2009 ASTR Conference

Angela Pao, Dept. of Comparative Literature, Indiana University – Bloomington
In this paper, I will revisit questions regarding ethnic and national identity raised by the work of the National Asian American Theatre Company through a consideration of their productions of Falsettoland (1998 and 2007) and Leah’s Train (2009), two works with central Jewish characters and themes.  [...]

Jean O’Hara, Department of Theatre, York University, Toronto

“We produce Asian-Canadian playwrights because no one else is doing it. And our stories are just as important and relevant as the rest of Canada. We’re here to remain visible and present in the Canadian diaspora. So that people can go, ‘ah, that’s Canadian, too’.”  These [...]

Christine Mok, Theater and Performance Studies, Brown University

In their introduction to Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino describe the constant journeys of the title for this seminar, as a “continuous narrative of Asian American entry, reentry, expulsion, remigration and movement across [...]

Eng-Beng Lim, Department of English, Michigan State University

This paper considers the intersection of postcolonial and Asian American performance in a spatial configuration that I call “transcolonial borderzones.” The performance at the center of my analysis, “Details Cannot Body Wants” (Singapore 1992, New York 1997), a one-woman show by Peranakan (Straits Chinese)-American performance artist-scholar [...]

Seunghyun Hwang, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University

As a 1.5 generation Asian American playwright, Young Jean Lee has added her unique voice to American theatre about Asian diaspora since 2002.1 As a professional playwright and director, she has produced plays about multicultural, gender, and racial experiences in society. An experimental recent work, The [...]

Gad Guterman, Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center

It might just be that America is no more than “a faraway place in the mind—a piece of dream that scatters like gold dust in the wind.”1 So the character of Chin Gung in Genny Lim’s Paper Angels tells us.  For a migrant population, such an illusory destination [...]

ChuYoung Chon, Ohio State University
To the Korean-Americanf playwright/director Young Jean Lee, the racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact. She is disturbed by White Americans who evade the subject or declare their innocence even when exercising racism. Such “cluelessness” of White people has motivated Lee to devise plays specifically on racial identity politics. Given [...]

Julian Cha, Theatre Department, UCLA
In the heart of what is known as “Thai Town,” located in the multi-ethnic landscape of Hollywood, California, there exists a seemingly run-of-the-mill, nondescript Thai restaurant called The Palms Thai Restaurant. However, what separates this establishment from other ubiquitous Thai restaurants in the multi-cultural hodgepodge of Los Angeles is a man [...]

Angela Ahlgren, University of Texas at Austin

In a spoken word piece titled “Reaching,” Su-Yoon Ko details her experiences performing in school “outreach” gigs in Minnesota while she was a member of Mu Daiko, the taiko drum ensemble associated with Theater Mu, an Asian American theatre company in Minneapolis. She describes how, as the group [...]

Catherine Young
City University of New York Graduate Center

Raymond Knapp contends that “musicals have helped us envision ourselves as a nation of disparate peoples, functioning within a world of even more extreme differences.” Knapp also asserts that “arguably the central theme in American musicals” is the urge to “define America.” [...]

Korey Rothman
South Carolina Washington Semester Program

In 1928 Paul Robeson famously shocked London audiences when he changed the lyrics to “Ole Man River” to “Show a little spunk and you land in jail,” not knowing that “spunk” was slang for semen. As global boundaries shrink and musical markets become more international, moments like Robeson’s [...]

Ellen Peck
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1947 effort, Allegro, came on the heels of two phenomenal successes, Oklahoma! and Carousel. Its record-breaking box office advance of $750,000 – the largest in history up to that point – testified to the high expectations Allegro carried with it. But while Oklahoma! and [...]

Sam O’Connell
Northwestern University
Released in 2003 as a 10‐song concept album, Neil Young’s “musical novel” Greendale tells the story of three generations of the Green Family as their way of life is threatened in the fictional, eponymous California town at the hands of political corruption, pollution, and crime. Since its release, this story has since been [...]

Erika Hughes
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This essay examines national and cultural identity in the children’s musical Ab heute heißt du Sara [From today you are called Sara] alongside Inge Deutschkron’s life and work on tolerance education in the German public sphere. First produced by the GRIPS Theater of Berlin in January 1989, the play follows the life [...]

Barbara Grossman
Tufts University

In Mel Brooks’s madcap musical romp The Producers, impresario Max Bialystock, once the “King of Broadway,” has just produced his latest flop: a musical version of Hamlet called Funny Boy. Desperate to claw his way back to the top, or at least to turn a profit once again, Max has an epiphany [...]

