Theater Classes Research Articles

El teatro como estrategia didactica para mejorar la autorregulacion de la conducta en niños con tdah

The Attention Deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a disease that occurs in 3% to 7% in school-age children and a set of features related to the lack of attention, hyperactivity, inattention and lack of performance, which commits affecting their learning process and integration in the different fields of life. The purpose of the research was to design a teaching strategy that will facilitate the process of self-regulation of behavior in children with ADHD through the theatrical resource. For this study, contemplate a population of 20 students that meet the criteria for ADHD and 56 teachers in the Corporation education American School, located in a municipality of the Colombian Caribbean region; was intentionally extracted a sample composed of 7 children diagnosed with ADHD and 20 responsible teachers teaching these children. In observations made in class, the children with ADHD focused on academic activities in the theatre class and very little focused on other responses (distractors), to differences in other subjects, where children attended more to the other answers, that the academic activities.

Effects of Live Plays, Discussion Technique and Traditional Teaching Method to Learning Outcomes of Theatre Class (Sample of Ondokuz Mayıs University Faculty of Education

Effects of Live Plays, Discussion Technique and Traditional Teaching Method to Learning Outcomes of Theatre Class (Sample of Ondokuz Mayıs University Faculty of Education

What Stays (in Undergraduate Theatre Education)

What Stays (in Undergraduate Theatre Education) Russell Vandenbroucke (bio) I hope you won’t hiss, but I was trained in graduate school to be a theatre critic. Anatole France advised: “To be quite frank, the critic ought to say ‘Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of Shakespeare, apropos of Racine, or of Pascal, or of Goethe.’” Speaking of myself apropos What Stays, I took exactly one theatre class as an undergraduate. It was in my final semester, and on the first day Bob Auletta announced that his goal was to discourage any of us from becoming playwrights. I acted for the first time that same semester as an attendant to Earl Hyman performing Othello for the 500th time. I had zero lines. I was slow to figure out what is now obvious: Plays are meant to be staged, not read. That belated insight led to Yale Drama School, and after it to twenty years in the land of LORT as a literary manager, dramaturg, director, and artistic director. I was past age 50 when I joined the University of Louisville as chair and attended my first faculty meeting ever. The “myself” I speak of apropos What Stays, teaches • at a public university; • within a college of liberal arts and sciences; • in a department that offers a BS, an MFA, and a Graduate Certificate in African American Theatre; we are home to one of the few African American theatre programs in the world; • and as director of a certificate program in Peace, Justice & Conflict Transformation that I cofounded. Theatre has never been my sole passion. What Stays, at least for my department, is home sweet home in liberal arts. I enthusiastically embrace liberal arts. I quibble with the language describing this panel as “in line with the realities of professional practice” if that implies that our primary responsibility is to prepare students for professional theatre. Most of them will not end up there and we mislead them if we suggest otherwise. What Stays is a core of learning that is wide-ranging and eclectic, like our students. Theatre is that rare human pursuit that can use every piece of knowledge and talent its practitioners possess. If you can juggle, play an instrument, speak foreign languages, walk on your hands, wield power tools safely, paint, write, sew, draft ground plans, sell tickets, raise money, inspire others, or make them laugh, you can apply it in the theatre. The more our students know and can do, the better prepared they are for life, and also for the theatre that might be part of it. What Stays is creating productions. In Marsha Norman’s Traveler in the Dark, one character counters another’s certitude: “That is not the truth. That is just a fact. The truth is what the facts mean.” Most of us spend weeks each year in productions seeking truth amid the clutter of facts. What Stays is the rehearsal room as a laboratory where we explore juicy interrogative pronouns that help us to separate truth from facts: Who am I talking to? What does this line mean? Why do I say it now? When do I move, if I move? Where do I stand, or sit, or skip, or sway? How do I communicate my intention or should I mask it? Why does any of this matter? [End Page 357] There are hundreds more questions to ask, then answer tentatively as best we can for this stage of rehearsal. (Do I reveal my technique as a director? I do.) And of course just outside the rehearsal room our collaborators are addressing the same questions in their studios, shops, and offices. In rehearsal rooms our students comprehend that communication includes proactive listening, not just inspired speaking; we are reminded why human beings have two ears and one mouth. And we figure out how to kiss the person we did not use to like. And curse the one we do. We evolve to trust everyone in the company, even those who may have seemed a little … different … around the table at the first read-through. Inside the cloisters of rehearsal rooms and shops we travel effortlessly across time and space...

