Theatre Conference Research Articles

Consent-based actor training as the only way forward

In her keynote address to The Stage’s Future of Theatre conference, Principal of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (Central) Josette Bushell-Mingo stated that the ‘future of drama training has changed forever’ (2022). Bushell- Mingo proposed that the time has come to make ‘artistic decisions’ in ‘dialogue with the students’(ibid). This change includes safe theatre practices involving the scrutinising of embedded conscious and unconscious bias in curriculum design and pedagogical delivery. Through the development of allyship and greater staff and student awareness, all artistic behaviour can embody consent, from negotiation of touch through to power differentials. This paper shares insights from public debate and policy documentation that have led to processes of a consent-based framework for students and staff within a three-year acting program. The hope is that such processes will provide a safer space for students of acting, offering autonomy of choice of material, a safe place for all students, Indigenous approaches to creating work, practices of consent in all areas of the work, especially in intimate work, and safe approaches in the creation of a role and the stepping out of role.

Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century by Mary McAvoy

Reviewed by: Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century by Mary McAvoy Christiana Molldrem Harkulich Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century. By Mary McAvoy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. pp. 266. $90.00 paper. Mary McAvoy's excellent study of drama programs at labor colleges in the United States begins with the provocation from the 1936 Brookwood Worker's Theatre Conference that there is "No labor audience for this theatre" (1). Louise Schaffer's proclamation was a bell toll for the death of many of the programs whose histories McAvoy regales, but it also prompts provocative research questions that the book takes up: Who was labor drama for? Whom did it serve and how? These questions drive Rehearsing Revolutions into a history of pedagogy, dramaturgy, and educators that spans the continent and a tumultuous period between the world wars. Woven within this history of drama programs are the labor colleges themselves: the education programs founded and supported by labor unions for their workers that for the most part did not survive the first half of the twentieth century. This book is ambitious and edifying, stitching together the many events and influences in the world that created the crucible of labor drama. Rehearsing Revolutions begins with a needed overview of the larger concerns and history of labor colleges and the labor movement in the United States to situate the importance and position of drama programs. Each subsequent chapter is a case study of a particular educator and their influence on a specific regional labor college's drama program. McAvoy deftly utilizes archival records and a broad and careful historical understanding to reveal the economic tensions at play in each of these chapters. The book organizes a constellation of labor colleges chronologically based on the start date of their labor programs. This choice allows McAvoy to trace pedagogical influence from program to program as each educator struggled with the questions of who labor drama was for [End Page 176] and what it was meant to accomplish. Instead of focusing primarily on productions or actors, McAvoy focuses on the educator, which ends up illuminating women's roles and impact, as so many women who may not have had much professional dramatic training were thrust into the role of drama program coordinator. Rehearsing Revolutions uncovers the labor of the drama educator that is often ignored in this period in favor of attending to the professional stage. Following the overview, the second chapter focuses on Doris Smith's work with Portland Labor College from 1921 to 1925 as the earliest example of what the new field of labor drama could be and of the tenuous relationship between radicalism on the stage and approval by the larger sponsoring labor organization. The third chapter focuses on Brookwood College from 1925 to 1926 and the work and pedagogy of Hazel MacKaye, the daughter of US American playwright and stage technology inventor Steele MacKaye. MacKaye's experiments in drama at Brookwood created plays like the 1926 drama The Miners (collected in Lee Papa's Staged Action) that illustrated the need for the dramatic work to come from the workers. Unlike many of the other teachers in this study, MacKaye had experience in professional theatre and larger political pageant work prior to joining the labor movement. Her experience caused her to ask and publish on the larger questions about what labor drama could do and could look like at Brook-wood and across the United States. While MacKaye spent only a year at Brook-wood, McAvoy points toward the influence that her writing and thinking had on the labor movement. While chapters 2 and 3 focus on Northern, more industrial concerns, chapters 4 through 6 turn to the more contentious and racially and religiously fraught work of labor drama and labor organizing in the Southeast. McAvoy's attention to regional differences illuminates aspects of the labor movements that are often missed when too much attention is paid to the industrial north. Chapter 4 examines the work of journalist and activist Hollace Ransdell's brief foray into labor drama from 1928 to 1936 with...

Changes

In March 2020 I came home from a theatre conference with a nagging cough, which I had been fighting for some time. Yet, it deepened and strengthened over the next few days. In the following week, symptoms accumulated and were strange and fluctuating: an experience with which I would become all too well acquainted in my COVID journey. Two weeks later on a second telemedical appointment a doctor heard me describe the coughing and chest burning I felt—where it almost felt like a sunburn—and told me it sounded like I had COVID. The inhaler she prescribed helped, but I originally dismissed her diagnosis. These were the early days when a test could not be found or taken, so I lacked confirmation that my body would verify to me for the months following through more drastic measures. A year later, after ongoing and prolonged symptoms of costochondritis, fluctuating high heart rates, difficulty breathing, and a multitude of costly hospital and specialist visits—including now being a part of the Post/Long COVID clinic in my state—I am changed. My health, like most of our lives this past year, follows a path of uncertainty and unknowns.