Laura Farrell-Wortman
University of Arizona
Following in the footsteps of the mega-musicals of the 1980s and 1990s, the dance production Riverdance appeared on the global theatre scene in 1995, and was marketed as a pop culture phenomenon. The show has since become synonymous with Irish culture. Riverdance’s undeniable influence as a cultural product for Ireland, both at [...]

Michelle Dvoskin
University of Texas, Austin
Performances of the past offered in musical theatre have typically been understood as, at best, nostalgic representations of a past stripped of its complexity, and their visions of “America” seen as similarly simplistic. In my work, however, I argue that musical theatre is, in [...]

Zachary Dorsey,
St. Lawrence University
Choreographer/director Bob Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast,” a three-and-a-half minute dance routine performed by Gwen Verdon and two other dancers in June of 1969 on The Ed Sullivan Show, has gone viral, demonstrating that contemporary technology and new fan-based practices have altered the well-rehearsed destinies of musical theatre products (out-of town try-outs, [...]

Lisa Wolford Wylam
York University

Art as Vehicle is a domain of performance research developed over the past 23 years at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. This praxis differs from more conventional forms of theatre in that its primary aim is not to create an experience for the reception of [...]

Paul Thelen
Northwestern University

This paper explores the realist performance practices used to produce “courtroom dramas” on and off the theatrical stage. The courtroom remains a place where truthful performances still matter, however, what qualifies as a truthful performance varies. Further, one of the unsettling aspects of certain courtroom performances is that what appears to be [...]

Kirsten Pullen
Texas A&M University

During the Classical Hollywood era (roughly 1930s-1960s), realist film acting is most often understood as the purview of male actors (such as Brando and Dean) and as an acting technique used in serious drama (A Streetcar Named Desire, Giant). Realist acting, however, was taught in the studio schools and used by [...]

James Lange
University of Calgary
Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell’s Alan’s Wife shocked audiences and critics in 1893 with its brutally realistic depiction of infanticide and its refusal to demonize a mother who kills her newborn baby. The intense debate in the press about the play made it an important theatrical event in 1893. Unfortunately, like the [...]

Donna Kornhaber
University of Texas, Austin

For all of the bold themes and disquieting subject matter of their plays, the theatrical praxis of contemporary dramatists like Neil LaBute and Conor McPherson has never proved particularly controversial. Rather, both figures and others like them have existed within the seemingly “safe” performative realm of normative theatrical realism. Translated [...]

Beth Hoffman
George Mason University

Since its inception in 1984, the veteran British experimental company Forced Entertainment has taken pains to define itself as the antithesis of the “new writing” tradition long exemplified by the kitchen sink realism of John Osborne and the New Wave. Instead of arrogantly “representing” reality in a naively transparent way, Forced [...]

James Harding
University of Mary Washington

Examples of theatre taking a metacritical turn and thinking about itself are easy to find. More difficult to locate are examples of what one might call a metacritical realism, a kind of realism which my paper will argue is uniquely (though not exclusively) configured in theatre that recounts actual historical [...]

J. Ellen Gainor
Cornell University
When we read the phrase “Socialist Realism,” those of us who work in theatre studies might immediately assume that we are in the realm of the Brecht/Lukács debates, and considering dramatic texts based on the “boy meets tractor” school of playwriting. However, as debates within critical theory have shown, categories of cultural [...]

Christin Essin
University of Arizona
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Collection, housed at the United States Library of Congress, contains a series of photographs documenting Injunction Granted (1936), a Living Newspaper that dramatized debates around unionized labor in the Depression-era economy. Production shots reveal minimalist staging designed to showcase a large, ensemble cast hired through federal funding. [...]

Lindsay Brandon-Hunter
University of California, Los Angeles
The advent of technologies of mediatization and their incorporation into live performance practices disturb traditional notions of the “real” and of authenticity. Given the centrality of notions of the real and the authentic to the structures of realist performance, and to the training methods for realist acting techniques, performances [...]

Andrew Bielski
Independent Scholar
This paper, which explores the notion of radical theatrical mimesis, takes as its immediate point of departure the late nineteenth-century pamphlet war between the actors Henry Irving and Benoît-Constant Coquelin, respective representatives of the so-called emotionalist and anti-emotionalist schools of acting. While appropriately invoking Diderot, whom Coquelin championed, William Archer’s contemporary reduction of [...]

Elaine Aston
Lancaster University
I come from a generation of feminist theatre scholars that argued realism as ‘deadly’ ­­– as a repressive and damaging form that objectified and silenced women in a ‘prison house’ of male-centred, patriarchal interests. Coming back to realism ‘after feminism’, however, I propose a feminist re-engagement with realism in order to explore how [...]