Poisoning the Mother/Land: An Ecofeminist Dramaturgy in José Rivera’s Marisol and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

Poisoning the Mother/LandAn Ecofeminist Dramaturgy in José Rivera’s Marisol and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints Arden Elizabeth Thomas (bio) In Marisol (1993) and Heroes and Saints (1992), the images that José Rivera and Cherríe Moraga contend with are of the poisoned earth and poisoned bodies, of deformed infants and bodiless heads, of a man giving birth and babies buried under concrete, of children crucified and the incarnation of la Virgen de Guadalupe, of Mother Earth as womb and tomb, of children and mothers and the earth screaming, burning, dying, yet refusing erasure and silence. When the title character in Marisol demands to know, “Why is there a war on children in this city? Why are apples extinct? Why are they planning to drop human insecticide on overpopulated areas of the Bronx? Why do cows give salty milk? Where did the moon go? How come nobody’s seen it in nearly nine months?” Rivera leads us through a series of questions that conflate images of ecological apocalypse with recurring images of maternity and childbirth. And when Moraga’s main character, Cerezita—a young woman born with only a head due to the toxic wastes infecting the land—takes on the ancestral images of the Virgin Mary and la Virgen de Guadalupe, she reclaims ancestral mothers and Mother Earth toward a conglomerate and powerful vision of a sustainable politics. This essay reads the plays Marisol and Heroes and Saints through the lens of ecofeminist philosophy to see how the theatre might intervene on behalf of issues of environmental justice and ecological sustainability. Paying particular attention to the material conditions of women, children, and the land and [End Page 143] interrelated issues of environmental destruction, race, and poverty, I examine how Rivera and Moraga incorporate metaphoric images of motherhood with concrete evidence of environmental toxins and policies experienced in the body. Ultimately, the playwrights articulate the material, physical consequences of political and ecological actions, calling for changed perceptions that empower individuals to work to transform communal, social, and even global ideologies of power that contribute to the destruction of the environment and the lives of women and children.1 With today’s increasing anxiety about climate change and ecological disasters, it is particularly instructive to look at these two plays from the early 1990s that bring together interrelated issues of motherhood, environmental destruction, race, and poverty. As testaments to their contemporaneity, both plays are today often taught in college theatre classes and regularly revived on college campuses and in theatre companies across the country. Nearly two decades after their premieres, Marisol and Heroes and Saints continue to hold powerful resonances for current conversations about the material relationship between bodies and the detritus of environmental waste; about the damaging effects of globalization on the land and the community, and in the lives of mothers and children; and about the symbolic and linguistic analogies between woman and nature that foster systems of domination. By using an ecofeminist dramaturgy—a relatively recent theoretical model that examines dramatic playtexts or stagings through the lens of ecological feminist criticism—this essay offers new readings of these important plays. I argue that Marisol and Heroes and Saints reveal in concrete detail how policies that continue to be promoted by government and corporations against urban families and rural farming communities impoverish the planet and its peoples, with women and children as their primary victims. Additionally, this essay examines how these plays interrogate what Sheila Rabillard and Karen Bamford discuss in their introduction to this special edition of Theatre History Studies as motherhood’s unstable cultural meaning in modern Western society. In particular, if Marisol and Heroes and Saints expose worlds of ecological destruction through metaphoric images of the maternal, this essay questions whether the plays go beyond Mother Earth as metaphor or essentializing myth, drawing on these archetypical precedents to foster an ecofeminist revision of such essentialism, or whether they are instead trapped by these culturally prevalent images. It may be useful to define ecofeminism at this point. The term ecofeminisme was coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 as a tool to assess interconnections between women’s oppression and ecological...

Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte

Reviewed by: Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte Andrew Sobanet Warren Motte. Mirror Gazing. Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2014. 295pp. When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor who pointed out to my class on twentieth-century French theater the importance of mirror scenes. I do not remember the specifics of the lesson, either its theoretical underpinnings [End Page 308] or the specific mirror scene we were studying. But I did internalize the central point of the matter: that mirror scenes are noteworthy. So in the 20-plus years since I took that class, I have paid special attention to mirror scenes in books, films, plays, and television shows. And it is indeed true: mirror scenes, across genres and media, often mark or coincide with a crucial narrative moment. Be it an instance of self-awareness, a pivotal moment of transformation, or a marker of alienation from the self, mirror scenes frequently indicate to the reader or viewer a key element about the mirror-gazing character in question. Often some sort of commentary on the narrative itself, mirror scenes can “reflect” a thematic or formal element central to a story. Take, for example, three mirror scenes in L’Etranger: one in Meursault’s apartment, when we don’t see him in his mirror at all; a second, in his prison cell, when his reflection in his pannikin (“ma gamelle de fer”) won’t smile at him, despite his efforts; and a third, when Meursault (by looking in that same tin cup a moment later, this time with the help of the sun’s last light) acknowledges his current state of seriousness as a prisoner. The first two scenes complement other elements in the text indicating that Meursault is, in many regards, unknowable and other, even to himself. The third scene suggests that Meursault’s sense of self is evolving, an evolution that continues through the final lines of the novel. I have used such scenes in almost all of my literature classes—while teaching works by Camus, Sartre, Colette, Queneau, and Marie Redonnet, among others—to show my students how mirror scenes can serve as gateways into understanding how narratives function and how characters are formed. Warren Motte, in his most recent book, Mirror Gazing, delves deeply into the topic that he brought up in that French theater class in which I sat as an undergraduate more than two decades ago. His book is based on more than three decades of reading, collecting, and categorizing mirror scenes. The full scope of the project renders clear what a voracious reader Motte is; over the years, he has read and categorized approximately 10,000 such scenes. That is not a typo: ten thousand scenes, an incredible number. Those roughly 10,000 scenes appear in around 1,500 books from a wide range of periods and genres. The set of authors covered in Mirror Gazing is huge and diverse. Ovid, for instance, lies in close proximity to William S. Burroughs. Barack Obama, Christine Montalbetti, and Agatha Christie share space with Proust and Whitman. In one paragraph, chosen more or less at random, Motte analyzes scenes in books by William DeAndrea, Len [End Page 309] Deighton, Harold Bloom, Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, Patrick Deville, and Harry Mathews (208–09). From start to finish, Mirror Gazing has a pleasant ludic quality to it. Motte employs abundantly the first-person singular in order to continually remind the reader that his book is about him looking at himself as a reader and cataloguer, and that this text is the reflection of an activity that has been a part of his distinguished readerly life since he was a graduate student. Indeed, Motte’s engaging, playful, and highly self-referential investigation involves considerable doubling and multiple layers of self, as do many of mirror scenes he so brilliantly analyzes and so ably situates into context (both in his book, and in the books from which they came). Incredibly, Motte manages to distill the thousands of mirror scenes he has catalogued into three basic categories, all of which revolve around degrees of self-recognition: simple recognition; difficult recognition; and failed recognition. Now, those categories as I have just outlined...

Predictors of engagement in and transfer from acting training.

Studies of transfer effects from arts training to nonarts skills are often criticized for not using random assignment of students to type of training. At the same time, there is little to no research on differences among children who take various kinds of arts classes. The study reported here investigated differences between children enrolling in theater compared with visual arts classes on previous experience and parental-rated characteristics. Children in theater classes were found to have higher levels of previous experience in theater and social activities and higher parental-rated characteristics such as tendency to role play and pretend play than children enrolled in a year of visual arts classes. Previously, a year of theater classes had been associated with an increase in self-reported empathy for these children. The currently found differences between groups did not predict transfer outcomes in empathy. Implications for studies of the effects of arts training and profiles of children who take arts classes are discussed.

The world of musicals: an encyclopedia of stage, screen, and song

This wide-ranging, two-volume encyclopedia of musicals old and new will captivate young fans-and prove invaluable to those contemplating staging a musical production. * Offers 700 alphabetically arranged entries related to musicals in theatre, film, and television * Spans the history of musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the late 1800s to the present * Concentrates on musicals that are historically important and/or of mainstream interest, as well as those that might be examined in a high school music, music history, or theatre class * Features a teacher-friendly guide to the most popular musicals performed by high schools, discussing casting/characters, costume needs, notes on the difficulty of the music, and more * Includes a selected bibliography, discography, and videography as well as a chronology capturing key events in the history of the musical

New Ideas and Clinical Practices to Improve Corporeal Self-Esteem

It’s common to face, concerning patients with eating disorders, the lack of trust towards others and the fear of judgment. In the clinic, this aspect is very interesting but also difficult to engage. The aim of this research is to evaluate theatrical techniques as tools to develop confidence toward the others’ point of view, through an improvement of collaborating and interaction abilities. We interviewed about building a character on the scene fifteen not professional actors and fifteen recovered eating disorder patients, attending to theater classes using Stanislavski Method. To compare the clinical and the amateur actors group and to analyze the link between the self-descriptions as a common person and self-descriptions as actors on the scene, we used modified repertory grids and semi-structured interviews. The outcomes of the work show us that every participant appreciate the stage activity as a potential training for the multiplicity of “the self”. Anyway, the Eating Disorder Group is more likely to reduce the interaction impact's size and to disconnect actors and observers (director and audience), in comparison to the Amateurs Group. The Clinical Group also doesn't recognize the importance of being a relational feedback during the construction of characters and it's easy that they give importance just to the aspects of the character which they already see in themselves. Thus, the fear of judgment could be overcome thanks to the theatrical laboratory, in fact the screen of the theatrical performance offers protection to actors. Possible outcomes in the clinical practice will be discussed.

