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

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Gergana Traikova Image Credits: Article In the course of the last decade, the tandem of Veselka Kuncheva, director, and Marieta Golomehova, set designer, managed to develop their special creative process and make a name as theatre-makers with a distinctive style characterized by deep symbolism, visual richness, and a combination of puppets, live actors, multimedia elements and music. Other features of their works are a dark aesthetics and experimental approach, where text seems to lose its primary importance and give way to the visual. In 2019 Kuncheva said in an interview “...I realized at some point that we start serving the text, and there is much more to theatre than just text. That is why my way of working is almost upside down - I accept the text only as one of the instruments of theatre. For me, the main thing in theatre is what we call life." ( Kultura newspaper: Issue 9 (2982), November 2021) The tandem’s performances have invariably been receiving predominantly rave reviews . Almost every year they have been awarded the main theatre awards Ikar and Askeer , thus cementing their status as leading figures of the Bulgarian theatre. However, behind the adulation and accolades there are issues that rarely get raised publicly. Recently, the tandem’s work has begun to follow one and the same, familiar pattern: repetitive visual elements with an emphasis on darkness and smoke. In almost every performance Kuncheva develops a similar idea, placing in the center a human being who is afraid, or corrupted by society, or possessed by their own demons. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson I have been observing the tandem’s work for ten years now and, during the first three of them I was not only impressed but truly enchanted by the visuality of their theatre and the richness of stage means of expression. In the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the rehearsals of the Queen of Spades by Pushkin, at the State Puppet Theatre of Plovdiv, and I kept a diary about the work process. I remember the rapture of the rehearsal atmosphere and Kuncheva's mastery of creating a team, her ability to challenge the actors every day with new tasks for creative experiments. A year later, though, I remember the premiere of Demon Life, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons at the State Puppet Theatre of Stara Zagora, as a moment of sobering down of my enthusiasm. The performance looked like a sequel to Queen of Spades: with the same approach, similar mise-en-scène and subject matter, albeit in a new visual form. With each subsequent performance of Kuncheva, the repetitive elements became more noticeable to me. Many would call it a style, but where does a style and creative language end, and uniformity and predictability begin? The newest work of Kuncheva and Golomehova, The Little Prince at the Youth Theatre “Nikolai Binev,” represents a slight departure from their otherwise typical dark aesthetics. Although the production is aimed at a children's audience, smoke and repetitive mechanical movements again take center stage, creating a feeling of depression. The plot of Saint-Exupéry's story is nearly entirely followed, with its key moments, like the Little Prince’s encounters with the Fox, the Rose and his travels through the wondrous planets, but they seem to remain on the surface, deprived of the depth and philosophical message of the original work. Repetitive elements, such as mass dance scenes, which have no clear connection to the plot or characters but are intended to summarize the previous scenes, deepen a sense of disjointedness and a lack of original directorial ideas for presenting Saint-Exupéry’s work. The theme of the individual and society – a Kuncheva favorite – creeps in here as well, but it does not bring anything new or different from her previous performances. Loud music, dancing and smoke once again dominate the stage space, making the transitions between scenes mechanical and devoid of emotional fluidity. The cast of The Little Prince is undoubtedly trying with utmost dedication to accomplish the tasks set by the director. Especially Kuncho Kanev, in the role of the Pilot, builds up a brilliant and complete character who goes deftly from the very striving for life and the steadfastness, through childish naivety, to the touching love for the world around him. The appearance of the actress Anna-Valeria Gostanyan is very impressive too; she plays the part of the Serpent, twisting around a descending spiral. It is a truly acrobatic moment where the airiness and beauty of the movement stand out against the repetitive mass dance scenes. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson It should be noted that Kuncheva and Polina Hristova, the authors of the dramatization, have managed to introduce some humor through several comic scenes that illustrate the absurdity of the world we live in. For example, the scene with the stargazers who count stars on an exaggeratedly large abacus in order to own, sell and earn money for more stars; or the geographer, who strongly resembles a bureaucrat from a government office refusing assistance because of a missing document. Although these moments capture the meaninglessness of the modern world, they also highlight the main problem in Kuncheva's work : lack of a clearly identified central idea that would unify the scenes and result in an overall integrity of the production. The visually appealing sets created by Marieta Golomehova manage to take the viewer briefly into the magical world of the story, transporting them through the stars and universes and introducing them to the whimsical characters. Golomehova incorporates spirals and rounded elements throughout the set design: from the descending spirals around which the planets are located, to a massive spiral platform in the center of the stage around which all the journeys of the Little Prince take place. Ultimately, though, despite the visually impressiveness of the production, it remains empty in terms of content. There is something of this combination in the previous production of the tandem: The Portrait of Dorian Gray at the Racho Stoyanov Theatre in Gabrovo. There, the fragmentary nature of the structure is taken to an extreme: the scenes often end upbruptly, as if literally cut off . This is sometimes rather confusing and makes it difficult to follow the overall storyline. The production follows the main thread of the novel, where Dorian Gray, obsessed with his beauty, sells his soul to preserve his youth while his portrait ages. Although the atmosphere of mysticism and decadence around the character are conveyed, the emphasis again falls mainly on the visual side and mass scenes. The idea of a tableau-vivant in which Basil (Dimo Dimov) models the actors' bodies in front of a translucent fabric, creating works of art, is impressive. A visually strong moment is also the coming to life of the portrait that finally swallows Dorian. Unfortunately, though, Blagovest Mitsev, in the role of Dorian Gray, fails to achieve anything memorable, playing as if one note almost through the entire performance. This contrasts strongly with Tsveti Peniashki, who demonstrates impressive vocal and acting skills in the part of Sir Henry Wotton. Penyashki manages to create a multi-layered character, while Mitsev seems to fail to capture the complexity of his character, and his achievements remain only on the level of plasticity. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray there again are dance scenes and mass scenes, in which the actors repeat movements and lines that have no essential meaning to the plot, except to re-emphasize the theme of aimlessness of existence. As in other recent productions of the tandem there is a combination of costumes inspired by a concrete era and rather neutral materials, such as elastics, nets, nylon and fabric. So the production has impressive plastic scenes, yet features the familiar flaws: excessive focus on the visual side at the expense of content. In 2016 the theatre critic Veneta Doycheva wrote in her review of Kuncheva’s Escapes performance, "If there is something that could be desired, it is towards the purely dramatic side of the performance. Individual etudes quickly exhaust their internal charge and do not trespass into a more generalized level of meaning. Many of the scenes get stuck in repetition and fail to develop the literal saturation of gesture or movement in a new plane. The metaphorical key is laid bare, and instead of poetry, the image acquires only technical dimensions." (HOMO LUDENS 19/2016) No doubt, the productions of Kuncheva and Golomehova represent a well-balanced hybridity between elements of dramatic theatre, puppetry, musical theatre and acrobatics. However, a major problem remains the very telling of a story. Attempts at creating a poetical atmosphere often turn into a maelstrom of repetitions which bring about stasis and cyclicity in the dialogue. What Doycheva underlined in 2016 has, alas, worsened now, and the repetition unfolds on two levels: first, in the repetition of scenes within one and the same production and, second, in their transfer from one production to another. An example of this can be seen in the repetitive lines and mechanical movements of the nobles in Dorian Gray , the nobles in The Queen of Spades , the controlled figures in The Last Man (2019) and the collective images of society in Momo (2014), Don Quixote (2022) and The Little Prince . Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson Actually, the repeated mise-en-scène, themes and means of expression in Kuncheva's work began after her production I, Sisyphus (2013), which is still running. In it, the main artistic element is the multiplication of the actor's face by means of puppets made from a plaster cast of his face. It is nearly in the same way that the collective image of the Gray people in Momo is built up. In Fear (2014), another production of Kuncheva (co-authored with Ina Bozhidarova), the same technique is used to present the fears of the main character. In The Queen of Spades , the repetition comes in the form of a dress made of multiple baby dolls, and in The Last Man , based on Orwell's 1984 (2019), there are busts again with plaster casts of the face of one of the actors in order to stress the lack of individuality. While the multiplication of faces gradually receded in the tandem's collaborative work, the "dancing woman," or an ensemble of "dancing women." remains a constant element in their performances. This motif appears in various forms: from the ballerina in Fear , through the Countess and Lisa in The Queen of Spades , Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation (2017), the Dulcineas in Don Quixote (2022), Sybil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (2024) to Roses in The Little Prince (2024). Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson In light of these observations, a question arises: does Kuncheva's focus on visual elements, at the expense of dramaturgy and analysis, contribute to the repetitiveness in her performances? In her interview at the Kultura newspaper, she reportss that she bases her approach on the personal experiences, skills, and perspectives of the actors. From my observations during the rehearsal process of Queen of Spades , I can add that she provides actors with the freedom and time to express themselves through a series of tasks related to the materials to be used in the performance (such as wire mesh, rubber bands, foam, etc.) and the themes and subthemes of the literary works. However, the freedom offered in the laboratory process seems not to have a significant impact on the final result, as it is often suppressed by already established visual images. This leads to a disconnection between content and form, resulting in performances that resemble scattered thoughts, devoid of a unifying overarching idea. The distinctive artistic approach of Kuncheva’s tandem with Golomehova is undoubtedly an important part of the contemporary Bulgarian theatre, but perhaps the time has come for a change: for an escape from the familiar dark narrative, for researching new themes, for challenging themselves. After all, the biggest challenge for an established artist is not to stay in the comfort zone, but to find new ways to inspire and be inspired. The human beings’ biggest battle is with themselves, as Kuncheva herself emphasizes in almost every work of hers. References References About the author(s) Gergana Traykova is completing her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Theatre Studies, NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov" in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her writings have been published in national theatre journals in Bulgaria, including KuklArt, Artizanin , and Stranitsa . She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management at NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov", followed by a Master’s in Puppet Theatre Directing. In 2021, she directed her thesis production, an original dramatization of Margarit Minkov's tale Merry Tickling Laughter at the State Puppet Theatre "Georgi Mitev" in Yambol, Bulgaria. Currently she is the dramaturg of the Drama and Puppet Theatre – Vratsa, Bulgaria. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch The Hamlet Syndrome by Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Hamlet Syndrome At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Theater, Documentary, Film This film will be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Poland / Germany Language Ukrainian Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 2022 A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives. https://www.hamletsyndrome.com About The Artist(s) Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski are acclaimed polish germany filmmakers. Get in touch with the artist(s) magdalenakaminska@me.com and follow them on social media https://www.hamletsyndrome.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Theater, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Thailand and Japan Language Thai, Japanese Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2024 This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. Co-Produced by Kyoto Experiment, The Japan Foundation and For What Theatre Supported by The Saison Foundation (International Project Support Program / Kyoto Experiment × For What Theatre Juggle & Hide [Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director]) About The Artist(s) Wichaya Artamat is a co-founding member of For What Theatre. He was long captivated by performances since when he was still studying Film. He started working in theater as a project coordinator for Bangkok Theatre Festival 2008. He joined the New Theatre Society in 2009, during which he grew to become a director recognized for various experimental forms and unconventional theatrical approaches. Hailed as ‘one of the most promising contemporary theater creators of Southeast Asia,’ Wichaya is especially interested in exploring how society remembers and unremembers its history through certain calendar days. He co-founded For What Theatre in 2015 and is also a member of Sudvisai Club and Collective Thai Scripts. Since the European premiere of his most prominent work ‘This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May)” at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, Wichaya has been extensively touring and creating in Europe, Asia, and beyond. Get in touch with the artist(s) forwhattheatre@gmail.com and follow them on social media http://www.facebook.com/theatreforwhat, http://www.instagram.com/forwhattheatre/ 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 My virtual body and my double by Simon Senn / Bruno Deville at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the style of a digital conference, Mon corps virtuel et mon double (My virtual body and my double) plunges us into the testimony of the artist Simon Senn who has the disturbing experience of embodying the digital replica of a female body thanks to virtual reality. Together with programmer Tammara Leites, he also creates an artificial intelligence powered by his own personal data and capable of writing. A film that reveals the unexpected entanglement between technology and human beings. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents My virtual body and my double At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Simon Senn / Bruno Deville Theater This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Switzerland Language French, with subtitles in German & English Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the style of a digital conference, Mon corps virtuel et mon double (My virtual body and my double) plunges us into the testimony of the artist Simon Senn who has the disturbing experience of embodying the digital replica of a female body thanks to virtual reality. Together with programmer Tammara Leites, he also creates an artificial intelligence powered by his own personal data and capable of writing. A film that reveals the unexpected entanglement between technology and human beings. Film director : Bruno Deville Production : Bastien Genoux Coproduction : Detours Films, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Compagnie Simon Senn With the support of : Fonds DE LA SCENE A L’ECRAN Partnership : TV5Monde. Based on the performances by Simon Senn About The Artist(s) Simon Senn is a Swiss artist. He works primarily with video and performance, exploring the effects of technology on human relationships. Bruno Deville, director and screenwriter, was born in 1976 in Ottignies, Belgium. Joint Swiss and Belgian citizenship. 1992 Receives degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wavre. 1995-2000 Attends ECAL (École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne). 2000 Receives degree in directing from ECAL. 2004 Cofounder of Le Flair production company in Lausanne. Detours Film : Detours Films is a cinematographic approach to apprehending reality, soaking up life trajectories, questioning the political positioning of the contemporary world, or flirting with movement and matter. Words and encounters are the keystones of this visual, often documentary, approach. It's a way of highlighting the inner worlds of people who are atypical or at odds with established norms. Get in touch with the artist(s) a.luthier@vidy.ch , bastien.genoux@detoursfilms.ch and follow them on social media Simon Senn : http://www.simonsenn.com Detours Film : https://www.detoursfilms.ch Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne : https://vidy.ch/fr/production/ 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

Research The Martin E. Segal Theater Center is committed to supporting research about theatre and the performing arts in a myriad of ways, through written scholarly enquiries as well as audio-visual documentation of artist talks, performances, interviews, and more. Our rich archive includes practitioners from United States as well as international performing arts landscape. All material and media published by The Segal Center is made available for free on our website. Books The Segal Centre supports the creation, editing, translation and distribution of books that explore scholarly, practice and multifacted criticism of key areas and developments in the performing arts. Explore Books Visiting Scholars Program The fellowships offer theatre scholars 3-6 months of research in NYC. They get workspaces, library access, and opportunities to collaborate with other fellows, faculty, and students on their research. Explore Program Segal Talks Featuring conversations with performing arts professionals from all over the world, our Segal Talks aim to capture a cultural Weltzustand ie State of the World. Explore Talks Journals The Segal Publication Wing includes three open-access digital journals, namely Arab Stages, European Stages and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. The journals are all available for FREE online to a global readership. Explore Journals

Encounter Kinesis Project dance theatre's work Bridge Matter / The Reach in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. 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 Kinesis Project brings new life into Inwood Hill Park with this excerpt of Bridge Matter/The Reach, created specifically for the park and Kinesis Project's uptown community, audiences will be led along pathways, waterways and bridge views with gorgeous dancing and the live music of Grammy Award winning musician, Johnny Butler. Bridge Matter / The Reach is a second collaboration with the research of geoscientist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, studying how our shifting climate is affecting even the bedrock of our earth. Featured Image Credits: Sabrina Canas Kinesis Project dance theatre Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company produces large-scale, space-changing and unexpectedly intimate dances. Kinesis Project is at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement with diverse communities and the cultural imperative of art in public spaces. Kinesis Project dances are inspired by Riker’s questions about the world around us. Those questions are excavated and answered through a generative, collaborative process with the dancers and designers of Kinesis Project. As the work moves into a site, Riker focuses on the expanse, scope and depth of the environment. Dances then further evolve based on the site, resulting in unique and custom performances in each space that the company enters. Aimed at democratizing contemporary dance for audiences at all ages and demographics, Kinesis Project injects movement and stillness into unusual and inspiring places, pushing the boundaries of how people see and interact with that space. As an educational and outreach organization, Kinesis Project teaches dance and creative thinking in schools, leads non-dancers in community movement making activities, and brings dance into public spaces. As a producing organization, Kinesis Project dance theatre founded Women in Motion, a platform to support female choreographers in New York City. Visit Artist Website Location Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Visit Partner Website

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Basel Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Marvin Carlson Image Credits: Article Basel, Switzerland, is surely not widely thought of as a major European theatre center, but each time I have visited it I have been impressed by the variety and quality of the work presented there, which regularly includes productions, even premieres, by some of the best known European directors. This was certainly the case when I visited the first week in May of 2024, where I saw four productions remarkable in their range and artistic achievement. The municipal Theater Basel is Switzerland’s largest venue offering theatre, opera and ballet and follows the standard European practice of rotating repertory, so I was able to see all of these productions in this single massive structure, although in different internal spaces. The theatre’s cultural centrality is reinforced by a large and complex fountain in front of its monumental main entrance, the work of Basel’s favorite native artist, the ingenious and whimsical Jean Tinguley. In the 2020/21 season the administration of Theatre Basel underwent a major restructuring. Benedikt von Peter, who had been in change of all three branches of the theatre, became manager only of the opera, while the ballet continued under the direction of Richard Wherlock, formerly von Peter’s subordinate. Most radical was the change in the drama sector, where a team of four were announced as of equal authority by the theatre, although the same report noted that “the central artistic signature” of the group would be that of Antú Romero Nunes, formerly the in-house director at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, one of Germany’s leading houses. There in 2018 his production of The Odyssey was invited to Germany’s most prestigious festival, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and in his third season in Basel, Nunes was invited again, for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, clearly establishing him among the leading contemporary German directors. Although I had not seen either of these two productions, awareness of them made me very eager to see Nunes’ new production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera my first evening in Basel. I was certainly not disappointed. It was one of the most original interpretations of this often revived piece I have seen, and surprisingly not because of its departures from Brecht but, on the contrary, by pushing Brechtian challenges to conventional theatre far beyond what most “Brechtian” stagings attempt. The tone of the production was set at the very beginning, when the audience was confronted with a totally empty dark space, not a touch of theatrical illusion visible. Into this space strolled a familiar, slightly stooped figure, wearing blue worker’s uniform with matching peaked hat and smoking a cigar. Even before he began to speak in a distinctive Augsburg accent, the audience applauded him as Bertolt Brecht, who acknowledged the identification and warned that the empty stage was an indication that the audience were going to have to put their imaginations to work and those unwilling to accept this “epic” approach might as well go home. In fact “Brecht” pulled out a rack with a few costumes on it to represent Peachum’s shop, and informed us of the invisible elements we must imagine. Indeed the only regularly appearing scenic element were a group of long neon lights, sometimes bright sometimes barely seen, which hovered above the actor to suggest ceilings or, upright, surrounded them to suggest various enclosures. Throughout the production written stage descriptions were regularly recited instead of being shown, and other stage directions indicating movements or reading of lines were similarly articulated. His general introduction over, “Brecht” announced: “Enter Peachum” and with a quick change of coat, became Peachum, one of a number of roles he would assume throughout the evening. This virtuosic actor, the remarkable Jörg Pohl, came with director Nunes from Hamburg and is now one of the four members of the directing board. If the production has a star, it is surely Pohl, but this term is really not applicable, since the company is a flexible ensemble all dressed in identical blue worker’s cap and jackets, occasionally covered with rough coats or removed to reveal body length white underwear. They switch roles freely, and anyone, male or female, may become Brecht, any other character, or an authorial voice. The plot outlines remain largely unchanged, but spoken material and songs are altered and moved about freely and side comments on the play or its presentation are frequent. In his opening speech, for example, as Peachum is explaining the tricks needed to get the public to part with its money, he compares his trade to that of the theatre, specifically reminding the audience of the expense of the seats they are occupying (Tickets in Theatre Basel run from $45 to $135, not shocking by Broadway standards but well above the average in Germany, where at a major theatre like the Deutsches Theater in Berlin seats run from $5 to $52). Although most of the words are Brecht’s, the cast feels free to experiment with readings—sometimes pausing, commenting on the line or the character, or repeating a scene to stress a particular point. From time to time a particular theatrical choice is explained, as when one actor suddenly remarks: “At this moment, before the main character is established, we add a retardant moment to increase the tension.” And often, quite unexpectedly, one of the cast will temporarily “become” Brecht, by producing the iconic jacket, cigar and slightly stooped posture, in order to make his own observations on the passing show. Music is provided by an eight piece live band led by trumpeter Anita Wälti, and although they beautifully captured the Kurt Weill tone, they, unlike the actors, were visually de-emphasized, mostly appearing at the back of the stage in semi-darkness and clouds of fog. Moreover the same sort of liberties were taken with the Weill score as with the Brecht text. The two most famous songs in the show—Mack’s Ballad and Jenny’s Pirate Song, were present, but far from their usual place and in much reduced versions, and similar changes were made in the music throughout. Again the effect was to keep the audience, especially those familiar with the opera, continually finding their comfortable expectations thwarted and challenged. Nowhere was this more evident than in the remarkable closing sequence. Mackie Messer, played by Basel actor Sven Schelker, sings his powerful final Ballad, in which he asks for general forgiveness. Anyone with reasonable knowledge of the play knows the shape of the following famous conclusion. Mackie ascends the scaffold and the waiting noose, but at the last possible moment Peachem stops the play to explain that although hanging Macheath would be the Christian thing to do, out of consideration for the audience’s feelings another ending will be substituted. Then comes the spectacular finale, the most famous deus ex machina in the modern theatre. A victorious messenger arrives on horseback to deliver a letter from the Queen pardoning Macheath and heaping honors upon him. Mackie and others exult in song, but Peachum and others in a closing chorus remind us that in real time, unlike in opera, happy endings are not common, and advise a more cautionary view of the world. In the Nunes production, the curtain abruptly and surprisingly closes immediately after Mackie’s forgiveness ballad, and the house lights go up. The astonished audience assumes that Nunes has taken the radical step of eliminating the calculatedly ridiculous happy ending and leaving Mack to his just fate. Hearty applause begins, but is immediately stopped by Peachum appearing from behind the curtains to announce that most of the company feel that the audience may feel cheated by being deprived of the famous traditional ending and so it will be offered for those who wish to remain. Indeed, the curtains part to reveal the usual almost empty stage except for the neon lights faintly gleaming above, and the blue clad actors lined up to present the closing sequence. When they come to the announcement of the victorious messenger, the neon lights blaze brightly and the orchestra sounds out in triumph, but no messenger appears, only a pathetic stuffed loose-limbed doll horse, about three feet long, triumphantly waved by a cast member at the end of the line. Once again, Peachum, at the other end, angrily interrupts, saying that this awkward nod to tradition was worse that nothing at all, and that if they were going to present the messenger scene at all it must be impressively done. Again the curtain closes and immediately reopens with lights and music blazing forth and a spectacular live white horse with richly festooned rider and cortege moving onstage to do the final scene. One more surprise awaited, however, when the curtain closed again on the play’s traditional ending, it opened for curtain calls, always elaborate in the German-speaking theatre. The entire cast had remove the blue worker’s aprons and caps they had worn for most of the evening, and appeared for the first time in a dazzling array of individualized costumes, copies in fact of the costumes of the first production of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928. After an evening of visual minimalism, this stunning tableau, in addition to its final reference to the operations of theatre itself, proved in fact as dazzling, and perhaps even more memorable, than the Queen’s messenger himself. Threepenny Opera. Photo © Inco Hoehn The following evening I returned to the theatre to see what turned out to be the most powerful production of my visit to Basel, a staging of Mozart’s Requiem by one of Europe’s most imaginative directors, Romeo Castelucci. The production opened to standing ovations in the festivals of Aix-en-Province in 2019 