Geoff Proehl's Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey

I've just finished Geoff Proehl's new book, Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey, which is excellent. It strikes me as akin to Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares in that it voices dramaturgical urges and pursuits without prescribing a set course of action, showing an awareness that each dramaturgical process is unique as well as a wariness of reducing dramaturgy down to the role of the dramaturg. Both his articulation of the "dramaturgical sensibility" and his critique of his own dramaturgical work at the Guthrie are lively, honest, and insightful. By weaving together a wealth of dramaturgical knowledge, personal narrative, and scintillating quotes from playtexts, he models through his writing the dramaturgy he practices. He combines the rigor of academic analysis with an open - almost vulnerable - reading of his own work to create a book that is engaging and important. Indeed, I would place this at the top of the required reading list for any course on dramaturgy.

I am preparing a full review of the book, which I will post here.

ASTR 2008

I've just returned from the annual ASTR conference. It was a strong conference this year, but two events really stand out for me. The first was the conversation on race in the election that was held Friday night. This was, for me, the topic of the week - Barack Obama's electoral victory. What was clear in the comments portion of the night is that so many of us are still processing just what this victory might mean. As Sonja Kuftinec said, she's sort of riding the wave of emotion and still trying to find her critical feet to start to analyze the event more intellectually. This was the sentiment of many. The panel members certainly had their critical wits about them; they each presented very nuanced and interesting looks at the Obama campaign and the Obama victory. They helped to start my own critical thinking. Tricia Rose mentioned that the significance of the Obama campaign and victory are often framed in the language of a Civil Rights Era understanding of race and race relations that no longer exists. That is, we are using an outdated language in the absence of a rhetoric of post-Civil Rights Era racism. This really struck a chord with me. I'm drafting an essay entitled "Barack Obama's Rehtoric of Inclusion" to pinpoint how he is reshaping common language usages - the "universal" we, the "Yes we can" chant, and the frank discussion of race in his speech following the Rev. Wright fall-out - along with his bi-racial identity to create a new way of speaking of, understanding, and (most importantly) addressing policy to fit the current state of race relations.

The other moment took place in my own seminar on Empathy and Activism. Laura and John set up an excellent model for discussion, and it really engaged the audience. We were divided into subgroups, and each member presented about one or two minutes on their individual papers before turning to a summary of the subgroup discussion held via email before the conference. From there, each subgroup posed to the larger group a question that emerged from their discussion. For ten minutes, we as a seminar struggled with each of these questions. Finally, at the end of the subgroup conversations and questions, we opened it up to the audience at large. The room was full and the conversation was lively and engaged. Some of the ideas that came out of that larger discussion, especially a discussion of agonism in the model of Chantal Mouffe, will impact my future work and thinking. That we should create not unity, but a space for dissent is a crucial idea for theatre (and theatre scholarship).

Election Reflections

With the election only eight days away, I've been considering a point I raised in my El Vez paper for ASTR. In it, I state:

Organized ruling blocs attempt to rearticulate the social and cultural landscape in emotional and affective terms, evacuating from them the potential for real political engagement. As cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg submits in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, “precisely by repoliticizing and re-ideologizing all of the social relations and cultural practices of everyday life, the new conservatism is effectively depoliticizing a large part of the population. It is creating a ‘demilitarized zone’ within everyday life through a series of ‘strategies’ directed at the national popular,” (259). Thus when Sarah Palin sneers at the community activism of Barack Obama and applauds herself, on the basis of her hockeymomdom, for her “real” American political work, she erases a potent site of democratic political action (community organizing) and politicizes an emotionally constructed identity (hockey mom) that in fact offers no possibility for involvement. Being-like replaces doing.

The revelations that the highest paid member of Palin's staff is a make-up artist and that her wardrobe drained $150,000 from the RNC coffers raise an interesting point about Palin's role in this election. While much has been made of the price tag and how this distances her from her own hockey mom image, I don't think this is the real issue. Based on my experience growing up in an elite Minnesota suburb, hockey moms can and do spend a pretty penny on their wardrobes. Hockey is an expensive sport. Though I can nostalgically remember neighborhood boys (girls didn't play hockey in those days) playing pick-up games on the pond in our backyard, in reality the equipment, the ice time, and the fees for playing in leagues all add up. There is a status attached to playing hockey, just as there is status attached to funding hockey - and hockey moms often participate in the competitive consumption that surround the sport.