Teaching Critical Performance Theory: In Today's Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities ed. by Jeanmarie Higgins

Reviewed by: Teaching Critical Performance Theory: In Today's Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities ed. by Jeanmarie Higgins Eero Laine Teaching Critical Performance Theory: In Today's Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities. Edited by Jeanmarie Higgins, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020; pp. 262. Reading Teaching Critical Performance Theory is like visiting an imaginary theatre and performance department. Playwriting, design, theatre history, and acting classrooms as well as the communities that support and surround those spaces are imbued with a critical sense of the import and impact of the work we do. I write "we" here because the volume feels like it is written to address fellow artists, teachers, and scholars, especially as it bridges many of the apparent fault lines in theatre and performance pedagogy and training. It is like we are being invited into a thoughtful and ongoing conversation with a community of critical performance theorists. I suspect this is in no small part because the volume emerged from meetings at the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and editor Jeanmarie Higgins and the over twenty contributors should be commended for extending those conference connections from presentation to the page. Following an introduction wherein Noe Montez reminds us of the potential of theoretical work, that "Critical theory aspires to change society as a whole. It aims to unearth and understand how power and privilege operate within the world" (1), the book opens into four sections of four or five chapters each. The sections on "Course Design: Reimagining the Syllabus," "Classroom Identities: Engaging Students in Theory," "Studio: Theorizing Praxis," and "Communities: Applying Theory" together develop approaches to critical performance theory and offer important ways of critiquing our own work as teachers and artists. The sections offer a neat structure to the book, even as there is generative overlap among the chapters they contain—practical case studies are not constrained to the studio section, for instance—and most of the chapters take up the range of ideas described by the various section headings. Higgins has assembled an impressive team of authors, spread across professional practice and every academic rank, and this range of contributors itself makes pertinent the ways that critical performance theory finds its ways into theatrical work. Emma Watkins and Stacy Wolf's chapter, for instance, examines feminist pedagogy in the musical theatre classroom and, in its writing, enacts a feminist approach to pedagogy. Here, undergraduate musical theatre student and full professor collaborate to argue for new and critical ways of teaching musical theatre that might shape "a new generation of theatre-makers, empowered to thoughtfully and subversively engage with the materials of the past and to create novel musicals that reflect their contemporary surroundings" (34). Their contribution shows that the work of critical performance pedagogy is not simply an act of thinking about or applying ideas; rather, the chapter drives home the notion that how we approach theatre and performance in our classrooms today affects the theatre and performance of the future. Indeed, the work in this volume frequently emphasizes the importance of the classroom, not only for emboldening students to think critically, but for our potential as faculty, artists, and scholars to impact the field, the discipline, and the industries of theatre and performance. To this end, the importance of collaborative methodologies in theatre and performance and their ability to encourage critical engagement comes to the fore through other co-written chapters. Jeanmarie Higgins and Michael Schweikardt, for instance, similarly write as professor and former student, exploring two sides of an assignment that asked graduate design students to think through a particular theoretical approach in their design for a play. The Marxist Oliver! that emerges from the assignment shows readers the theoretical possibilities of the classroom, of the production, and of the profession of theatre. A few chapters stand out for their emphasis on the heightened political and artistic stakes of critical performance theory. Angela K. Ahlgren's chapter wonderfully explicates practical considerations of pedagogical labor nested in a larger argument about teaching "theory over time" in survey courses (38). Jen Plants reminds us that "Theory expands or limits possibilities, impacts what we see and how we see it, frames distinctions in praxis, and opens gateways to clarify values. How...

Here we are sitting in a room waiting for Waiting for Brexit

ABSTRACT Shortly after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the prorogation of Parliament, Christina Papagiannouli and Evi Stamatiou performed Waiting for Brexit on 6 September 2019 at the 2019 TaPRA Gallery, as part of the annual Theatre and Performance Research Association conference in Exeter. Waiting for Brexit by The Etheatre Project is a semi-adaptation semi-autobiographical cyberformance on UpStage. In Waiting for Brexit, participants are invited to share their own Brexit stories and messages before and during the live performance, while Breaking News, the Home Office, BOJO, MIGO and POTUS build their Brexit narratives. This performative text looks at some of the key lessons learned through the experience of developing and performing Waiting for Brexit for online and on-site audiences.