Thomas Postlewait
School of Drama, University of Washington, Seattle
Abstract: Marvin Carlson’s most recent book, Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2009), reveals the ways that contemporary German directors (e.g., Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Claus Peymann, Frank Castorf, Andrea Breth, Thomas Ostermeier) draw upon [...]

George Panaghi
Graduate Center, CUNY
Abstract: The global hegemony of English as the universal language of commerce, science, and technology has created the illusion that the entire world is now available in translation to those who have learned English, either as first or as second language. In the field of theatre history, while the general curriculum [...]

Iris Smith Fischer
University of Kansas
Abstract: I propose a revised and condensed version of my chapter for Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009. In this paper I argue that Carlson’s attention to the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce demonstrates the value of semiotics for theatre study and analysis. [...]

Eszter Szalczer
State University of New York, Albany
Abstract: August Strindberg’s diverse oeuvre embodies a quintessentially modernist sensibility that helped transform the shape of Western theatre. His pioneering work deeply impacted both playwriting and theatrical production from the earliest avant-garde experiments to today. A restless spirit of self-searching and experimentation made it possible [...]

Gay Gibson Cima
Georgetown University
Abstract: In his Callaway Prize-winning /The Haunted Stage /(Michigan 2001), Marvin Carlson distinguishes theatre from the other arts by the unique way in which it operates as a memory machine. While concert-goers, devotees of art museums, and readers of literature routinely confront a new and different example of the /familiar/, theater [...]

Virginia Scott, Emerita
University of Massachusetts, Amhers
Abstract: I propose to look at the plays that Dancourt wrote to feature his 
family at the turn of the 18th century, especially those that were written for
his very young daughters, two junior soubrettes, who sang, danced, and
undoubtedly seduced the audience (from the stage, of course). I will also
 assess [...]

Claire Sponsler
University of Iowa
Abstract: Words have long been a central focus of Marvin Carlson’s scholarship, in ways that can seem contrarian given the preoccupations of theatre history. While drama is most often thought of as a mimetic visual medium, as one of the earliest English terms to describe drama—shew—suggests, it depends just as heavily [...]

Katrina Bondari
University of Kansas
Abstract:  When the Acropolis receives attention in the classical Greek plays, it serves as a synecdoche, or part for the whole representation, of Athens’ power. The playwrights use the Acropolis to discuss  Athens through the context of the play. The references to the Acropolis in the plays call attention to its actual [...]

Shannon Rose Riley
The US Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was implemented through the Works Progress Administration, which had been organized by Congress on April 8, 1935 as a Depression era relief program as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” The goal of the FTP was to develop a national theatre that would be, according to [...]

Jiayun Zhuang
Huiyi (Remember), a performance combining documentary and theater, an almost-stagnant, never-ending, and seemingly-trivial inquiry into and reflection on the memories of the Cultural Revolution and the socialist everyday life of the PRC, was staged by the Living Dance Studio at Beijing’s Caochangdi Workstation on October 1, 2008—the national day of the PRC. The entire [...]

Ioana Szeman
This paper focuses on street protests and strikes by the theatre workers’ union in Romania in 2008 and 2009, events that opened up heated debates about the role of theatre in society, the condition of the actor and the division of labor in the theatre and reclaimed the socialist imaginary. These public performances challenged [...]

Khai-Thu Nguyen
My paper traces how the conflict between national and regional narratives of Vietnamese identity plays out through the differences between aesthetic theories of cải lương melodrama in the South and the Vietnamese Communist Party’s restrictive policy of socialist realism.  The syncretic form of melodrama cải lương, born during French colonialism in southern Vietnam, mixed [...]

Shannon Jackson
The work of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset currently enjoys artworld caché.  Born in Sweden and Norway respectively, Elmgreen and Dragset have worked together since 1995; in 1997, they left Scandanavia to relocate to Berlin.  Initially co-creating performances and then moving into ever larger sculptures and installations under the theme of “Powerless Structures,” their work [...]

Daniel Cuonz
Bertolt Brech’s theory and practice of the epic theater is often referred to as one of the most influential manifestations of socialist ideals’ in the history of theater. At the present state of global capitalism, one specific aspect of Brecht’s plays and of his theoretical texts appears to be more prevailing than ever: the [...]

Xiaomen Chen
This paper addresses the session’s theme of socialist imagination in global theater and performance with a focus on the political culture in the 1950s and1960s when China allied with the Soviet Union, a problematic “socialist brother” of Maoist China. This paper starts with a 2006 drama Qu Qiubai, which depicts the title hero’s life [...]

