Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Sameena Mustafa Interview, Uyanga Chinzorig

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Sameena Mustafa is a stand-up comedian, actor, and writer named in the Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago 2016 issue. She has been featured in videos by The Onion and performed on world-famous stages like the Laugh Factory and Biograph Theater. A Northwestern University graduate, Sameena is a sought-after speaker and host, praised for founding Simmer Brown, a comedy showcase featured in the Chicago Sun-Times and Redeye Chicago.

Walk: Artist's Statement, Yozmit Walker

Mime Journal

Testifying to Thomas Leabhart’s legacy as a corporeal mime performer and educator, his former student Yozmit reflects on her performance piece “Walk,” a site-specific work created for a 2013 conference on Edward Gordon Craig at Pomona College (CA). Yozmit describes the way Leabhart’s teaching – partly inspired by Craig’s work – helped her to explore the balance between artistic thought and rigorous physical training.

Dreaming Of Light: On Edward Gordon Craig, Peter Sellars

Mime Journal

Sellars reflects on Craig’s legacy, emphasizing Craig’s focus on “making theatre out of light,” and casting Craig as “John the Baptist to Bob Wilson.” Sellars highlights the importance of Craig’s “keeping the dream space open,” but he also criticizes Craig for not traveling to experience the predominantly Asian cultures whose performance traditions he appropriated. Craig and Sellars have a shared interest in the functions of Baroque opera in socially cataclysmic times; Sellars speaks about the influence of Craig upon his stagings of Purcell and the St. Matthew Passion (first staged in 2010). Sellars celebrates Craig’s attempt to rescue the voice …

Picturing Robinson Crusoe: Edward Gordon Craig, Daniel Defoe And Image-Text Inquiry, Eric T. Haskell

Mime Journal

Haskell focuses on Craig’s work with art books in this essay. He offers a wealth of visual images to investigate influences upon Craig’s engraved illustrations for an edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a project planned for the Cranach Press, executed during the late 1930s, and published posthumously by the Basilisk Press in 1979. Haskell calls attention to the way that this fascinating edition—previously overshadowed by the Craig-Cranach Press Hamlet in the scholarly literature—adds to our understanding of Craig’s theories of print as performance. He also offers a nuanced reading of the way that Craig’s illustrations function as interpretation, providing …

Hamlet's Last Act: Artist's Statement, Sam J. Gold

Mime Journal

Gold contextualizes his performance piece Hamlet’s Last Act (video will be available on the Action, Scene, and Voice website going live in Summer 2017). He reflects on his own journey and process in creating the show, and also offers some fascinating information about Craig’s relationship to Asian puppetry traditions. Gold’s innovative show turns Craig’s wood engravings for the Cranach Press Hamlet into Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppets; Gold later discovered that Craig actually knew of this genre and referenced it in certain works. Gold explains how in Hamlet’s Last Act, Craig’s published engravings literally become performers, breaking down the …

Edward Gordon Craig, Étienne Decroux, And The Rediscovery Of Mime, Harvey Grossman

Mime Journal

In this edited transcription of his remarks at the 2013 Pomona College (California) conference “Action, Scene and Voice,” Harvey Grossman elucidates the theory and practice of his two most important teachers: Edward Gordon Craig and Étienne Decroux. Grossman elucidates Craig’s much-debated comments on the “Art of the Theatre,” as well as Craig’s influence upon the French corporeal mime Étienne Decroux. He relates in detail Craig’s positive response to seeing Decroux and his students (among them Jean-Louis Barrault and Éliane Guyon) perform in 1945.

Our Puppets, Our Selves: Puppetry's Changing Paradigms, Claudia Orenstein

Mime Journal

Taking up the topic of puppetry, Orenstein forges connections between Craig’s vision of the übermarionette and the rise of “New Puppetry” today. She examines the use of puppets to explore similarities and differences between the technological anxieties of modernists versus contemporary artists. In addition, she calls for a more careful and contextualized attention to Craig’s puppet theory, with a close reading of the übermarionette passage in "On the Art of the Theatre." Orenstein returns to some of the most well-known and much-studied passages and theories from Craig’s early work, but considers them from the fresh vantage point of contemporary puppetry …

Contents - Edward Gordon Craig Special Issue 2017, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

Cover, front matter, and contents for Mime Journal Special Issue, "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig." Guest editors: Jennifer Buckley and Annie Holt.

Appendix: Program, Edward Gordon Craig Conference 2013, Pomona College, Mime Journal

Mime Journal

Conference program for "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig," at Pomona College, Claremont, California, March 2013.

