Theatre Conference Research Articles

Shifting Positionalities: Interrogating Cultural Pluralism

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Shifting Positionalities: Interrogating Cultural Pluralism JuIi Burk The Women and Theatre Program (WTP) has spent the majority of its 18 year history exploring gender gaps in traditional patriarchal scholarship, practice , and teaching of theatre. This year's 13th Annual Women and Theatre Conference held at Emory University was devoted to the interstices of race, gender, sexuality and class. In preparation for the conference, participants were asked to read articles from three texts: bell hooks' Yearning, Tania Modleski's Feminism Without Women, and Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller's anthology of essays Conflicts in Feminism. Building on these essays and our general concern over the assimilationist potential of cultural pluralism, conference events ranged from practical workshops on publication and building course syllabi; to the staged reading of Jane Chambers Playwriting Student Award Winner Naomi Wallace's The Fields of Aceldama; to a performance by Jewish American writer and Performance Artist JyI Lynn Felman and African American Writer and Performance Artist Shirley Hayden Whitley titled Eye to Eye: Telling Stories, Breaking Boundaries; to small group discussions on how to apply the ideas raised by this conference in our work as theatre scholars, practitioners, and artists; to formal paper presentations focused around visibility and identity. Adrian Piper's video, Cornered, inspired the presentations of the first panel, "Shifting Positionalities," and continued to inform the discourse of the conference. Through the three days, three important paradigms arose that encapsulate the major issues discussed. The first came from Jennifer Brody, whose presentation at the Kick-off Session explored the paradigm of the hyphen—the space in between—to examine issues of assimilation, evolution and cultural pluralism. Amy Robinson's Comments on Process explores this image. The second paradigm was that of tourism, discussed by Susan Bennett. She delved 'Editor's Note: The following Comments on Process comprise an overview and specific selections from the 1992 Women and Theatre Conference. IuIi Burk oversaw the selction of articles. 71 72 Juli Burk into the delicate issue of cultural archeology, what Trinh T. Minh-Ha calls legitimized voyeurism, asking how scholars, writers, and practitioners of theatre can resist making someone else's identity the site of an 'archaeological' dig. The third paradigm came from Lynda Hart, whose presentation investigated the paradigm of looking as a process of both remembering what we've forgotten and forgetting what we remember in order to underscore the importance of understanding that "race and gender and class can't be theorized discretely" (10). While the many presentations and discussions that took place at the conference were not specifically organized around these three images, they emerged as points of commonality among the concerns and issues raised. Cultural pluralism easily becomes synonymous with the second paradigm , that of the tourist gaze. As Kate Davy argues, it becomes a tool of liberal humanism for assuring the hegemony of whiteness. Examined closely perhaps cultural pluralism naturalizes the position of token, positing it, as Annie Nyman noted, as the only means of inclusion and authority available to the marginalized, hyphenated Other within carefully constructed brackets. Of further concern is that the only authority of the token within this structure is as a tour guide for those from what Rosemary Curb called the dead center of privilege. Recalling the idea of tourism, Curb noted her discomfort with comfort and recommended that "a good guide might be to question every safe and comfortable assumption and perception" (2). Tracy Davis' idea about how to avoid this tour was to use theory to explore instead of trying to tell 'the truth' about what we see. She asks, "Can we tell the 'truth,'" questioning the position from which one garners the authority to confer truth. As feminists, most at the conference long ago relinquished any positivist notion of truth, yet the issue of positionality remains. Miranda Joseph's presentation on the panel, "Representing and Interrogating Cultural Representation /' offered a performative notion of position and community wherein identity is a consequence of participation. The third paradigm, that of looking, traditionally confers identity by visual characteristics, a common means to establish community, participates in establishing locations to tour and attributes to hyphenate. Additionally, it creates categories such as race or gender that...