What I wish I was reading more of, then, is not about her distance from Joe Six Pack (or the Joe du jour, Joe the Plumber), but about her distance from feminism. If the highest paid member of your staff is there to make you look pretty - rather than, say, to educate you on foreign policy - then it is very clear what your role in the campaign is: to be the prop woman whose being-like (glamorous eye candy) replaces any sense of doing (actually helping to administrate and guide policy (or run the Senate, as Palin seems to believe)). Thus the political power of the Vice Presidency is evacuated. Which, maybe, is along the lines of what the framers thought, although that's a different inquiry entirely. My point is that we have a woman on the ticket who spouts everyday appeal and, at times, feminist sensibilities, and yet she is a woman who ultimately was chosen by the RNC precisely because she does not threaten patriarchy. At the same time, she distracts and detracts from real political engagement; when she asks, "Who is Barack Obama?" she redirects policy debate into identity.

I don't mean to vilify Palin as the creator of this strategy. Though she is a participant, she is not the originator. I do, however, believe that affective notions of identity and lifestyle are crucial elements of contemporary consumer culture. They are used to sell products, politics, and culture. Which is why I am so passionate about studying it; we need to find modes of resistance to consumer culture if we are to regain actual power.

Conference Planner Elect

After an exciting ATHE conference, I unanimously became the Dramaturgy Focus Group's Conference Planner Elect. I'm very honored to have been elected to this position and am looking forward to more excellent conferences with strong showings from the Dramaturgs.

I also joined the Membership and Marketing Commitee and ATDS.

Irony is the New Empathy

I'm thrilled at the possibilities for exploration in my latest work on El Vez, The Mexican Elvis.  I've been invited to participate in the 2008 ASTR Seminar "Unsettling Intentions: Activism and the Limits of Empathy." I feel like this paper will not only add an interesting voice to the discussion of this seminar, but will also help me deepen my exploration of the art of El Vez.  Below is the abstract I submitted:

On the “Campaign Trail” with The Mexican Elvis, Irony is the New Empathy: Constructing Alliances through the Distance Between

Mounting a fictional Presidential campaign as El Vez, The Mexican Elvis, the El Vez 4 Prez tour marries rock show bravado to political theatre. Framed as a Town Hall meeting in which candidate El Vez (backed by the Lovely Elvettes and the Memphis Mariachis) fields debate questions from concerned citizens and answers them with song, the performance successfully voices progressive political sentiments precisely because it uses irony and humor – rather than empathy – as its mode of engagement. Though empathy should facilitate a “feeling with” another, it can dangerously slip into a “subject-centered key” (Doris Sommer) wherein solipsism masked as connection simultaneously objectifies the other and erases all inequalities in a wave of universal understanding. This paper will explore how El Vez uses irony to foreground the distance between subject positions in order to prevent such colonizing acts that limit the efficacy of empathy. Rather, by marking the imperfect fit of alterity, El Vez disallows the easy equivalencies of empathy in favor of more productive connections that bridge difference rather than elide it. Because it does not prescribe a “feeling with” each other as either a starting point or an end goal, El Vez’s use of irony expands his message to reach his diverse audience base. Irony in an El Vez concert allows for the revelation of alliances across multiple subject positions to create an ethical community enacted through thought, reflection, and rock and roll.

Assessment/Reflection

Having wrapped up two shows, finished the final draft of the dissertation, and successfully defended, I've finally had the time to assess my recent work and reflect a bit on the process of making theatre and conducting theatre scholarship.

Art (and art scholarship) is work. It is hard work. But it also a creative process. And the very frustrating reality of work + creativity is that the creative aspect is much more unreliable than the work aspect. That is, the muse only strikes occasionally, and the reality is that to get a show staged or a dissertation written, the worker has to get up every day and rehearse, or write, to put in the labor. And in a long and drawn out process like SDD and the dissertation, that labor greatly outweighs the inspirational moments. The key to handling this fact is learning how to best use that labor, to use it to bolster the creative, rather than a) letting it completely overrun the joy of artistic creation or b) leaving those moments of vision isolated within a muddy field.

To very honestly assess SDD, what we were very good at was the creative expansion of our vision. Where the labor should have been applied, however, was in editing out ideas that didn't work. Instead, we worked exceedingly hard to cram too many ideas in, to make mediocre ideas fit our concept, to attempt to realize amazing ideas on a nothing budget. 90% of our energy was wasted on work that was, quite frankly, not going to work.

With Room 17C, I was able to scale down the ideas to a very workable size. By focusing on movement as a site of meaning, I came closer to the precision I felt was lacking with SDD. And yet I realize that I was a few steps shy of the creative vision I needed for that piece.

Thank goodness, then, for the dissertation. What encourages me most about the dissertation is that I have continued excitement and enthusiasm for my research sites. I haven't said it all, in fact I have barely started to speak on these ideas.