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit Sylvan Baker (bio), Stephen Buescher (bio), and Kaja Dunn (bio) The prompt for the following conversation originated in a session at the ATHE conference in Orlando that centered around teaching culturally competent pedagogy in the age of Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Brexit. This piece is a recording of a curated discussion among the three scholars from that panel, which took place on Skype across three time zones. In the wake of massive political transition in both the United States and the United Kingdom, we discuss what it means to have a culturally responsive, culturally competent curriculum on both sides of the pond (figs. 1–2). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Sylvan Baker (top), Stephen Buescher, and Kaja Dunn on Skype. [End Page E-29] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Stephen Buescher, Kaja Dunn, and Sylvan Baker (l-r) at the 2019 ATHE conference in Orlando, Florida. How do we start/continue to push forward ideas of equity, inclusion, and decolonization in our actor-training programs, while also dealing with a changing political climate and the increasingly partisan grouping of issues around race, ethnicity, and culture? This piece considers effective ways of changing both curriculum and culture on campus. Looking at practice and culture in BA, BFA, and MFA programs, the panel explores the barriers and strategies to implementing change in academia and advocating for the theatre world that students will enter. Drawing on critical race theory, decolonizing methodologies, and sociological and psychological research, the panel also looks at the unique barriers affecting faculty of color in theatre institutions that are working to implement change. To view the video, click here: https://www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-topics/online-content/issue/volume-30-number-1-march-2020/culturally-competent-and-trauma. [End Page E-30] Sylvan Baker Sylvan Baker is a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He has experience in a range of applied arts contexts. He is an Artist Fellow at QMUL and an Education Fellow for the UK’s Royal Society of Arts. His research enables individuals to explore social issues through diverse artistic practices. His current projects are working with young people with experience of care and practice aimed at disrupting racial exclusion for students and staff members in higher education. He was elected a member at large of the Black Theatre Association for ATHE. Stephen Buescher Stephen Buescher is a teacher, choreographer, director, and actor. He is a professor of movement at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and has taught or created curricula in various graduate acting programs, including the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), Dell’Arte, Yale and Brown universities, University of Missouri–Kansas City, and University of Connecticut. He has choreographed at theatres including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A.C.T., Old Globe, Long Wharf, and Trinity Repertory Company, and has directed in the graduate acting programs at A.C.T. and UCSD. He has performed nationally and internationally with Dell’Arte International for over a decade, and is a graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater and Calarts. Kaja Dunn Kaja Dunn is an assistant professor and head of acting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as well as a director, actor, and activist. She has presented her work on Training Theatre Students of Color at Goldsmiths, University of London, Southeastern Theatre Conference, Black Theatre Network, Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and ATHE, among other places. She is on the national board of the Black Theatre Association, and has performed in over forty shows and taught and performed internationally. She was previously a lecturer at California State University San Marcos and toured with Ya Tong Theatre in Taiwan. Other teaching credits include working with homeless and foster youth in San Diego. Follow her on Twitter where she frequently posts about EDI issues under the handle @KajaDunn. Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press

“We’re in for a future of provocateurs”: An Interview with David Yee on Asian Canadian Theatre

In a New York Times article from May 21, 2020, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong lamented the nine productions of works by playwrights of Asian descent that were cut short or canceled in New York City because of Covid-19 1 Of course, the pandemic resulted in cancelations or postponements of productions all over the world, including two major theatre conferences and festivals that would have centered Asian Canadian and Asian American performance: one to be hosted in Toronto and the other in Hawaii, respectively, during May and August 2020 Indeed, it would have been a banner season for performances that featured minor Asias! The following interview with David Yee, the artistic director of fu-GEN Theatre, tries to capture the energy and logic that animated this moment, now a pregnant pause, that challenges the demographics of theatrical production in the Great White North Fu-GEN is the longest-running professional Asian Canadian theatre company in Canada, and the first-ever International Conference and Festival on Asian Canadian Theatre, GENesis, took place under its auspices in 2010 Now closing the first decade of his leadership of fu-GEN, Yee has remained active as an actor and playwright in Toronto and elsewhere across and beyond Canada His plays have been produced on both sides of the US-Canada border;four of them-Acquiesce, paper SERIES, Lady in the Red Dress, and his Governor General Award-winning play Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave-have been published by Playwrights Canada Press © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved

Development of Hybrid Fibrous Panel for Controlling Acoustics in Home Theatre Conference Hall

Development of Hybrid Fibrous Panel for Controlling Acoustics in Home Theatre Conference Hall

Opera Omaha and the Great Plains Theatre Conference, <i>Stranger from Paradise</i>

Omaha, Nebraska, was in bloom with Blake this past May. What is William Blake doing in the land of Willa Cather? Opera Omaha, Nebraska’s only professional opera company, had commissioned the locally based playwright Kevin Lawler to write and direct an opera focused on Blake, with the goal of premiering the production at the 2017 Great Plains Theatre Conference. The conference is an annual regional festival hosted by Omaha’s Metropolitan Community College and designed to nurture the talents of a wide array of local and national theatre artists. However unlikely, it proved to be an apt site for an operatic portrayal of Blake’s life and work.