Protocolos teatrais verbo-visuais: produção de sentidos para a prática teatral universitária

Este texto, resultante de uma pesquisa de pós-doutorado, apresenta reflexões sobre a produção de sentidos para as aulas de teatro no ensino superior, a partir de protocolos de aula produzidos por acadêmicos discentes, e realizados sob a condição da verbo-visualidade. A partir da Análise Dialógica do Discurso, pautada nas contribuições teóricas de Bakhtin e o Círculo, é possível olhar para os discursos verbo-visuais dos alunos sobre suas aulas práticas, dialogando com os diferentes sentidos para os quais apontam.

Buddhist-inspired meditation increases the value of calm.

Most studies of meditation have focused on "actual affect" (how people actually feel). We predict that meditation may even more significantly alter "ideal affect" (how people ideally want to feel). As predicted, meditators ideally wanted to feel calm more and excited less than nonmeditators, but the groups did not differ in their actual experience of calm or excited states (Study 1). We ruled out self-selection and nonspecific effects by randomly assigning participants to meditation classes, an improvisational theater class, or a no class control (Study 2). After eight weeks, meditators valued calm more but did not differ in their actual experience of calm compared with the other groups. There were no differences in ideal or actual excitement, suggesting that meditation selectively increases the value placed on calm. These findings were not due to expectancy effects (Study 3). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how meditation alters affective life.

Improvisational Theater and Insights into the Function of Habit in Occupation

Various authors have recently approached the study of habit in occupation using a Deweyan understanding. This paper serves to further develop the theoretical and empirical literature on habit and advocate for focused research on the role of habit in occupation. An ethnographic study was conducted on an improvisational theater class to investigate how habits function in the particular occupation of “improvisational theater.” Ethnographic methods including interviews, audio recordings of in-class performances, field notes, and participant observation were used during weekly sessions over a 13 week period. The study of improvisational theater revealed extended understandings of the role of habit in occupation including the following: habits contributed to continuity of action, habits allowed for shared meaning making, participants embodied habitual ways of being in the material world, and habits contributed to possibilities, constraints, and change. In the discussion, it is proposed that the continued study of habit in human occupation is essential to occupational science and will require scientists to broaden their theoretical orientations, utilize multiple methodologies, and expand their unit of analysis to include the environment in order to capture the complexity of habit functions in human occupation.

La Prononciation française pour de vrai by Penelope Sewell

A selected bibliography and filmography is also supplied, listing for example the reference editions of Corneille’s work, a selection of books and articles about Corneille and his work, works on the seventeenth century, works on French literature in general, possible sources for the play, other important authors and their works of the seventeenth century, as well as a list of films and recordings of Corneille’s plays and other works, including operas and dance, which deal with seventeenth-century France, the addresses of companies that sell these recordings in the USA, and finally a few Web sites concerned with seventeenth century French theater, Corneille, his life, and his work. To conclude, the volume ends with a list of useful vocabulary to talk about theater plays, pictorial credits, acknowledgments, and a few words about the authors. This volume is very clear, written in simple yet accurate French, well laid out and would work well for students who are novices in classic theater or as a part of a basic introduction to French theater class. Armstrong Atlantic State University (GA) Dorothée Mertz-Weigel SEWELL, PENELOPE. La Prononciation française pour de vrai. London: Birkbeck, University of London, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9561796-0-9. £30.00 This program is a series of 24 lessons aimed at English speakers with a high intermediate or advanced level of proficiency in French. The program is presented entirely in French over five hours and forty-three minutes on a set of 3 DVDs. The content is detailed, thorough, well sequenced and challenging. It is obvious that Penny Sewell has a wealth of technical knowledge and expertise in teaching about the sounds of French and how to pronounce them. The program uses three native speakers to provide examples throughout the program. While the content is excellent, the production and delivery limit how the program might be used as an instructional tool. The material in this program is organized into 24 lessons. Lessons 1–8 focus on stress, rhythm, and intonation; lessons 9–17 focus on vowels; lessons 18–23 focus on consonants. The 24th lesson is a pot-pourri of useful information, including common phrases that differ between written and spoken French and onomatopoeia. These lessons vary in length, ranging from about seven to twenty minutes in length. Additionally, there is a Livret d’accompagnement with exercises on the phonetic alphabet, syllabification, and intonation. The longest segment of the DVD series is the twenty-four minute introduction. In this segment, Sewell explains how the program is structured, presents essential phonetic terms in French and English, teaches the International Phonetic Alphabet and explains its importance, discusses common problems English speakers face when learning French, and explains how to learn to pronounce French like a Francophone. The subsequent lessons on the first DVD focus on syllabification, intonation and accentuation, and rhythmic groups. The second DVD of the series offers an in-depth look at vowels. It begins with some generalizations of sounds and continues with how to form one’s lips to create the appropriate vowel sounds. The remaining lessons in the second DVD focus on at least one, but no more than three vowels in each lesson. Sewell offers comparisons and contrasts between vowels pronounced in French and 636 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 those in English. Additionally, native Francophone speakers are used to model the pronunciation. In each of these lessons, there is ample opportunity for the student to gain practical skill in pronunciation and listening. The third DVD focuses mainly on consonants. As was the case in the prior lessons, the student has ample opportunity to practice the sounds along with Sewell as well as with native speakers. The information is detailed and thorough. Again, Sewell makes many comparisons between French and English and points out common errors Anglophones make in pronunciation. This program’s weakness is in the production value and technical delivery of the material. While Sewell’s information is thorough and comprehensive, the method in which it is delivered is lacking. Throughout the three DVD series, Sewell is seated in front of a green or blue screen and reads from off-screen notes. Often, there is an informational slide projected behind her...