Michael H. Bodden
The modern theatre work of the left-wing Indonesian cultural organization, Lekra, has been mainly vilified and dismissed as forgettable propaganda. Yet, in fact, Lekra’s theatre work has hardly been studied seriously to date, leaving a large gap in our knowledge of cultural work from 1950-65. Both of these facts are the result of [...]

Adrian Curtin
Graduate Student, Northwestern University
French symbolist theatre has typically been regarded (sometimes derogatorily) as a theatre of mood and atmosphere, of vagueness, stillness, suggestion, and of the so-called “spiritual” realm. Indeed, symbolism, in line with traditional conceptions of “high” modernism, has largely been treated as an autonomous, rarefied movement whose vanguardist credentials are questionable. [...]

Nathan Hedman
Graduate Student, Northwestern University
The task of this paper will be to articulate a temporal expansion of entwined theatrical and philosophical modernisms embedded in Kierkegaard’s Repetition (Gjentagelsen 1843)—a novella explicitly pursuing a performed repetition in the travel narrative of Constantine Constantius’ pilgrimage to Berlin’s Königstädter Theater. While several theatre scholars take repetition to be a [...]

Ju Yon Kim
Graduate Student, Stanford University
The growing body of research on the adoption of non-Western aesthetic practices and styles by European and American modernists is drawing an increasingly complex picture of the relationship between the cultural exchanges and appropriations of modernism and the material transactions and migrations of modernity. Performance, as a crucially embodied [...]

David Kornhaber
Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Austin
The influence of The Birth of Tragedy on the development of modern drama is well documented, but less regularly observed is the power Nietzsche’s seminal work had on the articulation of some of the [...]

Paige McGinley
Assistant Professor, Yale University
This essay brings a performance-studies approach to the 1937 modern dance and musical piece How Long Brethren?, which played on Broadway for 42 acclaimed performances. As the head of the Federal Dance Theatre, choreographer Helen Tamiris took on the Works Progress Administration’s mandate and provided employment for a great number of [...]

Glenn Odom
Assistant Professor, Rowan University
In Modernism and Performance Olga Taxidou argues that puppetry serves as an “experiment with the limitations of anthropomorphic and psychological representations” (10). This formulation of modernity relies on Western notions of the subject and Western modes [...]

Lisa Parkins
Visiting Assistant Professor, SUNY/Empire State College
Ephemeral in nature, cabaret performance was from its inception in fin de siècle France, an ironic and informal mode perfectly suited to express modernist movements. In Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), as in earlier incarnations of cabaret on the continent, performers found in this theatre of small [...]

Jeff Porter
Assistant Professor, University of Iowa
On October 30, 1938, listeners tuning into CBS Radio were greeted by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra, broadcast live from the Park Plaza in New York City. Minutes into “La Cumparasita,” a reporter interrupted the show to deliver an important announcement concerning a disturbance on the surface [...]

Karima A. Robinson
Assistant Professor, SUNY, Purchase
Jamaican choreographer Ivy Baxter developed her dance aesthetic in the 1950s during the process of decolonization. She based her choreography on the island’s African heritage and her Western training in ballet and modern dance. The narratives that Baxter performed demonstrate elements of resistance embodied in the sacred folk [...]

Dawn Tracey
Graduate Student, Northwestern University
In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist submitted that “[i]t is simply impossible for a human being to reach the grace of the jointed doll. Only a god can duel with matter on this level, and it is [...]

Ryan Tvedt, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Informed by frustration with the overpowering tradition of the classical Russian writers and poets such as Pushkin and Tolstoy, the Russian futurists from 1913 on embraced a modernist artistic practice that used relatively new and prominent [...]

Sarah Guthu
Graduate Student, University of Washington, Seattle
In his adaptation of the classical Japanese Noh drama, William Butler Yeats engages gesture and the body to model the constitutive action of a new modernist, nationalist construct of Irish selfhood outside the bounds of English imperial order. If gesture functions as a sign of the failure of language, [...]

Jonathan Chambers
Associate Professor, Bowling Green State
In his foundational works in the field of death studies, Phillipe Ariés charts the advent of the modern attitude toward death. Variously termed “forbidden death” and “invisible death,” modern death for Ariés constitutes a complete refutation of pre-modern presuppositions regarding mortality. Whereas death was once ubiquitous, communal, and acknowledged, [...]

Kris Salata
Associate Professor, Florida State University
One of the key concepts leading to understanding Grotowski’s project as a whole, initiation has generated surprisingly little interest in theatre scholarship. Mircea Eliade defines initiation as a combination of rites and oral teachings aimed at a “basic change in existential condition,” or in other words, a process of becoming [...]