Twenty-Six Observations on a Queer Theatre Conference

This article is a brief poetic précis of a queer theatre and performance conference in Vancouver in 2016.

Introduction

Introduction Sara Freeman Theatre History Studies is an annual journal. We print one issue per year, and we assemble it almost a year in advance. I write this introduction in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election and I find it hard to project what commentary might be the most applicable in the fall of 2017. The scholarship in this issue resonates with several developments that dominate the global political sphere, such as upheaval in conservative and liberal social positions and tactics, ongoing debates about national identity, new contours of generational conflict, upsurges in student activism, and resistance to or embrace of change, in any format. Laura Ferdinand Feldmeyer's documentation and analysis about a key line of dialogue in the play adaptation of Peter Pan—"to die will be an awfully big adventure"—unfolds J. M. Barrie's history of writing war propaganda during World War I and his change of heart about the project of war in relationship to the Western cultural imaginary about masculinity and adventure. Feldmeyer tracks how the line was included or excluded from performances of the play and the treatment of the line both onstage and off while investigating the great generational divide operative in both the experiences of the Great War and its aftermath. Attending to that divide transforms Peter Pan from a delightful, uplifting piece of theatre to an elegiac one. That unsettled, simultaneously childish and mournful status of Peter Pan is still reflected in contemporary theatre made in adaptational dialogue with Barrie's tale, including Peter and the Starcatcher, Sarah Ruhl's 2016 play For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, and Sally Cookson's production of Peter Pan appearing at the Bristol Old Vic and the National Theatre in London across the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. It is still unclear, in the wake of a UK vote to "Brexit" the European Union and of the election of [End Page 1] Donald Trump to the US presidency, what masculinity means and if our societies are willing to grow up. Feldmeyer begins her article by considering a 1922 address Barrie gave to students at St. Andrew's University about youth and age. La Donna Forsgren's Schanke Award-winning paper from the 2016 Mid-America Theatre Conference also takes college campuses as the loci of its analysis and makes a diachronic link between black student activism in the 1960s and the 2010s, especially as such activism used performative demonstrations at Northwestern in 1968 and the University of Missouri (Mizzou) in 2015. In doing so, Forsgren also recovers the history of Black Folks's Theatre at Northwestern University, which was formed as the artistic branch of For Members Only, the Northwestern black student union founded in the wake of 1968 campus protests. Forsgren connects Black Folks's Theatre to the Black Arts Movement, strengthening our theatre-historical sense of how the artistic branches of social movements participate to bring about institutional change. Julie Jackson's article explicating the practices of "Chicago-style theatre" and what the phrase denotes about acting technique, approach to staging, or audience experience follows not only how theatre interacts with institutional change but also how insurgent theatres become institutions. Her history of the Chicago theatre as "not just rock 'n' roll" gives new depth of understanding to the style characteristic of the artist-operated ensemble theatres that define Chicago's scene. At once a close reading of press discourse about Chicago theatre, a personal history drawn from four decades of watching and making theatre in Chicago, and a cataloging of key companies in Chicago theatre beyond the highly mythologized Step-penwolf, Jackson's scholarship provides a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of realism and artifice at work in Chicago theatre aesthetics. Likewise, Gabrielle Houle wrestles with "style"—a combination of realism and artifice in performance techniques—while revealing the struggles with mask work experienced by twentieth-century commedia dell'arte star Marcello Moretti. Houle's masterful set of propositions about the challenges a mask presents a performer and her materialist attention to the role of mask-makers and mask-making techniques in helping performers reclaim the mask culminates with insight about the role...

LGBTQ Historical Scholarship: What Was It Like Twenty Years Ago?