A Study of Readers Theater in Eighth Grade: Issues of Fluency, Comprehension, and Vocabulary

This study investigated the impact of Readers Theater on eighth-grade students, the majority of whom were reading below grade level. Over six weeks of a short story unit, one class participated in Readers Theater. The comparison group of like-ability students received more traditional literary and vocabulary instruction. Quantitative measures showed that when compared with students in the comparison class, students in the Reader Theater class made statistically significant growth in reading level, as well as significant gains in fluidity and expressive measures of oral reading. Groups were not significantly different on comprehension measures. However, the Readers Theater class nearly doubled the vocabulary acquisition of the comparison group. Qualitative measures attested to the potential of Readers Theater to motivate struggling adolescent readers and to build their reading confidence.

Taking liberties: a theatre class of foolish witnesses

Theatre is a dangerous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration and craft. I explore the relationship between failure, witnessing, and displacement in a class grappling with their own backgrounds, migrations and interrogations of the idea of place and home. We approach performing testimony as an ethical practice in the context of foolish witness, an approach based in neither tragedy nor paralysis, but the impossible bravery and willingness of the clown. The strategy is to unearth the potential in the hysterical, the possibility in the foolish. I describe an exercise in translating and performing testimony and explore how the students navigate the terrain of bearing witness – engaging with class visitors, class readings, creating their own performances, encountering the differences amongst themselves and their own histories – in the context of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's concern that the problem with tragedy is that it is never tragic enough. Clown and foolishness as an approach provide the opportunity for a performance form where the relationship between suffering and survival might be negotiated.

Fried Eggs

Fried Eggs Seth Sawyers (bio) My lovers suffocate me, Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” Long before she turned out to be a plate of fried eggs, Sarah was a bagel. A toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and tomato. That’s still my standard order. I’ve gotten it in Baltimore, DC, and now Norfolk. And it’s not only the bagel itself, still warm from the toaster and wrapped in waxed paper, but the process too. The walk to the counter, the glance at the bins, the order that’s simple and confident. Through the whole process, she’s beside me, within, rolling her eyes at my jokes, holding my hand. She was big on food. She loved the Philadelphia roll at the sushi place on Charles Street, was disconsolate for two full hours the time they were out of fresh salmon. I went out of my way to bring her the things she liked and smiled when I thought that her being an actor heightened her senses, made her more aware of what she ate and things like the way I stood when I was drunk (pelvis out and teetering backward). I remember once, after a silly fight about something I don’t remember, she made me a dinner of pasta with fresh mozzarella. The noodles were overdone, the wine was cheap, and the tomatoes cut so strangely that they fell apart on the plate before I could get them to my mouth. But I smiled and said it was good and she was none the wiser. She ate everything on her plate, joyous and drunk on the burgundy I poured from an enormous handled jug. It seems now that I was happy all the time then. We made dates for vegetarian subs without yellow peppers and ate on the bench outside the theater building at school where Sarah spent all her time. We skipped [End Page 286] classes so we could lay naked in my bed, our legs entangled and our arms wrapped around each other’s backs, lightly stroking, up and down. One time I stopped by her place while her roommates were watching ER. I walked into the apartment and three girls pointed toward the hallway. “She’s in her room,” one said. None of them looked up from the television. Sarah didn’t hear the door open, so I eased my way in and saw a pack of Newports on her desk. She didn’t smoke menthols. Didn’t smoke anything before she started bumming my Camels. I crept along, listening to Sarah talk to herself. She laughed at one of her jokes that only she knew about. Then she turned and saw me. I folded her small, hard frame in my arms as she hit me on the chest, half-kidding. Then she did her impression for me. It was for a project in theater class. The guy she chose smoked Newports, and I found out that he had a bad lisp. Or maybe Sarah wanted the guy to have a lisp. I never asked, just sat on her bed with my back against the wall and watched, laughing when she laughed, the tendons in her neck flaring when she squealed and got one just right. She had a squeaky bed that year, so we made love on the floor of her room that night while her roommates watched TV a few steps down the hall. We moved with great intent but slowly, very slowly. We touched each other’s fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, backs, and hips. My belt buckle didn’t make any noise when she let it fall to the floor. We breathed quietly, and when I locked my eyes on hers it was the quietest thing I’d ever done. We dropped some pillows on the floor, and I reached up to the bed for a quilt her grandmother had made. I draped it across my back. After a while I pulled it over our heads. “This is just for us,” I whispered. “I know,” she said. I could just make out her eyes in the dim light, steely blue...