Ben Spatz
Ph.D. Candidate, CUNY
In this paper I would like to consider a possible intersection of the studio and the academy in the field of performance research. Performance research, as I understand it, is the sustained investigation, through doing, of a defined area of performance practice. As such, performance research has always existed and does not [...]

Michael St. Clair
Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University
In 2008, funded by a research grant from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, a team of collaborators and I built the PlaySound, an adult-sized interactive musical playground consisting of a teeter-totter, a merry-go-round, and a set of swings appending from a climbing structure. PlaySound uses sensors [...]

Megan Todd
Independent Scholar and Artist
Dancer and dance anthropologist Katherine Dunham once suggested that through dance we can understand many things about society and that dancers are astutely positioned to do so. Dunham observed that in industrialized societies there is a “growing lack of integrative tendency” and a “fundamental disharmony” as we humans are bombarded daily [...]

Maiya Murphy
Ph.D. Candidate, UC San Diego
Practice as research has always faced the need to justify itself in the academic context. By privileging embodied knowledge, it implies that there is something “better” or at least different in this kind of knowledge than in that of the intellect, traditionally supported by academia. Twentieth century physically-based performance pedagogies [...]

Daniel Mroz
Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa
This paper will present the proposed curriculum of Les Ateliers du corps, a three-year research studio devoted to the sustained training of contemporary performers in Ottawa, Canada. The curriculum is comprised of traditional Chinese ‘body technologies’ drawn from martial arts, restorative discipline and religious practice which have been combined and [...]

Matthew Moore
Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University
It has become a truism that the essential characteristic of performance is its liveness. Yet, as the field of Performance Studies expands to encompass all acts of art happening, the definition of this vital term deteriorates. Through the application of a phenomenological methodology, I will define two kinds of [...]

Irma Mayorga, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Florida State University
In 2003, inspired by the epidemic rise of obesity in working-class Mexican American communities and time spent as a community organizer/activist, I sought to create a performance piece that described the material conditions of Mexican American lives through the organizing metaphor of la panza. Technically, panza is the Spanish [...]

Virginie Magnat, Assistant Professor University of British Columbia, Okanagan
Co-authored by Virginie Magnat, Nicole Cormaci, Lara Haworth and Cathy Stubington
I am proposing to co-author a paper with the three graduate students involved in my project Meetings with Remarkable Women/You are someone’s daughter. I have obtained two research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [...]

Daniel Larlham
PhD Candidate, Columbia University Doctoral Program Subcommittee on Theatre
“Mimesis” has become something of a bad word in contemporary theatre and performance studies, linked as it has been with a reductive view of the theatre as a medium limited to representation and/or reproduction. This paper returns to mimesis terminology’s original center of gravity in [...]

Chloe Johnston:
Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University
In March of 2009, The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM), a Chicago-based theatre collective, arrived at Arcosanti, an urban laboratory in the high desert of Arizona to create “Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment.” The original performance was based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Manhattan Project, and the work [...]

Claire Canavan
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Texas, Austin
The role of the actor’s creativity in performance training can vary dramatically from method to method. For example, in my paper for last year’s conference, I argued that in Viewpoints training, the actor is conceptualized as a collaborative creative artist whose energies are directed toward the group, not as [...]

Peter A. Campbell
Assistant Professor, Rampo College, NJ
In my work as a writer/director on the project Yellow Electras, which was produced in July 2008 at the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator in New York City, I attempt to use experiential praxis to interrogate the use and effects of media in live theatre productions. I am especially interested in [...]

Bruce Barton
Associate Professor, University of Toronto
What happens when an actor begins to sing … or cry … or disappear?
In the 2008/09 academic year, the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Study of Drama (Drama Centre) introduced Practice-Based Research (PBR) as a core degree requirement in its Master’s program. All MA students now conceive, design, [...]

James B. Ashby
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto
When describing the current state of puppet theatre in Canada, one may be tempted to use a metaphor related to the concept of arrival. Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes and Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia are not only two of the most famous contemporary Canadian puppet theatre companies but [...]

Kris Salata, Florida State University
Theorized and analyzed in the discussion on mediatized-versus-live performance, liveness has yet to receive scholarly focus as a very special quality in the art of acting, one sought by Stanislavski and Grotowski. A closer reading of these two practical researchers’s texts reveals that while liveness resists methods and techniques, it [...]

Ken Cerniglia
Disney Theatrical Productions

Disney stories and characters have delighted international audiences for more than eight decades, but as The Walt Disney Company has sought to reach new markets in the twenty-first century, Disney’s live theatrical productions have served a unique and important ambassadorial function.  Twelve years ago this November, Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion [...]