Category: ARTS & THEATER

  • Discovering Contemporary Theater by Italians of African Descent

    Discovering Contemporary Theater by Italians of African Descent

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    A panel discussion and reading of excerpts of plays by Italians of African descent.

    Featuring:
    Nalini Vidoolah Mootoosamy, playwright, The Foreigner’s Smile
    Margherita Laera, translator, University of Kent
    Elena Bellina, NYU
    Isabella Livorni, NYU
    Laura Caparrotti, Artistic Director, KIT – Kairos Italy Theater

    In English.

    Part of the series Black Italia
    In collaboration with KIT – Kairos Italy Theater

    Black Italia is a series of events (book discussions, theatrical performances, film screenings, lectures) sponsored by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in collaboration with NYU’s Department of Italian Studies. It aims to promote conversations on the intersections of race, identity and migration in Italy. Conceived in connection with courses taught in the Department of Italian Studies, Black Italia revisits the format launched by Casa Italiana’s Virtual Salons: Discourses on Black Italia, held virtually during the pandemic, by bringing together artists and scholars in order to address questions about race and racialization across Italian history and its multifaceted diasporic geography.

    About HowlRound TV

    HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.



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  • Automation, Slavery, Monsters, and Misery in Search of the Whole

    Automation, Slavery, Monsters, and Misery in Search of the Whole

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    Maud Acheampong: … because what ignoring the slave as a technology in history allows is for the iPhone to continue to use slave labor in the making of those technologies. Because the tech industry has successfully kind of decoupled themselves from the sociopolitical world by framing themselves as a necessary good, as a necessary component of everyday life, as something that is more important than perhaps the experiences and the lives of people in the global south.

    Tjaša Ferme: Welcome to Theatre Tech Talks, AI, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide.

    Maud, I am so excited to speak with you. Your work is so unique and so delicious, and you have such a fresh new perspective that I can’t wait to ask you more questions to wrap my mind around the universe of you and of your work.

    Maud Acheampong is a Ghanaian American new media performance artist interested in soft technologies like misery, ugliness, nostalgia, and the way they manifest in our digital ecologies for better or worse. Through Dainty Funk, their digital avatar and drag persona, Maud takes on monstrous forms and attempts to chronicle these assumed human phenomena with a digital lens.

    Wow. Yeah, like I said, so unique and it seems like your work is kind of like at the convergence of performance art, of technology, of philosophy, of cultural and social theories, but at the same time, I have caught in your video that you actually studied bioengineering. And then you went into politics and government. Tell me a little bit about this journey. Where did all of this come from?

    Maud: Yes. Oh, my gosh. I began creating artistic content in 2020. Prior to that, I had been a part of a lot of spoken word communities, especially at my alma mater, University of Maryland. I was participating in slam poetry specifically, which has intentional emphasis on performance and your interaction with an audience when you do poetry. But as you mentioned, I had begun my secondary education as a bioengineering major. Part of that was because of my background as a first generation Ghanian American citizen and the culture around what is possible for immigrants to do and make money. And so I had believed the lie that to be an artist, you had to be a struggling artist. And it was only in the last couple of years that I feel like to a certain extent, the creative spirit that I had been stifling was like, I have to get out somehow. I will not stay silent any longer.

    And so in 2020 during the pandemic, where most of us had too much time with ourselves, I had finally had the space and time and room to stretch and breathe and play really with what it would mean to be an artist. And Dainty Funk was born through that pontification and thinking around art making. I think that despite my change, moving from bioengineering to government politics to now an artist concerned with digital ecologies, I’m bringing all of those experiences with me in my work.

    I feel especially having a background in government politics and the kind of political nature of all things that we interact with in our world, was a really important distinction for me as an artist and always being directly, intentionally in conversation with the political in my work. And then this kind of relationship to public health, my understanding of the body and the way it manifests in public health spaces, I think helps me to translate the ways that the digital world also affects our bodies in ways that we may not be super poised to understand or even think about or connect, that the digital world has a direct effect on our physical selves.

    And so I think it’s a testament to how even though maybe the thing that you’re doing currently doesn’t feel related to what you may want to do in the future, for me, I found all of the paths that I went down ultimately led me to this creative career that I’m starting to build for myself.

    Tjaša: Yeah, I’m so happy that you managed to find this courage and freedom to basically carve a space for yourself where your vast knowledge of government systems, politics, et cetera, is really the content and informing your performance art, but at the same time, you’re using so much of your creativity to your own satisfaction and obviously to a very compelling artistic body of work.

    Maud: Thank you.

    Tjaša: Yes, of course. I was so curious. So when I watch your things, I’m trying to figure out what this is. And I feel like this is not the performance art that we’re used to. It looks very different. It has this cinematic quality. Your performance is incredibly subtle and incredibly cinematic. It’s not like getting on an apple box and in some rageful way engaging or looking for an audience, looking to engage with an audience. Your makeup and your masks are super evolved. Your lighting is super cinematic. So I’m curious about the process of how you make things and how the content and the form meet each other and interact.

    Maud: I am very visually stimulated by a lot of… color, it’s really, really important to me. And I have a really intimate relationship with horror, specifically the seventies Italian cinema movement in horror, Suspiria by Dario Argento. That’s one of my favorite horror movies. House is also a Japanese horror, anyone is familiar with those two movies, I think they can see the parallels in terms of my color palettes in the work. I enjoy the kind of playfulness in those horror movies where the blood is too red and the windows are a stark neon blue, and the death scenes are very dramatic and unrealistic. And so I’m definitely using those kinds of techniques in the work. But I really appreciate the mention of subtlety because I also want to ground the performances to suspend the disbelief of the viewer. I’m really interested in the blurred line between our physical and digital worlds.

    And with the avatars and these characters, these monsters that I’m creating, I want the audience to believe their expressions to be truthful and authentic. And so the makeup ends up being such a powerful tool to make that delineation between characters. Instead of having to overemphasize a certain kind of performance tick, I can really concentrate on what that character looks like. And I really enjoy the medium of self-portrait, specifically turning the camera towards myself and becoming both the voyeur and the captured in that moment. I feel like I can go the farthest with myself, and you’ll never exhaust the medium of yourself. And so I think doing that publicly as well, exploring the selves that inhabit my artistic practice in public is something that’s super important and interesting to me. In terms of what the process looks like. My writing tends to be what happens first; I’ll have a poem or a couple of paragraphs from a script or even reading something that is kind of tying into the work. I then kind of develop a visual language after the written language. For me, the way that I’ve been able to elevate my skills is by committing to practicing very often. So during that period of time when I first started creating art in 2020, I was doing makeup looks almost every single day. I had the time to do that. I certainly do not have the time to do that now. I look back at that period of my life and I do not know how I managed to push out that much work, but I truly believe because of that intense skill building period, I can now count on my skills to create the images that I am imagining.

