species as both historical and geological agents during the Anthropocene, Jackson-Schebetta deploys geologist Mark Anderson’s contemporary work on Mexico City to emphasize the Spaniard’s and, before them, the Nahua’s struggle to drain the basin of central Mexico so that its former lake-bed could provide habitable land for agriculture and city life. This allows her to reconfigure the 1680 viceregal entry as yet one more vain attempt in a string of performances that continues to the present day to overcome the ecology of Mexico City’s lacustrine limitations. In “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti’s Marrathon , Milton Loayza finds significant parallels between the situation of the marathon dancers in Monti’s Argentinian drama and Americans from both continents caught up in the historical myths of the Anthropocene. To understand the meta-theatrical levels of the play in production, Loayza turns to Marxist historian Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015). Attentive as well to Monti’s scenographic and dramaturgical layering, Loayza reads Marrathon through the lens of architect Kenneth Frampton’s concept of tectonics. The result is a keen analysis of the five myths that focus the action of Marrathon – conquest, independence, pastoralism, industrialism, and fascism. Our final essay by Clara Jean Wilch proposes a website that can help progressives animated by the problems of the Anthropocene to communicate their performances with translocal, global audiences. Her “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity” draws on the insights of cognitive science to discuss the importance of avoiding groupish responses and inciting empathy and altruistic action with climate change videos. Although appreciative of several short videos produced by Oxfam and 350.org, she recognizes that sharing such performances on YouTube or Facebook poses inherent difficulties and risks. This leads her to advocate the creation of a new platform that would encourage participants to share their personal stories and local experiences of climate change with others for the purpose of building collaborative communities across the globe. We hope you enjoy this Special Issue of JADT. Bruce McConachie, Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor References [1] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard), 2015: 2. [2] Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis : Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (New York: Routledge), 2015:3, 4. [3] Ibid, 4-5. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRUCE MCCONACHIE Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor Editorial Board for Special Issue Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker 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 American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Philippa Wehle Image Credits: Article From Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, artists from some fifteen Arabic speaking countries offered visions of their world in keeping with Avignon artistic director Tiago Rodrigues’ decision to invite Arabic as this year’s guest language: Arabic, the fifth most spoken language in the world and second most in France. Accordingly, the 79 th edition of the festival offered examples of Arabic and Arab culture in many different forms and expressions from Islamic poetry to rai , from original maqams and chaabi and from Sufi music to Arab-Andalusian melodies. The Arab world was present in many of this year’s offerings, both musical, visual, and spoken. The works ranged from a superb 3- hour concert featuring some 24 celebrated Arab-speaking artists performed for just one evening to a short piece held indoors, in a meeting room, for only an hour. Radouan Mriziga: Magec/The Desert . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. In general, this year’s festival tended to feature dance, poetry and song more than written word theater. In fact, one third of the festival’s official shows were dedicated to dance and music. Radouan Mriziga (from Morocco and Belgium), for example, offered Magec/the Desert, a glorious evening of dance exploring the desert’s relationship with time, nature, and the cultures that inhabit it using rhythms, gestures, masks and stories. Evoking wild spaces that cannot be tamed, the show’s outstanding dancers led the audience through encounters with our relationship with nature. La Voix des femmes ( Women’s Voices ) on the Honor Court stage in the Pope’s Palace and Nour , was a poetic celebration of the Arab language at the Cour du Lycée Saint-Joseph. Although each was given only one performance each, they provided outstanding examples of concerts of music, song, poetry and movement from the Arab world. On the evening of July 14 th , fifty years after the passing of Oum Kalthoum, the legendary Egyptian singer and songwriter known as the Star of the East, La Voix des femmes , under the musical direction of Lebanese producer Zeid Hamdan, presented a monumental two-hour concert composed of a variety of love songs delivered by seven artists invited to pay tribute to this great singer. They were accompanied by six superb musicians (among them Zeid Hamdan in the percussion section) and a violinist as well as more traditional instruments such as a qanun (a sort of oriental harp or lute). La Voix des femmes: Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Nour : Artistic Director: Julien Colardelle, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Nour ( “light”in Arabic) , a much larger piece, involved numerous artists from the Arab world in an evening of concerts, performances, readings, and screenings at the Cour du Lycée St Joseph. Twenty-four major personalities, musicians, actors, poets, and dancers performed ancestral texts along with contemporary poets. The evening’s offerings were structured around foundational themes such as love, spirituality, nature, and resistance. Hala Mohammad, Syrian Protest Poet in exile. Maryam Saleh, Egyptian singer and songwriter, Mohammed Al-Qudza, a Palestinian poet writer from Gaza City, were just a few of the artists featured in this event. Nour : Artistic Director: Julien Colardelle, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage One’s own Room Inside Kabul : Directed by Sumaia Sediqi, Caroline Gillet & Kubra Khademi. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Held inside in one of the meeting rooms in the Cloître St. Louis, home of the Festival offices, the play One’s own room Inside Kabul by Caroline Gillet, Kubra Khademi and Sumaia Sedi was presented. Spoken in both English and French, the work was a fascinating introduction to the life of Raha, a 21-year-old Afghan woman isolated from the outside world after the Taliban had taken over her country. Entering a makeshift living room, the audience takes their seats on red velvet cushions lined up against the walls facing each other. Between them, a white tablecloth set with 40 carefully arranged ceramic plates, beautiful teapots and vases of flowers. On each plate there are a few words telling the stories of other Afghan women who, like Raha, were forced to lead a confined existence. Raha spoke to us of her secluded life by way of an immersive video/audio installation. The audience was able to follow her thoughts through voice messages and spatialized sound design. Clearly her determination to remain “in her own room” inside Kabul was a brave act of resistance, but a stirring testimony to her and others like her. La Distance : Directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage There were numerous more traditional works of theatre. La Distance , a fascinating new play by Festival director Tiago Rodrigues, was a futuristic drama in which a father living on earth and his daughter who had left earth to live on the planet Mars in the year 2077 attempted to communicate. With over 139,805,518 miles between them, they play posed the question “how could they”? The father, powerfully portrayed by Adama Diop, tried desperately to stay connected to his daughter through voice messages and long-distance calls. But these took at least five months to be deliv ered. The daughter (lovely Alison Dechamps) now a member of a newly formed colony on Mars, had been given the gift of forgetting thanks to programmed amnesia. As a result, her memory of earth and her father was being erased. Time became of the essence for her father to communicate with her one last time. This drama of separation took place on a unique stage design composed of two platforms in rotation that came close together at times and then drifted apart at others. Accompanied by music, light and color designs, they move around each other in perpetual motion, accelerating, decelerating and rare moments of standing still. On the stage, father and daughter were visually separated from each other by a barren landscape composed of an imposing rock formation next to a surrealistic display of a tree trunk with imposing bare branches reaching out into the void. Father and daughter never really saw each other although at times she seemed to be right next to or behind him. Other times, she was hanging over him from the top of the rock, even though they are miles apart. La Distance : Written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage The distance between father and daughter was both generational as well as real; the daughter had chosen to leave earth to invent a new life, and she was happy to be free from the past. Still living in the past, the father was unable to let go of her. The Distance concluded