and Adelaide in 2020. Basel was scheduled to follow, but Covid intervened, and the much anticipated production did not reach Basel until 2024, though its silencing and resurrection added another powerful symbolic level to this already densely layered experience. Castellucci and his musical director, Raphäel Pichon, have created a radically innovating interpretation of one of the most family works in the Western musical canon. Perhaps taking his cue from the fact that Mozart left the work incomplete and it was finished by his student Süssmeyer, Pichon has woven together a collection of other related musical pieces, including Gregorian chants, other religious music by Mozart, and Masonic hymns. The resulting text is projected as supertitles in Latin, German and English. These translations often provide little explanation of the specific images on stage, however, which depart far more radically from the tonality of the original than do the arrangements of Pichon. In his production notes, Castellucci calls the work particularly suited for contemporary times, tormented by the idea of extinction both of us as individuals, of our species, and perhaps of our planet itself. This idea is most clearly and powerfully seen in one of the production’s most memorable features. Throughout the evening names are projected on the rear wall of the stage, changing every few seconds. For a considerable time these were unfamiliar Latin names, like Dunleosteos Belgicus or Panxiosteur ocullus, but at last a series of more familiar names appeared—Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannisaurus—and we realized we were seeing a chronicle of extinctions. Nor was this confined to plants and animals—as man appeared, his departed creations were added to the list, extinct languages, disappeared cities and monuments, lost writings and works of art. As the evening went on so the list inexorably drew closer to the present--Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima—and at last evoked a future in which even the present theatre and its audience must inevitably join the ever extending list. It formed a deeply moving and disturbing visual grounding for the production. Requiem Romeo Castellucci. Photo © Luciano Romano In front of this constantly changing roll, however, Castellucci developed a highly complex performance structure that in part reinforced and in part worked in counterpoint to the pain and suffering suggested by the music and projections. Running parallel to themes of mourning, anxiety and death, Castellucci also celebrated the continual counter-process of rebirth and renewal. His production begins with a sequence closely fitting the musical theme. In a black void, an elderly woman places a rose in a base, climbs into an isolated simple bed, and dies. Castellucchi however takes this end as a beginning, when, in the course of the evening, we will follow this woman backward, into middle age, youth, childhood and infancy, and as the litany of extinction rolls inexorably in the background, the stage is filled with the glories of her (and all human) life. The black background is torn away and replaced with a large white curtain. A stunning sequence follows, beginning with the chorus point brightly colored paints over the youthful incarnation of the woman who opened the show. She is then lifted by ropes up to serve as the central element in the white background, as the chorus surrounds her suspended figure with bright splashes of paint of all colors. The chorus itself remains onstage except for the opening and closing scenes, beginning in regular dress, then changing to a series of traditional folk costumes, and at the end, naked except for loosely wrapped shrouds. Through the major central part of the production they clearly represent the ongoing life force of the countryside, moving ,primarily in circle dances from many traditions, including an inevitable maypole. Trees and flowers burst up among them. Inevitably, however, the dances end. The trees and flowers disappear and the chorus obliterates the bright colors behind them by splashing black paint across them. A pile of soil pours onto the stage and as the lights fade to a low level, is spread out to cover the white stage floor by the actors, who have removed their festive clothes and now are either nude or loosely wrapped in shrouds. When at last they rest quietly in an indistinct pile of soil, bodies, and shrouds, the back of the stage slowly begins to rise and this mixture of material slowly slides forward to create a mound of refuse downstage. The old woman whose death opened the evening appears with her three younger avatars, gently place a young baby on the mound and leave. Offstage a boy treble sings Mozart’s In Paradisum, “May the angels lead you into paradise.” Silence follows, broken only by the baby’s contended gurgles as the curtain slowly lowers on this final image of hope and rebirth in the very face of death. For my third evening I returned to the Theater Basel, but to a different performance space there, the medium-sized Schauspielhaus (450 seats as opposed to 860 in the main house and 320 in the small experimental stage). The production was Maxim Gorki’s Summerfolk, a familiar work on the German stage, but rarely seen in the United States. The play has a very Chekhovian feel and is generally regarded to have been inspired by Chekhov. Chekhov in fact died in 1904, the same year Summerfolk appeared. Chekov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, with a tonality and characters especially close to those Chekov used. Summerfolk has been often considered a kind of sequel to The Cherry Orchard, though the Chekhovian echoes must have come from earlier plays. While the Chekhov play focuses upon the departure (literally and symbolically) of the old social order represented by the Renevskaya family, that of Gorki takes place a few years later, when the materialistic and pragmatic generation represented in The Cherry Orchard by Lopahin have come to power. Each summer they gather at the summer house of one of their number, presumably to relax and enjoy this vacation from the pressures of the business world, but actually to pass the time in empty discussion, tedious quarreling and flirting, and lamenting the pointlessness and joylessness of their empty lives. In the background, the audience, knows, the impending revolution will sweep all this away. This production has a special relevance in the career of director Stephan Pucher. After launching his career with a series of pop and disco-oriented works, much influenced by the Gob Squad, he achieved his first major success with a radical reworking of a classic text, which has been his major type of work since. This first triumph was his reworking of The Cherry Orchard in 1999, created in Theater Basel. Since then he has premiered only two other productions in this theatre, Uncle Vanya in 2005 and Faust I in 2012. Summerfolk, just 25 years after his first major success with the closely related Cherry Orchard at this same theatre, thus seems a kind of homecoming. In addition to a particular fondness for Chekhov (Pucher’s first invitation to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffn was with his 2001 The Seagull, created in Zurich), Pucher has from the beginning been one of the German directors especially interested in experimenting with the combining of live action with video and digital technology. The unconventional ending of Pucher’s 1999 Cherry Orchard clearly indicates this and eerily anticipates the technological world of his current Summerfolk. In Chekov’s original, the dying Firs sits alone within the locked confines of the abandoned Renevskaya home. In the Pucher staging, two large doors opened upstage to reveal an electronic wasteland. The verdant cherry orchard dissolved into a frozen ice-glue tundra inhabited by the ghostly images of the departed family, still carrying on their empty and directionless activity. The opening scene of Summerfolk might almost be seen as a parodic variation on this unsettling conclusion. We see a healthy middle-aged couple ( Annika Meier and Jan Bluthardt) relaxing in front of a beautiful mountain landscape—but immediately recognize it as a bit too beautiful, and indeed the landscape is a video projection with the glowing colors of a TV travel advertisement, and even the three-dimensional scenic elements surrounding the couple suggest advertising stage properties. The theatricalized summer wear they display has elements of both the early twentieth century and current fashion, since Puchner has moved the play from pre-revolutionary Russia to the modern world of international capitalism. Summerfolk. Photo © LuziaHunziker The basic situation remains unchanged, a group of nouveaux riches, disappointed by the lack of fulfillment in their current lifestyles, withdraw to a country retreat, where they find not relief but an even keener awareness of the emptiness and lack of direction in their lives. Pucher’s contemporary summerfolk assume that the emptiness they feel in their everyday live is caused by their growing reliance upon non-human technology—cell phones, video games, the internet, and ultimately AI. The retreat to which they withdraw promises to provide relief from these forces specifically bans cellphones and internet access, to provide the direct experience of nature. The difficulty of finding such a retreat is suggested by Pucher locating it in Davos, one of Switzerland’s most popular (and crowded) Alpine resort areas, and equally significantly, the regular meeting place of the World Economic Forum. The impossibility of escaping contemporary technology is a central theme of both text and staging. Almost every character has a hidden presumably banned cellphone hidden somewhere about the set, and the resort itself attempts to reinforce its ban on technological devices by technological means, including hidden cameras and even more intrusive video projections about current information of presumed interest which are created by rather robotic announcers in a small isolated area to the side of the stage, and appear on the central screen. The operations of this system, and its frequently malfunctioning, are the continuing preoccupation of the arrogant but inept local engineer, very amusingly portrayed by Ueli Jaeggi, constantly complaining to the audience of the stupidity and pointlessness of his tasks. The other major character Pucher adds to his band of Swiss escapists is Rick Roaming (Julian Anatol Schneider), a half-demented American visitor to the resort who is already much more seriously affected by the current digital world than his Swiss companions. Neither he nor they are entirely sure whether he is an actual computer addict or his avatar which exists both in and out of the game. In any case, Rick is convinced that he is threatened with death by his digital foes, and frantically is attempting to construct a coil gun to defend himself. Eventually is appears that he (or his avatar) is indeed killed, but since the visual background of the stage shifts continually between the idyllic landscapes of Alpine vistas, in which the actors from time to time appear, official but garbled video announcements from the resort staff, apparent video interventions from the resort engineering center airing the grievances of the engineer, and digitalized segments of Rick’s ongoing Star War type battles with his mechanized adversaries, it becomes increasingly unclear to both audience and characters whether the world in which they are operating is real or digital. Perhaps not only Rick but all of them are in fact AI figures. Desperately they seek a way to discover which is the truth and decide that the question “What do you desire?” is reportedly one that computer intelligence cannot answer but living humans can. In fact none of the characters are able to provide a satisfactory response to this test, and so we are they are left to wonder whether they are all in fact empty forms of AI or whether they have essentially become such by their immersion in the new technological world. Clearly, as most reviewers were quick to admit, this concern is far from Gorki, despite the well-known socialist sympathies of translator and adaptor Dietmar Dath, but German directors like Pucher have long turned classic texts in radical new directions to make, as this production clearly does, surprising new insights into our most pressing cultural concerns. For my final evening in Basel I returned to the major house for a new production by one of my favorite modern directors, Herbert Fritsch, who has defied the traditional view of a lack of humor in the German dramatic tradition by establishing himself as the leading director of farce in Europe today. I first encountered Fritsch’s dazzling and over the top visual and physical theatre in 2011 when he was first invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, with a stunning and hilarious version of Ibsen’s Doll House played in the grotesquely exaggerated style of a gothic horror film. Since then I have followed his work whenever possible, as he continued to put his own particular spin on classical authors like Dürrenmatt and Molière and, to my mind, even more successfully in his own works (like the well-known Murmel, Murmel, with an eighty minute text composed only of those words—the German for “murmer, murmer”). Although internationally his work in theatre is most frequently compared with the great French farce writers of the late twentieth century, so far Fritsch has only staged two of their works, both by Eugene Labiche, The Affair in the Rue de Lourcine in 2010 and the current Italian Straw Hat in Basel. Seeing Fritsch’s interpretation of this masterpiece of modern farce was one of the major reasons for my choosing Basel for this European excursion. Perhaps my expectations were too high, because although I certainly found the evening entertaining, and occasionally hilarious, I did not consider it as a whole among the director’s best works. All the elements of successful farce were there—the constant frenetic movement, including of course the continual slamming of doors, the elaborate physical routines based on the manipulation of physical objects like hats, glasses, flowers, and walking sticks, the repeated handstands, pratfalls, and inadvertent collisions and near collisions. Music is almost always an important part of a Fritsch production, and that promised to be the case here, with the play advertised as an Opera, co-produced by the Komische Oper of Berlin, and with lyrics and a score by a cultural icon with an even larger following than that of Fritsch, the rock-pop star Herbert Grönemeyer. The plot, however and even the songs, often tended to disappear in the activity, but that did not seem to me a great loss. Grönemeyer’s lyrics were rather banal (though not much less so than the originals) and as for the plot, it is largely an excuse for all the confusions and rushing about in search of the rather ridiculous object which gives the play its name (here changed from the French original [and traditional English and German translations] An Italian Straw Hat, to the admittedly somewhat more active and comic [at least in German] Pferd frisst Hut [Horse Eats Hat]). Pferd Frisst Hut. Photo © Thomas Aurin Fritsch’s company are virtuosic actors, acrobats and musicians, and although the latter skills were less used here than in some pieces, the stage provided essentially a machine for the display of their physical abilities and endurance. Designer Oscar Meteo Grunert has created essentially a colorful open box with side walls consisting mostly of doors (actually five on each side) and at the back center, a semi-circular bright yellow platform with five steps leading up to a revolving door. All the doors and the spaces between provide locations for every sort of physical activity, with actors constantly running into doors and walls, running up and sliding down stairs, and performing complicated routines around the revolving elements. The familiar saying that the manipulation of doors is the heart of French farce was never more imaginatively developed than here. The Basel chorus, which plays the confused wedding party running