    Tjaša: So you say that you start with content, you first write it out. And is it that you look at a piece and say, you know what? I think that this is one person and then this is a different persona, or is it that you record a part of the piece in a particular persona and then all of a sudden you realize, or maybe you get bored and you say, I’m going to bring another character in. I need to change something up. So how do you mosaic different perspectives and different personas within one piece? Because your pieces are real one person show, they’re like an hour long or half an hour long. They’re substantial.

    Maud: Yeah. I think using one of my projects as an example could be helpful. A project I did last year, To Be Or Not To Be On Nostalgia, a large part of the work was based on a book by Svetlana Boym called Nostalgia, where she distinguishes between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia, restorative nostalgia being a desire to return to the past and reflective nostalgia being reflective relationship with the past. And so in the study, there is that emergent, already an emergent visual language that is embedded within the academic language of nostalgia, restorative being this kind of Soviet, “make America great again,” fascist kind of relationship to the past. There’s a visual stimulation that’s already embedded in that definition. And then reflective nostalgia being a kind of ode to memory and nostalgia, a care that leaves the past where it must be, in the past.

    And so from there, what happens in my mind is this kind of, what does that look like? How can I communicate those two ideas in a story or in a performance? And so what emerged from that was a look based on cyanotypes, which are these sun printed prints. You use the sun to make these prints, and they’re blue and white. And they have the ephemera of memory but in a softer, more reflective way, in the same way that I had felt or I could see in the definition of reflective nostalgia. And restorative nostalgia had this destructive kind of devilish, even childlike to a certain extent, feeling to it. And then I’m thinking of colors. I think restorative nostalgia in my head has a red, blood-red kind of feel or image or visual hue. And the reflective nostalgia has a more blue and white angelic kind of hue to it.

    And from there, the two characters are born. And often the poems are written in tandem with the visual language. And so, I do a lot of story boarding where I grab images from these movies that I enjoy, a lot of makeup campaigns from the nineties by Pat McGrath or Thierry Mugler, these fashion archival moments and kind of story boarding those in tandem with the writing of these poems.

    I think, yeah, there are times when I’ll be recording or in the middle of making a piece, and I’ll feel like I think there’s another person or another feeling here that needs to be conveyed more intentionally or more singularly with an entirely different persona or character. I think my process, I don’t want it to be strict. I want to feel like there’s room to stretch and change and grow. And I really think this is a saying that a lot of sculptures say where when they sculpt a piece, it’s them revealing something in the block of clay. And I really identify with that in my work as well, that these ideas are there already. I just have to kind of tease them out, and bring them into the foreground.

    Tjaša: I’m curious about your monsters. Are these your personal monsters? Are these mythological monsters? Are these monsters from the sheer resistance to our culture’s obsession with beauty and beauty standards?

    Maud: Yes, absolutely. I think the latter is something that I’m really interested in, beauty, desirability. Also, I’m interested in the construct of humanity, the idea that there is a way to be human. The existence of the tool of dehumanization implies that there’s also a humanization process that we must become human. And I think to a certain extent, the monsters are an attempt to reject, to opt out of humanity, to remind us to center the disfigured, the disabled, the monstrous among us, the people among us who are dehumanized and marginalized by this kind of hegemonic language around who is human and who is not, who is savage and who is not. And so I think I seek to embrace this kind of community framework where we center these people that are often on the margins and considered kind of subhuman in the western ideological framework. There is a quote, oh, I’m forgetting the author’s name, but it’s about fungi and the mycelium network and the kind of very technologically, almost advanced communication system of fungi.

    Tjaša: Yeah. Is it maybe Paul Stamets?

    Maud: Maybe, that sounds really familiar. It might be. And that kind of calling on us to reconnect with the natural world, to not see ourselves as separate from the natural world and to learn from it, to learn from the mycelium on what it means to be in community with one another. And I think to a certain extent, the construct of humanity elevates the human above the natural world or above monstrosity. The wolf, bear, the wild animal, they are slaves to their instincts. They don’t have the mind and the skill of the human. I think that sentiment has always felt like ostracizing. I think it separates us from the land, from learning from all of the creatures that live in the same world that we live in. And so I think the monsters are kind of calling on my audience to think about who they are beyond their humanity and what is left when you strip away that part of yourself and how do we come to a point where to be human is not the prerequisite for life, for the right to life, for community, really.

    Tjaša: This reminds me so much of Carolyn Elliot, who’s one of my favorite authors and her Existential Kink talking about taking on the whole experience, all of it. Even where we are failing and we’re imperfect and whatever it is, we just need to allow it, recognize it, allow it, and then enjoy it until it’s fully satiated so that it can become conscious and then integrated. Not for it to become beautiful, but for yourself to be whole, encapsulating the polarities and everything in between. And then she talks a lot about Alester Crowley. He was this incredible magician, had an incredible experience of channeling an incredible text, but at the same time, he took it on himself to be “the monster” and the one that people can criticize and ostracize to embody that in a society because even that brings in a lot of power and wisdom and beauty.

    Nothing is one way only. Everything that exists has these properties of the whole, and that’s how he tried to draw attention to what he was teaching. So this very much reminds me of that work, and I’m pretty immersed in this work because it’s made my life so much better. Do you know what I mean? A meditation on why do you like scarcity? Why do you engage in scarcity mentality until you realize that there’s something exciting about it, that it’s like a game. I grew up with Pippi Longstocking who was an explorer, and it was all about finding things on the street, and that’s never left me. So I think that a part of this excitement and need to be resourceful is a part of why in some way I have in the past or maybe still in some ways, enjoyed this game of scarcity.

    Maud: Absolutely.

    Tjaša: So love your monsters, and I think that the way you embody them, there’s also this beauty and serenity and purity in them. So this transcendent quality of everything being on an equal playing ground totally comes across.

    Maud: Thank you. I really love that, Crowley. Yeah, the idea that what humanity asks of us is to leave some part of the world at the door and to abandon that part of the world and opt in for a very specific, very small part of all that life has to offer. And so returning to the whole, returning to the community and all of the members of that community and remembering the conflict of the inanimate and animate world is completely constructed by many times capitalists, colonial powers, by powers that are interested in taking from the land. And in order to take from the land, you must separate yourself from it. You have to convince yourself that you are above it, that it is your divine right to take. And I think when you function in that scarcity, remembering that the world is not yours and how beautiful that is, it is a really freeing expansive experience. And I think the world, the universe tends to respond in kind. It tends to become friendlier, I think, when you are moving through the world in that way.