LGBTQ Historical Scholarship:What Was It Like Twenty Years Ago? Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra Introduction We developed our project on gays and lesbians in American theatre history from two very different institutions and career stages in our home state of Iowa long before we ever dreamed that we would be able to marry our partners legally in our own backyards. The original catalyst came from what Bob Schanke, then professor and chair of the theatre department at Central College in Pella, Iowa, learned while on a coast-to-coast book signing tour for his 1991 biography Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. People were really interested in how the same-sex sexual desires of this actress impacted her life, her art, and her career. He envisioned a collection of essays on other such figures that he would coedit as a gay male scholar with a lesbian scholar, hence his recruitment of Kim Marra, then a new assistant professor at the University of Iowa, whom he had met at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Although the University of Iowa in the early 1990s led the Big Ten in establishing health coverage for same-sex domestic partners, administrators were under fire by politically appointed regents for condoning the use of sexually explicit gay-themed materials in classes, which contributed to an anxious climate for untenured out faculty. Bob was long tenured, but he endured homophobic vandalism of his office multiple times on his small, religious campus as his scholarship made his personal proclivities more public. Thus, we both had to consider certain risks in pursuing this project, but those risks fueled our sense of need for such work ultimately to combat homophobia. When our original proposal for a single book was expanded into three books, as LeAnn Fields details below, we needed to bring on a third coeditor as point person for the final volume. The late Billy J. Harbin (1930–2004), professor and former chair of the theatre department at Louisiana State University, who also contributed essays to the first two volumes, took on that role. Whereas the two of us had both been out for nearly a decade, Billy had been deeply closeted for his entire career. This project, which he joined in his mid-sixties, marked his coming out. The contracts for the three books were rendered in the winter of 1994–95. At the ATHE conference in San Francisco the following summer, during sessions of the newly constituted LGT Focus Group led by Tad Currie and Willa Taylor, several of us appeared on a roundtable, “(Re)writing the Invisible: Gay and Lesbian Theatre History,” and we solicited many more of the fifty-eight authors who would ultimately contribute to this multivolume venture. It took considerable maneuvering over the next three years with LeAnn’s and Jill’s sagacious guidance to bring the first volume into print. Among many other revisions, we had to rewrite the introduction four times to justify the project. Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History finally appeared in October 1998. The second volume, Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, followed in 2002, and the third, The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era, in 2005. [End Page 27] Billy did not live to see the publication of that last volume, whose compilation he directed. He suffered an embolism while leading a London theatre tour the previous summer. Just before the ultimately futile last-ditch procedure to save him, he handwrote us a fax from his overseas hospital bed with instructions about where to find the files in his house in Baton Rouge in case he did not return. He worked to the end on the project that had transformed his life. In the dedication to him at the front of the volume, which LeAnn personally helped us assemble, we quoted from Billy’s remarks at the first symposium on queer American theatre history, held at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in New York City in 1998 to mark the publication of Passing Performances. These were words that at...

Keynote Address Delivered at the Mid-America Theatre Conference En Ser Inspirado | On Being Inspired

Keynote Address Delivered at the Mid-America Theatre Conference En Ser Inspirado | On Being Inspired Irma Mayorga (bio) Nudge a Mexican and she or he will break out with a story. GLORIA ANZALDÚA, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art. FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES I want to open up my thoughts with three points of genealogy. A preface of a sort, if you will. First genealogical point of order This is not my first visit to the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC); however, it is only my second time attending. My first visit to the MATC was over twenty years ago. The conference was held right here in Kansas City, Missouri. The Mid-America Theatre Conference was enjoying its eighth annual convening. That year, prescient in its planning, MATC also held a “Mini-festival of Plays for Young Audiences.” About ten of my undergraduate student peers and I, along with our professor, Dr. Kaarin Johnston, had piled into vans and driven down from St. Joseph, Minnesota (north of the Twin Cities) to [End Page 301] present a play in the festival. I was not an actor in our group; I was the show’s costume designer. But Dr. Johnston strongly believed that I—a designer—should come to the conference nonetheless, that I should see in motion a conference dedicated to thinking on theatre. To further entice me, she dangled before me the allure of the conference’s keynote speaker. In 1988, the keynote speech was delivered by the esteemed theatre historian Oscar G. Brockett. She knew this would get me in the van, because she knew I was a Brockett fangirl. I may have been a designer, who had started off with the intention of becoming an actor—but through it all, I adored the stories and tales found in Brockett’s History of the Theater. Admitting this, I have now fully owned my life-long theatre nerdiness outright. And even though we were presenting, we also had to complete our theatre history homework for class the following week, so I had in tow Brockett’s fifth edition. And when Oscar G. Brockett took the podium for his keynote, I listened with his landmark book clutched in my hands, mesmerized and starstruck. I have no idea what Dr. Brockett said that day. And that’s okay. However, I do remember being inspirited by the liveness of being in the same room with him, of putting a face and body to the person who had written all those pages of stories about theatre’s history. When he finished speaking to a mob of what seemed like raging theatre history fans (probably just his colleagues congratulating him afterward) gathered around him, Dr. Johnston urged me to go have Dr. Brockett sign my copy of History of the Theater. I may have been an ardent fangirl, but I was also shy. When his groupies dissipated I approached him, and he gladly and cheerfully signed my book, which I have always treasured. At that time, I could never have imagined that I, like Dr. Brockett, would also one day obtain my doctoral degree in theatre studies from Stanford. When I was last here in Kansas City for MATC, I was a young Mexican American woman attending a small liberal arts school, trying to make a bit of my own history by becoming the first person in my familia’s entire existence to graduate from college. The enormity of returning to MATC, having obtained that goal, suffuses my thoughts as I speak from this podium. Second genealogical point of order Fangirl, and yet, I am not a theatre historian by training or degree. However, to do my work as a woman of color, Mexican American, Chicana-positioned [End Page 302] theatre artist-cum-scholar, I always find myself digging in history. Usually, I’m foraging through archives in which...