about in search of the elusive hat, moves well and sings nicely but they lack the virtuosic skills that Fritsch likes to encourage and which are stunningly displayed in the leading actors, especially the harassed protagonist Fadinard (Christopher Nell). In all, despite the ingenuity of Fritsch and his company, the three hour production , entertaining as it often is, is also rather exhausting. The Threepenny Opera. Photo © Ingo Hoehn References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker By Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Encounter Keith Josef Adkins's work The Heat Will Kill Everything in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival The Heat Will Kill Everything Keith Josef Adkins Theater Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 3pm Riverside Park South, Manhattan Performance on Locomotive Picnic Lawn @61st street on the Hudson River. Enter at 59th St, or 66th St and Riverside Boulevard Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy 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 A Black man’s daughter disappears during an extreme heat event. Excerpts will be performed by Francois Battiste and directed by Russell G. Jones. Keith Josef Adkins Keith Josef Adkins is a writer and artistic director. His plays have been produced around the U.S., and include The People Before The Park, about the 19th-century black community Seneca Village that was razed to create Central Park. Keith received Samuel French’s inaugural Award for Impact and Activism in the Theater Community, and a Helen Merrill Playwright Award. Keith is the co-founder and artistic director of The New Black Fest, dedicated to new and provocative playwriting and discussion from the African Diaspora. He has written for CBS’ The Good Fight, ABC’s For The People, and P-Valley on STARZ. Visit Artist Website Location Performance on Locomotive Picnic Lawn @61st street on the Hudson River. Enter at 59th St, or 66th St and Riverside Boulevard Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy Summer on the Hudson is Riverside Park and West Harlem Piers Park’s annual outdoor arts and culture festival that takes place from 59th Street to 181st Street along the Hudson River, from May to October. Events include concerts, dance performances, movies under the stars, DJ dance parties, children’s shows, educational workshops, special day-long festivals, wellness activities, and more. All programs and events are free to the public and no registration is required unless specifically noted. Visit Partner Website

Vivian Appler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF [T]aking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts. -Donna Haraway [1] Imagination and Representation: Laurie Anderson and the Performance of Science Science, a liberal cultural domain, carries certain gendered expectations with it. [2] Science disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and engineering tend to be the most heavily laden with prejudices that continue to manifest in unequal hiring practices and disparities in wages within those fields. [3] In this special issue of JADT dedicated to “Scientific Research and Inquiry in American Theatre,” it is important to recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts, and that gender bias exists at all points of our social spectrum. This interdisciplinary perspective reveals that problems of inequality apply to the domain of science as well as other cultural and economic domains such as art, business, and education. Theatrical performance has long been a popular mode of social critique, and when science is understood as a part of culture, not apart from it, the potential arises for theatre’s critical pen to address science issues as social. Representation of women as contributors to knowledge production within the domain of science is an important part of the critical power of theatrical performance. The use of the theatre as a laboratory to extend and create new knowledge about science is an exceptional quality of Laurie Anderson’s performance of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in The End of the Moon (2004). In this article, I offer an explicitly feminist analysis of one high-profile piece of science-integrative performance art that is implicitly feminist in its deconstruction of science practices and transparent representation of science ideas within the community of a general theatre audience. This article contributes to a body of scholarship that is growing to match an increasing amount of science-integrative theater on the twenty-first century stage. Laurie Anderson’s performance art tends to be critiqued within a non-representational framework. Moon is no exception: she embodies her own experience as a NASA resident-artist while performing science within the experiential context of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). However, the unfamiliar and unavoidably removed nature of the science objects central to her story must be considered within a somewhat representational context. The representational quality of her female body stepping into the domain of science onstage is a critical step towards expanding liberal notions of who has access to physics and astronomy careers. Her artist’s body is equally significant because it blurs the cultural boundaries that separate science discourse and practice from other cultural realms. Anderson’s embodied intervention into the arts-science divide suggests that science should be a part of a holistic cultural conversation, one that is equally accessible to all curious participants. Interdisciplinarity is central to the realization of feminist scientific discourse. Twentieth century science writer C.P. Snow infamously observed a “two cultures” divide that has long defined interdisciplinary discourse as antagonistic. Snow’s philosophical intervention into this cultural schism often (although perhaps not intentionally) situates scientists as better culturally read than their literary and artistic peers. [4] Snow’s binary question of “arts versus science” oversimplifies a much larger issue of empathy among cultural domains which have unequal levels of inclusivity and access. Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective. Artists such as Laurie Anderson, Lauren Gunderson, and Critical Art Ensemble are informed by feminist theory even when their science-integrative performances explicitly address other socio-scientific issues. Overtly feminist analyses of such arts-science hybrid performances expose a cultural imbalance in access to fields such as astronomy and physics even as they suggest alternative pathways to these apparently elite jobs. Science-integrative performance can reveal practical and theoretical interdisciplinary commonalities among diverse cultural domains. NASA Art Program Curator Bertram Ulrich observes of Anderson’s process, “her mind works very much the same way a scientist’s would. They’re both reaching out to try to understand what’s unknown.” [5] Moon was created as an outcome of Anderson’s arts residency at NASA; in it she uses performance art to invite the average theatre-goer into the space agency’s relatively closed ranks that she, an artist, has tenuously joined. Anderson shares her research with her audience, whom she imagines to be “a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh.” [6] Randy Gener praises Anderson’s “faux-naif mutability, her techno-artist reputation and cross-wiring of art modes [that] are part of her idiosyncratic appeal—the reason she was selected by NASA’s Art Program.” [7] It may come as a surprise that NASA even has an art program, but artistic interpretation of the space agency has existed since its inception. The NASA Art Program was founded in 1962 as an attempt to make NASA’s enterprises more available to a popular American audience. The Program’s original director, James Webb, “wanted to convey to future generations the hope and sense of wonder that characterized the early days of space exploration.” [8] While many of the artists funded by NASA have been visual artists—alumni include Annie Leibovitz, Robert Rauschenberg, Terry Riley, and Norman Rockwell—Anderson was the first performance artist invited for a residency. [9] The selection of Anderson to participate in the Art Program reveals the agency’s desire for a more inclusive performance of science within traditional scientific spaces and an understanding that a theatrical performance artist is qualified to ease access to this elite domain in ways that other science outreach activities have been unable to do. Yet, Moon , the second in a trilogy of performance pieces that Anderson has devised in response to the post-9/11 cultural climate in the U.S., is not uncritical of NASA. [10] Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. She gives the audience glimpses into elements of the monolithic science institution through sparse verbal narration, lyrical soundscapes, and iconic images. Anderson fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. Her position as a woman artist engaging with science issues models a culture in which all citizens are empowered to participate in disciplines that have historically, and habitually, been restricted to professional scientists that physically resemble hegemonic figures of scientific authority: white, able-bodied, Euro-American men. Anderson’s Moon intervenes into this perennial limitation of American imagination with regard to inclusive practices in astronomy. Her storytelling is a proposal for citizen engagement with the process of exploratory and experiential astronomy as it was being practiced by NASA in the mid-2000s. Anderson’s combination of the human, the technological, and the animal—represented onstage physically, imagistically, and textually—constitutes a cyborg system intent on subverting culturally accepted notions of science that have come to be, she implies, accessible only to those agents performing almost exclusively within the secret domain of the military. [11] Anderson’s citizen-scientist performance opens with a pastiche of iconic twentieth century images that have come to define an American idea of the night sky. These images’ ubiquity in American pop culture contributes to an atmosphere of familiarity that enables an empathetic relationship between general audiences and science-oriented performance to transpire. The tableau is reminiscent of Clement Hurd’s illustration of the children’s book Goodnight Moon , by Margaret Wise Brown. Anderson is seated in the downstage right chair (where Wise’s mother bunny sits), surrounded by stars—tea candles—scattered across the stage, and the moon in its upstage left corner. Anderson’s moon is a fragment, indicative of the partial relationship that a human has with any piece of the universe. This synecdochal moon is a reproduction of the well-known photograph of Neil Armstrong’s lunar footprint. Taken in 1969 and projected onto a classroom-sized screen, Anderson’s deconstructed moon is nonetheless familiar to a general American audience in 2004. Anderson transduces NASA into a familiar object by isolating a sound that is a piece of a human: a voice. The tale begins with a description of a typical day in her studio in the company of her dog. The telephone rings. She describes the NASA representative on the other end of the line not as a person, but as a voice. “The voice said, ‘this is so and so and I’m from NASA and we’d like you to be the first artist-in-residence here.’ ‘You’re not from NASA,’ and I hung up the phone.” [12] Anderson continues to recount how the voice from NASA called back, and so her astronomy-integrative performance research began. Anderson’s choice to depict NASA as a voice renders the giant organization manageable. One voice can have a conversation with another voice on the telephone, but an individual might not as easily encounter a high-profile science institution such as NASA in its entirety. Feminism and The End of The Moon In this article, I draw primarily upon theories of the posthuman, performatics, and the cyborg in order to tease out the feminist aspects of Anderson’s performance of astronomy. N. Katherine Hayles’s [13] and Rosi Braidotti’s [14] approaches to posthuman theory help to articulate a line of thought that is at once socially aware and embodied. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” playfully addresses the shifting roles of feminism, informatics, and hybridity within the domain of science even as she argues against notions of cultural boundaries. Diana Taylor’s use of performatics is also rooted in a desire to transcend geo-political borders. Taylor suggests the term “performatic” rather than “performative” when critiquing embodied performance, “to denote the adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of performance… [b]ecause it is vital to signal the performatic, digital, and visual fields as separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism.” [15] Here, I extend Taylor’s term from its original “Americas” context and apply it to the analysis of performances that deliberately blend technics, politics, and informatics in order to disrupt liberal disciplinary boundaries. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, whose performance theory in Cyborg Theatre is deeply inspired by Braidotti’s cultural criticism, asserts that, “arguments for alternate subjectivities—nomadic, non-unitary, hybrid, cyborgean—permeate a theoretical technological landscape reflecting a need for radical rethinking about human positioning in the world.” [16] Anderson’s performatic intervention into the problem of inclusive science access alters the positionality of critique—from without—that is vital if change in a cultural imagination of science and scientists is to transpire. Anderson’s narrative is overtly cosmopolitan and science-driven, but feminist principles are implicit to the science-integrative framework that makes her global critique possible. A feminist approach to the performance of science might include the identification of the following qualities: Transparency. As hybrid technologies make more of the universe detectable to the human, so the social machine that makes these new technologies possible must maintain open and inclusive environments. Hybridity. Feminist performances of science might acknowledge the networks over which the knowledge-productive elements of socio-scientific labor are distributed. Alignment with post-colonialist and post-human “insights about the importance of the politics of location and careful grounding in geo-political terms.” [17] Cultural position in relationship to access and authority within the domain of science is directly related to the liberal, humanist social contract of the West that post-colonialist and post-human theories seek to dismantle. Performances of science that transparently enact hybrid and inclusive knowledge production practices are a step towards the realization of an equitable culture across multiple disciplinary domains. Analyses that elucidate these qualities go hand-in-hand with the realization of theory as practice. Transduction—the communication of information across different media—is caught up in the feminist analysis of the performance of science because of its potential to equalize access to disciplinary-specific information. Citing James Berkley’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, Hayles invokes the power of mimesis to communicate data while also providing a framework for the transfer of power from one performing agent to another through mediated interactions: “Mimesis, in [Berkley’s] account, becomes a transducer transferring the power to evoke wonder and terror from one site to another, while the sublime sets up the transfer by presupposing that a connection exists between environment and system, stimulus and affect, externalized object and internalized subject.” [18] In a broad theatrical context, the performance process begins with information found in the world and that information is transduced through the dynamic body of a performing agent. Mimetic transduction moves information from one medium (the page) to another (the stage, screen, or other performance venue) so that