    Tjaša: I love what you said. Basically the West’s division of subject and object and how it’s the object is always, well, objectified and looked down upon. And this is not universal, of course. Recently I just read Jeremy Narby’s book, it’s called Intelligence in Nature. And it talks a lot about, he’s basically looking for nature’s intelligence/consciousness, and everybody’s sending him to Japan to go and talk to their researchers. And really he found out that everything hinges, whether we believe in the intelligence in nature, it hinges upon do we believe that the nature can be conscious or do we react to it, see it as an object, as an inanimate object that serves us?

    And so in Shintoism, there is belief. People make burials for their objects. Let’s say that have used a comb or a personal care object for a while, and then you want to separate from it. You would create a ritual, and then you would bury the object. How beautiful. So there is actually a lot of research, I’m sure it’s from other parts of the world as well, but specifically from Japan, a lot of research on butterflies, on slimes, on molds, on mycelium. And what seems to be the core of the research is how the intelligence works, meaning that there is a predisposition that nature is intelligence because we’re asking how it works, not is it there to begin with.

    Maud: Absolutely. You saying that, it sparks this kind of relationship that the West has with consumerism as well, that forces the human in the western context to also be unable to rend themselves away from the object. So the object is so integral to our identities, our lives, that there is a blurred line already between subject and object. But instead of that deference or the recognition of this intelligent nature, there is a kind of necessity almost to reject the consciousness of these inanimate objects in order to participate in the consumer culture. Because if you must part with your items in such a dedicated way, then it prevents you from mindlessly consuming. And you also have, instead of having a connection to the object, you’re connected to the consumption specifically, which is in itself a very different, often destructive relationship with objecthood.

    Tjaša: That’s right. We don’t look at objects as if they have agency. In order for us to satisfy our consumer needs, they just become a tool because if you perceive your objects that surround you as something that have soul, well, how many souls can you actually tend to, right? So if there’s just this endless chain of coming and going and no real relationship, well, I mean I think that’s probably where our emptiness comes from because you get satisfied by a relationship and communion. That’s what’s spiritual and that’s what really feeds humans. I am curious in your views on technology that you subverge, that you criticize, also that you use as your platform of your performance. In one of your pieces, you say that a slave is a technology. I love that. In one of our previous conversations, somebody said that a potato is a technology. So I would love to hear more about that.

    Maud: Yeah, I think I can speak especially in the western perspective, because I think this is a particularly western relationship with technology. Technology has a really intimate relationship with militarization, with weaponization, with surveillance, but it’s not an inherent relationship. It’s an imposed relationship. This idea that in a world so technologically advanced, why have we not gotten past a capitalist framework when automation as a concept could potentially replace work in a non-antagonistic way? But because we live in this capitalist framework, the presence of automation and technology acts as a thing that is directly at odds with laborers and people. And there’s this fear that these technologies will replace us to some capacity. So I think for me, there’s also this lie in the West that technology has a neutral face, that when we have these technological advancements, that they are in whole for the better of society.

    Ignoring the slave as a technology in history allows…for the iPhone to continue to use slave labor in the making of those technologies because the tech industry has successfully kind of decoupled themselves from the sociopolitical world by framing themselves as a necessary good…as something that is more important than perhaps the…lives of people in the global south.

    And because of that, we must ignore all of the horrors that go into making these new devices. So I think reconnecting the historical relationship with technology, technology as object or tool reminds us the kind of racialized, marginalized relationship that technology has always had with non-white non-men in western culture where technology has been used to subjugate and watch and keep account of people and communities to keep the status quo. And so I think it’s important to reconnect that history so that when we move forward, which I believe is possible, that those historical frameworks are being directly responded to and prevented in these new technological frameworks that we are interested in. Because what ignoring the slave as a technology in history allows is for the iPhone to continue to use slave labor in the making of those technologies because the tech industry has successfully kind of decoupled themselves from the sociopolitical world by framing themselves as a necessary good, as a necessary component of everyday life, as something that is more important than perhaps the experiences and lives of people in the global south.

    And there’s also a direct decoupling between the consumer and the product because what we see when we buy an iPhone is not the laborers. We see a phone in a pretty box in a white store, and that complicity that the consumer participates in is also replicated in our governments when we are giving out tax dollars to governments that seem to be able to use this money in ways that we may not personally agree with. But the American apparati depends on this complicity to keep the citizenry from doing anything about it because, oh, we all have blood on our hands. That kind of sentiment, it allows inaction. And so it’s very important to remember tech in context, in historical context. Even with climate change activists who are advocating for solar panels, there’s a lack of intersectionality when we think about where do those technologies come from, who is exploited to get those technologies?

    And we understand in an intersectional framework that climate change is also something that is racialized. It’s also something that you can use a feminist framework for climate change. There are so many ideologies that once you incorporate them, you find that those communities tend to be the most affected by climate change. But that movement tends to be decoupled from politics, from the political sentiments of race and sex and sexuality and gender. And because of that, often people believe climate change, the movement, as one of the more successful movements, a movement that tends to not be as violently opposed by the state. But recently, as Greta Thunberg began to align with her politics around Gaza, we’ve seen this backlash of climate change activists wishing to keep their hands clean in terms of their relationship to politics, this idea that the climate is somehow apolitical and is not also participating in the world powers.

    And I think that’s the same kind of sentiment around technology, this false neutral space that allows money to be given to these ventures for the good of the world, when really it’s the good of a specific part of the world and a specific people of the world, but not all people and not the whole world. And I believe that tech has the capacity and possibility to be helpful for everyone. There’s a disability framework within deaf communities about subtitles, where if you engage in accessibility framework, it’s helpful for everyone, not just the disabled. If you put subtitles on a movie or a screening, you are not just helping deaf people, you’re helping people with audio processing issues, you’re helping people with ADHD. You’re helping people who perhaps have problems keeping up with understanding what’s happening without the words to follow along. This is to frame technology as a tool or a community member that can be helpful to all of us, will also benefit all of us more than it would to cater to a specific kind of person.

    Tjaša: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot. That was a whole meal. Whole meal. Thank you. I’m going to keep chewing on this, but yeah, right on. Beautiful. I know that your next piece is going to be about AI and automation. You can plug it in. When is this coming out? What can you reveal about it?

    Maud: Yes. I am working on a piece about the connection between slavery and automation and the current rippling that we’re seeing of that relationship in AI and the fear that a lot of people have of the replacement of creative work with AI technologies. That should be coming out in March. Currently, I’m working on a piece on grief and misery in digital spaces and using grief and misery as a tool to create community and to find each other in the midst of a very dark and apocalyptic kind of world that we’re living in. That’s called Blue Dark and in the Shape of Me, and I’m hoping to release that at the beginning of the year. So keep tuned, keep your eyes peeled for that.

    Tjaša: That’s amazing. And we can find you on YouTube?

