Praxis (E-Journal, Villanova University)
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Playing Diaspora as Sidney Bechet: A Meditation on Performance as Research
Get PDFIn March 2016 I created the original one-woman show Me & Monsieur Bechet as a way of researching Bechet’s diasporic subjectivities through my live, moving body. The show privileged movement and featured walking, dancing, sliding on the floor and pushing against the wall. It also included dialogue and singing. It ran fifteen minutes and was created as a performative text for our students in Africana Studies and Dance. The show culled multiple research materials such as Bechet’s autobiography, recordings, reviews, interviews, comments from bandmates, radio and TV shows. The students were tasked with investigating a selection of these texts as well as chapter one before attending the performance. They filled out a questionnaire about what my performance added to their impressions and the performance was followed by a class discussion.“Playing Diaspora as Sidney Bechet: A Meditation on Performance as Research” is a meditation on one significant performance moment from the show and how it addressed the opening question: How do we play diaspora? The essay is organized under two key themes that emerged in experiencing Bechet’s diaspora: double consciousness and the middle passage. In the end these themes represent not only the life of Sidney Bechet, but also my own life as well as collective experiences of the African diaspora. The significance of this performative meditation is that it presents answers gleaned through my own embodied experience as well as my students’ observations. This performative research elicited particular aspects of the physical and psychological experiences of the African diaspora that I may never have articulated so clearly otherwise. Thus, in addition to a meditation this essay is an argument for performance as a powerful research tool.
A Strategic Call for All-Female Production Spaces
Get PDFThose who have the courage to question theatre’s imposed borders will shape the future of performance. Still, how can one break theatrical borders when they are not in the room determining the play’s parameters? In 2015 Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori won a Tony award for Fun Home; bringing lesbian theatre to the commercial masses. Although such an accomplishment enhances the role of women in musical theatre, the fact that Fun Home was the first all-female writing team publicly praised and decorated by theatre critics illuminates the larger need for all-female writing/production teams and spaces for creating new works.When developing new plays, it is imperative that we look beyond onstage gender representation and focus our eye on the representation of gender in the production/writing teams. Only through forming all-female development teams can we create performance spaces that empower an inclusive intersectionality of all identifications of women and promote creative performances that are for, by and about women. Much to my creative dismay, all-female spaces are not easy to procure or cultivate.This paper examines the Mickee Faust Queer as Faust’s 2016 staged reading of Shero: Femme Fatale, an original lesbian super-shero comedy that investigates the feminist struggle through the eyes of Shero/Heart, male Detective by day and female avenger by night. This case study calls for new strategies in new spaces. It advocates for the benefits of an all-female performance space while still acknowledging the obstacles and concerns presented that unveil themselves when trying to create such an environment
Polyvocal Playwriting and the Evolution in New Play Development: Examples from the EU Collective Play Project
Get PDFDiscusses the largest experiment perhaps in the history of contemporary playwriting: The EU Collective Play Project. Over 50 playwrights are involved across 8 projects from 12 countries, writing collectively, and developing works that are hybrids, polyvocal in design and execution, and earmarked for production and publication. Funded by the EU consortium on the arts, the project was initiated in 2015 and the author of this article is serving as the editor/curator of the project. This paper explores two works in particular that the author has been involved with directly: Darkness by the Nordic group, and Narcissus based on the cult classic, Pink Narcissus from the 1970s, in essence showing the range of approaches in the EUCP. These findings demonstrate new techniques of play development differing from standard American models, exploring how multiple authors can collaborate across multiple drafts of a playscript while maintaining individual voices. The article closes with several thoughts on the implications of polyvocal, collective playwriting. The EUCP represents an evolution in how we make and develop new works for the stage
How Moment Work Leads to Narrating with the Elements of the Stage
Get PDFIn spring of 2017, X University partnered with the Tectonic Theater Project to devise a play with its theatre capstone class entitled A Metamorphosis, inspired by Kafka’s well-known story of a man transformed into a giant insect. This year-long residency provided a full opportunity for students to implement Tectonic’s Level One and Level Two Moment Work training and experience the final mastery of threading Moments into a fully-produced play (Level Three). X students had the opportunity to deepen their understanding of what Tectonic calls “the elements of the stage,” a non-hierarchal inventory used to structure a narrative and heighten theatricality. This essay focuses on how Tectonic’s technique of narrating with the non-textual elements leads to a richer, more engaging theatrical experience—both for the creators and the audience members of the production. The authors content that Moment Work helps devisers create a more engaging, impactful artistic experience than working in a traditional (autocratic and text-centric) theatre praxis. Moreover, Moment Work helped them build skills valued in the professional theatre, such as collaboration and artistic risk-taking. They advocate that Moment Work reaps these benefits because it is a systematic way of creating theatrical narratives. Moment Work proceeds from experimentation (sketching in the rehearsal room) to a product based on the needs of the show.
