Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Mapping Urban Performance Culture: A Common Ground For Architecture And Theater, Ting Chin, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

Our co-taught course focuses on theater history, with an emphasis on performance architecture. Assignments are designed to illuminate the ways in which architectural design and technology inform performance practices and audience reception. The pivotal assignment for exploring interdisciplinarity is a three-week module on mapping historical theaters in New York City. Open-source Global Information Systems (GIS) software serves as a common mechanism for students to situate theatrical productions in the context of the built urban environment, deepening their understanding of the social, economic, and artistic forces that contributed to performance culture. Mapping is a shared pedagogy for analyzing and presenting research …

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan

Publications and Research

This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.

Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions And Audience Attention, Claire Bishop

Publications and Research

Relocated from the “black box” of experimental theatre to the “white cube” of the gallery, dance in the museum brings about new forms of performance — the dance exhibition — and new protocols of audience behavior that permit, even encourage, smartphone photography. This is the “gray zone” of recent performance, which is both a symptom of, and compensation for, the virtualization of contemporary perception.

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

A Conversation Rewound: Queer And Racialized Temporalities In Hamilton, Shereen Inayatulla, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

The authors of this article, two educators and immigrants situated in the United States, consider the exigencies of listening to Hamilton: An American Musical. Shaped as dialogue, this article follows a previous piece where the authors processed their experience seeing Hamilton performed live. The current conversation shifts to the act of listening; it examines the ways in which the soundtrack embeds the audience into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s narrative, reinscribing the racialized immigrant body onto both Alexander Hamilton’s story, and Hamilton, the musical. Additionally, this article asks how the fictional Hamilton’s message to rise up and take a shot grants audience members …

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Broad City Scrambles The Formula, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Robert Leston explores how Broad City breaks the sitcom mold, eschewing the conservative and cyclical narrative structure of the traditional sitcom and thereby offering a "willingness to explore controversy and to cross identity, class, race, and gender boundaries."

Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

In a 1960 letter to a friend, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett, “I’ll buy his goods hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty; his work is beautiful.” What do we learn if we take the word “beautiful” seriously? Rereading Waiting for Godot backward through Betrayal, this article argues that Beckett’s landscape, typically read as a realization of postwar angst, is in fact one released of the pressures of contemporary living and for Pinter a homosocial Eden. Jerry’s joke upon discovering the adultery—“Maybe I should …

Tenneriello Studies Theater In Many Forms, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“My background was in a working class/middle class family, and I had a passion for drawing when I was a kid, but we also put on a lot of theatricals. Lots of dramas, playing with things and staging thing. So, my exposure to theater was not professional, it was more interactive with my friends and family.” That is how Susan Tenneriello explains how she ended up becoming a theater scholar.

A native of Bayside Queens in New York City, she obtained her doctorate in theater from the CUNY Graduate Center, and today she is an associate professor in the Department …

Caplan Studies, Teaches The Richness Of Yiddish Theater., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I grew up in a family where Yiddish was spoken around me quite a bit. I grew up surrounded by Yiddish and Jewish culture, but I didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish, so it was something that was sort of mysterious that I didn’t know very much about.” That is the way Dr. Debra Caplan explains how she became an expert in Yiddish theater. A native of North Wales in Pennsylvania, she says she was always interested from a very young age in performing arts. “I studied theater in high school and in college and became very interested in theater history. …

From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This essay looks at T. S. Eliot's major dramatic productions from the 1930s-40s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party as a series of investigations into spatial expressions of faith. By using onstage space in unique ways, Eliot encourages audiences to consider the connections between performance and belief, the knowable and unknowable.

Who Tells Our Story: Intersectional Temporalities In Hamilton, An American Musical, Andie Silva, Shereen Inayatulla

Publications and Research

This article examines the ways in which Hamilton: An American Musical can be read less as a historical account and more as a prediction of a future immigrant, who is called upon to (re)define US nationhood. Keeping with the tempo of the musical as well as the broader issues of time, space, and identity it attempts to address, this article is presented as a dialogical rap. The co-authors’ discussion frames Hamilton as an example of the power of unplottable, time-arresting immigrant bodies, to whom the colonial imposition of linear history does not apply. From this framework, the authors’ conversation shifts …

Playing God: The Bible On The Broadway Stage By Henry Bial (Review), Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Broadway As Global Brand, David Savran

Publications and Research

For people around the world, "Broadway'' means the Broadway musical, the epitome of singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. Although the Broadway musical is customarily perceived as the most distinctively U.S. theatre form - whose national and municipal identity is embedded in its name - it has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As the globalized cultural economy increasingly facilitates the worldwide circulation of multinational theatrical productions, Broadway-style musicals are being manufactured from Hamburg to Shanghai. They are no longer a specifically U.S. form, but a global brand that freely crosses borders, genres, and styles.

Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …

Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …

Disciplines, Institutions—And Desires, Will Stockton, Mario Digangi, Ruth Mazo Karras, Melissa E. Sanchez

Publications and Research

Will Stockton: I would like to begin by asking you to consider the chiasmus under which we gather: “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” The chiasmus focuses our attention on the crossing of two terms, each with noun and verb forms their grammatical flexibility indexed, perhaps, to the methodological flexibility of the fields in which most of us work: early modern (here both Renaissance and late-medieval) queer and/or sexuality studies. Talk a bit about the definitions of desir/e/ing and histor/y/icizing, and the relation of these terms to the periodization and thematization of your and our work. Is defining these words more …

Aquell Estiu Del 66. L'Actuació De Merce Cunnigham A Sitges, Ara Fa 50 Anys, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

El desembarcament a Sitges de la MCDC ara fa cinquanta anys exactes, es considera un punt crucial en la cultura catalana i espanyola tant en art com en música. Carles Santos ha titllat aquella actuació de «traumàtica» pel que va suposar per a la música espanyola. I a més a més, molts estudis erudits recents sobre l’art conceptual, la música electrònica i la dansa experimental consideren l’actuació a Sitges com un dels inicis de tots aquests moviments a l’estat espanyol. Al final, Clive Barnes va acabar per tenir raó: al Departament d’Estat l’havia subvencionat un pintor europeu, almenys la gira …

Stargate Theatre Company: Engaging Justice-Involved Youth In Creativity And Growth, Jeffrey A. Butts, Martha Wade Steketee

Publications and Research

This report provides a possible starting point for an evaluation of The Stargate Theater company. The Stargate Theater Company, embedded in the resources, expertise, and artistry of the Manhattan Theatre Club Education Program, recruits its members, 10-15 males, from youth services agencies for a seven-week summer arts program. Members of the program write raw materials which become performable text and perform the work with the help of professional theater artists. The writer-performers work for pay and ultimately perform their own words about their life experiences. The program aims to be a paid job and a work readiness training program, a …

The Mcgowan Trilogy (Plays), Seamus O'Scanlain

Publications and Research

The McGowan Trilogy is a psychological journey of violence, sorrow and love lost. Set in 1980s Ireland after the Brighton Bombing which targeted Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet it follows the exploits of Victor M. McGowan - a new breed of IRA enforcer - in love with puns, guns and the pogo. The Trilogy won awards for Best Actress, Best Director and Best Production in 2014 and played for 20 nights in New York. In 2015 it played in the UK at the Kino-Teatr, An Taibhdhearc, The Town hall Westport and The Town Hall Galway.

Una Reflexión Sobre La Violencia Y La Construcción De Paz Desde El Teatro Y El Arte, Patricia Tovar

Publications and Research

Este artículo es una invitación a pensar en el arte y el legado de la violencia y la injusticia en la historia de la humanidad y en los esfuerzos trabajados desde diferentes proyectos artísticos en la resolución de conflictos y en la promoción de la paz en el mundo. Se presentan y analizan algunas de esas experiencias y se examina cómo han sido aplicadas por diferentes disciplinas para resolver o avanzar sobre algunos de los problemas que aquejan a la sociedad. Es también importante pensar en el uso del arte, del teatro y de la creatividad como estrategia metodológica y …

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …

Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This article is an edit of the opening remarks for the event held on May 22nd, 2014 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as part of the In The Life Series supplying Black LGBT programming coordinated by Steven Fullwood. Outing Lorraine included panelists: Alexis DeVeaux, Joi Gresham, and Steven Fullwood and was moderated by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz. Opening remarks provide a biographical description of Lorraine Hansberry's life, prepare the audience for a conversation on the implications for "outing" a black iconic figure, details the purpose for use of primary and secondary sources when, and provides a bibliography for …

Technology And Wonder In Thirteenth-Century Iberia And Beyond, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

As the desire for affective experiences of the sacred increased in communities across Europe in the late Middle Ages, the Christian faithful crafted lifelike, mechanized figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints for use in religious festivals. Although each devotional culture evidences unique body/object relationships and meanings, in general animated ritual objects encouraged lay participation in the celebration of saints and the Passion by engaging the senses, and, consequently, an emotional sense of God. In this essay I investigate the ritual alliances between moveable, prop-like saints and their Iberian devotees, in particular the performative meanings that arose from encounters …

Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Students Embrace Avant-Garde Theatre Style, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dance In The Museum, Claire Bishop

Publications and Research

This paper argues that the art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: …

Eco-Theatre, R. Murray Schafer, Eleanor James, Sarah Ann Standing

Publications and Research

Born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1933, and widely considered Canada’s leading living composer, Raymond Murray Schafer is also a librettist, educator, writer, and “soundscape” theorist. Schafer composes for symphonies as well as chamber orchestras, solo instruments (he has even composed a piece for snowmobile), and vocalists. His compositions have played throughout the world. Schafer’s operatic cycle Patria—a masterwork almost forty years in the making—consists of ten episodes, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue The Princess of the Stars and epilogue And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon (also known as the Wolf Project) comprise an eco-theatre where Schafer places …

Amanda Knox And Bella Figura, Denise Scannell Guida

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.