    Maud: Yes, you can find me on YouTube at Dainty Funk, on Instagram at Dainty Funk, and sometimes, occasionally I post on TikTok, but it’s not my favorite platform. If you want to get the full scoop of what I do, YouTube is the place to go. I also have a Patreon under Dainty Funk where I do some more in depth live study sessions where I go through some of the things that I’ve been reading, more specifically educational format so that people can connect some of the theories that I’ve been thinking about to the work that I’ve been making.

    Tjaša: Fantastic. I’m so looking forward, and just because you mentioned grief and misery, and I remember that in your artistic statement, you mentioned that those are soft technologies. Maybe just a sentence about that, about what are soft technologies? Did you come up with this terminology?

    Maud: I am sure someone said it before me. I haven’t seen anyone else say it, but I feel like that’s not crazy. I was thinking about communication tools and communication technologies and grief and love and sadness being the avenue, the lens through which we connect with each other, how grief is a transfiguration of love in a really beautiful way, and how the process of transmutation in and of itself is a kind of technology. And I guess from the soft kind of imagery, I’m thinking of the body as a soft place where these technologies can live and thrive, and also soft as in human, as in community, as in something that we can ease ourself into as opposed to hard, which can be a little more overwhelming and daunting and less easy to understand. I think soft technologies involve more of an embodied knowledge that we share with each other.

    Tjaša: That’s just so brilliant. Thank you for going there, and thank you for bringing this in. And I guess from what you were talking about it, I saw an image that grief is almost like a monster of love. And I love that you’re saying that emotions basically are transmutating, transforming, and therefore are like technologies or are technologies in the space of a body. Beautiful. Wow, I feel like I could keep going with you.

    Maud: I know, I could talk with you forever. This is awesome.

    Tjaša: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commonss. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. If you love this podcast, I sure hope you did, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. If you’re looking for more progressive and disruptive content, visit howlround.com.



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  • We’re in Our (Black) Opera Era

    We’re in Our (Black) Opera Era

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    Leticia Ridley: Welcome to Daughters of Lorraine, a podcast from your friendly neighborhood, Black feminists, exploring the legacies, present and futures of Black theatre. We are your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

    Jordan Ealey: And Jordan Ealey. On this podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide, we discuss Black theatre history; conduct interviews with local and national Black theatre artists, scholars and practitioners; and discuss plays by Black playwrights that have our minds buzzing.

    What can the form of opera do for Black people? How can Black artists employ this musical genre to stage our complex histories? These are the kind of questions that, perhaps, enter into the room when Anthony, Thulani, and Christopher Davis all begin writing and composing their opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.

    First premiering at the New York City Opera in 1986, the opera is described by the Met as “a new staging that imagines Malcolm as an everyman whose story transcends time and space.”

    Leticia: In late 2023, the Opera received a new staging at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. This comes two years after Terence Blanchard became the first Black composer to have an opera produced at the Met with his piece Fire Shut Up in My Bones, with the lush sweeping score and visionary staging by critically acclaimed director-playwright Robert O’Hara. X provides new possibilities for Black performance and artistry, specifically within the operatic genre.

    Jordan and I each watched the opera’s theatrical release, and on today’s episode, delve into themes of time and space in this production and briefly discuss our introduction to the world of Black opera.

    Hello folks. Welcome back to another episode of Daughters of Lorraine. This is our episode back fresh off the holidays and our subsequent breaks that we both respectively had. Jordan, how was your holiday season?

    Jordan: Holidays are good. Got to come on down to Georgia, where I’m from. I don’t think I’ve mentioned on this podcast before. I’m just kidding. It was nice to thaw out. For those of you all who may remember, both Leticia and I pretty much live in the same area of, well, you’re in Toronto and I’m in Rochester, but for all intents and purposes, we live in the same region, and it is cold. It is cold. It was really nice to come back to Georgia and thaw out a little bit. How was your holidays?

    Leticia: My holidays was good. Great time with the family, was able to relax a little bit, get some time away from work, but I’m glad to be back in Toronto even with the snow that is falling outside of my window and my aversion to traveling in snow that I need to get over, but that’s neither here nor there.

    We are so excited to chat about a filmed version of the Met Opera’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X that we both respectively had an opportunity to see before we traveled home for the holidays—on the same day at different theatres, and we were texting back and forth during the intermissions—via the Met’s Live HD series, which for those of you who may not know, the Met has theatrical releases of their operas.

    It’s not like a regular film where it’s going to be showing for two or three weeks. You kind of have to really be on top of when the Met Live HD series is going to be coming to a theatre near you, but this was both of our first times having the opportunity to see an opera in this way.

    Let me tell you, Met, you all have this whole digital theatre thing down because let me tell you, fantastic on so many levels: the way that it was edited, the way that you utilize intermissions with interviews from the creative team and the cast, and then also, it was the sound and the filming, I think was really great.

    Jordan: Absolutely. I totally agree. Many people in our field of study in theatre and specifically performance studies, we all have had this ongoing debate about liveness and capturing and all these different… mediation and what that does to the experience of theatre, but for the ways that they utilize this film production, I really did feel like I was there in so many way. I mean, I didn’t feel like I was actually at the production, but it felt like I was really seeing theatre. I really felt like I was kind of ingratiated into the space.

    Also, just as an educational tool, like you said, the use of the interview was really great. They were done, if you didn’t know, by Angela Bassett, which I was so… I did not know this going into the movie. I’m not sure if that was announced anywhere on the website or anything when I booked my ticket, but I was like, “Oh my goodness! Is that Angela? Is that Angela Bassett?” That was a wonderful surprise.

    Also, she’s an incredible interviewer. I want to say that because just because you’re an actor, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great interviewer, but she was very talented at interviewing folks, and I thought that people’s responses to the questions were really well thought out and gave you just more context for it, especially for someone like me who is really new to this form of opera.

    I do want to say, Leticia, we said it a little bit in the episode preview about this being an introduction, but just kind of generally, what is your experience with opera? Do you have any kind of prior relationship with it?

    Leticia: I’m going to be honest with you, my experience is zero. I felt that sitting in the theatre. I will say though, there is an unsung hero of an opera that I think a lot of people would not place in this category that I love. If you know me, you know I love this, it’s called Carmen: A Hip Hopera, starring none other than Beyonce, (rapping) sweetness flowing like a faucet, body banging, no corset. Oh, don’t get me started. Don’t get me started. That’s my jam.

    I was really watching this with no sort of prior knowledge of the genre of opera, having any expectations of what this would be like. I really entered into the theatre ready to experience a new form and understand how Blackness and the form of opera relates to one another, especially a story about Malcolm X.

    I think one of the interesting questions that comes up specifically with X, the opera, is around why an opera and not a musical theatre piece, which the creators of the opera talked a bit about during the interviews that were aired during intermission.

