Viva Christmas!

I'm gearing up to see El Vez's Viva Christmas tour on December 18. What a perfect antidote to the Holiday Blahs - a new show backed by Los Straightjackets and sure to be filled with humor, political critique, and rock and roll. I am excited to see how this new show gets me thinking in new ways.

I just sent off an article on El Vez's use of spectacle, irony, and entertainment. In it, I condense a lot of the arguments I made in my dissertation, suggesting that El Vez is able to pierce through stupefying Debordian spectacle by picking up the ultimate spectacular joke - Elvis. Elvis becomes the common access point to a show that radically revises the political, social, and consumerist tropes that surround us. By embracing spectacle, humor, and entertainment, El Vez effectively flips our encounters with pop culture, allowing us to critically assess prejudice and injustice through a thoroughly pleasurable performance event. More news if it gets published.

Dramaturgy Workshop, RUR Have Come and Gone

It has been a very busy past few months.

I had a lovely time working with the students of ASU in our two-part dramaturgy workshop. An excellent and excited group of students participated - they were so engaged and had so many questions for me. It's exciting to know that dramaturgy strikes a chord of interest among students. There's at least a few budding dramaturgs in Tempe doing interesting work and learning more and more about the field.

R.U.R. at Caltech was extremely successful. It was a joy to stage this play - there's so much in it that comes to life when staged and not solely read. Kudos to our actors and artistic team. We completely transformed Dabney Lounge into a working theatre space and created a funny, yet poignant telling of the story.

It was really wonderful to immerse myself in Karel Capek's world - both the fictional world of the play and the historical one of the Czechoslovak Republic. His commitment to democracy comes through in his essays, and his insouciant wit make the reading delightful and touching.

Next up: Pasadena Babalon by George Morgan.

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).