A Conversation with Brooke Ciardelli

Brooke Ciardelli was the founding artistic director of Northern Stage, a regional nonprofit theater located on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, where she directed over sixty productions. Brooke has been honored by the New England Theatre Conference's Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater three times, for All My Sons (2004), Les Miserables (2008), and Hamlet (2009). She directed a staged reading of Arthur Miller's then-unpublished Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence. She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.Ciardelli has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals. As a creator, Ciardelli has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage including Ovid's Metamorphoses, O Myths, and The Shrew Tamer by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She is working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production.Ciardelli received the Miller Estate's permission to create and direct a Muslim/Syrian version of A View from the Bridge. The production received its world premiere in a staged reading on Saturday evening, October 17, 2015, at the Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at St. Francis College. This interview took place February 6, 2015.Stephen Marino: Welcome. On behalf of the readership of The Arthur Miller Journal, I would like to thank you for your willingness to be here today to discuss your insight in directing Miller plays, particularly this exciting, new version of A View from the Bridge.I would like to start with your experiences as the founding artistic director at Northern Stage. You certainly cast a wide net in the plays you selected up there. I don't know if eclectic is quite the right word, but you staged classic tragedies from Agamemnon to Macbeth; many other plays are drawn from the twentieth-century dramatic repertoire, and you have done a fair share of musicals. I would like to know how, as an artistic director, you select those plays. Then how does that affect your work as a director working in such a mixture of styles and genres?Brooke Ciardelli: I do plays that I love. What I call great plays. If you are an artistic director, you are hired for your taste, your personal taste. So you have to start there, read the plays, and wow-give this as a present to the audience every night. It's a feeling of when you buy someone a really special birthday gift and it's wrapped up in the box. You know what's in it; you know how much they're going to like it, but they haven't opened it yet. So that's what I want to find in a play. To have that feeling about it. I ran the company for sixteen years and we did between seven and eight shows every year.SM: That is a lot of shows.BC: Yes, that is a lot of shows. They all ran three weeks; some of them ran as long as five. The area where the theater is located is fairly rural with a very large subscriber base. It is only one of four theaters in America that has such a small population density yet produces its own work at this level, which some may argue doesn't work. You don't have quite enough people.SM: So how do the preferences of your rural, but engaged, audience affect your choices?BC: It's a very smart community. My audience base did not grow up in the area. They maybe went to Dartmouth; maybe they wintered and did ski vacations in Vermont. They went out, lived their lives all over the world, and chose to come back and retire. Many of them are fairly young. It meant that they had seen world-class culture offerings and had established levels of expectations. When you deal with a subscriber audience-we had a very large subscriber base-that is very good for a theater. One person buys every show in the beginning of the season so the plays are not reviewed. …

Columbia College Chicago's Symposium: "Chicago: Theatre Capital of America. Past. Present. Future." A Report from the Field

