Keynote Speech from the Twenty-eighth Mid-America Theatre Conference, Changing Theatrical Landscapes: Mapping New Directions in History, Pedagogy, and Practice in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

{ 1 } \ Keynote Speech from the Twenty-eighth Mid-America Theatre Conference, Changing Theatrical Landscapes Mapping New Directions in History, Pedagogy, and Practice in the Twenty-first Century —LOU BELL AMY I’m inspired by the boldness of the challenge of this conference’s theme. As I thought about it while preparing this talk, I even began to wax creative and found myself becoming excited over the possibilities. “Mapping new directions ”offers the opportunity to reevaluate, to extend the reach and understanding of ourselves as well as those for whom we perform and those whom we mentor and teach; to set new frameworks through which we perceive our history , our pedagogy, our practice; to understand ourselves and our power to change our world more thoroughly. It’s a mandate that has as its basic tenet opening our institutions and our curricula to populations and cultures heretofore only marginally served. Once I began to think in these lofty terms it was only a very short time before the latent “Trekkie” in me took over and I was imagining myself standing at the helm of the Enterprise, facing new frontiers and “boldly go[ing] where no man has gone before.” What did I mean,“no man”? Well, I meant me. Not no man. Me. It was here that I began to feel a bit of dread. Not from fear of the unknown, but something that began to rise from within myself. I repeated the phrase “where no man has { 2 } LOU BELL AMY gone before.” The arrogance that is presupposed in my thesis staggered me. Images of Cecil J. Rhodes, King Leopold II, General George Armstrong Custer, and too many others to count here spring to mind. So I determined that I’d give some time to thinking about respectful ways to engage the heretofore disengaged, the ignored, the misrepresented. And that thinking is what I’d like to share with you today. I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life (the last thirty years) stewarding a cultural institution and interacting with the dominant culture from a marginalized position. So you’ll hear me today speak of myself as sort of an inside-outsider. I hope that by sharing my own trepidation at dealing with cultural nuance, I’ll awaken in you a similar feeling that asks you to interrogate what you bring to the encounter. As we inside the academy, inside the major regional theatre movement, reach out and seek to include the cultural expression that traditionally has not been part of our offerings, in our curricula and our theatrical presentations, we face special challenges. As founder and artistic director of one of the oldest and most influential professional theatrical organizations (in the world, I’m told), whose reason for being is the exploration and distillation of the AfricanAmerican experience and aesthetic, I believe my experiences may be relevant to the reordering that this conference’s title would suggest. I would caution us to be aware that the information we may be seeking to engage is most likely part of a living culture, part of the ethos of live people whose lives and culture are integral to the understanding of our study or the theatre that we seek to perform or present. I would hope that our interaction would be respectful and mindful that we run the risk of misinterpreting, misrepresenting , of morphing the very thing we seek to investigate. The applied anthropological directive comes to mind: “First, do no harm!” From my vantage point, an honest appraisal of our past behavior leads me to again propose extreme caution. Most of our expansion, if even tacitly, has as its basic assumption that before our involvement, the examined cultures either have an unappreciated worth, are simple, unadorned, messy, and/or wasteful. This perspective places us in a position of participating in a “discovery” rather than participating in a meeting or an engagement. One position places us in the role of cultural arbiter. The other makes us a guest. One polemic places the efforts of Ridgely Torrence,Paul Greene,or DuBose Hayward as honest attempts at presenting cultures they knew little about and as interpreters of those cultures, raising folk and folklore...