with the father’s final moments with his daughter, moments that only the audience could hear and appreciate. As the play neared its end, the father sent his daughter birthday greetings. He put on a record to wish her a “happy birthday” as he placed family photos on the ground. Though on separate planets, they shared a laugh together. “You left because you wanted to have hope,” he told her, “hope and forgetfulness.” She had achieved her goal of inventing a new life on Mars as the father, on earth, was left with the tragic loss of his daughter and unable to accept it. The powerful ending was devastating. Israel & Mohamed : Created by Israel Galván & Mohamed El Khatib, Photo by: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Israel & Mohamed was a documentary dance performance created and performed by two well-known contemporary artists, noted Spanish contemporary flamenco dancer and choreographer Israel Galván and well-known author and documentary theater maker Mohamed El Khatib. Inspired by both their similarities and differences, they created a captivating biographical piece inspired by their family histories and their choices to pursue their own careers beyond what their fathers expected of them. Early in the show, Mohamed and Israel sat in the orange chairs and watched videos of their fathers talking about what they had hoped for their sons and their disappointment that their sons had chosen careers in theater and dance, Evidently, both artists came from deeply traditional families with high expectations; Israel’s father had hoped that his son would continue the family tradition of classical flamenco dance while Mohamed’s cannot understand why his son did not pursue a path as a professional academic. Israel & Mohamed played out across the full length of the Cloître des Carmes stage. At either end Mohamed and Israel had make-shift tables facing across the stage from each other. These movable tables became “altars” set with mementoes and reminders from their past. In the middle of the stage, sat two bright orange chairs on which they watched videos of their fathers. On Mohamed’s table, were the “babouches” (Moroccan slippers) his father used to teach him a lesson whenever he would forget a line from the Koran. Above him was the head of a stag and beneath him was a portrait of his father. Israel’s altar featured a mechanical parrot that sang along with a large pile of medals and prizes he had won. throughout his career. Among these archives of his life was also a portrait of his father. Israel & Mohamed : Created and directed by Israel Galvân & Mohamed El Khatib, Photo by: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Seated on the uncomfortable chairs, their backs to the audience, they silently watched videos of their fathers talking about their expectations their sons lives and careers and their ultimate disappointment. Israel, celebrated for his avant-garde flamenco performances ( La Curva , in particular) had been raised in traditional flamenco, Mohamed chose theater despite his academic background. While Israel’s father voiced his disappointment that his son did not follow in his family’s traditional flamenco style. Mohamed’s father who left Morocco to work in a factory in France to support his family, had hoped that his son’s educational degrees would lead to professional success rather a career making documentary theater. In the evening’s memorable finale, the two artists, collaborators and friends created an original dance number. Their pas de deux represented their happy yet emotional response to their fathers’ collective disappointment. BREL, Conceived and directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Solal Mariotte, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage BREL , was another collaboration, this time between legendary Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Solal Mariotte, a young French breakdancer and a member of De Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance company. A new creation set to the iconic songs of the great Belgian singer and songwriter, Jacques Brel and was presented in the Carrière Boulbon, an immense quarry outside of Avignon. Conceived, choreographed and danced by the two, their work was inspired by a selection of 26 Brel songs. Just to listen to these glorious songs in such a magical space would have been enough but watching De Keersmaeker and Mariotte respond to them was an enchantment. BREL was performed on a simple bare platform set up against the quarry walls on which larger than life projections accompanied a number of scenes. The special play of shadow and light against the walls added to the mystery of the evening during which the dancers often played in silhouette. A gigantic image of Brel hung over the early scenes, and his aura became an important part of the performance. The opening number was a solo by Anne Teresa, ( Le Diable ça va or The Devil, everything’s okay ) dramatized the devil’s visit to the earth where he is delighted to find that men are still having fun playing the dangerous game of war and putting bombs on railroad tracks. Each line of the song ends with “ça va.” “All’s well!” In case the audience missed the irony of Brel’s words, CA VA was projected in giant letters on the quarry wall some 130 feet above the playing space. Appearing alone out of the shadows and wearing a grey tailored pants suit, De Keersmaeker with her back turned to the audience. As she turns around, she smiled as if to suggest that BREL was going to be something quite different from what we might have expected. She waltzed with great twisting and turning movements, clearly enjoying Brel’s social commentary. As she finished the opening, Mariotte joined her and became her partner for the evening. Together they explored 26 of Brel’s classic songs, not so much interpreting them as testing out possible contemporary responses to Brel’s world as compared to our own with waltzes and love songs and tangos, duets and solos. There were a number of Brel’s love songs “ Quand on n’a que l’amour ” (“ When Love is All we have ”) and “ Ne me Quitte pas ” (“ Don’t Leave me ”), but especially “ Marieke ,” about a lost love from long ago, performed by Mariotte, whose choreography brought out not just the sadness of Brel’s plea to the young woman he once loved, but more importantly, perhaps, he seemed to emphasize Brel’s longing for his Flemish homeland, the Flemish sky that wept with him, the flat land that was his and the endless mist. Solal’s familiarity with the back spins, freezes and footwork of the breakdance tradition added a note of urgency to Brel’s song. Toward the end of his solo, De Keersmaeker joined him lying on the floor, reaching out to him as if to comfort him, they rolled across the stage together. Solal’s breakdance background was even more visible in his solo interpretation of “ Une valse à mille tem ps” (“ A Thousandth-time waltz ). He clearly welcomed this song which began with a slow waltz ( Une valse à trois temps) and built to dizzying moments of twirling, spinning and frenzy. BREL: Conceived and Directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Solal Mariotte, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Their very different styles, their backgrounds, their difference in age, (Solal is 26, De Keersmaeker in her 60s) and their very different choreographic approaches, allowed numerous possibilities for movement: playful at times, mocking at others, all displayed by somewhat tongue-in-cheek choreography. Their collaboration melded together very different styles into a unified collaborative work. MAMI: Directed by Banushi, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lag With MAMI , Mario Banushi, Albanian born artist, 26 years old, offered audiences an exciting new voice. His stunning “visual poem,” dedicated to different women, different “maternal” figures from his life, was a wordless landscape of memories that paid tribute to his early years and featured many women, young, sweet, angry, and old from different moments in his lifetime. I mages ranging from mothers giving their breasts to their babies to a son feeding his elderly mother are just a few of the fascinating moments in MAMI. A wordless mixture of theater and dance, the work presented the mysterious relationship between mother and child. Banush noted “My work mixes theater and dance, my shows are a mixture of sensations, feelings, colors, odors… there is no text per se but they are telling a story. It’s like an epiphany.” His pieces are landscapes composed of shapes, sensations, colors and fragrances and filled with performers of all ages. Young and old, actors, actresses, dancers and singers, many of whom were non-professionals were involved and many cultures were mixed and juxtaposed. Le Procès Pelicot : Directed by Milo Rau, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage A large sign hung outside of the Théâtre des Carm that read Le Procès Pelicot ( The Pelicot Trial ) representing the words spoken by Gisèle Pelicot at the trial “Pour que la honte change de camp! “Shame must change sides.” Le Procès Pelicot , written by Servane Dècle and directed by Milo Rau, was advertised as a night of readings inspired by the landmark trial that took place in a court in Avignon, from September 2 to December 4, 2024. On trial were Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, who over a period of nine years, had repeatedly drugged and raped her and recruited dozens of men contacted through an on-line website, to join him. Fifty men in all, from ages 27 to 74, responded to the invitation. All of these men were found guilty and were convicted. To create what Rau called “le théâtre du réel,” (reality theater or theater of the real), the authors used real testimony from the case as well as interrogations, pleas, lawyers’ summations and other commentaries to create a reenactment of the trial, a distillation into four hours accentuating and condensing the most powerful moments. Gisèle Pelicot’s words from the actual trial were delivered by three different actresses. The evening was divided into 40 segments with a prologue and an epilogue. On the stage, a minimal version of the courtroom, two women sat behind a desk in the center, the judges. On either side, rows of wooden benches, filled by French actors and actresses with transcripts in hand. As the play proceeded, the presenters took turns reading at the two lecterns located stage front. Three different actresses delivered the words that Gisèle Pelicot had spoken in court. One of the case’s expert psychiatrist’s Laurent Layet, read the diagnoses of the defendants that he had delivered in court. For four hours, the fifty some readers watch, listened and remained present. It was a stunning achievement and a devastating performance. Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Cristophe Raynaud de Lage Le Sommet, a comedy by Swiss theater director and musician Christophe Marthaler, was one of the great moments in this year’s festival. Six characters from different nationalities, three men and three women, were gathered in a chalet atop a mountain for a high-level summit. The actions of the political world leaders verged on the burlesque and absurd. To complicate matters, they did not even speak the same language. The early scenes take place in the interior of the chalet - a small, uncomfortable room where they wait for the important meeting to begin. Their surroundings are anything but luxurious. A small table in a corner, uncomfortable chairs, and one double decker bed. A strange rock formation in the room created a challenging obstacle course and, with no doors, the only access to the space was via a dumb waiter. Since they do not understand each other’s languages, they invent a number of activities to keep busy or to entertain themselves. Fortunately, one of them plays the accordion. They dance, they sing, they hum, they even yodel. And they all seem to know the words to “Edelweiss,” the famous song from The Sound of Music. They also chime in on “En haut de la Montagne … un beau chalet,” a traditional French mountain song. To top it off, they improvise a dance number using ski poles. Before long, numerous seemingly important documents arrive via the dumb waiter, that require their review and signatures. The group hastily signs them – unread. As the work progresses an impended battle seems imminent and they are delivered some forty plastic fire extinguishers for safety by a helicopter. A separate battle about what to do with the extinguishers begin to take place Where can they hide if indeed there is a war? Behind their clothes hanging over the bench? With no windows to the outside world and little ventilation, they soon complain of suffocating in their small, enclosed space. Their panic leads them to remove their clothes and improvise a hilarious sauna scene. Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Le Sommet : Directed by Christophe Marthaler, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Later in the work they begin to get dressed an elegant dinner; the women change into fancy evening gowns while the men put on tuxedoes. While they admire themselves in their new attire, we hear sounds of bombs bursting somewhere and helicopters flying overhead, hints of an attack of some kind outside of their safe haven. They listen in vain to the walls and the floors and climb up to the top bed, trying to escape what might be an attack, but there is no way out of their confined quarters. Now the news comes that the roads are blocked and they clearly are stuck in their chalet for an indefinite period of time – perhaps as long as 15-18 years. The work ends with their future in complete disarray with no clarity as to how they might survive in the tiny confined environment. Le Soulier de Satin : La Comédie-Française. Directed by Eric Ruf, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage Eric Ruf’s magnificent staging of Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin ( The Satin Slipper ) in the Honor Court, with opulent costumes by Christian LaCroix and masterful performances by twenty Comédie-Française actors playing some sixty different roles, was a glorious moment of theater. Claudel’s epic masterpiece (1919-1934) has rarely been performed. Antoine Vitez ‘s memorable version in the Cour d’honneur in 1987 has been the reference until now. Claudel’s verse drama is a love story that takes place over a period of twenty years. Set in the Spanish Empire during the 16 th century at the time of the Conquistadors. The central couple Don Rodrigue, a Conquistador and Doña Prouhèze, wife of Governor Don Pélage, struggle not to give into their passion. They believe that there’s a divine mission to achieve the Grace of God. The work was divided into four days that covered over fifty years. The major event, over eight hours long was performed on an unadorned stage with props, costumes, lighting, and music, all of which served to suggest the many locations and jumps in time. The on stage orchestra played throughout the entire evening. Eric Ruf’s Soulier de Satin is a glorious adventure story, filled with suspense and unforgettable images . Le Soulier de Satin , La Comédie-Française, Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage The Comédie-Française Soulier de Satin was truly a major festival event. A marathon welcomed by an enthusiastic audience who mostly stayed until the end. Director Ruf’s had chosen to include the audience in on the story telling, which was especially refreshing given the length and the seriousness of Claudel’s epic verse drama. The work was expansive and utilized every available space including the aisles of the theater, the windows as well as the stage itself. It is rare to see shows in the Honor Court taking advantage of the entire house. The 2000 member Cour d’honneur audience became an integral part of Le Soulier de Satin as the actors moved among and interacted with the audience. References References About the author(s) Philippa Wehle is Professor Emerita of French Language and Culture and Drama Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. She writes widely on contemporary theater and performance and is the author of Le Théâtre populaire selon Jean Vilar, Actes Sud,1981(revised editions in 1991 and 2016), Drama Contemporary: France and Act French:Contemporary Plays from France (PAJ Publications). She is a well-known translator of contemporary French and American plays. Her book Eclairer la Cour d’honneur , interviews with a selection of lighting designers who created the lighting for important shows in the Honor Court of the Pope’s Palace in Avignon, from 1969 to 2025, due to be published in May 2026 by Actes-Sud Papiers. Dr. Wehle is a Chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeanne Klein 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 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Jeanne Klein By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre . Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn has accomplished a significant feat. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre marks the first book-length study that examines the emergent history of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) from its earliest Indigenous origins, as well as its burgeoning dramatic literature and scholarship over the past three decades. Having grown up in New Mexico and west Texas, Aragόn writes passionately from her lived childhood experiences as a Chicana/India. Her family engaged in rasquache teatro in their backyard, performed in biennial pastorela and pasiόn plays at their church, traveled in a van to perform, work, protest, and march for Chicana/o rights, and assisted border-crossing Mexican families. Facing both Anglo and Mexican prejudices, she came to recognize the double consciousness of her borderlands identity. Based on her personal, coming-of-age experiences, Aragόn argues her theory of “performing mestizaje” in which she defines bicultural and hybrid body-mind concepts that (a) exhibit an Indigenous identity in Chicana/o Latina/o cultures through language and body practices, (b) enable a transformation that helps explain mestiza/o and Indigenous consciousness, spirituality, and healing, (c) participate in promoting Indigenous rituals and celebrations through the use of mythology and symbolism, and (d) enact cultural production that contests, resists, and interrogates the impacts of imperialism and colonial systems. (3) In these ways, she gives voice to Chicana/o and Mexican-American young people whose dramatized stories remain disparaged among professional theatre companies and all too many university theatre programs today. The first three out of five chapters (half the book) comprise a meticulous literature review with requisite due diligence. In the first chapter, Aragόn’s overview of US children’s theatre is based on somewhat inaccurate narratives propounded by the Theatre for Youth and Community program at Arizona State University in Tempe, the site of her heretofore unpublished dissertation. Contrary to canonical constructions that US professional theatre and dramatic literature