audiences might understand that information differently than they would were they to encounter the same information via a different medium. Embodied transduction that occurs in a science-oriented theatrical context can empower audience members to participate in science concepts even when liberal social norms deny the non-scientist easy access to the domain of science. Theatrical transduction can encourage an empathetic audience response and therefore often results in the creation of an array of culturally imaginative possibilities for audiences of science-oriented performance. Anderson’s position as both resident of NASA and science-outsider allows her to empathize with NASA scientists as well as with general audiences. She establishes herself as an artist who is qualified to comment on science issues through her performed encounter with contemporary astronomy. Her feminist intervention is implicit; she, a woman artist performing science, is also fluent in scientific discourse and therefore challenges astronomy’s habitually exclusive practices. The kind of science mastery that Anderson exhibits falls into a category that philosophers of science Kyle Powys Whyte and Robert P. Crease, citing H.M. Collins’s and R. Evans’s 2007 study, refer to as “interactional expertise,” in which a non-scientist achieves “knowledge of a scientific field that is sufficiently advanced to understand and communicate within the discourse yet unable to contribute to research.” [19] But Anderson’s work is research. She uses her “interactional” expert position to conduct performance research that endeavors, at least in part, to discover what may be missing from the domain-specific attempts to diversify the laboratory. Anderson’s passion for astronomy and cosmology is infectious, and her performance craft transduces not only science concepts but also her enthusiasm for the subject. Her knowledge of NASA’s scientific processes grew through her residency, but her status as an outsider remains and necessitates the empathetic bridge-building of her science-integrative performance. Such interdisciplinary connections are needed if NASA and other physics and astronomy laboratories are to achieve the inclusive atmosphere that they purport to desire. Yet Anderson’s stakes are higher than the interests of a single government agency. The empathetic bridges she builds are also necessary for our society to function as a whole. Anderson and the Hubble Space Telescope [20] Historically, many scientists who began as astronomy outsiders made their most remarkable discoveries, in part, because of the field’s non-normative worldview that restricted outsiders’ access to mainstream spaces in which astronomy research had been conducted. These scientists were forced to introduce a new perspective if they were to perform science at all. American women such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) and Vera Rubin (b. 1928) made remarkable discoveries about the cosmos that were directly connected to their limited access to traditional methods of astronomical research and experiment. Like the introduction of women and other socially excluded groups to the observatory , the addition of each new component—including machines—to the hybrid project of knowing outer-space holds the capacity to radically alter conventionally held notions of humanity’s place in the world. This was the case with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which produces breathtaking images of the universe that are now readily available in a variety of contemporary media. [21] Anderson’s performance renders the HST’s process at once transparent and curious. History, astronomy, and technology are necessarily entwined enterprises because of astronomy’s methodological reliance upon the reference to and manipulation of many different visual representations of individual astronomical objects captured over long periods of time. [22] HST images add to an archive of telescopically transduced celestial imagery that has been accumulating around the globe for centuries. HST images have become a popular way for astronomers and curious amateurs to get an idea of the appearance and composition of objects in outer-space. In Moon, Anderson speaks for the non-expert as she performs her curiosity about the way that HST engineers manipulate images of celestial objects. She explores the knowledge-generative labor performed by the HST (and its team of astronomers, technicians, and astronauts) with her audience. Her performance of HST image transduction systems creates a metaenvironmental space in which spectators participate in NASA’s transductive processes. HST images are developed through networked transduction systems in a cyborgean enterprise designed to bring previously undetectable information about deep space objects into the optical spectrum. [23] Anderson illuminates this esoteric process for her audience, but she also indicates that the process is imperfect in its ability to align perception of distant objects with the spectral truth of those objects. In astrophotography, the distant celestial body may really exist, but it is also a product of the technology that detects it, the telescopic camera that captures previously unknowable information, and a transductive process that involves choices made by intentional human agents. [24] The original object—the Andromeda Galaxy, a mountain on the moon, the Great Nebula of Orion—disappears even as it is created for observation by a general, earthbound audience, and this presents a problem for Anderson. She voices a discrepancy between how celestial objects exist in their original environments and how those objects are represented to consumer-audiences of science media. Anderson brings her critique of technologically mediated images back to the human body: “We’re always fixing up photographs,” she remarks as she compares the work of HST engineers to photoshopping a “miserable family Christmas” photo. [25] “One of the things that really bothers me about photography,” she continues, “is that you never know how hot it is in the photograph.” [26] Anderson’s problem with photoshopped family pictures analogically grounds her critique of heavily mediatized HST images. Both types of images are fragmented, removed from first-hand experience, and therefore indicative of the posthuman condition necessary to the performance of astronomy. Mary Thomas Crane points out in her examination of early modern science that much of the experience of the laboratory (and, by extension, the observatory) counters “basic sensorimotor experience.” [27] Anderson describes her frustration with astrophotography’s incapacity to accurately convey the environment of a star or a galaxy in a two-dimensional image. HST pictures, she argues, are simply archives of data that document conditions that remain forever outside the experiential grasp of the human observer. A family photograph’s observer cannot distinguish the difference between the photographic subject’s embodied experience and the record of that experience. [28] The photograph is an index of original environmental conditions; the colors, texture, and size of the sweater, and who was wearing it are indicated by the photograph, but the embodied experience of wearing the sweater, as well as the circumstances surrounding the photographic event, is a much trickier experience to share with an observing agent across distances of time and space. For consumers of HST media images, this translates to an inability to sense data that does not normally appear on the human visual spectrum, such as ultra-violet rays and x-rays. Meanwhile, these inexact documents become iconic in their representation of events in cultural memory. Colorization is one way that HST engineers attempt to transduce spectrally invisible information collected by the HST into images that are meaningful for popular audiences and astronomy experts alike. Art historian Shana Cooperstein explains that colorization “encourages people to imagine links between photography and vision, as well as between ‘truth’ and visional perception.” [29] Elizabeth A. Kessler finds that ascriptions of authenticity and authority to colorized HST images depends “on a definition of truth that rests on human perception; but color carries a greater range of meanings. . . . [C]olor can be used to label, to measure, to represent or imitate reality, or to enliven or decorate. Furthermore, it incorporates both objective and subjective elements.” [30] Kessler describes the process of colorization as one that depends upon the variability of human perception as well as a number of possible choices that might be made by individual imagists working across history. Kessler discusses “false color” as “hues” that need not have any relationship to the visual appearance of the phenomena or the wavelengths of light registered by the instrument. Instead, different colors might indicate another dimension of the data….In addition to what the color indicates, false color has come to describe a particular color palette—flat, garish hues that do not resemble natural phenomena in our world.[31] A colorized image emotionally engages a general audience because of that audience’s memory of the familiar icon and subjective associations with the colors in the image. The process is creative in that some personal choice is involved on the part of the HST engineer, but these choices are constrained due to the indexical ends of the photography experiment. Such images are breathtaking, but Anderson is unsatisfied because of the HST’s inability to transduce celestial objects in their complete spectral splendor. She describes an encounter with some of the scientists who work on HST transduction. She performs the kind of expectation that the woman in “Row K” with a casual interest in science might share by asking NASA scientists, “Could you have used a whole different color range…. How did you arrive at these colors?” [32] By “these colors” she means pinks and blues instead of her suggested alternatives of brown and gray. The answer the scientists offer is simple: “We thought people would like them.” [33] She pauses as the audience laughs at the arbitrariness of human choice involved in the transduction of information that comes to us via the space telescope, is interpreted by human engineers who manipulate that data, and manifests in journalistic media images detectable on the visual spectrum. Anderson’s tone waxes lyrical and her text shifts back to the sublime as she muses, “It looks like a painting of heaven.” [34] Colorized HST photographs affect science media viewers in a manner similar to that of acting technique with regard to audiences of realist theatre: both are capable of engendering simultaneous states of curiosity and familiarity on the part of the spectator towards the observational object. Creators of HST outreach images must weigh factors of emotional connectivity, scientific objectivity, and personal memory in the subjunctive work of representing truthful information while also stimulating popular imagination towards distant celestial phenomena. Much like the unnatural techniques that actors deploy to convey a sense of realism in representational theatrical genres, HST astronomers isolate wavelengths that are not on the visible spectrum and ascribe an unrealistic color to them. The effect is a fantastic image that the unaided human eye could never see, but that nevertheless registers as realistic and familiar in the imagination of the observer. Neither realist acting techniques nor HST image manipulation replicate identical copies of the original object of observation, be it a fictional character or a distant star. In theatrical and photographic forms, a sense of familiarity with a scenario or an image is essential for spectators to empathetically engage with the representation of a novel object. Ultimately, it is the creative agency of the individual scientist that determines how distant astronomical events appear to a general public. The subjective memory of the scientist affects the color choices made, even when those color choices don’t represent the “true” color that the human eye would see. Cognitive theatre scholar Amy Cook claims, “[t]o represent the previously invisible, to perform the seemingly impossible, is vitally important to creating the visible and the possible.” [35] Such imagination is necessary each time astronomers reinvent a familiar celestial object with a new technology. In a similar way, Anderson reinvents the domain of astronomy through her critique of HST. Astrophotography distorts the truth while representing reality; it encourages audiences to learn something new about celestial objects through the process of composite imaging. [36] A composite photographic image is created by layering several negatives and thereby blending information of each to create a single image that represents the idea of a photographic object but does not reproduce visual information in a one-to-one manner. HST images are not only colorized, but composite, consisting of layers of captured spectra that have each been assigned colors representative of different aspects of the object’s qualia. Through HST composite, colorized imaging, astronomers create new pictures of familiar objects that index more information than ever before, but that continue to resemble the iconic images captured by earlier astronomers. Visual reference to earlier astronomical icons encourages non-scientist viewers of these images to access any memory they may have about what they already know of these objects, and thus to cognitively build upon previous memories in a continuous development of learning about the objects in question. In Anderson’s composite performance of NASA, she doesn’t work simply with color, but she blends cultural memories and impressions of NASA in order to elicit a simultaneously curious and critical audience response. While her inclusion of Armstrong’s footprint brings to mind a familiar moment in the history of science, it also conjures the Cold War context surrounding the space race. As discussed above, her female artist’s body might trigger a number of associations from different audience members. For those who work within the science industry, Anderson’s performance might signal the disciplinary exclusion of certain social groups from the field. Other audience members who remember Anderson’s previous performances as works of cultural critique may expect an unsubtle criticism of NASA’s affiliations with the military. Still others who have come to expect a spectacular array of high-tech gadgetry from a Laurie Anderson production might be disappointed by the apparently simple stage technology in a piece that deals with technics that are off-limits to the average American citizen. [37] In Moon , Anderson’s trademark electric violin solos create time and space for viewers to process her performatic transduction of NASA as it mingles with subjective associations among the audience. Defying Gravity (And Other Socio-Scientific Forces) In the midst of the multi-layered web of cultural memories that individual audience members experience when faced with the iconography embedded in Moon , Anderson deconstructs NASA even as she composes it. She questions whose bodies have the authority to occupy the subject position in a national conversation about science through her cyborgean relationship to culturally familiar objects that are commonly associated with Americans in space. Parker-Starbuck, in her discussion of the fragmentation of multimedia performance, states, “[a]bject and object bodies are both bodies at a distance, bodies outside of our ‘selves.’ These bodies triangulate around the ‘subject’ as those who are refused, rejected, desired, critiqued, or negotiated with. These are the bodies that reiterate who we think we are and where we fit in the world.” [38] On Anderson’s stage, Neil Armstrong’s body, invisible save for his footprint projected on the small screen, is at once abject and object. Anderson is the subject performing astronomy “in play with” the abjected object of the first man on the moon. [39] The physical and technological space created on her cyborg stage makes room not only for her, but for the witnesses to this feminist comment on representation and authority in the domain of astronomy, to join the cultural conversation. Further altering the triangular relationship she has established among herself as subject, audience as participatory witness, and abjected icons of American space exploration, Anderson playfully manipulates simple video technology in order to defy notions of a familiar physics concept: gravity. Her challenge to physics provokes audience members to increase their engagement with socio-scientific government actions. Towards this end, she performs a spacewalk that introduces NASA’s innovative space suits as war machines. In this sequence, Anderson uses a live-feed video camera to create a performance of weightlessness. She makes her illusory technics transparent to her audience by exposing her stagecraft even as she performs it, letting spectators in on the joke. “Our moon is just the moon,” she muses as she switches the camera on and focuses it toward herself, the audience visible within the camera’s frame. [40] The image of Armstrong’s historic footprint on the upstage left screen is replaced with a live projection stream from Anderson’s camera; now she occupies both subject and object positions on her cyborg stage. She holds the camera upside-down so that her projected image appears to be floating on the space of the stage, also upside-down, with a stage light shining like a sun behind her disembodied head, which bobs gently in accord with the movement of her live body. The camera captures some of the tea candle stars on the stage, and in an instant doubles the amount of “space” represented through the handheld projection device. Through this fragmented stage presence, Anderson raises the issue of gravity, verbally reflects on the experience of seeing old photographs of astronauts “suspended, floating in space” during her residency at NASA, and imagines what it must be like to walk on the moon. [41] As she begins to perform her spacewalk, Anderson describes the technology built into NASA’s new spacesuits that will, according to Anderson, “increase your strength, say, forty times.” [42] The suits contain all kinds of “liquids” and “entry points for medicine.” [43] Just as the audience starts to dream about space suits capable of transforming the human into the superhuman (posthuman?), she disrupts the audience’s reverie with news about the grim reality of war times. The super-suit project’s contract has been transferred from NASA to a “new joint team” between MIT and the U.S. Army. [44] The suits will not be worn by astronauts but will be sent “out into the desert. Out into the world.” [45] Like the touched-up family portrait and HST photographs, no matter how much a person learns about a thing—a physical force, a moon, a space agency—there is always something that remains outside the realm of immediate experience. What remains outside the grasp of the everyday American, Anderson suggests, is the end to which NASA puts its ingenious inventions. Her criticism resonates with Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that “how bodies are modified and by whom are the ethical concerns that surround what already is, and will continue to shape both humans and non-humans alike.” [46] Parker-Starbuck’s theatrical cyborg ethic echoes Haraway’s late twentieth century cyborg provocation: “Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups?” [47] Anderson’s performatics model an alternative way of doing science—in public—that resists traditional power structures hidden within the practice of space exploration. While the spacesuits that Anderson describes resemble more conventional popular imaginations of the cyborg in their immediate melding of human body with technology, Anderson’s “reliance on corporeal-technological relationship” in performance is also cyborg in its technics and its critique. [48] She weaves her criticism into the fabric of transparent video-play about gravity, made strange within the space of the theatre. She proclaims, “Gravity is an illusion, a trick of the eye, not a force.” [49] In the metaenvironment of Anderson’s science-integrated theatre, imagination and illusion enable non-astronaut humans to participate in this rare aspect of the human experience and critique the politics within the institution that makes such experiences possible for a select few Americans. Saying “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” [50] she segues into a musical interlude that provides the reflective space for her audience to ponder the experience of weightlessness and the role of the individual in the socio-technological tangle of post-9/11 culture. She raises her electric violin and now the image on the screen takes the perspective of the bow as it meets the instrument’s strings. The illusion of space persists as the audience is presented with the live Anderson playing her violin beside the projected, more intimate, close-up image of her face. Quantum Anderson twins are separated by the space of the stage and connected by the electromagnetic force that powers her performance technologies, all in support of the artist’s efforts to transduce the hidden nature of NASA for the general audience assembled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Anderson’s performatics encourage her audiences to engage with the domain of science in order to stay informed and active in a culture that would apply detection-related technologies developed in the domain of science to the art of global warfare. She presents herself as a science outsider, shares her socio-political performance response in an empathetic manner, and thus multiplies the number of non-scientists participant to the process of astronomy in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, Moon can seem to be internally contradictory—should the non-scientist viewer love NASA or fear it? Seen as parts of a cultural whole, the balance between science and art, fear and wonder, becomes evident. This ability to isolate individual components in order to realize a whole system is integral to Anderson’s posthuman stage presence. Her doubled image—on the stage as well as on the projection screen—is an embodied metaphor for the ways that humans can hold contradictory opinions about one subject. She raises the social stases of war and peace as poignant examples for 2005. “Yes,” she says, “you can keep two things in mind.…[W]e can hold both at once without dropping.” [51] The show closes with a monologue in which Anderson imagines the end of time with a mixture of theories of quantum physics, dream sequences, and, of course, the haunting musical accompaniment of her electric violin. She offers a parting comment on the hybrid nature of human cognition at the dawn of the quantum age: “Sometimes, I think I can smell light,” a suspicion that resonates with her earlier human frustration with the inadequacy of transductive technologies to replicate original conditions of deep-space phenomena. [52] Here, she suggests that such previously undetectable information is accessible by means of our extended and imaginative posthuman state. Access to the previously inaccessible becomes a matter of a change in critical, embodied, and disciplinary perspectives. Feminist, posthuman, and cyborg criticisms of the domain of science in the space of the theatre model possibilities for non-traditional bodies to participate in interdisciplinary actions and conversations having to do with science. The representation of women performing scientist roles in performance is a critical move towards a culture that might imagine, accept, allow, and encourage the female body as normative for the task of practicing physics and astronomy. Anderson is transparent in her own creative process that also renders NASA a bit less opaque for non-scientists. Her presence as a woman onstage, performing science from the perspective of an artist, offers an empathetic bridge for other curious science-outsiders to critically participate in the experience of astronomy. References [1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 181. [2] This article was written, in part, during a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in 2015. Thanks also to the New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collections for granting me access to review the archival footage of The End of the Moon . [3] The 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) found that “the proportion of [science and engineering] degrees awarded to women has risen since 1993. The proportion of women is lowest in engineering, computer sciences, and physics.” National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015 , accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15311/digest/ . There is much action that is currently being performed within astronomy in particular to emend these disparities. Blogs such as Women in Astronomy and Astronomy in Color are evidence of actions performed by women and racial minorities who work within the discipline of astronomy towards the end of equalizing access to astronomy. Women in Astronomy , accessed 14 November 2015, womeninastronomy.blogspot.com. Astronomy in Color , accessed 14 November 2015, astronomyincolor.blogspot.com. [4] “They [literary intellectuals] still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture,’ as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all.” C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 14. [5] Ulrich in Grossnov, Michael Joseph, “Inviting the Cosmos Onto the Stage,” The New York Times, 11 November 2004, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [6] Anderson in Solomon, Deborah, “Post-Lunarism,” The New York Times Magazine , 30 January 2005, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [7] Gener, Randy, “Fly her to the moon: what’s art got to do with NASA? Laurie Anderson listens to the cosmic pulse,” American Theatre 22, no. 3 (2005): 26+, accessed 2 December 2014, http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA130570546&v=2.1&u=upitt_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=1d8012ba9f173f1b83d9bc51f4d0ad28 . [8] NASA ArtSpace , accessed 6 December 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/connect/artspace/ . [9] The Smithsonian recently curated an exhibit dedicated to the NASA Art Program’s history, documented in the book, NASA/ART—50 Years of Exploration . Selections from it may be seen on NASA’s website, https://www.nasa.gov . [10] Other pieces of the trilogy include Happiness (2001) and Dirtday! (2012). [11] Anderson has a history of connecting the dots between the domains of science, technology, and the military. Friedrich Kittler points out that she adapts the military technology of the vocoder for her representation of the voice of a pilot announcing a crash landing in the song, “From the Air” on the record Big Science (1982), also featured in the live performance, United States (1983). Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: the Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 21, no 1 (2012): 110, accessed 19 October 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/491050 . [12] Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon (New York: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theatre, February 27, 2005), videocassette, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Research Collections, Theatre on Film and Tape. [13] N. Katherine Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no.3 (2004), accessed 11 May 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247415 . [14] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). [15] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. [16] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14. [17] Braidotti, The Posthuman , 39. [18] Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” 313. [19] Kyle Powys White and Robert P. Crease , “Trust, Expertise, and the Philosophy of Science,” Synthese 177, no. 3 (December 2010), 411-25, accessed 26 July 2015, 417. [20] The HST is a 2.4m-wide reflective telescope that is situated three-hundred and eighty-one miles above the Earth’s surface. On 24 April 1990 it was carried in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Discovery and placed into orbit. Its “improved wavelength coverage,” will come to bear on this article’s examination of the HST role in detecting invisible spectra in the accessible performance of astronomy as it appears in The End of the Moon. Robert W Smith, “Introduction: The Power of an Idea,” Hubble’s Legacy: Reflections by Those Who Dreamed It, Built It, and Observed the Universe with It , ed. Roger D. Launius and David H. DeVorkin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 3. [21] HST has its own website that is operated by NASA. Hubblesite , accessed 19 October 2015, http://hubblesite.org . [22] Repeated observations and visual documentations of celestial objects like stars and galaxies allow astronomers to track changes in an object’s location and appearance over time and therefore learn about the object’s distance, heat, and movement. [23] The visual spectrum refers to the small portion of the energy, emitted by all objects to some degree, detectable to the human eye. [24] In a discussion of mid-late nineteenth century photographs that contain extra-visual data, art historian Josh Ellenbogen states, “[p]hotography does not reproduce data in such images, but instead it produces them.” Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Maray (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 6. [25] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [26] Ibid . [27] Mary Thomas Crane, “Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies , ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 107. [28] The relationship of experience to the documentation of experience is a recurrent trope in Anderson’s lifelong explorations of the connections that exist between science, culture, and the military: “Stand by. This is the time. And this is the record of the time.” Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” in RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 96. [29] Cooperstein’s case study is of the imagistic history of the Orion Nebula in which she compares nineteenth century astrophotography and the photography techniques used by turn-of-the-millennium astronomers. Shana Cooperstein, “Imagery and Astronomy: Visual Antecedents Informing Non-Reproductive Depictions of the Orion Nebula,” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (2014), 133, accessed 27 May 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/len/summary/v047/47.2.cooperstein.html . [30] Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 154. [31] Ibid., 157. [32] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] Amy Cook, “If: Lear’s Feather and the Staging of Science,” The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive ,” ed. Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59. [36] Ellenbogen defines the composite image as “a synthesis of data—a condensed, abbreviative representation of the kinds of information one might otherwise derive from a binomial curve, or better, a series of binomial curves that measured the particular features a given composite shows” (Ellenbogen, 9) . [37] Most reviews remark upon the pared-down technology of Moon , when compared to the technological complexity of her earlier work. [38] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 95. [39] Ibid. [40] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 194. [47] Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women , 169. [48] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 101. [49] Ibid. Gravity is (probably) a force, but one that physicists are still seeking to adequately explain. See Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (HarperCollins ebooks, 2009). [50] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [51] Ibid. [52] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Vivian Appler is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. A former Fulbright fellow, her current research focus is on feminist performances of science. 