Praxis

Playing Diaspora as Sidney Bechet: A Meditation on Performance as Research

2018-05-24T10:21:37-04:00

In 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.

How Moment Work Leads to Narrating with the Elements of the Stage

2018-05-24T10:21:37-04:00

In 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.

Polyvocal Playwriting and the Evolution in New Play Development: Examples from the EU Collective Play Project

2018-05-24T10:21:37-04:00

Discusses 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.

A Strategic Call for All-Female Production Spaces

2018-05-24T10:21:37-04:00

Those 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.

Why New Plays?

2018-05-24T10:21:37-04:00