Everyday Atrocities and Ordinary Miracles, or Why I (Still) Bear Witness to Sexual Violence (But Not Too Often)

Everyday Atrocities and Ordinary Miracles, or Why I (Still) Bear Witness to Sexual Violence (But Not Too Often) Susan J. Brison (bio) Seventeen years after having been jumped from behind, beaten, raped, strangled into unconsciousness, and left for dead at the bottom of a ravine in a rural area in the south of France, I still—as I just did—occasionally bear witness to the assault. Why do I continue to tell this story? It certainly isn’t because I enjoy doing so: at this point, telling the story is neither therapeutic nor retraumatizing. Frankly, after telling this story hundreds of times, to perhaps a million people (if one counts the readers of the Sunday New York Times), I’m bored by it. 1 But I continue to tell it, albeit with decreasing frequency, because doing so is bearing witness to something much larger, and much worse, than what happened to me personally: namely, the atrocity of widespread and ongoing gender-based violence against women around the world. I also mention it, somewhat paradoxically, to reassure other victims of sexual violence that I’ve moved beyond it and don’t feel the need to talk about it regularly any-more. Looking back on the several years before I was attacked, I see now that I was living a charmed life. I was newly married and had a full-time job I loved, teaching philosophy at Dartmouth, and enough energy and drive to teach additional courses at both New York University and Princeton, while sitting in on law school classes at NYU, taking tap dancing lessons in SoHo and musical theater classes in Greenwich Village, and singing jazz occasionally with friends in piano bars in the city. One term I managed to teach five days a week at Dartmouth and still spend every weekend in New York City with my partner going to cabarets and jazz concerts and Sunday night swing dancing at the Cat Club. And, then, wham! I lost it all, just that suddenly, and for a very long time, but—I can now report—not forever. In spite of my having [End Page 188] written, years ago, that I died in that ravine, I now have more in common with my preassault self than with the person I became for more than a decade afterward. Although I originally described my preassault life as a quite sunny one that suddenly went dark, I stopped thinking about it in that way after someone pointed out what he saw as the “gothic novel” structure of the tale I was telling. I became quite suspicious of the “reverse-conversion” narrative I found in many rape stories (including my own) and made a point of downplaying any contrast between my preassault happiness and my postassault misery. But now that I have emerged from the latter, I think I was genuinely blessed with joie de vivre and fortunate circumstances before that fateful day. There are many different reasons to tell a trauma narrative, and I’m guessing that, over the years, I’ve told mine for just about all of them. The very first time, I told it (mentally) to myself, as it was happening: “What is this? This is a nightmare. No, this is a rape. No, this is a murder.” The purpose of that narrative was to keep me alive, and by sheer luck, it did the trick. After my assailant had dragged my body to the bottom of a creek bed and choked me one last time, I played dead until he left, which enabled me to scramble up the ravine to a roadside, where I was rescued by a man in a tractor who took me to his nearby farmhouse. My next attempt to bear witness to my attack was met with incredulity, as the people who gathered around me decided initially that I must have been hit by a car, even though I kept saying that I had been attacked by a man. After I repeated my story to the police and the doctor who had been summoned and my account started to gain plausibility, someone said, to general agreement, “It couldn’t have been anyone from around here...

Essay: What can the arts bring to medical training?

