Dramaturg on the Road

I am very pleased to announce that in October, I will be traveling to Arizona State University to teach dramaturgical methodologies to first-year grad students in Dr. Tamara Underiner's Research Methods course. This is an exciting opportunity: I will get to develop a much condensed introduction to dramaturgy that I can then expand into a larger syllabus for future coursework.

I am also going to begin work with TACIT (Theatre Arts at the California Institute of Technology) in a more formal capacity, as a producer/dramaturg. I will be both producing and dramaturging the fall show, Karel Capek's R.U.R. (in a new translation!). The dramaturg end is much like what I did with Life of Galileo - production dramaturgy with a dash of dramaturgical suppllement-as-outreach thrown in. For the producer role, I will seek out donations in innovative ways. What exactly does that mean? I have a few ideas that I am developing, things that I hope will situate TACIT (and theatre, more generally) at the intersection between science and culture. More details to come.

Works-in-Progress

I have just seen the draft of the new LMDA Review and look forward to reading the final copy when it is published in the next few weeks. My conversation with installation dramaturg Lisa Arnold appears as the final article in the Review. It was great fun to collaborate with Lisa again, but more importantly, our discussion was informative to us, and we hope to the larger dramaturgical public as well. Lisa and I have worked together on many projects, but rarely have we ever sat down (virtually, as we did this all by email) to discuss our specific methodologies and how they differ with the very disparate work that we do. Drafting this article provided insight into her process, and it also allowed me to reflect on my own work and why I do what I do the way that I do. Dramaturgs, check it out!

I've also just returned from ATHE - always invigorating. I am beginning work on another article involving my work at Caltech. I would like to take some time with this piece, so that I can move it from focusing specifically on Life of Galileo, the piece I recently dramaturged, into a larger discussion of the role of a liberal arts education at a technical institute. I believe that the dramaturgical materials I prepared for our production served as a sort of outreach for the performing arts. I'm looking forward to starting up collaboration with Caltech again in a few weeks. I'm also planning to propose a roundtable discussion on our work at TACIT (Theatre Arts at the California Institute of Technology) for next year's ATHE in Los Angeles.

An Interesting Experiment

I've decided to undertake a Herculian task: to re-read Brockett. The great tome, which as a graduate student I found to be so heavy with information as to become soul-crushing, still stands as the archival Bible of sorts, though seemingly every few years someone creates a new theatre history book that seeks to rival its dominance. I'm curious to see if, with PhD in hand, the book becomes something new to me. I also want to determine if I can find through this experience a new pedagogy, a way of teaching theatre history so that it becomes alive and vital.

Right now, the biggest hurdle to this experiment is finding where I've stowed the book. During the dissertation writing and the dramaturging I've done of late, I have pulled it out on more than one occasion, just to check a name or review a snippet of history to make sure it's as I remember it. The problem is that I tend to leave my Brockett carelessly lying about after I've exhausted it or it's exhausted me. Then something happens - a house guest arrives, a party ensues, I rebel against the mountains of paper that clutter my world - and I shove it somewhere out of sight. This happens with some frequency. Other books get carefully reshelved in the haphazard yet workable library system I keep in my head (fiction here, theory there, plays in the bedroom closet, loosely grouped by topic or genre and sometimes even alphabetized), but Brockett always gets shoved somewhere nonsensical.

Case in point, I pulled my Dukore off of the shelf where it always is - in the back row of the scholarly works section, next to Foucault perhaps, hidden behind the works on consumer culture theory and democratic negotiation I find more pleasurable, and thus more useful. But there he was, waiting for me patiently, knowing I would want to supplement my Brockett with him.

Where are you Brockett? And what will you hold for me when I find you and once again crack your cover?

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.