Editors' Note - Action, Scene, And Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues With Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

A roadmap to this Special Issue of Mime Journal. This issue emphasizes the tissue of influences that shaped Craig’s own work and continue to impact contemporary theater and performance. By focusing on the historical contexts in which his ideas were developed and those in which they have been received, the essays counter the widely held perception of Craig as the solitary genius of the “Art of the Theatre.” His claims of originality and singularity have too often obscured the connections between his work and that of other artists—especially the dancer Isadora Duncan, upon whom two of the pieces included here …

The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove

Mime Journal

Jennifer Buckley interviews dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lori Belilove on Isadora Duncan’s practice and legacy. Belilove argues for Duncan’s modernism, and emphasizes her impact upon Edward Gordon Craig’s developing aesthetic and his career. This edited transcription of their conversation takes its point of departure from Craig’s portfolio of six drawings of Duncan in action, Isadora Duncan: Sechs Bewegungsstudien, Insel Verlag, 1906. Belilove sees both Craig and Duncan as poised between late Victorianism and modernism, and she contends they shared a modernist impulse toward abstraction. Belilove also comments on her own practice as a performer and as a teacher passing …

The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou

Mime Journal

Olga Taxidou analyzes the ambiguous concept for which Edward Gordon Craig is best known—the “übermarionette”—alongside Isadora Duncan’s discussions of the liberated dancer. Highlighting the emphasis on futurity in Craig’s and Duncan’s manifestos and theories, she contends that this pairing works to undo the binaries between Hellenism and modernism, and between mechanistic and vitalistic aesthetics. Emphasizing the impact of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories upon Duncan’s theory and practice, Taxidou locates Duncan within an intellectual vanguard that includes Jane Harrison and her fellow Cambridge Ritualists as well as major modernist poets.

Edward Gordon Craig's Übermarionette And Étienne Decroux's "Actor Made Of Wood", Thomas Leabhart, Sally Leabhart

Mime Journal

Thomas Leabhart testifies to Edward Gordon Craig’s continuing influence on postmodern mime and movement. Leabhart discusses the influences that shaped Craig’s theory of acting. He then considers what the living actor and Craig’s “übermarionette” have to say to each other, putting pressure on the binary between human and non-human performers, especially in physical theater. Himself a student from 1968-72 of Étienne Decroux, the French corporeal mime and teacher whom the elderly Craig recognized as an “artist of the theatre,” Leabhart relates how he carries on Decroux’s pedagogy and legacy as a performer and teacher of corporeal mime.

Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt

Mime Journal

Holt focuses on Craig’s influential stage designs in relation to the performing body. Through costume design, Holt rethinks Craig’s relationship with the designs of the Ballets Russes, placing him in context with the experimentations of his contemporaries Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. Holt frames these designers’ historic opposition as a difference of opinion around the way that costumes can carry meaning. She argues that while all three designers used similar visual language and agreed that costumes should communicate with audiences, each artist used a different model for this communication – speech (Craig), music (Bakst) and writing (Picasso).

The Who's Tommy

Theatre Programs

The Who's Tommy
Book by Des McAnuff and Pete Townshend
Music and Lyrics by Pete Townshend
Additional Music and Lyrics by John Entwistle and Keith Moon
Directed by Oanh Nguyen

Rock musical; adult language and content as well as strobe lighting effects will be utilized

Based on the iconic 1969 rock concept album, The Who’s Tommy is an exhilarating story of hope, healing, and the human spirit. The story of the pinball-playing, deaf, dumb and blind boy who triumphs over his adversities has inspired, amazed, and puzzled audiences for more than 40 years. This five-time Tony Award-winning musical was translated …

On Behalf Of Theatre In Rural America, Robert J. Hubbard

Northwestern Review

This essay is a theatre review with a sense of place: the small-town-rural upper Midwest in the spring of 2008. The author assesses Tim Robbins, Dead Man Walking, as staged at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa; Jeff Barker, Terror Texts, as staged at Northwestern College, Orange City, Iowa; and Adam Long, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, as staged at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Création, Jeu Et Contemplation : L’Art Comme Exercice Spirituel, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

"Je voudrais commencer en parlant d’un livre que j’ai lu il y a quelques années déjà, et qui pour moi a été très influent et très important, qui s’appelle « Free play », qui est un livre de Stephen Nachmanovich. C’est un livre que je trouve passionnant à plusieurs titres. D’abord parce que l’idée centrale du livre, c’est de dire qu’on ne peut créer que dans le jeu, c’est-à-dire que toute création doit être ludique pour pouvoir exister vraiment. Et ça, c’est une prise de conscience. J’allais dire une découverte, mais je ne pense pas, parce que je pense que …

Lighting Questions List, Brandon Washington

The Flick (2017) - Lighting

The realistic environment, story, dialogue, and characters fed the ideas of light that would help tell this story. Later in the show, the movie theater called “The Flick” is taken under new ownership and is remodeled into “The Venue.” Changes in color accents and temperature of light within the theater provided us with the larger visual switch and passage of time that happens towards the last quarter of the play.

Magic Sheet, Brandon Washington

The Flick (2017) - Lighting

The realistic environment, story, dialogue, and characters fed the ideas of light that would help tell this story. Later in the show, the movie theater called “The Flick” is taken under new ownership and is remodeled into “The Venue.” Changes in color accents and temperature of light within the theater provided us with the larger visual switch and passage of time that happens towards the last quarter of the play.

Lighting Key, Brandon Washington

Journey's End (2017) - Lighting

The lighting design for Journey's End needed to create the dark and claustrophobic environment of a war dug-out. Candles from low angles and slivers of natural light that could barely penetrate the dug-outs were the only sources of illumination. The high-contrast world that was composed only added to the hell that these soldiers endured.