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: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. 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Iris Smith Fischer Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer By Published on June 2, 2016 Download Article as PDF This special issue, sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society, explores forms of research and inquiry offered by theatre and performance in the age of STEM—that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [1] The issue also presents developments in the scientific fields of information technology, biology, and medicine that employ techniques and approaches drawn from theatre practices. The issue poses a number of questions: What challenges and opportunities does this historical moment present for theatre to assert its relevance and necessity? How does theatre engage in alternate forms of inquiry? How does scholarship aid theatre, both by bringing theatre’s methods of inquiry into view or engaging in them itself? Can alternate forms of inquiry close the gap between practice and analysis in theatre, and counter claims that research occurs only in STEM disciplines? How can theatre offer an ethical perspective on STEM research, which claims to be value free? These are humanists’ questions, fueled by recognition that the arts themselves involve forms of research and inquiry, and that the concept of scientific objectivity, with its concomitant rejection of subjectivity, should be reexamined. Scientists, on the other hand, want to know how theatre and performance techniques can aid them in their research and teaching, or in the dissemination of results to colleagues, administrators, and the general public. For many scientists, valuable research is objective and ideology-free, separate from applications of already-produced knowledge, and clearly distinct from the creation of plays, the activities of performance artists, or the types of analysis and evaluation involved in theatre history or dramatic criticism. Yet some scientists question the exclusion of subjectivity, ideology, or empathy from STEM research and inquiry. These inquirers ask how the STEM disciplines can incorporate methods of learning borrowed from the humanities and arts, be opened more fully to participation by women, minorities, and the disabled, and teach students in the STEM disciplines to recognize, value, and use forms of embodied knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the term research is not proprietary to the STEM disciplines, defining it as “systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject.” Yet the OED also recognizes later disciplinary and institutional usages: “original critical or scientific investigation carried out under the auspices of an academic or other institution.” In a similarly broad fashion, the OED defines the term inquiry as “the action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something,” and offers “search, research, investigation, examination” as related terms. [2] Theatre and performance inquire and investigate, often proceeding carefully and methodically, but offering knowledge through acts, processes, and conceptual lenses such as the mimetic, the epic, the postdramatic. These types of knowledge are often not recognized as knowledge of an objective world. The current cultural dominance of the STEM disciplines is driven both by economic exigencies and underlying ideological assumptions about what constitutes valuable research and inquiry. Identifying performance as research can be seen as a response by artists and scholars to institutional, political, and economic pressures, and as a corollary effort to break out of academic silos and loosen funding restrictions. Performance approached as research allows inquirers to recognize commonalities among disciplines and share their methodologies and techniques. This turn reflects in twenty-first-century fashion the moment in the late nineteenth century when higher education was being organized in institutions but disciplinarity had not yet taken on its more rigid twentieth-century forms. Inquiry in science was not so isolated from inquiry in philosophy or literary history. One thinks of the American pragmatists—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, and others—who sought to keep in view the connections between scientific advances and humanistic inquiry. A similar desire has emerged recently in many fields, among them complexity science, biosemiotics, and epigenetics, which encourage awareness of the role of embodied knowledges in research. In this regard Wendy Wheeler usefully distinguishes between conceptual, experiential, and tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge, or “creaturely skillful phenomenological knowledge,” is essential to human flourishing and artistic creativity but incapable of formulation in propositional language. Yet conceptual knowledge or “abstract intellectual knowledge that ” cannot by itself account for experiential knowledge or “phenomenological embodied knowledge how ,” i.e., readable acts created “in engagement with the world and other embodied creatures.” Biosemiotic methods of inquiry, Wheeler argues, allow access to necessary tacit knowledge through the reading of such acts. While applicable to many realms of life, human and otherwise, she notes, “Skillful being in cultural complex totalities is a specifically human skillful being in the world. Actions (especially, perhaps, political actions) driven mainly by abstract thinking, which forget embodied experience, local knowledge, and skillfulness, are always, almost by definition, dangerous.” [3] Research and inquiry should engage the phenomenological how along with the conceptual that . In an effort to claim the term research for performance practices, some have questioned the tendency in the arts to distinguish between practice and analysis, as Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter point out: While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR) and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.[4] The movement known as Practice as Research (PaR) first developed in the United Kingdom, Riley and Hunter note, in response to government assessment tools introduced in the early 1990s to apportion funding based on departments’ research productivity. While humanities scholarship—as opposed to arts creation—more readily fits existing definitions of conceptual knowledge production (in the form of scholarly articles and monographs), arts departments in the U.K. faced the challenge of developing criteria for assessing creative activity as research, a process begun later at U.S. universities, and still ongoing. [5] Today embodied knowledges are being widely discussed at conferences and in publication. In their recent call for a working group on “Transfusions and Transductions: Science and Performance as Permeable Disciplines,” Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti argue, “As with the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, the theatre serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, a place to penetrate barriers and test innovative ideas, approaches, and practices.” [6] Also promising in closing the practice/analysis divide is the concept of situated knowledge, drawn in part from black feminist thought and summarized here by Lynette Hunter: Unlike scientific knowledge in which the effect of the observer is often a ‘problem’ and many experiments are devised in order to minimize it, in situated knowledge the whole point is that the observer is engaged. It is only through their engagement that knowledge can be manifested, and the observer is both the practitioner who makes things and the audience or respondent.[7] Calling such current developments “a moment of discovery and transition” in the long history of research in performance, Arthur Sabatini emphasizes that the training of performers is built upon considerable research into the capacities of the human body and mind. Use of the voice, breathing, manual dexterity, movement techniques, directing or choreographing for performance are all outcomes from highly proscribed and ever-evolving systems that have been researched, repeatedly tested, and advanced by practitioners worldwide.[8] Institutional pressures and burgeoning terminology may actually present opportunities to explore and document the need for embodied and situated knowledges that cross the institutional divide between arts and humanities on the one hand, and STEM disciplines on the other. Invested in both creativity and discovery, initiatives are coming from all sides to bridge that gap in terms of how research is conducted, students are trained, and knowledge is disseminated. * The articles that follow argue for the value of embodied knowledges from the nine contributors’ rich and varied backgrounds in theatre history, playwriting, both arts and science education (including science museum education), physics, molecular biology, medicine, engineering, information science and technology, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, acting, directing, and—not least—stand-up comedy. Each perspective contributes in its own way to this special issue. Bradley Stephenson, in “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls ,” approaches embodied knowledges offered by theatre in terms of disability studies, epic theatre, and recent theories of animacy. Building on Mel Chen’s concept of animacy as “the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present,” Stephenson argues that, in Gregory’s re-telling of the historical events involving young female workers poisoned by their interactions with radium-laced paint, “radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.” Citing disability theory as an ally of performance and theatre studies, Stephenson explores the interactions of biological life with radioactive half-life in order to rewrite our medical understanding of radium’s effects on the body as a complex of transcorporeal agencies. Vivian Appler approaches science—in this case physics, astronomy, and engineering—as “a liberal cultural domain,” a formulation that recognizes the STEM disciplines’ roots in liberal humanism. “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon ” argues that scientists and artists alike have a social responsibility to “recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts.” Appler calls for a “holistic cultural conversation” to bridge what C. P. Snow once termed ‘the two cultures divide’: “Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective.” Appler focuses on Laurie Anderson’s arts residency at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the resulting 2004 performance piece The End of the Moon : Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. . . . [She] fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. By means of transduction or “communication of information across different media,” Appler continues Anderson’s intervention, revealing in the performance a “cyborg system” that invites discussion of gender assumptions active both within science and outside of it. By documenting a woman performance artist embodying representations of gendered scientific research, Appler’s article shares concerns expressed by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Suzanne Trauth about the barriers women encounter in thinking of themselves as researchers and gaining access to the sciences. Suzanne Trauth’s play script iDream , based on Eileen Trauth’s research and documented by Karen Keifer-Boyd, is designed to “raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who [can] participate in the STEM field of IT [information technology].” The authors of “ iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” have found that the scientific professions have difficulty creating gender balance. Just as scholarly publications on information technology are not written in language accessible for the general public, “the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation.” The authors turn instead to girls, their families, and their teachers, to raise awareness of the cultural narratives at work. Transforming Eileen Trauth’s research findings into theatrical scenarios, the authors seek to “stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields.” iDream employs several story lines to engage audiences during staged readings and the discussions that follow. In a work process resembling what Appler terms “interactional expertise,” albeit not in a full production or performance art but rather in a script-centered experience, the authors created an exploration of “science opportunities . . . and barriers . . . [focusing] not so much on overt barriers [but] rather the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams.” Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio also investigate theatre’s applications in the interaction between STEM researchers and the general public. Rather than raising awareness of constraining social narratives, the authors report on their use of Viola Spolin’s improvisation techniques to prepare undergraduate life science students to communicate complex concepts to non-experts. Duckert and De Stasio developed a required capstone course to rehearse students in performance skills they need as professionals and public intellectuals, i.e., to make their discoveries “accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows.” Moreover, We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues the audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and . . . to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work [in order] to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. Often initially resistant to engaging in theatrical improvisation, students find that even minimal awareness of performance circumstances improves their ability to communicate. While this would not surprise theatre majors, the incorporation of performance skills into a life sciences curriculum appears to leave life science majors with a new respect for the role that movement, gesture, and facial expression play in communication. The authors also note that, as teachers, they became more aware of public speaking’s embodied character, as well as physiological and neurological elements such as the linkage between mimicry (empathetic physical behaviors) and the action of mirror neurons in fostering an audience’s receptivity. Could performance techniques become part of the life sciences’ methods of disseminating discoveries? Duckert and De Stasio’s capstone course, embedded in their department’s curriculum, suggests that improvisational performance could assist STEM researchers in communicating more effectively with administrators, legislators, and the general public. This possibility also appears in “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters,” in which George Pate and Libby Ricardo address the use of simulated patients in training medical students for clinical encounters. A relatively recent development, simulated patients—non-actors who volunteer their participation—do not learn a traditional standardized script but are given their characters’ medical and personal histories and also acting guidelines for behaving as their characters would in real-life consultations with their doctors. As the authors note, such “high fidelity” encounters rehearse the performance of empathetic responses to improvised, often unpredictable patient behaviors. The authors’ use of simulated patients follows “recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measurable ways.” In this regard, Pate and Ricardo’s project resembles that of Duckert and De Stasio, both in regard to the medical students’ initial reluctance to role-play and in the authors’ successful use of workshop exercises to integrate clinical skills with medical knowledge. Drawing a parallel to literary techniques of storytelling, Pate and Ricardo found that such improvisational exercises, like fictional narratives, helpfully “suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them. . . . [Further,] improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can.” Of all the activity going on in performance as research and research-informed