There is clearly more to being a doctor than clinical expertise. In the UK, medical schools are recommended to ensure that students know about and understand the rights of patients, are able to communicate eff ectively, to accept the moral and ethical responsibility involved in providing care, and to respect patients irrespective of lifestyle, culture, beliefs, race, colour, gender, sexuality, disability, age, or social or economic status. These are excellent ideals, which raise complex questions that cannot easily be answered scientifi cally. The concepts— lifestyle, culture, even gender—have shifting meanings and are diffi cult to measure. So, how can they be taught? Over the past 5 years I have implemented a range of arts programmes in medical schools, delivered by cuttingedge contemporary artists and thinkers who are specialists in their fi elds. The aim is to get outsiders in, to cross cultures, to demonstrate that there are many voices at play within health care, and to benefi t from diff erent perspectives on the cultural context in which medicine takes place. I believe that arts can have a role in medical education in three key ways: practical skills; examination of cultural and ethical issues through the arts; and introduction to artists working in health. In conventional medical training, students do things to other people’s bodies rather than gathering an awareness of their own. But charisma or bedside manner isn’t something innate. A person can improve. An understanding of the practical skills of voice, body language, and use of space can make a huge diff erence to the way doctors communicate and perhaps even to the way they diagnose. Training methods common to performance can bring confi dence to students, many of whom are nervous of interacting with patients. Physical awareness and exercise can help students build up the skills and stamina they need to sustain a work practice that is highly demanding. There is so much well-deserved focus on patient-centred practice, but the physical and mental well-being of the health worker should not be ignored. My approach to teaching practical skills to medical students is not to apply them immediately to a clinical context. Possibilities of learning should be opened up before skills are honed to suit specifi c scenarios. For example, students might experiment with tones of voice by working on a dramatic text with a voice coach before applying these skills to a context of breaking bad news. Non-verbal communication can be taught in a physical theatre class, allowing students to experiment with wildly inappropriate and ridiculous ways of behaving so that they eventually fi nd a fl exibility and physical openness that can be adapted to a range of possible scenarios. Appreciation and interpretation of narrative can be developed in literature classes. Anatomy courses can be complemented with dance, yoga, life drawing, or state-ofthe-art body imaging, inspiring students about the landscape of the body, bringing the science to life, providing students with physical and visual ways to remember information. The body can be enjoyed and respected as poetic, beautiful, rich in possibility, ready for change and transformation. Obviously, medicine always takes place within a cultural and ethical context. Treatment of someone in a war zone is very diff erent from a consultation in a family doctor’s surgery in a safe suburban area. Doctors need to be able to relate to people from whom they feel culturally diff erent. The more knowledge that can be bought to bear on the rather abstract concept of respecting patients irrespective of their lifestyle, gender, and so on, the better. Arts can provide a colourful and provocative platform from which to examine ideas of identity, control, sexuality, and ownership, a platform that actually embraces subjectivity. A look at photographic theory can address the ways in which we see. The work of Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Jo Spence can help students to refi ne their judgments in the visual domain. An examination of medical photography itself sheds light on how a medical gaze has been constructed and reveals tensions in the doctor– patient relationship, especially in terms of power; photographs of 19th century psychiatric hospitals are an interesting example. Contemporary performance artists such as Franko B, Ron Athey, and Orlan cause controversy by taking control of their bodies using surgical techniques unsanctioned by the medical profession. Some medical students are Suzy Willson is the Artistic Director of the theatre company The Clod Ensemble and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Bart’s and The London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry. She is currently Director of the Performing Medicine Project, which programmes arts workshops, courses, and events for medical students and health-care professionals.

A Note from the Editor

In contemporary culture, "rules of engagement" refers us directly to Iraq, Jerusalem, the streets of Brooklyn. These battlefields have inspired the authors in this issue to consider the term in a different context as they debate the ways in which actors and audiences alike are actively engaged in the necessarily political act of making theatre. What are the rules of engagement that allow theatre to effectively battle injustice, misogyny, apathy, segregation? How can we refine the engagement between director and cast, between actor and actor, between critic and artist, to ensure the place of theatre as a primary generator of social change? Julie Jackson's exploration of the work of Frank Galati opens this issue. In examining the staging of one of our foremost directors, Jackson focuses on the unique way that Galati engages and challenges those who witness his work through his manipulation of objective and subjective presentation. She considers Galati an "intellectual provocateur" and questions how our perception is engaged "when disquiet and uncertainty are the intended effect." Rules of engagement in two contemporary political hotbeds influenced the rules for engagement within performance as explored by Lucy Winner and Ellen Kaplan. For Winner, a crisis in American democracy, as exemplified by the conditions in Guantanamo, led her to create a theatre class in which personal engagement in a redefined theatrical arena led its participants to recognize "that performing democracy is key to the health of our society." Ellen Kaplan's visit to the Middle East encouraged her to examine theatre intended to engage opposing forces in attempts at reconciliation. Examining the work of Arab and Jewish Israeli teens, along with that of apartheid survivors in South Africa, Kaplan considers the importance of distance in our ability to tell and retell stories in an effort to heal. The next three articles in this issue focus on feminism and the theatre. For me, the resonance of this ongoing engagement is clear, but I wondered about its resonance for a younger generation and queried my students. The majority of those who responded think of feminism as existing in a bygone time, although they simultaneously recognize that some of its basic ideals have not yet been realized (and indeed may actually be slipping out of our grasp). One student noted that studying feminism would be like studying a different culture. While compassion and discontent clearly drove the answers I received, these students by and large do not consider themselves to be involved in "feminist activities," and feel no empowerment to make change. At the conclusion of my study, I felt all the more compelled to include the writing of Beth Watkins, who explores "how performance practices provide a framework for understanding the construction of gender, identity, and authority." Watkins describes the struggle to reconcile her political and artistic agen [End Page v] das as she considers the profound impact of engaging students in different rehearsal models intended "to raise questions about gender constructions for all students and to empower women students in particular." Watkins's work leads directly into Ann Armstrong's study of Split Britches' Lois Weaver's residency at the College of William and Mary. Armstrong notes that "the rehearsal process was guided by a feminist ethic that required students to embrace the uniqueness of their identity on multiple levels that included regional identity, class, sexuality, gender, religion, and race." Armstrong's description of Weaver's "pedagogy of coalition," one that "that builds alliances while encouraging students to recognize the multiple contradictions that exist within their own subjectivity," is perhaps a powerful model for redefining the rules of engagement within a society whose sole use for "coalitions" is to justify rules of engagement on the battlefields. The building of coalitions is also the focus of Lara Shalson, who argues that "[c]ommunity-based performance has extraordinary potential to effect social change when criticism is viewed as integral to the community, rather than as something imposed upon it from outside." Again, the traditional rules by which engagement occurs within the theatrical arena are...