for children began in the 1880s, prominent child actors actually began performing plays in professional theatre companies for young spectators in the 1790s, as well as Shakespeare’s works and pantomimes since the 1750s. More importantly, she addresses the nascent study of LTYA with critical texts and play anthologies that began to appear in the 1990s. In regard to shifting cultural constructions of childhood, her heavy reliance on classic Piagetian stages of child development reflects an unfortunate yet understandable lack of awareness of this field’s complex advancements in social-cognitive and neuroscientific realms. Chapter two builds upon the crucial foundations of other scholars by reviewing the Indigenous roots of child performances in Mesoamerican rituals through Spanish colonial pastorales. After Mexico’s independence from Spain, theatrical Mexican families toured southwestern US territories and their children, the first generation of native-born Mexican-American actors, starred in Spanish-language theatre companies through the 1950s. Photographs of child performers, including stars María Luisa Villalongín and Leonardo “Lalo” G. Astol, enliven their costumed performances. From there, the pivotal Chicana/o movement begun in the 1960s gave rise to multiple youth teatros that sparked today’s generation of major LTYA playwrights. To underscore the cultural, political, economic, social, and psychological specificity of young Chicana/o identities, Aragόn delineates border theory and Chicana feminism in connection with theatre scholarship in chapter three. She also explicates Jean Phinney’s three-stage psycho-social model of ethnic identity development (1989-90). In chapter four, Aragόn applies all theoretical frameworks by analyzing representations of children and adolescents in six pivotal plays: Alicia in Wonder Tierra (or I Can’t Eat Goat Head) by Silvia Gonzalez S., Farolitos of Christmas by Rudolfo Anaya, The Highest Heaven by José Cruz González, No saco nada de la escuela by Luis Miguel Valdez, Simply María or The American Dream by Josefina Lόpez, and The Drop Out by Carlos Morton. Her succinct comparative summation of these coming-of-age plays reveals how extraordinary child and adolescent protagonists successfully negotiate familial, social, political, and psychological border crossings by age, gender, class, and ethnic identities through physical journeys, metaphorical dreams, or in school settings. Playwrights’ biographies, featured with their child and adult photographs, also serve to justify how and why these foundational works created borderlands children’s theatre. The final most provocative chapter adds Aragόn’s illuminating interviews with each playwright in which they recount their most memorable theatrical and school experiences and their artistic connections with the empowering Chicana/o movement. Notably, many highlighted their frustrating challenges trying to get their plays produced by mainstream professional companies. Paradoxically, once El Teatro Campesino achieved its mainstream status, youth teatros declined until university-bred artist-scholars revived and advanced LTYA for young audiences, albeit with too few child and adolescent actors, while various community organizations expanded theatre with Latina/o young people. Yet even today, as Aragόn makes clear, childism remains firmly entrenched far behind all other contested cultural movements (e.g., December 2016 issue of American Theatre). Despite the formation of Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012, LTYA festivals still vie for national recognition among mediated adaptations of children’s literature and other popularized trends. Even so, Aragόn’s optimistic outlook for the future of LTYA inspires hope and bodes well for the next generation of theatre artist-scholars. From my perspective, this slim but somewhat overwritten book tends to reproduce its major points unnecessarily throughout each chapter. Moreover, the requisite postmodern need to use and repeat Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, or Latinx terminology may or may not bog down the flow of readers’ experiences. However, my foremost concern has to do with Routledge, a major theatre publisher that has failed this author by ignoring its copy-editing responsibilities. Regardless of these reservations, Aragón ultimately offers more than a cursory glimpse of historical legacies and trending representations of children and young people in LTYA. As the population of Latina/o and biracial children soars, Borderlands Children’s Theatre calls us all to take immediate actions by ensuring that young voices are not only heard but respected and celebrated for present and future generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JEANNE KLEIN Lawrence, Kansas Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Tea, Arts & Culture's work Community Poetry and Tea in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Interactive Ceremony, Poetry Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 2pm Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event * This ceremony is 2pm - 4pm Through the Odes to Common Things, we will share tea and explore poetry from Pablo Neruda and Keorapetse Kgositsile, uncovering our deep bond with nature and the interconnectedness between ourselves. Tuning into nature’s myriad stories could offer us profound insights into navigating our collective journey on our shared planet. Tea, Arts & Culture Tea, Arts & Culture began as a gathering of friends and tea lovers to enjoy nature and tea in the park starting in 2019. Compelled to respond to the rapidly shifting world during the start of the pandemic, they are committed to using tea arts and culture to nurture community and belonging in the face of isolation and to cultivate mindfulness and inspiration in the face of our daily challenges by establishing themselves as a non-profit organization. They believe that they can support communities in need through fostering an appreciation of tea, arts, nature, oneself, and one another. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan East Side Outside Community Garden (EO) was established as a GreenThumb community garden in 2016. The name of the garden was determined by the students at ESCHS which is next to the garden Before EO became a GreenThumb community garden, from about 2010, the garden was mainly used by ESCHS with other organizations and volunteers, including Earth Matter NY which did composting projects with the high school students (with coordination of the biology/science teachers). The composting projects were not only a general teaching component for the whole class, but also some of the students used the project as part of their PBAT (Performance Based Assessment Tasks)—students at this high school uses the PBAT, at the conclusion of which they would do a powerpoint presentation in front of teacher and guest judges, instead of having to take the Regents Exams. From about 2014, a composting operation called Reclaimed Organics, a program of Common Ground Compost, began collecting and composting food waste at the garden. They use cargo bikes, instead of motor vehicles, to pick up food waste from various locations. Eventually, the garden became an official public drop-off site, through DSNY (Sanitation), for the community to bring their food scraps, 24-7, for composting. Before becoming the East Side Outside Community Garden, the garden was also known as LES Park (Lower East Side Park). Visit Partner Website

Watch I AM NOT OK by Gabrielle Lansner at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A mother and son respond to the unending killings of Black Americans amidst the backdrop of the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Dance and archival photographs are woven together to evoke fear, outrage, and anger and the need for communities to come together and find solutions. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents I AM NOT OK At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Gabrielle Lansner Dance, Documentary, Film This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2022 A mother and son respond to the unending killings of Black Americans amidst the backdrop of the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Dance and archival photographs are woven together to evoke fear, outrage, and anger and the need for communities to come together and find solutions. Directed & Edited by Gabrielle Lansner Narration Written & Spoken by Tiffiney Davis Starring Pat Hall & Dahsir Hausif Executive Producer, Dean Taucher, Produced by Ben Glickstein, Gabrielle Lansner, Director of Photography, Barbie Leung, Music by Philip Hamilton, A.T.N. Stadjwijk, Journalistic Photography by Erica Lansner, On Set Photography by Arina Voronova, Assistant Editor, Jordan Campbell, Editorial Assistance, Marilys Ernst, Sound by Jeff Seelye About The Artist(s) Gabrielle Lansner is an award winning filmmaker, choreographer, and producer whose work is influenced by her background in choreography and performing. Her films have screened at dozens of festivals worldwide and garnered multiple awards. Her latest short film, I AM NOT OK is an experimental dance film inspired by the words of Tiffiney Davis, the Executive Director of the Red Hook Art Project, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The film has screened extensively at film festivals worldwide and won Best Experimental Film at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora FF in NYC and Best Cinedance at the Minneapolis St. Paul Int'l FF. For over 30 years, Lansner has explored artistic disciplines moving from pure dance works, to dance/theater, to film. She has always been interested in story and character: creating emotionally complex and layered works that delve into the heart and psyche. Her film, the birch grove, 2015, had a successful festival run, screening at the Newport Beach Festival, the Cannes Short Film Corner, and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, to name a few. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Experimental Film at the Underexposed Film Festival in Rock Hill, S.C. and composer, Joel Pickard, won Best Original Score from the International Fine Arts Film Festival in Santa Barbara. Lansner's, THE STRONGER, 2012, premiered at the Cannes Short Film Corner and screened at over two dozen festivals, including Interfilm Berlin, Festival International du Film sur L’Art Montreal, and the Female Eye in Toronto, to name a few. Garnering awards worldwide, the film received Best Artistic Director Award from the Lady Filmmakers Festival in LA, the Award of Distinction from the Open Stage Festival in Poland, and was nominated for Best Experimental Film at the Female Eye Festival and Best Cinematography at the VisionFest Festival in NYC. Get in touch with the artist(s) gabriellelansnercompany@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.gabriellelansner.com/films/2022/06/I-AM-NOT-OK/, https://www.facebook.com/gabrielle.lansner, https://www.instagram.com/gabrielle_lansner/?hl=en Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

By Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu | Capturing 10 years of the contemporary performances and conversations of the Segal Center's PRELUDE festival. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the link: http://www.tcg.org/Store/ProductDetail/6110895 To view this publication online for free, visit the link: https://www.scribd.com/doc/283453685/Ten-Years-PRELUDE Ten Years PRELUDE Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu Download PDF Edited by Frank Hentschker Designed and Design Concept by Yu Chien Liu For over 10 years the annual Prelude Festival, held at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, has been a force in New York theatre and performance – a free, three-day festival that celebrates artistic and academic exchange in the heart of the city. This book represents ten years (2003-2013) of unlimited creativity, discourse and exchange within an academic setting. The artists of Prelude – pioneers in their field – demonstrate that theatre and performance continue to matter – and that New York City is still at the forefront of the form. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Summer 2025 in London, England Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Amy Hamel Image Credits: Article While the primary goal of being in London this past summer was professional development - participating in quality acting classes for both stage and screen and taking a plethora of dance classes of various styles and levels – another goal was to pack in as much live theatre as possible. The shows on the agenda before arrival were Hamlet and Hail to the Thief (a mash-up with Radiohead), and whatever was playing in the West End theatres or at the Globe Theatre. Anything that could be seen in the United States was not on the list of desired theatre attendance. The programs, exquisite theatres, and their fascinating architecture, as well as the impeccable service and ushering, were just some of the notable differences that made the experience unique. Within three weeks, we saw 11 plays and one Mod Ballet. The following is a reflection on a few of the productions witnessed, with the first two being featured for their amazing stories, soundtracks, choreography, and technical specialties. Photo Credit: Johann Persson Hamlet Hail to the Thief, by the Royal Shakespeare Company in co-production with Factory International, was adapted by Christine Jones with Steve Hoggett, music by Radiohead, and additional orchestrations by Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead). When I was in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2006, I saw Romeo and Juliet by this company with tap dancing as the fight scenes, and it was evident that the actors were uncomfortable and not as skilled in that style of movement as they were with the spoken text. Nearly twenty years later, this current production completely redeemed my skepticism in movement or choreography in Shakespeare, and I will never be able to see any other production of this iconic play without thinking of this one! Oddly enough, it was just about that time, twenty years ago, when this particular Hamlet project began. The music, lights, imagery, projections, fight choreography, and ensemble performance blended Shakespeare’s text with Yorke’s orchestrations of Radiohead’s album Hail to the Thief to near perfection. The stage environment included amplifiers and speakers used as scenic elements along with blocks and pedestals, all synced together to create this epic, rock concert-infused, one-of-a-kind interpretation of the tale of the Danish prince. Photo: Johann Persson When first walking in, the dimly lit, fog-covered stage was filled with long trench coats hanging suspended all over the stage, floating as though you could see old ghosts in a cemetery. King Hamlet’s ghost appeared in the projections on the upstage wall, and then the coats disappeared into the fly space. The set of the thrust stage was primarily bare, featuring a two-story platform along the upstage wall where people could climb one of two ladders to sit or stand above. Additionally, two singers appeared in bookending doorways on the top floor space when it was time for them to sing. There were three separate plexiglass booths on the bottom floor for the band, with the drummer in the center booth. The choreography, by Jess Williams, featured several unique dances, physical gesture work, and distinct movement vocabularies, like the dance where the players portray the royals, upon Hamlet’s insistence, told through a contemporary style ballet. In Act Two, Scene Two, when Hamlet and his school buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in dialogue, they are also in a series of leaning movement sequences, showing that just when they think Hamlet’s thoughts are moving one way or another, then they will lean in opposition or lean towards him to gain his trust. Then the childlike, adventurous dancing to some of Yorke’s music established a deeper relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia than is seen or heard in the text, representing the length and depth of their friendship, consequently making Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia all the more heartbreakingly powerful. Examples of clever fight choreography and staging by fight director Kev McCurdy were seen when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her own bedroom, and Hamlet kills Polonius in the supposed wardrobe; there was no furniture, but through movement, it provided clarity to the storytelling. The final fight between Hamlet and Laertes was also well-choreographed and contained a variety of fighting styles, including wrestling, which required perfectly timed dance-like partnering. There were moments when it was somewhat unclear as to what was happening due to the addition of strobe lights, but one moment of clarity in the fight was Gertrude’s grotesque reaction to the poison she drinks as she violently spewed blood everywhere, especially onto the combatants, making for an extremely gory stage picture. As the fight concludes, death falls upon most of the stage. Horatio, touchingly portrayed by Alby Baldwin, cradles Hamlet’s body on the floor and delivers his final speech. The long trench coats from the top of the play, as the cemetery, began to lower down into their original suspended state, and as the final word was spoken, an audible latch was released, and all of the coats dropped to the floor. Blackout, followed by an audience-wide gasp. A moment that is now forever connected in my memory to this play. Samuel Blenkin’s embodiment and delivery of the young prince, Hamlet, contained just the right balance of fire and finesse, teen angst and grief-driven, dutiful son seeking vengeance. It is a role that can easily be portrayed as very whiny, snobby, or the actor “milks the cow” for sympathy and becomes annoying. That was not the case here. His engagement with the audience made it feel as though we were the only ones whom he could trust, and even though most knew the ending of the story, he made us have hope that it would end differently. His singing of Yorke’s music and text was effortless, and his voice floated as though his thoughts were flowing through the space. It helped that actors Paul Hilton as Claudius and Claudia Harrison as Gertrude did their jobs exceedingly well, being so disgustingly evil, giving us more reasons to root for and like Hamlet. What made this production even more memorable was the treatment and portrayal of the role of Ophelia, hauntingly performed by Ami Tredrea. Before reading more of the director’s insight regarding this tortured character, it was evident that she was receiving some extra attention. Through her movement, physical gestures (her arms were almost always lifted as if she was always in a state of surrender), her singing in her madness, and her repetition of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech, connecting their grief with the same conflict of life, the performance was stunning. Lights for Ophelia