    How about yourself, Jordan?

    Jordan: I don’t have a ton of experience with opera, but I have seen one opera before this. I had seen one opera live in my life and that was Blue, which is the opera, the music was done by Jeanine Tesori, and it was premiered at the Kennedy Center. I believe it was a commission for the Kennedy Center. That talked about police brutality, and chronicled with the life of a victim of police brutality and the belief… Also the libretto and direction, if I’m not mistaken, was done by Tazewell Thompson.

    That was kind of my only experiencing opera live when I saw that opera at the Kennedy Center, not literally earlier, I guess now it’s 2024, but early in 2023 as a dissertation break, I allowed myself some time to go see an opera, and I was surprised at how much I really just didn’t know about the form sitting there and watching it. It was really interesting.

    I couldn’t tell you what the kind of intricacies of what they were doing kind of dramaturgically or anything like that was because I’m not kind of familiar with the traditions of opera, but it was a really fascinating learning experience. As someone who writes about musical theatre, it is opera-adjacent in many ways. There’s some people, for example, who would consider something like Hamilton to be an opera more than a musical. I think that the boundaries between all these different genres are incredibly thin, but yeah, that’s really my experience with this.

    Actually, X came into my purview because I know Thulani Davis mainly as a poet and as a historian actually, but was not actually familiar with her work as a librettist. Seeing that this was coming to the Met, but also that it was being streamed across the world, was really exciting. Though we are not experts in opera, I want to preface this episode by saying that we thought it was important for us to kind of broaden our horizons and look at what this particular form is doing.

    Leticia: Absolutely. I’ll also just say, Thulani Davis, if you ever listen to Daughters of Lorraine, we would love to have you on as a guest just because, one, you have a storied career as a historian, but now discovering that you are a librettist is amazing. I’m excited to dive into your work more, both as a poet and a librettist as well.

    I will also say, preface—thank you for the preface Jordan because we are not experts by any means—but I would like to acknowledge Naomi Andre’s book, Black Opera: History, Power and Engagement. It was absolutely vital in preparing for this episode to give us a sort of skeleton of Black opera and help us sort of situate X within a longer tradition than either of us were aware of prior to preparing for this episode and/or seeing X. I just want to sort of shout out Naomi Andre’s book, and of course, it’s going to be in our reading list that we offer at the end of the episode, but I just wanted to foreground that because a lot of the research that we did for this episode is directly from the research that Naomi Andre completed.

    In Naomi Andre’s book, she really cites her own experience as being a Black opera lover. She cites many particular instances where she attended opera, but she focuses on, at the beginning of the book, on a 2012 production at the Met of Verdi’s Otello, which I think for us English speakers is Othello, where there was a white South African actor who was in the starring role who wore blackface.

    I will say that my tangential knowledge of opera, if we can even call it that, has often been around opera’s relationship to blackface and understanding that blackface, the tradition, had been in opera for a very long time, and if I’m not mistaken, in some regions of the world, is still being practiced within the operatic form.

    She’s sort of situating how it is to experience this blackface. Even though she had encountered it a lot in her own experiences of seeing a lot of operas, what does it mean when she attended this with one of her colleagues that she was working on something else with, and they started asking questions about the tradition of blackface within opera.

    I think that’s an important place to start this conversation with, which is I think definitely a critical component of the genre of opera itself, but also thinking about how potentially X fits in or differs from this tradition and what happens when you have a Black composer, a Black librettist, a Black book writer writing the form of opera and how that pushes the boundaries of what we know can show up about Blackness in the form of opera.

    These spaces are not constructed to welcome in Black people, but this incredible, operatic, classically trained voice is one that we know very well.

    Jordan: That was really also one of the main, that I encountered when it came to opera, was the ways in which Blackness was erased and invisiblized in particular ways in this form, both historically and contemporarily, whether it’s the fact that not many operas produced are by Black composers—I mean, we ourselves already said that the Met’s first Black composer to have an opera in the season only happened in 2021, which is about two and a half years ago at this point—or if there are actors who are in blackface who are performing roles like Aida, like Otello, that should be just cast with Black people, but to get these kind of big name performers who are often white or non-white, they are taking on those roles and just putting them in black- or brownface.

    That’s how I had encountered this form just being in the theatre world and the musical world and being adjacent to the world of opera. There’s often also this kind of ways that the form of music, the form of music that is in opera, which is this more classical style, again, I’m not a musicologist, so I don’t know the exact kind of form or this exact term to describe this, but classical style that can be, in many ways, really divorced from Black people. It didn’t seem necessarily as if this was a space that was welcoming to Black folks.

    Being a musical theatre scholar and having adjacent research to opera, someone that constantly comes up, and especially as someone who studies Black women in music theatre, someone that constantly comes up in my work and in my research is that of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield; and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, being this Black woman who was one of the, I mean, think Beyonce, but in the nineteenth century. She was a very, very famous Black woman.

    The reason why she was so famous is that people just could not believe that this Black woman was such a talented opera singer, that she was so classically trained and that she was performing this music that folks just couldn’t understand.

    A lot of sound scholars write about the relationship between race and sound. If you look at someone’s work by someone like Nina Eidsheim, for example, who discusses how this idea of what a Black voice should sound like comes from this perception of Blackness, someone like Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield is an incredible study of that.

    I believe Jennifer Lynn Stoever writes about Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield in her book The Sonic Color Line, where she talks about how white audiences received Taylor Greenfield or didn’t receive her, even going further into history, someone like Marian Anderson.

    Marian Anderson, continuing into the mid-twentieth century, Marian Anderson making history as the first Black woman to perform at Carnegie Hall as this opera singer. Again, this idea that these spaces are not constructed to welcome in Black people, but this incredible, operatic, classically trained voice is one that we know very well.

    Then, also my experience in thinking about opera and the relationships to Black musical genres too, is something like the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the ways that they were transposing their scores, which were made up of Negro spirituals, for example, and transferring them into this classical, operatic sound is what made the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other jubilee singers that came out of other places outside of Fisk University, really popular and paid for many ventures that the university had because of their popularity, both nationally and internationally.

    Then, you have someone like Zora Neale Hurston, who’s very critical of the fact that Negro spirituals being transposed into this classical, operatic sound is not staying true to where Black music comes from. There’s this really interesting relationship between the classical genre that is often used as a way to gatekeep Black people from entering into these spaces, but then at the same time, there is, as is pointed out in Naomi Andre’s book, that there is this long history of Black people being here. That was kind of also running through my mind as I was watching X.