William Branch: (A Conversation) Reminiscence

William Branch (actor, playwright, educator, screenwriter, and producer) earned the B.A. at Northwestern University (1949) and the M.F.A. at Columbia University (1958). As an actor, he was a cast member of the national company of Anna Lucasta, among other productions. He has been a professor at University of Maryland-Baltimore County and at Cornell University as well as guest lecturer and visiting scholar at many colleges and universities. Branch has also worked in radio, television, and film, serving in myriad capacities--from writer to producer. Among his many plays are A Medal for Willie (1951); In Splendid Error (1954); A Wreath for Udomo (1960), adapted from Peter Abraham's novel of the same name; and Baccalaureate (1975). In addition, Mr. Branch is the editor/contributor of Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama, which brought him an American Book Award in 1992, and Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. The initial session of this interview took place at Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies; the last session was completed there on August 12, 2002. Throughout the interviews, Branch was thoughtful, enthusiastic, and informative. NN: Since we are at Columbia University, it is appropriate to begin this interview with a Columbia question. You received your M.F.A. in playwriting from Columbia University in 1958. What was that experience like for you as an African American? WB: Well, I was at Columbia under that program for two years. I had recently gotten married. I had the G.I. Bill at the time--from the Korean conflict. I was commuting from my apartment on the Lower East Side. It was a very interesting experience. I do recall being in a theatre class taught by Maurice Valency that was very stimulating. Maurice Valency, in addition to being a professor, was an active Broadway playwright. He had adapted several European plays. He had an extraordinary breadth of knowledge in theatre. As for the playwriting classes themselves, I frankly felt they left something to be desired. NN: Did you have any association or courses with Eric Bentley? (Bentley was the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University from 1954-1969.) WB: Oh, yes, I had a Shakespeare course with Eric Bentley, which I enjoyed a great deal. I might point out that I asked both Maurice Valency and Eric Bentley about being sponsors for my Guggenheim Fellowship application. I supplied them with copies of my play In Splendid Error and asked if they would consider recommending me for the fellowship. After reading my play, both of them agreed. They, along with Langston Hughes and Loften Mitchell, recommended me, and I'm happy to say that the application was successful. NN: What was the process of interacting with other students like at that time? WB: I'd come to the campus for classes and when the classes were over, I would leave. In effect, I did not have that many interactions with students. In the playwriting classes, I was the only African American. I did not really have a campus kind of experience when I was getting my Master's at Columbia as I did at Northwestern when I was an undergraduate. NN: Now can we go back and talk about how and why you decided on Northwestern? WB: I spent my first 13 years in the North, mainly in New York State. When I was 13, my father, who was an A.M.E. Zion minister, took a parish in the South, in Charlotte, North Carolina. This was the first time I had lived in the South. Segregation and discrimination became real to me. When I was in the eleventh grade, I started to write a play but abandoned the effort. I lived some distance from the school, and there were days when I didn't quite make the bell. The principal decided he was tired of students not making the bell. He decided that any student who came to school late from then on would be kicked out of school. …

(Re-)Creating the Critique: In(tro)ducing the Semiotics of Theatre in the Foreign-language Performance Project

Theatrical performance comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and qualities on college campuses, large and small. Students participate not only in the usually high-budget productions destined for the theatre department's main stage, but also in less elaborate productions connected to theatre classes or even English drama classes. Those play productions that evolve from foreign-language are frequently considered the "low" end of campus performance. Many of us who teach foreign languages believe in theatrical performance for a variety of reasons, and some of us regularly run our program's most demanding course, the foreign-language theatre practicum. In this practicum we mostly literary- and language-oriented academics direct students in the production of a play in a foreign language, usually a classic text.