Reimagining History to Alter the Future: Demea’s Interrogation of Two Colonial Ideologies
No full textIn the nineteen-fifties, South African scholar and poet Guy Butler wrote Demea, an adaptation of Euripides’ masterwork, Medea. The play carried with it a strong message against apartheid and a possible solution for South Africa’s future. Due to government censorship, the play went unpublished and unperformed for nearly four decades. With the abolition of apartheid in 1990, national mythologies were struck down, and people were left to reframe their memories according to the new South African socio-political paradigm. The long overdue production and subsequent publication of Demea provided South Africa with a reimagined history and proposed a way of moving forward as a nation. By placing the events of Demea during the Great Trek of the nineteenth century, Butler is able to criticize the present and conceive a possible future by looking through the lens of the past. Butler sets up two treks. The first is historically accurate, and led by the Creon character, Kroon. This trek exemplifies European colonialism. The second trek, of Butler’s own construction, is composed not of Boers, but of people of diverse racial backgrounds. This imaginary trek, led by Jonas (the Jason character), mirrors the Greek archaic colonial ideology. Thus, Demea offers an interrogation of two national mythologies regarding colonialism, ultimately proposing a solution to apartheid in the form of an altered history
A Beauty But A Funny Girl: A Queer Investigation of the "Broadwayfication of Disney"
Get PDFThe term “Disneyfication” is traditionally a way of implying that substance and depth have been removed and replaced by simplistic, conservative values, at best, and dangerously fascist encoded messages, at worst. To refer to the opening of Beauty and the Beast on Broadway as the beginning of the “Disneyfication of Broadway” is to imply, therefore, a corporate invasion of a theatre culture which has been portrayed through various historiographies as a leftist refuge for the outsiders of American culture, particularly the LGBT community. However, I would argue that before Disney\u27s occupation of Times Square, the culture of the Walt Disney Company had been breached by two Broadway veterans, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who incorporated the book musical structure, musical theatre styles, conventions, and progressive themes into Disney\u27s animated films in a period which I shall refer to as the “Broadwayfication of Disney.” Because one of the major deterrents of a queer reading of Disney musicals, and the subsequent exclusion of them from queer histories of Broadway, is the “Disney” brand name, this paper will examine, through textual analysis of the film and stage versions of Beauty and the Beast, informed by the writings of Eve Sedgewick, Judith Butler, and Mikhail Bakhtin, the ways in which the creators of Beauty and the Beast utilized traditional musical theatre styles and conventions to present the mainstream public with an anti-essentialist treatment of gender and sexuality in American culture
“Ya beautiful, beautiful child, I could ate ya”: The Brutality of Matriarchal Revolution in Juno and the Paycock, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and By the Bog of Cats
Get PDFIf Hibernia is often reflected in the major female characters of Irish drama, the mother-daughter relationship would be a particular site of anxiety around the future of the nation. How are the patriarchally essentialized notions of Irishness being preserved or challenged in each generation, and how willing or able is the older woman to transmit and nurture them in the younger? How do the sexual anxieties surrounding these women affect that ideological torch-passing, and in what ways do these escalating pressures manifest in increasingly violent confrontations between the women? In tracing the mother-daughter bond from the supportive and hopeful pair in Juno and the Paycock to the savagery of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and finally the gruesome, fatalistic bond at the heart of By the Bog of Cats, an increasing ambivalence surrounding the state of the nation and the worth of its firmly held identity politics emerges. This paper seeks to address these questions through Julia Kristeva\u27s theory of the abject and the critical work of Brian Singleton, Melissa Sihra, and Victor Merriman
Finding My Voice: A Director, Performative Writing, and my Feminist Self
Get PDF In this paper, I investigate the creation of my performance of a feminist director. I explore using performative writing to discuss joining activism and scholarship within the rehearsal hall and on the page. I use performative writing as method and methodology as I contextualize my research into and experience of feminism, communication, and directing. Performative writing allows me to tell my own unique story while still relating it to the scholars and practitioners upon whose shoulders I stand. Rather than simply telling my story, I examine the experience through a critical lens. This is an autobiography as a performance of self on paper. It is research as performance and story as scholarship
Redefining ‘Yellow’: Questioning the Asian American Identity in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face
Get PDFIn this paper, I examine the various representations of Asian Americans in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face and track the myriad of social roles that his two main characters, DHH and Marcus, cannot play, want to play, have to play, and/or are invited to play. I address how DHH struggles with his definition of what it means to be Asian American. By juxtaposing DHH and Marcus, the play serves as a prime example of what David Palumbo-Liu describes as “rescripting the imaginary,” or the attempt of Asian American and other writers to “invent within their discursive spaces images of Asian America that both delineate the boundaries of Asian America and envision particular modes of crossing them.” Through this role shifting and juxtaposition of the two main characters, Hwang simultaneously acknowledges the delineation of certain boundaries while also proposing potential opportunities for crossing those boundaries. Ultimately, I argue that Yellow Face calls for an understanding of the Asian American identity as changeable dynamic, and provides a potential strategy for its renegotiation