West Coast Woman and Theatre Conference

West Coast Woman and Theatre Conference

Reviews & resources

Performance The Tarnished Angels and The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler. Choreographed by Karole Armitage. Performed by The Armitage Ballet Scenery by David Salle. Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 1987. Eden. Choreographed by Maguy Marin. Performed by Compagnie Maguy Marin (Creteil, France). Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival, October 20–22, 1987. Elena's Aria. Choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Performed by Rosas. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival November 3–8, 1987. Blue Scene Grey. Written, directed and designed by Linda Mussmann in collaboration with Claudia Bruce; music by Semih Firincioglu. Time & Space Limited production, New York, October, 1987. Dress Suits to Hire. Written by Holly Hughes in collaboration with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Performed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Women's Interart Center, New York, through January 16, 1988. Improvisations by Simone Forti and Pooh Kaye. 2nd Annual Festival of Women Improvisers, Kraine Gallery, New York City, October 10, 1987. Blood on the Saddle. Choreographed by Jennifer Monson in collaboration with Zeena Parkins. Danspace, New York City, November 7, 1987. Active Graphics II and Tangled Graphics. Choreographed by Pooh Kaye. Performed by Eccentric Motions. The Kitchen, New York City, December 5, 1987. US. Written by Karen Malpede. Directed by Judith Malina. Co‐production of Theater for the New City and Living Theatre. New York, December 1987‐January 1988. Film The Golddiggers. Written by Sally Potter, Lindsay Cooper, and Rose English; directed and edited by Sally Potter; music by Lindsay Cooper; Rose English, art director and assistant editor; Babette Mangolte, lighting camera. Released 1983; New York premiere February, 1988. Books Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, by Teresa de Lauretis. Indiana University Press, 1987. Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. The public forum On the Road: Voices of Bay Area Women in Performance. Performed, compiled, edited and produced by Anna Deavere Smith. West Coast Women in Theatre Conference, in conjunction with Julian Theatre, San Francisco, January 8–10, 1988. Electra: An International Festival of Experimental Performance by Women.Double Edge Theatre, Boston, January 8–24, 1988.

Reviews & resources performance

Help Wanted, written by Franz Xavier Kroetz, translated by Gitta Honegger, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, presented by Mabou Mines at Theatre for the New City, New York City, February and April, 1986. The Women Here Are No Different, by Nancy Beckett, directed by Jenny O'Hara, presented by 13th Street Repertory Company, New York City. (attended on 8.27.86). The Early Girl, by Caroline Kava. Directed by Munson Hicks. Circle Repertory Theatre. Crowsfeet Dance Collective, Performance Space 122, New York City. June 1986. This Is For You, Anna/A Spectacle of Revenge, directed by June Guralnick; created by The Anna Project (initiated at the Nightwood Theatre in Toronto), Suzanne Odette Khun, Ann‐Marie MacDonald, Patricia Nichols, Banuta Rubess, Maureen White; performed by members of The Women's Ensemble Theatre: Mia Kanazawa, Alonia King, Judith Pucci, Debbie Smith. Rate It X, produced by Lynn Campbell, Claudette Charbonnear, Paula de Koenigsberg and Lucy Winer. OMT Productions Inc and Channel 4 of London, 1985. NYC Film Forum 1987. Distributed by Interama Inc. Interview with Filmmaker Marken Gorris, conducted by Katheryn White with Helma Klooss at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in New York City during Holland Film Week at Carnegie Hall Cinema, Spring, 1986. Sex & Dance Series, Dance Theatre Workshop (DTW) and P.S. 122, October‐November, 1986. L.O.W. in Gaia, by Rachel Rosenthal. The Kitchen. New York City. Books Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights, by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. 480 pp. Index. Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women, by Helene Keyssar. London: MacMillan Modern Dramatists, 1984. 223 pp. Bibliography and index. The public forum A Report on the Women's Preconvention of the National Educational Theatre Conference, Tisch School of the Arts and the Gallatin Division, New York University, August 15–16, 1986. Founding Mothers: Contemporary Dance as a Canon for Women's Studies, Department of Dance in collaboration with the Women's Studies Program and the Research Center for the Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland, College Park. The Third Annual Women in Theatre Festival, Boston, March 20–29, 1987.

Halifax Towards an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony

Two years ago, participants at the Atlantic Theatre Conference held in Halifax moved that delegates representing the region’s theatre community study the feasibility of an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony. As a result, the Dramatists’ Co-op of Nova Scotia established a committee to assess support for the colony idea. Founded in 1976, the Co-op is a self-governing branch of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. During the past 10 years, it has developed programmes that serve the interests of playwrights, including the publication of a monthly newsletter, a catalogue of members’ plays, public readings, round-table workshops and, most recently, a highly-successful workshopping and public presentation of six new Nova Scotian plays.

Halifax The First Atlantic Theatre Conference

Twenty-one professional theatre companies from the Maritimes and Newfoundland met at Neptune Theatre on 26-28 April 1985 to discuss mutual concerns and possible co-operation at the first ever Atlantic Theatre Conference. The event was organized by the Canada Council at the request of theatre companies in the region, and representatives of federal and provincial funding agencies, as well as the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre (PACT), the Playwrights Union of Canada, and the Dramatists Co-op of Nova Scotia, were in attendance.