have four clear lines creating a box around her, with the box sizes differing depending on who she is speaking to, or who is verbally putting her in a box. The projections on the back wall during her descent into madness showed flowing water, and the sound of rain and water, and as she finished repeating Hamlet’s speech, the box of light became a rectangle and established an opening in the stage with water appearing to cascade into it. Ophelia lay down beside it and simply rolled into the space and disappeared. This is one of the only productions that I have experienced where Ophelia’s death is shown on stage, and it has left another lasting impression. Romaya Weaver as Player Queen and James Cooney as Player King in Hamlet Hail to the Thief . Photo: Johann Persson Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet with orchestral score, based on the album and movie of the same name, was presented by Sadler’s Wells, Extended Play, and Universal Music UK. Written by Pete Townshend. Directed by Rob Ashford. Choreographed by Paul Roberts. Music Direction and Orchestration by Rachel Fuller, with Orchestrator Martin Batchelar. Set Designer, Christopher Oram. Costume Designer, Paul Smith. Video Designer, Yeastculture.org . All of the above are important to mention, as each of those components coming together so spectacularly is what made this piece special. I was familiar with the story due to personal connections with one of the actors in the 1979 film, and I had heard that Pete Townshend was talking about this potential project, where the story would be brought to life again through dance. So, when I saw the poster for this show around London, that the show had come to fruition, and that it was with Sadler’s Wells (another artistic viewing bucket list), it went straight to the top of the must-see list. It did not disappoint! The company of Quadrophenia in Act One’s closing scene in a London Basement Club . Photo: Johann Persson Set in 1960s London and Brighton, Quadrophenia follows Jimmy, a young man navigating life and love, unhappy in his factory line job and determined to become more. In his search for his identity, he finds release in music, dancing, going to clubs, and doing drugs. He becomes a Mod, a subculture of the time and place characterized by tailored suits, their love for modern jazz music, and riding scooters, specifically Lambrettas. The rivalry with another subculture called the Rockers, known for their love of rock music and motorcycles, serves as the backdrop for his story. The super short version of the plot is that a childhood friend of Jimmy’s becomes a Rocker, some Rockers hurt one of Jimmy’s Mod friends, and the childhood friend becomes the target of the Mod’s retaliation. All while Jimmy chases after his dream girl who belongs to another Mod with no clear chance of having her. This sends Jimmy further into a personality crisis, and the rival groups into historic riots on the beaches of Brighton. Lead dancer, Paris Fitzpatrick as Jimmy, is joined by four other male dancers who represent different facets of Jimmy’s personality: the TOUGH GUY, the ROMANTIC, the LUNATIC, and the HYPOCRITE. At the top of the show, we see all 5 men standing on the Brighton Beach rock, doing a series of lifts, and actually showing the portrayal of the end of the show, where a vital decision is about to be made. Then the set transitions to a psychiatrist’s office, and the audience is transported to a week earlier in the story, when the character first learns of the multiple facets. Stuart Neal as the FATHER and Kate Tydman as the MOTHER/Dance Captain in Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson As Jimmy’s journey progressed, many characters would dance with him, depending on the environment or the situation. For example, in scenes at the club when he was infatuated with the main Mod Girl that everyone wanted to be with, then the ROMANTIC would be incorporated into the dance, or at the end, when Jimmy sees one of the top Mods working as a bellhop, then the HYPOCRITE danced with them. There were times at the beginning when the other facets dancing along were confusing. It took a couple of scenes to realize this theatrical convention and understand the distinction of when Jimmy was dancing with another character, one of his fantasies, one of his facets, or all of those. It was a pioneering and dynamic approach with a compelling and lasting effect, especially once it became clearer, and the stellar performances of Fitzpatrick and this ENSEMBLE cast contributed to Jimmy’s story being so effectively told. Along with Rachel Fuller’s amazing orchestration, with select instruments used to interpret the original rock score, and captivating choreography, this production relies on intricate technical aspects to enhance the storytelling. From projections and fly work that transport Jimmy on a drug-induced train ride that leaves the audience feeling like they too are tripping, to sets with trap doors where dancers can disappear into a booth in a diner, and Jimmy can dance with his reflection outside of the diner. From a large rotating rock that represents Brighton Beach, to a bed that looks like only one person is in it when magically two more emerge, all the sets provided unique dance canvases, heightened the movement theatrically, and provided insight into Jimmy’s thoughts. Glimpses of Jimmy’s home life are shown through dances between his MOTHER and FATHER that express their marriage and working-class struggles, and one imposing militaristic style of movement and formations of men in a memory dance of his father’s time in WWII. The same rock used for Brighton is also used in the Father’s War memory dance, and some of the men are depicted fighting up a hill or marching off the edge. Company of Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson Jimmy and his childhood friend (turned Rocker) and their friendly bench dance in Act One, stood in stark contrast to the later Brighton Beach Riot where the teen angst driven choreography, much like the similar rivalry of the Shark and Jets, was reminiscent of West Side Story , and included vivid stage pictures to exhibit the violence of the fight. The father’s war memory, the diner dance with escape booth where Jimmy fantasizes about the Mod girl and her dreams and dances with the ROMANTIC too, the 5 guys on rock at top of show representing Jimmy and his personalities, the train ride while tripping, 2 couples dancing on the beach in time period swimwear with partnering that closely resembled the movement of classical ballet, and the club scenes with its specifically stylized, 1960s dance vocabulary, complete with the most fabulous time appropriate costumes and LaDuca shoes! As Townshend’s notable, and the production’s final song “Love Reign O’er Me” is played, the final scene too is played out with Jimmy on the giant rock where the show began. The continued use of projections filled the stage with images of the moving sea and waves crashing on the rock. Jimmy is left alone in his emotional turmoil and faced with the final decision as to which facet he will let have control, determining his next movements. He jumps and the audience is led to believe that he has taken his life, but as the score triumphantly crescendos, Jimmy triumphantly climbs back up atop the rock, choosing to not allow his story to end in tragedy, and leaving the audience with a glimmer of hope for the young character and with an awesome soundtrack replaying in our heads. The following three plays were selected for their topics, themes, and messages that linger and continue to raise questions, as quality theatre can do. Themes of these plays demonstrated cultural and societal relevance to today’s situations, addressing race, gender, social, and economic issues, and the numerous perspectives they hold. The standouts featured next were the Playwrights, Directors, and Actors' performances Retrograde was written by Ryan Calais Cameron, directed by Amit Sharma, and played at the astonishingly gorgeous Apollo Theatre. Closing performance, June 14, 2025. This production was so thoroughly enjoyed that I purchased the script afterward, conducted further research on acting legend Sidney Poitier and the topics of the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I rewatched his 2002 Honorary Oscar acceptance speech, which brought another level of appreciation for the man and his part in history in the arts, especially in America. The set was that of a 1950s office of a New York City NBC network television lawyer. The small cast of three includes Sydney Poitier, a screenwriter, Bobby, and the network lawyer, Mr. Parks. Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier in Retrograde . Photo Credit Johann Persson This ninety-minute play encompasses some personal history of Poitier, his humble beginnings, how he got his break on Broadway, and covers information on his (then) current life, wife, and family for which he was responsible for feeding and providing. Bobby had brought Poitier to the lawyer’s office under the pretext that Poitier would be signing a contract for a new television show he was writing and just needed him to meet with the lawyer for proper protocol. Both Bobby and Poitier were shocked to discover his true intentions as he began to ask the rising star about his American allegiance and his political affiliations, bearing in mind that this was a time of communist threat to the American way of life and the rise of the civil rights movement to which Poitier was known to have had connections. The lawyer’s objective was to get Poitier to sign not just a loyalty oath, but a document that would disavow his political associations and specifically denounce his friend and hero, Paul Robeson, creating a moral and ethical dilemma that could hold great consequences with either final decision. All three actors gave compelling performances and easily held the audience captive for the duration of the production. Ivanno Jeremiah’s embodiment of Poitier was breathtaking. Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron is quoted to say of his performance, “People who knew Poitier told me that Ivanno Jeremiah was almost possessed by his spirit”, and with this play, Cameron tackled the topic of race and politics in the 1950s with the same grace and respectful manner as Poitier himself. Oliver Johnstone as Bobby and Stanley Townsend as Mr. Parks in Retrograde. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant , was written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The cover of the program has a picture of the lead actor, John Lithgow, and displays the one-word title, with a tear or rift in the letter “a” in the graphics, along with the name of the theatre, Harold Pinter Theatre, previously known as the Royal Comedy Theatre. We attended an invitation-only, full-dress rehearsal featuring the understudies of the six-character cast. Instead of being taken in by the celebrity of the immensely talented Lithgow, this experience allowed me to truly see the play for what it is and the message it brings. It also allowed a glimpse into the life of an understudy in the West End. As one who began her career and Broadway experience as a swing, I have the utmost respect for those who are waiting in the wings or the dressing rooms, staying ready for the unknown, hanging on to every possibility. Much was learned about understudy life as a working actor on the West End and how it differs from that of Broadway and American Actors' Equity rules. The play left me seeking more information about Roald Dahl, his “complex legacy” (Rosenblatt), and pondering the question the play asks: “at what point does one stop being the victim and start becoming the aggressor?” It demonstrates how one’s life experiences can shape one’s opinions, beliefs, and perspectives on another’s culture, and it even had me questioning some of my own beliefs concerning this topic. John Lithgow in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant is set in the summer of 1983, in Roald Dahl’s family home, which is under construction. Dahl’s UK publisher, along with his mistress of eleven years, now fiancée, is discussing an upcoming book release, illustrations, and anticipating the arrival of his NY publisher. The NY publisher has sent a young female assistant, Jessica Stone, to try and connect with the writer in hopes of persuading him to make a public apology for what some believed to be an antisemitic book review he had recently written. Dahl and Stone bond over their own children and the fact that both of their young ones suffered from debilitating illnesses (Dahl losing his child to that illness); however, it does not take long for Dahl to pick up on the clues that Miss Stone’s original name was Stein and that she herself is Jewish. Ultimately, the arguments are built with powerful monologues revealing their own truths and bringing up convincing points that one can’t help but weigh both sides and sympathize with them, and yet also be offended by both as well. John Lithgow as Roald Dahl and Aya Cash as Jessica Stone in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson After the main blow-up at the end of Act One, Act Two consisted of Dahl talking to his houseworkers: a male groundskeeper and a female cook. It appears at first as though he is trying to get others’ views, but in reality, he is trying to get them to back him up. In the conversation with the cook, the audience discovers that she, too, is Jewish. Dahl stubbornly continues his soapbox rant, he offends her, she exits the stage, and at the end of the play, when he calls for the cook again, she does not return; it is discovered that she has left the house. After which Dahl is alone and sneaks to his phone to make a call. The audience is led to think that maybe he has seen the others’ side and felt the non-verbal statement of the cook’s departure; instead, he doubles down on his original statement, leaving us in thoughtful shock in this final moment of the play. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, was written by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Dominic Cooke, and played at the Garrick Theatre , s tarring Imelda Staunton and her real-life daughter Bessie Carter. This ninety-minute, no intermission, controversial “problem play” and its history have much to offer in the way of discussion on the topic alone. The commentary is mostly on the artistic choices in the casting, the set, the visual imagery, and how those creative decisions impact the message of the play. In this case , celebrity was important in contributing to the dramatic impact of this show. As Bessie Carter herself puts it in an interview in the program, “Our relationship is adding a subconscious kinetic level”, and indeed it did, as they brought this dramatic classic to life. Vivie, the daughter and recent Honors Mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge, first appears barefoot, free, and fun. The estranged mother, Mrs. Kitty Warren, arrives well-dressed and classy, and the tension is immediately felt. The four male characters are Rev. Samuel Gardner, his son Frank, who is involved romantically with Vivie but also flirts with her mother, Mrs. Warren’s business partner Sir George Croft, who is also attracted to Vivie, and Mr. Praed, an architect, friend of Mrs. Warren, and potential suitor for Vivie. There is an ensemble of silent women, of different sizes and ethnicities, all dressed in white undergarments, who, through their physicality in acting, appear to age or grow with the daughter character. They do not engage with Vivie, but rather observe, and it is not quite clear who these women are or their significance at the top of the play. The ethereal set had a low-hanging ceiling, over a circular rotating platform with a grassy knoll, garden flowers, and a white bench. The silent ensemble shows up in between scenes and changes the set by first moving the flower arrangements and bench while the stage rotates to become another garden, then changing after the next scene to take away all flowers to create an open field between the characters’ homes. Eventually, the ensemble of women even rolls up the grass to create a blank, open, bare stage, making room for the final scene’s staging, where a back wall, shaped in a semi-circle with a solo door, was lowered down onto the stage, two desks and chairs, and a waste basket were added to create Vivie’s office. Bessie Carter and Imelda Staunton in Mrs. Warren’s Profession . Photo Credit: Johann Persson As the play’s physical environment gradually wasted away, it exposed more and more truths of Mrs. Warren’s past, the decisions she made that were vital to her survival (which also provided funds for her daughter’s education), scandals like the discovery that Frank may have been Vivie’s half-brother, and other situations that reveal the relational dilemma Vivie is faced with in the decision to embrace her mother and her profession. At one point, it seemed as though Vivie understood her mother’s reasons for her life decisions and even praises her resilience, but in the end, once she learns that her mother is still running the “business” even though she doesn’t need to, Vivie not only rejects her mother but also disowns her. The final scene, which took place in Vivie’s office, offered Mrs. Warren’s last desperate plea to be in each other’s lives. Mrs. Warren was closer to “her girls” and has been more of a mother figure to them than to her own daughter. This, coupled with the casting of real-life mother/daughter dynamics, made the scene even more poignant. Vive’s education came from the work of the girls, and although she has been proposed to by her mother’s much older business partner, she is resolute in her determination to do her own work in an office and not take the easy or privileged route. This was made more obvious with the director’s decision to have the silent ensemble of women enter the office and stand on the other side of the desk after Mrs. Warren’s dramatic departure, reminiscent of Ibsen’s “door slam heard round the world”, and with that final powerful image, it is abundantly clear who these women were and that they had been supporting Mrs. Warren by providing for Vivie throughout the play and their collective lives. That imagery gives life to the unseen yet crucial characters in this story, adding another level of depth to the play’s significance. The brilliance that is Ismelda Staunton and Bessie Carter and their gripping, heart-wrenching performances, especially in the final scene, is a master class in listening and being truly present. This, partnered with Dominic Cooke’s direction of the literary classic, easily qualified this as one of the strongest shows of the summer. In conclusion, the range of theatrical experiences I encountered over the summer in London—comprising physically based pieces, new plays, and contemporary adaptations of classics—was truly extraordinary. From the innovative reimagining of Hamlet Hail to the Thief to the diverse performances across venues like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sadler’s Wells, each production offered a unique perspective on