Columbia College Chicago's Symposium:"Chicago: Theatre Capital of America. Past. Present. Future." A Report from the Field Arvid Sponberg (bio) There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. . . . Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing. —Richard Feynman1 In It, Roach claims that theatre-making is part of the service economy, a product that is expended as it is consumed yet can endure in other forms. He writes: "Theater historians need to complicate that definition because they know that the experience of attending a performance is not a thing; it is a service of a very dynamic and labile kind." This service exists not as goods, but essentially as time spent in pursuit of something internal (aesthetic delight, emotional purgation, distraction from one's own woes, and so forth.) I made a similar point in The Economics of the British Stage: 1800-1914, expanding upon the ontology of what theatre artists make as distinct from what playgoers consume. The critical issues remain time and durability. —Tracy Davis2 It is possible to believe what we do not understand. It is not possible to reason about what we do not understand. —S. H. Burbury3 [End Page 125] When is it proper, advisable, or preferable for scholars to "complicate our understanding" and when to "simplify"? When new ground opens for scholarly exploitation, should the first surveyors choose one goal or the other, or take steps to achieve both? If so, what steps would those be—in 1911, 2011 or 2111? These questions, among many, underlie the work of the organizing committee (OC) of the first-ever Chicago theatre symposium.4 "Chicago: Theatre Capital of America: Past. Present. Future." occurred 18-22 May 2011 at the Film Center of Columbia College Chicago. The following paragraphs present a sampling of the first fruits of the Symposium, describe the prospects for future work in this site, and open for discussion two theoretical questions. Given the climates in which dramatic theory, praxis, criticism, and historiography live, move, and have their being, the OC keenly understood the risks of adding the terms "Past. Present. Future." to the symposium's title. The simplicity of the words only magnified the complexity of the subjects signified. Barely submerged beneath the placid surface of these ordinary words seethe powerful artistic, academic, and cultural currents. Which pasts? What presents? Whose futures? We believed that we steered in less hazardous waters with the phrase "Theatre Capital of America." We sought safe harbor from stormy criticism by deploying the words of a critic, and not just any critic—nonAmerican, nonaffiliated, nonacademic Michael Billington. He conferred the title on Chicago—not us! (What simpleness is this, indeed!) Yet our simple tactics to draw the gaze of theatre makers and theatre scholars alike never masked our astonishment at an abyss in the historiography of modern theater: In a half-century, Chicago has transformed itself from a theatrical dead zone into interlocking networks of performative ecosystems. Where once no creative performers sustained themselves, now hundreds of creative lives flourished with even greater numbers emerging. How could we account both for these profound changes in Chicago's performative ecology and the sparse commentaries about them in the historical and historiographical records? Circumstances cried for action of some kind. Some Background During 18-22 May 2011, over 350 theatre scholars and theatre makers convened at Columbia College's Film Row Center in Chicago's south Loop to celebrate, analyze, and discuss the evolution of professional nonprofit theatre in Chicago since 1950. The support of the Mid-America Theatre Conference for the symposium was essential to its development and success. A goodly number of MATC members participated, including Rhona Justice-Malloy, Rosemarie Bank, and Harvey Young, a featured speaker who gave the second-day keynote address. [End Page 126] Speculating about what moved each person to attend the sessions and related events would...

Introduction

Introduction E. Bert Wallace My involvement with the Southeastern Theatre Conference Theatre Symposium stretches back in some ways to its beginnings. The first Symposium conference was held in April 1992 with Dr. Philip G. Hill of Furman University as editor. I was a drama major at Furman under Dr. Hill, graduating in May of that year. That first conference was held at The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa; the topic was "Commedia dell'Arte Performance." I later attended graduate school at Alabama under Dr. Paul Castagno, a commedia scholar and one of the founders of Theatre Symposium. Among my duties as Paul's harried graduate assistant were transcribing tinny audio recordings of the conference proceedings and implementing final changes for Volume 4 of Theatre Symposium, which Paul edited. My first scholarly presentation was at a Symposium. And, two decades after the first conference, I was named editor for Volume 20. The 2011 conference was held in April at Furman, with Dr. Hill (now a Professor Emeritus and "Phil" to me) serving as de facto host. It would have been difficult to imagine, as I sweated through Phil's theatre history and dramatic literature classes, where I'd be twenty years hence. The 2011 topic, "Gods and Groundlings: Historical Theatrical Audiences," drew an interesting range of presenters and approaches. Of course, not every paper can be published (for a variety of reasons), but the presented papers not published in this volume deserve some mention. As a longtime fan of the theatre riot (I am fascinated by the Astor Place Riots, which I first learned about under Dr. Hill while at Furman, and was myself in a near-riot sparked by the apparent shredding of [End Page 5] a live goldfish on stage while I was at Alabama), I was most pleased to hear several papers on audience violence: Sebastian Trainor (University of Washington) shattered my romantic notions about the Ubu Riots; Rick Jones (Stephen F. Austin State University) and Peter DuPuis dealt variously with Irish hooliganism in the theatre; and Wes D. Pearce of the University of Regina gave us a marvelous account of a Victorian-era riot involving the ladies of New York and a limited supply of free "Merry Widow" hats to be given away at a matinee. Other papers included a consideration of vaudeville and music hall audiences by former editor Susan Kattwinkel (College of Charleston); a discussion of producing and performing in a traveling Toby Show by Dawn Larson (Francis Marion University); an evaluation of Early Modern and contemporary audiences by Jeremy Fiebig (Fayetteville State University); and presentations by Sivan Grunfeld and Rayya El Zein, both of the CUNY Graduate Center. The papers published in this volume represent a similarly wide range. This year's keynote speaker was Dr. Susan Bennett (University of Calgary), whose work (including the influential book Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception) was cited by numerous presenters. In keeping with the spirit of the conference, Dr. Bennett attended all the sessions and held a conference response and discussion at the end of the event. Her insights were invaluable. Her paper is published in this volume as well. One of the most valuable aspects of Theatre Symposium is the chance for scholars from all over the country (and often other countries as well) to learn from one another in an intimate setting with a single topic and no overlapping sessions. In addition to hearing everyone's work, we share meals, allowing discussions to continue and grow. Though the conference was organized into topical panels of two or three papers each, no attempt has been made to categorize the papers here. Rather, it is my hope that the value of a conference of scholars coming together to wrestle over a specific topic will be clear in the variety and quality of the papers published. I must give special thanks to Phil Hill for his inestimable help—as editorial advisor, "leg man" at Furman, and, along with his wife, Margie, magnanimous cocktail-party host. Thanks also go to former editors J. K. Curry and Scott Phillips for all their help and support; Rhett Bryson of Furman University (another significant mentor from my undergraduate days...