‘Particular Pleasures’ in Performance

The recent death of J. B. Priestley, in the same year as that of the finest exponent of his plays, Sir Ralph Richardson, seems to signal the close of an era. We had hoped in an early issue of New Theatre Quarterly to arrange an interview with the playwright to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, and although generous tributes have been paid to Priestley's work in the theatre, two aspects of this work (incidentally of crucial importance to the policy of this journal) have been somewhat neglected. After the end of the Second World War, during the discussions and plans for building the new Britain (and by extension Europe) from the ruins of the old, Priestley stood for a particular kind of integrity in the British theatre: and his role in the creation of the International Theatre Institute and his own conception of the British Theatre Conference of 1947 raised many interesting questions about the social, national, and international role that theatre could play. If the intervening years have not seen developments to match that vision, our theatre nevertheless owes a great deal to the various reforms that have followed from such initiatives, and in future issues we intend to return to those ideals and ideas – to see what basis they constitute for a critique of our own time, and to assess what continuing relevance they have for our future. Any theatre journal today also owes a debt to Priestley for his pioneering championship and criticism of the various forms of popular entertainment in which he so delighted, and in which he discerned strong social values – essentially, the inspiration for a line of criticism carried forward brilliantly by Raymond Williams and others over the last three decades. Tragically, two of the great comedians who earned his admiration, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe, departed before him, too far short of his own fullness of years. The world's stock of laughter has slumped since their passing and, as Priestley showed us, we have lost two innovators in the art of theatre. Tommy Cooper's deconstruction, if not demolition, of the stage was a masterly exposure of the polished sales techniques of showbusiness, and his exploitation of the art of anti-climax showed new ways through which to hold an audience and relate to them. Eric Morecambe, equally ruthless and proficient at puncturing the pretensions and posturings of glib naturalism and pseudo-aestheticism, had also the self-deflating wisdom of the true philosopher. One day, when we have grown over-familiar with the reruns of the reruns of the shows he has left behind, a retrospective examination of all the work of Morecambe and Wise will surely show that, underlying the technical brilliance of the comic playing, there is also a serious progression through the process of ageing, as brash optimism is tempered by the disillusionment of experience in the struggle to survive and extract what advantages one can from life. We learned a great deal about theatre from Tommy Cooper, and a lot about living and growing older from Eric Morecambe: they have gone leaving that education unfinished, but to commemorate them in the power of their effect, and to remind us of our debt to Priestley, we reproduce here the two pieces he wrote about them as living performers in the collection of essays Particular Pleasures, published in 1975 by Heinemann (to whom our grateful acknowledgements are extended).

Report of the American Theatre Association Panel: Asian Theatre Through Conferences and Festivals

August 1984, a panel chaired by Andrew T. Tsubaki was devoted to exploring recent theatre festivals and conferences in Asia. It is a relatively recent development that Asians have begun to examine what other Asians are doing so that they can relate to, and learn from, each other in detailed fashion. A reflection of this new tendency is the increasing number of international conferences and festivals being held these days. Here three festivals are reported in brief summary by Patricia Harter, Nancy K. Nanney and Andrew T. Tsubaki, while a fourth, by Carol Martin, is given fuller treatment.

Theatre East and West: An International Congress

The Central Studio (Centro Teatro Ateneo) of the University of Rome, in cooperation with the University Commission of the International Federation of Research and the Institute for Research of the University of Vienna, hosted an international congress on the topic Theatre and West, September 24-28, 1984. Fifty participants from Europe, North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia assessed the confrontation that is occurring between theatre in Asia and the in this era of instant communication. This was only the second such conference in Europe, and all week the participants, students, and observers packed the Studio's theatre on the University of Rome campus. (The organizer, Professor Ferruccio Marotti, was also responsible for convening Europe's first East-West theatre conference, held in Florence ten years ago.) Major speakers wereJerzy Grotowski and, via video interviews and statements, Peter Brook. Grotowski contrasted theatre in the and the West. In the the actor walks, but in the he enacts signs of walking (walking as opposed to walkness). In the the idea of void is related to nakedness, that which remains after peeling away what was, while the Eastern artist sees void as a space to be filled, without obstacle, a potential for creation. Grotowski spoke of the meaninglessness of East and West as descriptive terms but, inevitably, had to use these words for convenience as we all do. The comments made by Grotowski and many participants confirmed the fact that Asian theatre remains an other in Western (especially European) consciousness in the mid-1980s. Many topics were raised: from analyses of acting and possession,

First International Jewish Theatre Conference and Festival

First International Jewish Theatre Conference and Festival

“The New Establishment”? Fragments of the TDR Theatre Conference

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The British Theatre Conference

The British Theatre Conference