    Leticia: Right, definitely. To your point and to Andre’s point, is that the story of Black people in opera is often one that is told and begins with the history of singers and Black people’s access to singing within the form of the opera. There is limited, but ongoing scholarship to really highlight and recover and nurture the work of Black opera composers and creators and directors, and thinking about how Black folks are in a lot of different roles in the operatic genre, and to really sort of think about Black folks engagement with opera beyond singing.

    That’s not to discount the history that you accounted for because I think it’s critically important, and Andre even notes that Black singers did not enter the form of opera from the outside looking in as a form of skill, but as oddities. People went to go see them or allowed them in because they were like, “These Black people singing this classical music form? Interesting.”

    What they actually end up doing is unearthing and usurping some of the expectations of what Black people could sound like, and then within themselves, ingratiating themselves in this genre where they were not welcomed and/or thought to have anything to say or do with. I think that’s critically important, that history you laid out for us.

    Also, to say that I am so excited to have the opportunity to talk and chat with you and to have seen X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, because I think it really does focus on Black opera composers, writers, librettists that I was unfamiliar with, and I think that we can focus more on, and just to use the opportunity to note that while we will be focusing specifically on this particular opera, there are a list of other Black composers and creators of opera that are working and have worked for a long time. Andre gives us a list of these folks that we are also going to mention some at the end of the episode.

    Then, lastly, what I’ll say is what Andre identified for me as someone who is newly entering Black opera is that there’s actually quite a few operas that are documenting key stories from African American history and people, which I thought was very, very interesting because my inclination when hearing about X and that their opera and Malcolm X was interesting, but it seems to be a critical point to tell these sort of epic stories about Black historical figures that I was just totally unaware of.

    In her list, you have folks talking about Paul Laurence Dunbar as an opera, or Harriet Tubman. I think, I was really interested in what seems like to me, a correlation with the opera being a place where you can tell these epic stories about Black people.

    Jordan: Yeah, exactly. I think that the sweeping and expansive nature of the form is… it gives way to telling these epic tales, epic histories and something big and grand, and because the way that the opera is structured, at least just from my very limited experience, my sample size is two, some of the librettist and composers I work with as a musical theatre dramaturg are transferring into the opera genre.

    I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of them about the particular ways that the libretto works in opera. If you notice this, Leticia, when we were watching this, but there’s a kind of truncated way that the libretto enters into the space. Usually in opera is that, the focus is on the score. The music is the centerpiece. I wouldn’t say that isn’t necessarily untrue in musical theatre, but there is a way that it’s even more emphasized in opera.

    I thought it was really interesting that X, in my opinion, actually used a lot more libretto than I expected. Even when I saw the other opera I mentioned earlier, Blue, is that it seemed like Thulani’s words as the librettist, got a little bit more focused in this opera than normally a libretto might get in this particular genre. I thought that was a really fascinating way of bucking against that genre.

    I think we now can transition to just talking about the production.

    Leticia: Yeah, I think that’s a great transition point. I would also like to say, to add a bit more context, is when we started thinking about this, we’re like, “How did the creation come to be? How does someone think about putting Malcolm X to an opera?”

    According to Christopher and Anthony and Thulani, who are all cousins, Christopher was in a college course about African American autobiography, and he was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. If you see this production ever, or you read the opera, or you listen to the music, a lot of what’s being pulled within the story is based off of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That’s the sort of direct reference texts.

    He called Anthony. To your point about music, when he was reading it, he was like, “Man, there’s so many music references in this specific autobiography,” and for me, it seems like it would be a happy medium to sort of think about this. At that time, he was thinking about it as a musical theatre piece, and it was really Anthony Davis who came in and was like, “Well, what about an opera?” Thulani was like, “Yes, I think this story needs to be told in an opera because of what the form itself allows.”

    I think there’s a really interesting way that we see it show up within the opera form because while I had my own personal experience of adjusting to the sort of different sonic pace and sound of opera itself, because I wasn’t familiar with it, there was still a level of comfort I felt because it was playing with all these different musical genres as well that I was familiar with, that I’m not sure finds its way into the form of opera a lot, specifically, the way the sort of public imagination of what opera is. I think what you’re noting and what you’re pushing us to think about this boundary pushing that even within X as it sits with an opera is doing, is quite interesting to me.

    I think that, or I would argue my limited argument, AKA my limited research in this area, is I wonder if it is this idea of when Blackness inserts the frame or Black people enter these genres, that because they have been excluded oftentimes from these spaces, they’re not only thinking in relationship to the form as it stands, but thinking about how can this form suits the needs of my project and how can I also pull in other forms to create different forms? This just continues our conversation that we’ve often have, Jordan, around form and genre even, you mentioned, with musical theatre.

    Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. I find it really interesting because, let me tell you all, one of the standouts of this production was the choreography. Oh, my goodness. The dancing in this production was absolutely fantastic. Rickey Tripp, I believe, did the choreography for this production, and it was absolutely incredible. Again, we are not dance scholars by any means, but the use of dance as a storytelling method.

    The kind of premise of the show is there’s a big spaceship that is on stage throughout the production. There is this ensemble of folks who are both singing and dancing, who are telling the story, helping to tell the story of Malcolm X. Some of them are future-oriented, and then some of them are also throughout his life and from the historical past.

    The dancers were really, primarily utilized as this kind of futuristic mechanism. I found it really fascinating how dance was utilized. I’m curious to delve in deeper in many ways with the form of dance and how it shows up in the operatic genre. I wonder if that’s a typical thing that happens. Is dance and choreography utilized in this way?

    I know it’s a part of musical theatre as the sort of storytelling dramaturgical function, but I was curious about how that entered into the frame within an opera. Even Anthony Davis, as the composer of this opera, did say that he was really involved in creating music for dance and quote, he says, “That set the stage for my opera work because with opera, you’re also creating music for bodies in space, bodies in motion. Movement and drama are part of the music.”

    Working with this kind of embodied knowledge or making use of the embodiment of these different performers on stage was it informs the way he does musical process. It’s informing the way that he makes this music. You could really tell that in those scenes, for example, if you’re familiar with the story of Malcolm X, the story of Malcolm X, it’s his life, Malcolm X’s life, once he moved into this more urban environment versus the rural environment that he grew up in, the way that dances of the time period were coming in.

    You had bebop, and you had folks doing these swing dances, just the way that that music and dance were intertwined in the same way that they usually are in African American community. I was really, really interested in that part. Anthony Davis’s background as a jazz musician really, I think, comes through in the score when you look at not just the jazz music, but just the kind of ways that it’s an unexpected thing, in the way that jazz makes use of improvisation is a part of what makes jazz, jazz. I think that that unexpected what’s going to happen next idea really comes through in the way that the music played in this production.

    This is not this kind of straightforward, biopic type of telling of Malcolm X’s journey, though it certainly is… follows a kind of chronology in some ways, but more so that history is always occurring. What we do in the past is also in the future, is also in the present, is also in the future, you know what I mean?