Company: Keynote Speech from the Thirty-second Mid-America Theatre Conference

Company: Keynote Speech from the Thirty-second Mid-America Theatre Conference

Poor "Black" Theatre: Mid-America Theatre Conference Keynote Address, March 7, 2009

Poor "Black" Theatre: Mid-America Theatre Conference Keynote Address, March 7, 2009

All Together Now? British Theatre after Multiculturalism: Report on the British Theatre Conference held at Warwick Arts Centre, 13–14 June 2009

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Querying Difference in Theatre History (review)

{ 249 } BOOK REV IEWS lates far beyond its relatively small size. In particular, playwrights will find inspiration in the African-American women writers they meet in this book. —KIRK WOODWARD Artistic Director Troupe of Vagabonds Theater \ Querying Difference in Theatre History. Edited by Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 190 pp. $59.99 cloth. Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo’s Querying Difference in Theatre History is an exciting volume of short essays ideally suited to teaching in the theatre history classroom. As Haugo and Magelssen explain in the critical introduction, the essays , which began as conference papers for the 2006 Mid-America Theatre Conference meeting with the same theme, were written to “draw out the dilemmas that emerge when attempting to constitute ideas about difference from ideological or scientific points of view, and offer new modes of inquiry and critical vocabulary for contemporary scholars of theatre history” (1). The “differences” the volume engages include sexuality, gender, class, and ethnic identity. In essence , the volume opens up discussions of the “how” as well as the “what” in the increasingly diverse field of theatre history studies. Rather than organizing the book according to the types of differences the essays elucidate, the editors have arranged the essays methodologically, with sections on historiography, performance and cultural exchange, and imagined communities and the performance of cultural identity. The historiographical section includes essays on anti-queer performance and radical democracy (John Fletcher); the use of theatre reviews in theatre historiography (Henry Bial); British restoration theatre historiography (Robert Shimko); and intersections of radical politics of sexuality and class in French theatre (Alan Sikes). The next, and considerably longer, section on theatre and cultural exchange includes essays on gender in antebellum performance (Shauna Vey); Ira Aldridge and the politics of British theatre censorship (Kate Roark); British productions of “Chineseness” on the early-twentieth-century stage (Dongshin Chang); the theatrical construction of California’s Mexican past (Andrew Gibb); and the historiographical imaginings of East-West exchanges in the work of Ping Chong (Kay Martinovich). The third section on imagined communities and the performance of cultural identity brings to- { 250 } BOOK REV IEWS gether essays on the representation of African Americans in brothel plays (Katie Johnson); a reconsideration of “American” optimism in the plays of Serbianborn playwright Steven Tesich (Michael Rothmeyer); 1970s Native American performance (Julie Pearson-Little Thunder); the vagaries of representations of Native Americans in Barrie’s Peter Pan (Jodi Van Horn-Gibson); Timberlake Wertenbaker’s diasporic poetics (Sara Freeman); non-San Juan-based Puerto Rican theatre (Elena Garcia-Martín); and the complex performative politics of battle reenactments (Leigh Clemons). Many of the essays use methodologies germinal to performance studies, gender studies, political theory, and critical race studies, whose emergence in theatre historiography over the last twenty years has radically changed our field. Yet, some of the most intriguing essays clearly elucidate ethical, theoretical, and historiographical dilemmas our field struggled with before these sea changes in methodology, such as the decentering of Euro-American perspectives, positivist history, and the addition of gender, race, and class analysis. For instance, Henry Bial’s examination of reviews of the New York production of Angels in America asks us to consider exactly what we do with theatre reviews when we attempt to write histories of reception of particular performances. Going beyond simply acknowledging the bias and so-called expertise of reviewers as ideal spectators, Bial demonstrates how reviewers often produce categories of difference rather than merely reflecting them. Bial calls for theatre scholars to enjoin Althusserian and Butlerian theories of the interpolation of the subject when these reviews hail difference, maintaining awareness of the fact that these cultural objects are not subjects. Ultimately, this critical stance requires a double movement in which these reviews may be taken as evidence of spectatorship , even as we must historicize whom the reviewers were speaking to as part of the process. Katie Johnson brings up a common dilemma, at least for those of us who write about historical artists of color. Her essay on David Belasco’s 1926 Lulu Belle asks how and when we can recover agency for the African-American extras in a production that used racist modes of...