storytelling and artistry. The combination of compelling narratives, powerful soundtracks, and mesmerizing choreography demonstrated the richness of live theatre and its power to connect with audiences on multiple levels. Whether through classic adaptations, fresh interpretations, or pioneering biographical pieces, the brilliant performances in every production highlighted London’s vibrant theatre scene, emphasized the importance of live art in fostering creativity and inspiration, and provided audiences much to talk about. This journey through England's theatrical landscape undoubtedly enriched my experience, offering invaluable insights and lasting memories that will continue to influence my personal and professional growth in the performing arts. References References About the author(s) Amy Hamel, (AEA, MFA Acting from University of North Carolina Greensboro, BA Theatre Arts from Palm Beach Atlantic University) is a performing artist, director, choreographer, and educator, currently serving as Visiting Lecturer of Theatre at Palm Beach Atlantic University, in West Palm Beach, Florida, teaching courses in both the Theatre and Dance departments. Her performance credits extend from regional theatres across the United States, and cruise ships around the world, to the lights of Broadway as a member of the historic closing company of the original production of CATS, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab | Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit this link: https://www.tcg.org/Store/ProductDetail/6110849 Four Arab Hamlet Plays Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson & Magaret Litvin with Joy Arab Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. This volume samples that tradition with works by Moroccan Nabyl Lahlou (1968), Syrian Mamduh Adwan (1976), Jordanian Nader Omran (1984), Iraqi Jawad al-Assadi (1994), plus an autobiographical sketch by Egyptian Mahmoud Aboudoma (2006). Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

John Bray Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl John Bray By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl. Amy Muse. London: Methuen Drama Critical Companion Series, 2018; Pp. 215 + xv. Amy Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl offers an insightful reading of the works of one of the U.S.’s most prolific contemporary playwrights. Since the premiere of Passion Play at Trinity Rep in 1997, Ruhl has won a number of accolades demonstrating her significance, including the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award (2003), the Fourth Freedom Forum Award from the Kennedy Center (2004), and a MacArthur Genius Award (2005). She has also twice been named a Pulitzer Finalist ( Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2005) and In the Next Room or the vibrator play (2009)). Ruhl began writing plays in Paula Vogel’s dramatic writing course at Brown in which she wrote Dog Play, where she was able to unpack her grief at having lost her father while making the focalizer of her play the family dog (“played by a person wearing a dog mask and an apron”) (xi). Thus, Muse situates Ruhl with the “artist-thinkers” that William Demastes labels the “new alchemists,” in Muse’s words, the “artists and scientists who are re-enchanting the world through a grounding in the world” (xiii). For Muse, Ruhl’s gift of re-enchantment lies in her ability to weave works that blend the empirical and the spiritual. While not the first critical book on Ruhl (that honor belongs to James Al-Shamma’s Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays , published by McFarland & Co. in 2011), The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl presents an important addition to critical examinations of Ruhl’s plays, even if her analysis could sometimes go further. In the Preface, Muse discusses why she structures the book not chronologically, but according to Ruhl’s “artistic and ethical concerns” (xv). Ruhl’s works, Muse argues, “call for a more phenomenological than ideological mode of analysis,” thus situating Muse as a guide through the ways in which Ruhl creates modes of feeling and transcendence by inviting audiences into conversations with the stage, rather than looking at the stage as a place for detached analysis (xiv). The next four chapters are each super-titled with a quote from Ruhl, reinforcing this sense of conversation. Muse’s first chapter deals with Ruhl’s influences, as well as her adaptations of Chekhov and Woolf, in order to demonstrate how Ruhl is more interested in writing about “Moments of Being” rather than presenting realistic representations for the stage (23). In chapter two, Muse considers four of Ruhl’s plays – Eurydice , Demeter in the City , Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince . She reads each work to activate an interplay with “the actual and magical” resulting in plays that on the surface feel “whimsical,” but are rather “philosophical comedies that plumb the depths with a light touch” (61). Chapter three deals more directly with Sarah Ruhl’s approach to dramatic structure; here Muse demonstrates that Ruhl, much like Maria Irene Fornes, is less interested in creating characters driven by psychological objectives and more in bringing characters into a room together where their reckonings are rich with pre-Freudian defined desire. In Chapter Four, Muse situates Passion Play, The Oldest Boy, To Peter Pan on Her 70 TH Birthday, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage with medieval Mystery Plays and plays born out of rituals. As with the Mystery Plays, Muse argues, these works of Ruhl’s have less to do with preaching morality and serve better as invitations to experiences that are holy and invisible. Each of these four chapters ends with a “Coda,” rather than a conclusion, evoking the musicality of Ruhl’s plays. For Chapter Five, Muse departs from the layout of previous chapters and interviews two artists who are well acquainted with Ruhl’s works: Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn. Rasmussen is the Artistic Director of the Jungle Theatre in Minneapolis and served as assistant director for the Broadway production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play . Finn is the Associate Artistic Director of the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis and a former classmate of Ruhl’s. She directed the first workshop production of Eurydice (129, 131). One resonant moment arises when Rasmussen describes how her childhood play impacted her views of directing: “I was entranced by how a small, made up story can sound out larger truths in our lives” (qtd. 135). Rasmussen’s notions of childhood make-believe feeds well into the sense of wonder, myth, and staging of the invisible truths that guide Ruhl’s plays. Chapter Six features three critical essays: “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Medieval Performance” by Jill Stevenson; “From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl” by Thomas Butler; and “Arrested Dev-elopement: Myth-Understanding Father-Daughter Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice” by Christina Dokou. Each essay demonstrates different paradigms for nuanced, in-depth discussion of Ruhl’s plays. Muse closes with an Afterword, “I Had Hoped to Give Them Pleasure,” in which she considers how writing this book may be a little premature; after all, Ruhl is a midcareer writer who will likely continue having a rich and lustrous career. In the final paragraph, Muse avers that Ruhl’s plays “are not so much about love, intimacy, communion, and transcendence as they are vehicles which the audience and the theater makers experience these pleasurable states” (177). Following the Afterword, the book includes a Chronology of major milestones in Ruhl’s personal and professional life. Muse’s writing is infectious. It is much like listening to a die-hard fan unpack their thoughts and feelings and getting swept up in their unabashed love. The only drawback is that, at times, Muse ignores possibilities for further inquiry by foregrounding summaries of Ruhl’s plays rather than her own analysis. For example, Muse makes passing mention of criticisms of Ruhl being not political enough in her writing, and yet, Ruhl has written political plays. Indeed, as authors such as Lauren Gunderson have argued, simply writing a play can be seen as a political act given our historical moment. Nonetheless, Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl will prove to be necessary and exciting reading for our next generation of dramatic critics and dramaturgs alike. References Footnotes About The Author(s) John Bray University of Georgia 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JULIA JARCHO presents Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism JULIA JARCHO 3-3:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Celebrated poet and critic Michael Robbins (Walkman , Alien vs. Predator ) will join Jarcho to read and discuss her new book and how to be a pervert in writing. Throw Yourself Away proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing—and that THEATER has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar. She puts on her plays with the NYC company Minor Theater. They include Marie It's Time , Pathetic, The Terrifying, Dreamless Land, Every Angel Is Brutal , and Grimly Handsome . Other books: Minor Theater: Three Plays (53rd State Press) and Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press). She is the head of MFA playwriting at Brown. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on