theatre, this special issue presents only a sampling. Many other projects incorporating theatre and performance offer embodied and situated knowledges that can inform scientific research, suggest alternate forms of inquiry, and allow inquirers in the age of STEM to communicate effectively as public intellectuals. References [1] It has been a pleasure to work with JADT editors James Wilson and Naomi Stubbs, and managing editor James Armstrong. I extend my appreciation to them and also to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the opportunity to edit this special issue. My special thanks go to Cheryl Black, ATDS President, and the members of the special issue publications committee, ATDS members all, who both served as readers and provided me with excellent advice. [2] “Research,” “Inquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000-). http://www2.lib.ku.edu/login?url=http://www.oed.com . [3] Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 49. [4] Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, “Introduction,” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xv. [5] Ibid, xvii. Riley and Hunter distinguish among the relevant terms: “The acronym ‘PaR’ in the United Kingdom refers to ‘practice as research’ in its most inclusive sense to embrace music practices, the visual arts, dance, and theatre [while] ‘PbR’ refers to ‘practice-based research’ with a wider reach across the arts and sciences. . . . PbR is also well-established in the United Kingdom and Europe, and contributes to many areas, from the medical sciences to spectatorship studies. PbR emerges from different academic areas, but seems to have particular usage in the sciences. . . . In the United States, especially in the fields of performance and theatre studies, the acronym PAR is common shorthand for ‘performance as research’.” [6] E-mail communication from Meredith Conti, 23 May 2016. [7] Lynette Hunter, “Situated Knowledge,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 151. [8] Arthur Sabatini, “Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance and the Arts,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 120, 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) Iris Smith Fischer is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches modern drama, semiotics, literary and dramatic theory, and avant-garde performance. From 2007-2010 she served as editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her publications include Mabou Mines: Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (author, University of Michigan Press, 2011); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, by Thomas A. Sebeok (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Her current book project, "Charles Peirce and the Role of Aesthetic Expression in 19th-Century U.S. Semiotics," examines the intertwined histories of theatre (Delsartist approaches to actor training and public speaking) and the still-emerging field of science-based semiotics. 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: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi By Marina Johnson Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. Directed by Emile Saba. Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah. 10 October 2024 Guernica, Gaza : A Surreal Exploration of Resilience and Humanity Amidst War at Ashtar Theatre in Palestine مش مفروض الطير يكون مقيّد، مثل ما الإنسان مش مفروض يكون محاصر -حمزه, غويرنيكا، غزة (١٧) A bird is not meant to be grounded, just like a human is not meant to be besieged. -Hamza, Guernica Gaza (17) What does it mean to make theatre in times of genocide? As the ongoing genocide in Gaza has persisted since October 2023, this question has weighed heavily on the minds of many artists. While some international artists make the choice in their artistic praxis to engage with or distance themselves from what is happening in Gaza, theaters within Palestine face a starkly different reality. For them, the question is not whether to respond, but how and when to continue their artistic practice—and what message that work must convey in the face of such devastation. Ashtar Theatre Board Member and playwright Naomi Wallace reunited with her long-time collaborator, Palestinian playwright Ismail Khalidi to write a play specifically about Gaza for Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Center of the Earth was directed by Ashtar Theatre’s Artistic Director Emile Saba and premiered on 13 July 2024, with five initial performances. I attended its second series of productions, which began on 10 October 2024, in their Ramallah space. Though Khalidi and Wallace wrote the original text in English, Alice S. Yousef translated it into Arabic for Ashtar Theatre, and all performances have been staged in Arabic. As the performance began, ominous music filled the intimate seventy seat theatre. At the same time, a striking video projection of a human eye spanned three strips of screens, overlaid with shifting faces—presumably those of the characters. The three projection screens formed a fragmented visual space: stage left featured a short and torn panel about two to three feet long, while the center screen, positioned slightly upstage, stretched from the ceiling to the floor. On stage right, another screen extended from the ceiling and draped onto the floor. Throughout the performance, abstract images filled these surfaces, layered and overlapping, creating a dynamic collage that echoed the fragmented, multi-layered imagery emerging from the play’s text. The visuals and projections added a haunting, surreal dimension to the performance, deepening the emotional and symbolic impact. The play tells the stories of five characters from Gaza: Yara, a young surfer and her father, Antar; Yamen, a young man with PTSD and his older brother Hamza, a resistance fighter; and Bilal, a beekeeper. While the brothers occasionally talk to each other, all of the characters appear to exist more in each other's memory than in the present moment. However, Saba’s staging made it clear that they sense each other's presence. Throughout the play, the audience experiences fragments of the characters’ lives that create a kaleidoscopic view of life in Gaza during the genocide. Wallace and Khalidi were inspired by the Picasso painting Guernica (1937), which was created after the small Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain was bombed by Nazi Germany and Italian Fascist air forces during the Spanish Civil War on 26 April 1937. The attack on Gernika was one of the first aerial attacks of its kind and was used as a testing ground for death and destruction from the air, in much the same way new weapons of war are being tested in Gaza. Piccaso’s Guernica “articulated the terror of it so potently that the picture has become almost synonymous with a sense of outrage and condemnation. Merely possessing a reproduction of it in Spain during the Franco era was an imprisonable offense.” [1] Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the painting into two groups, one made of humans and one of animals. The latter group consists of the bull, wounded horse, and bird. The group of humans consists of a dead soldier and several women, one of whom holds her dead child. [2] Many of these images were brought to life in indirect ways in the play penned by Wallace and Khalidi. Like the painting from which it takes its name, Guernica, Gaza illustrates the importance of the interspecies relationship between humans and animals. Through juxtaposing human and animal figures, both pieces vividly convey the violence and destruction from which no one, human and animal alike, can escape. Both art objects reflect on the fragility of life and the senselessness of conflict, emphasizing that violence spares no one. The human-animal connection immediately recalls Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's dehumanizing remark on October 9, 2023, when he said, "We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly." [3] While Gallant's rhetoric toward Palestinians is not new, Guernica, Gaza challenges this narrative by highlighting how Palestinians extend their compassion to all forms of life around them, including animals: YAMEN: When I first heard those two words, ‘human animals,’ I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Do they mean that we are animals that are human? Or humans that are animals? HAMZA: Animals and humans are two separate things. YAMEN: But they’re afraid of the bombs like we are. The dogs hear the drones and wet themselves. They whimper. A ‘human animal.’ Maybe it means we are inside the animals and they are inside us. يامن: اول مرة سمعت كلمة "حيوانات بشرية" ضليت افكر فيها. هم مفكريننا حيوانات اصلها بشري؟ ولا بشر اصلهم حيواني؟ حمزه: الحيوانات والبشر اشيين منفصلين. يامن: بس الحيوانات بخافوا من القنابل مثلنا. بشخوا تحتهم لما يسمعوا الزنانات، بيرجوا…حيوانات بشرية معناها انه الحيوانات عايشة فينا واحنا عايشين فيهم كمان. This exchange with Yamen (Fadi Murad), a character who appears to have PTSD (though it is never directly stated), and his resistance fighter brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) suggests that the struggle for survival for both groups is interconnected. Yamen is obsessed with sewing other animal parts back onto injured animals, even contemplating attaching animal limbs to himself if he becomes injured. Compassionately played by Murad, Yamen’s mind blurs the lines between human and animal suffering, viewing their fate as intertwined. Image 1: Yamen (Fadi Murad) with his brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) behind him; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre The play also uses insects as metaphors for the endurance and the fragility of life. Bilal, the beekeeper, played with nuanced care by Tamer Tafesh, shows deep consideration for the lives of his bees. He exhibits empathy over the destruction of their hives and fears for their future; so many farmers have been killed, their land destroyed, which means that there is less pollen for the bees, and the hive count has dropped to its lowest point ever. The destruction of the bees’ hives parallels the bombing of human homes, underscoring the shared suffering of all living creatures in conflict. Despite the devastation, the bees and other animals symbolize resilience. Bilal clings to the hope that he can protect his last hive, moving it to safety, even considering building an underground refuge for the bees, away from the drones. Even though he is hungry, he refrains from harvesting the honey so as not to deplete the hive. Bilal emphasizes their role in pollination, without which humanity would struggle to survive, and contrasts their harmony with the violence around them: Did you know the buzzing of the wings of a hive is in the note of C? Science suggests that this note melts away your worries, eases tensions, fights stress, and treats trauma. That’s why beekeepers have the highest quality of life and lifespan of any profession. A drone buzzes overhead. He ducks. The drone makes an ugly barking noise. That buzzing and barking is definitely not in the key of C! بتعرف يا غالي، إزا بتعمل موسيقى على زنّار الخلية، رح تلاقي الأزيز على نوته ال دو؟ العلم بيقول إنه هالصوت بيخفّف التوتر، وبيعالج الصدمات وبيهدي الأعصاب. عشان هيك مربي النحل عندهم أجمل حياة وأطول عمر، بتتخيل؟ نحن مبسوطين كثير بهالسيمفونية اللي بتطلع من أوركسترا الفليهارومنية تبعت النحلة على نغمة ال دو. هالزن والجعار اكيد مش ع ايقاع ال دو. In the above excerpt, Bilal describes the sound of the drones or "zenanas” as barking, while Yara later describes them as mosquitos from hell. The drones burn their unnatural buzz into the ears of Gazans, reminding the audience of the inescapable presence of surveillance and fear that they face when they’re overhead. Months ago, several commentators noted that the aerial images coming out of Gaza made the Palestinians there look like insects. By contrast, in Guernica, Gaza it is the military weaponry that becomes the insect reference. The stark contrast between the natural world and the unnatural elements of war is also evident in how water appears in the play. Water, typically a source of life, has long been a contested element in Gaza, with Palestinians receiving limited amounts of running water. While the Mediterranean offers Palestinians a glimpse of freedom, Isreal limits Palestinian access to the ocean to a narrow zone. This creates a paradox where the natural landscape, instead of nurturing, mirrors the captivity imposed on Gazans. Despite these circumstances, Yara (Sasha Asbah) is a young surfer, initially taught by her father Antar (David Tannous), though she eventually surpasses his surfing ability, fearlessly facing rip currents with a deep knowledge and respect for the power of the ocean. Yara was killed in the war; at the beginning of the play, her father enters the stage carrying Yara, much like the mother carries the body of her murdered child in Picasso’s Guernica . We see her reminisce (from beyond the grave) about her short life. Surfing provided her with a sense of freedom, her sole opportunity to experience childhood. She powerfully reenacts these memories for the audience. Image 2: Antar (David Tannous) carrying Yara (Sasha Asbah), an image that is mirrored in Picasso’s painting Guernica ; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre Even after her death, Antar imagines her still alive, surfing the waves, suggesting that water and surfing represent an enduring spirit that cannot be easily destroyed. He clings to her memory, imagining that if he can call out to her, she might return, bringing to the forefront the hope that love and memory can bring someone back, even if only in spirit. Despite the fact that she has died, Yara addresses the audience, her vigor for life haunting the viewers who have seen too many young children like Yara lose their lives before they have even really begun. Through his staging, director Emile Saba skillfully blended the real and the surreal, creating a space where the beauty and pain of the characters are experienced for 80 minutes, and where the characters haunt the viewers, as witnessing a genocide should haunt us all. The actors break the fourth wall, directly addressing the viewers as they move fluidly from scene to scene, drawing the audience into a surreal world, created by Yasmine Omari’s video and lighting design, that is both familiar—the Gaza seen in daily news—and abstract. The production relies on the ensemble's ability to tell their stories with sincerity and truth, without succumbing to intense emotions these stories elicit from the audience. Guernica, Gaza , the creative collaboration between Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, delivers a powerful and moving portrayal of the cost of war. Through compelling characters, vivid imagery, and a unique fusion of the real and surreal, the play draws attention to the devastating impacts of genocide that stand out from the media we consume daily. With poignant performances and a visually arresting production, Guernica, Gaza challenges dehumanizing rhetoric and offers a profound reflection on resilience, memory, and the shared vulnerability of all living beings, humans and animals alike, amidst violence. This play serves as a timely and necessary artistic response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, urging audiences to confront the horrors of war while holding onto the enduring hope that Gaza will, sometime soon, see peace. Bibliography Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’ . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. Khalidi, Ismail and Naomi Wallace. Guernica, Gaza . Unpublished script in both Arabic and English (translated by Alice S. Yousef). 2024. Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. [1] Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007, 2. [2] Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. [3] Middle East Eye Staff. “Israel-Palestine War: ‘We Are Fighting Human Animals’, Israeli Defence Minister Says.” Middle East Eye, October 9, 2023. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-fighting-human-animals-defence-minister . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.