    Leticia: Absolutely. I 100 percent agree with you. I also was very struck by the use of dance, and it was one of the most compelling parts of the opera for me. I just kept thinking about the bodies moving in space and what appeared to me as people that were inside and outside of the opera.

    I say this because they were dressed in sort of cream-colored, neutral clothing, so they were not identifiably connected with the characters of X, like Malcolm X himself, his sister, his mother, Street, Elijah Muhammad, and simultaneously not connected to the extraterrestrial Black folks that were on stage, kind of sort of witnessing the opera and this story. I was really interested in their fluidity of how they were able to move around the space.

    I think this goes to O’Hara’s direction as someone who was… this is his first opera that he directed, but he has directed a lot of different genres and forms. He’s done straight plays. He’s done musical theatre. I think we see George C. Wolfe’s influence all over this, this sort of experimental nature in which O’Hara’s direction, I think, has always leaned into trying things differently, AKA. he’s the one who’s like, “Let’s put a spaceship on the stage.” Let’s really connect this notion of Afrofuturism to the story of Malcolm X.

    We see that with the beginning, opening number and opening image where the spaceships crash lands at the Met. We hear this song about Marcus Garvey and Back to Africa Movement, and we see all these beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous, regal Black people of the future, Black people of the future that have came from this spaceship as they are singing and the costumes by, I believe it’s Dede Ayite, sorry if I mispronounce your name, but was absolutely fascinating.

    If I was to imagine Black people of the future that are extraterrestrials, that is it. I just thought it was so interesting how this theme of Afrofuturism blended within a story that we may not associate with it, and also the way that it was connected with the past. How do you utilize Afrofuturism to tell a story of the past? I think that’s such a compelling question and issue that O’Hara takes up in this particular opera.

    Jordan: Thinking about Malcolm X as this kind of everyman figure, Robert O’Hara talked about, for example, choosing the actor who played Malcolm X and saying, “There’s no reason for you to be playing Malcolm X, except there’s every reason for you to be playing Malcolm X because he lives in all of us.” I think, not in this simultaneous, symmetrical experience, but more so the way that Black people perceive time, and it’s also a way that Indigenous folks perceive time is that it’s cyclical. It doesn’t move forward. It moves in a circle. It goes around.

    I thought that the choice to have all of the characters, and all of the extraterrestrials, and also the folks from the past all on stage together, blended together… There were points when I was looking and trying to separate them, and I was like, “There is no separation.” Everything’s always happening simultaneously. It’s always happening in a circle.

    I was really fascinated with Robert O’Hara’s interpretation of that and how that contributes that this is not this kind of straightforward, biopic type of telling of Malcolm X’s journey, though it certainly is… follows a kind of chronology in some ways, but more so that history is always occurring. What we do in the past is also in the future, is also in the present, is also in the future, you know what I mean?

    It’s just this spiraling rather than this kind of linear narrative. I really, really love that because, again, my limited experience of opera in the forefront, but so much of the storytelling function of opera is this kind of linear narrative, what happens and from scene to scene, and there’s often subtitles, all these different things. What does it mean to have X come in and redo in the same way?

    I think that someone like Malcolm X, someone who greatly impacted the way we understand Blackness, the way we understand ourselves as Black people needs a musical or an opera or something that does the same thing. I know this is directly related to the actual book, Malcolm X’s autobiography, but also I couldn’t help but think about Spike Lee’s telling of Malcolm X, which I love. I love that movie. I know it’s three—

    Leticia: That’s why Angela was there.

    Jordan: Exactly. I know it’s three billion hours long, but it is definitely, to me, it’s Denzel Washington’s magnum opus, which is saying something because Denzel Washington is great in everything he does, and having that movie in my cultural imaginary, also, I think that was also something that Robert O’Hara was also contending with because there are going to be people who have only seen that movie.

    I think with public figures, you have to contend with, yes, them as people, and you want to get their lives right, but they also existed in this public space. Many people have different relationships to Malcolm X and his work. How do we tell a story that is both surprising but also familiar?

    Leticia: Which something that you said that really resonated with me was the idea of the past and the present and the future all intertwined is that we see that within the direction itself, like you mentioned, right? There’s the moment where the spaceship is used as a projection site, and we see the names of all the Black folks skilled at the hands of violence scrolled across very early, actually, within the opera. I thought that was a really interesting choice.

    I will say, I buy the Afrofuturist inclusion within the opera and in the direction of it. I do think there was moments later on, as the show sort of progresses where it sort of loses its connection with the piece because we see less interaction with the two things, but that does not mean that, by any means, I don’t think that it should be taken out. I just think it’s actually quite interesting within the frame that O’Hara’s offering us as we sort of thinking about this cyclical nature that you led to us.

    One of the things that O’Hara really said during one of the interviews during intermission that really struck me was this notion of cost, right? He said, “Malcolm X, it cost him so much to be this political leader to decide to go against the nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad,” to sort of move in his sort of political stances in so many ways that this opera itself should cost the audience something.

    When you think about the audience for opera, the first thing come to mind, like most theatre, is rich, old, white people. The way that this is written is confrontational in nature. The music, the lyrics is, I mean, this white man has to go. Some of the lyrics, I was like, “Oh, Christopher and Thulani and Anthony, they are not playing.”

    The story has much punch as Malcolm X had in his lifetime. I really appreciate it, that intention behind the opera and not saying we’re trying to pull punches or we’re trying to soften Malcolm X, and who he was and what he said. I really appreciated that that spirit was captured within the opera itself and that they, even though this premiered in ‘86, and I believe it was the second production of this particular opera, that they were open to new interpretation and ways to update it for a time that we currently live in.

    You’re confronting the majority space, but you’re also intervening in that space by the dramaturgical interventions, the sonic interventions, the choreographic interventions.

    Jordan: I agree with you. I think that there can be a tendency when particularly politically controversial figures enter into these kind of more mainstream spaces… Well, I wouldn’t say opera is mainstream, but enter into kind of “highbrow spaces,” spaces that are not necessarily seen as radical places. There is a tendency sometimes for these figures, for the political resonance of what they did and who they are to be defamed. It becomes more apolitical, or it becomes more universal, whatever that means. We know what that means. That usually means how does it appeal to white, liberal, borderline conservative sensibilities.

    What I thought, but to your point, Leticia, they didn’t do that. I felt like Malcolm X’s radical stances were maintained throughout the piece. I don’t feel that he was kind of dialed back or watered down in any way. It didn’t feel like they were trying to appeal to the opera audience, is what I’m trying to say. Like you said, it’s confrontational.

    One of, we’ve mentioned Isaiah Wooden on this podcast many times, but in his article that he wrote about the Black gaze in theatre, he talks about how learning from Black artists taught him that the point of Black art is to confront and intervene. I felt, in many ways, that that was happening in this piece, that there was a confrontation of this white gaze that was, because you cannot ignore that that this is who this space comprises of.

    You’re confronting the majority space, but you’re also intervening in that space by the dramaturgical interventions, the sonic interventions, the choreographic interventions. I really appreciated the ways that they were utilizing the many tactics of embodied action in order to reach those dramaturgical goals.

    I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed this opera. Even though I think it was like three hours long, I want to say, with two intermissions, it did not feel like that. It did not. I wasn’t sitting there being like, “Oh my God, when is this going to be over?” I really, really was invested, and it felt accessible to me, someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with opera. Because that was one of my main concerns—I was like, “Am I going to feel confused? Am I just going to be totally fish out of water here?” I didn’t feel like that at all.

    If this ever comes to any opera near you, or for some reason they put it back in theatres for us to watch, which you should, Met, or they release it on streaming, I highly recommend that you watch this even if you are not familiar with opera. It will completely be an experience that is accessible to anyone, I think.

    Leticia: I, 1000 percent agree with you, and likewise, I cannot recommend this opera enough. I was really, really pulled by what I’ve seen and excited to really seek out more opportunities to see Black opera. I want to see more operas.

    Jordan: Are we in our opera era?

    Leticia: I think we might be in our opera era, and really thinking about its relationship to Black theatre, I think, is such an interesting and fruitful place for more exploration. Again, highly recommend, highly recommend.

    Of course, as we always conclude our episodes with, we are going to give you a wonderful, wonderful reading list of operas that you may want to look out for. Then, also books and articles. What operas do we have for them, Jordan?

    Jordan: Let’s talk a little bit about Anthony Davis. Anthony Davis has other operas. We would love for you all to consume them in any way. We specifically like to recommend Amistad by Anthony Davis. Then, Adolphus Hailstork’s opera Paul Laurence Dunbar: Common Ground. Then, finally, Nkeiru Okoye— please charge it to my head and not my heart if I am pronouncing that incorrectly—and her opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.

    Leticia: Yes, as we should, as we should.

    Jordan: Absolutely. Yes. We’ve also mentioned, we didn’t get into chance to talk about her in this episode, but Shirley Graham Du Bois, totally is an opera… She wrote the first opera as a Black woman, or probably not wrote the first one, but first ones to produced, I believe, in the United States. We’ve mentioned her before, but I just wanted to bring her name back into this episode: Shirley Graham Du Bois.

    Leticia: For books and articles, we have an anthology, Blackness in Opera, that was edited by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor. This was published in 2012, which then led to Naomi Andre writing her book Black Opera History: Power and Engagement. Please, please, please check those out. Then, we have two articles from friends of the podcast that we would like to recommend: Kristin Moriah’s “On The Record: Sissieretta Jones and Black Feminist Recording Praxes.” Then, Caitlin Marshall’s “Ear Training for History: Listening to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s Double-Voiced Aesthetics.” Make sure you check out those books and articles as well as the operas.

    Jordan: Go see opera. Support Black people in opera.

    Leticia: This has been another episode of Daughters of Lorraine. We’re your hosts, Leticia Ridley—

    Jordan: And Jordan Ealey. On our next episode, we interviewed Jonathan McCrory, executive artistic director at the National Black Theatre. We have so much in store for you all that you definitely will not want to miss. In the meantime, if you’re looking to connect with us, please follow us on Twitter at @dolorrainepod, P-O-D. You can also email us at [email protected] for further contact.

    Leticia: Our theme music is composed by Inza Bamba. The Daughters of Lorraine podcast is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. It’s available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and howlround.com. If you’re looking for the podcasts on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, you’ll want to search and subscribe to Daughters of Lorraine podcast.

    Jordan: If you loved this podcast, post a rating or write review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find this transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content, on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event that theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to the Commons.



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  • Theatre in Palestine | HowlRound Theatre Commons

    Theatre in Palestine | HowlRound Theatre Commons

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    Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North Africa or MENA theatre from across the region.

    Marina Johnson: I’m Marina.

    Nabra: And I’m Nabra.

    Marina: And we’re your hosts.

    Nabra: Our name, “Kunafa and Shay,” invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea or in Arabic, shay.

    Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the Arab world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way, we also lean into the diversity, complexity, and robust flavors of MENA theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion. Yalla, grab your tea, the shay is just right.

    Hi, everyone. Welcome to a special episode of Kunafa and Shay in these very challenging times. We’re recording this on January 9th, 2024 in the midst of an ongoing genocide in Palestine. The past few months have been an indescribably difficult time. As most of you know, my research is on Palestinian theatre, so I wanted to bring you a specific episode that focuses on Palestine and performance.

    Nabra: How can theatre make a real impact in moments of social and political crisis? During a time of ongoing genocide and brutal occupation in Palestine with an exacerbating humanitarian crisis, this special episode focuses on Palestinian theatre and political action across borders. We discuss ASHTAR Theatre’sThe Gaza Monologues and Jackie Lubeck’s To The Good People of Gaza. Then Palestinian actor, writer, and scenographer Jeries AbuJaber joins us in conversation about what is currently happening in the West Bank and Gaza and his experience as a theatre artist in Palestine. AbuJaber also shares his experience as a clown with RED NOSES International and the performing he’s done with them in the West Bank and virtually in Gaza.

    Marina: But first, I want to contextualize what’s happening in Gaza. My hope with these remarks is to provide some context for what’s happening in Gaza for the past almost twenty years. In August of 2005, Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza after thirty-eight years of occupying it since 1967. The next year, Hamas won a democratic election with a 46 percent majority popular vote. Israel, the US, and other countries did not like this and attempted to overthrow the election results. Israel then imposed a blockade on Gaza consisting of a series of sanctions that have continued to this day, which severely limit how much electricity is available in Gaza, their water supply, restricting the imports that were able to get into Gaza and closing the borders so that Palestinians in Gaza could not leave the country. One of the many ways this affects the citizens of Gaza, for example, in order for cancer patients or people who have needs that exceed the capabilities of Gazan hospitals, they need to apply for a permit from Israel to travel to Jerusalem or another hospital within the West Bank that can take care of them. Often, these permits are denied.

    In 2017, 54 percent of the people who applied for permits received them with at least fifty others dying that year as a direct result of being denied life-saving medical treatment. This is something that Jeries will talk about a little bit more because he got to work with some of these children who are then given permits to access medical treatment outside of Gaza. Israel also controls the aerospace and coastline, giving Gazans limited space in which they can fish or swim. In 2006, Dov Weisglas was quoted as saying, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger.” A document was later found that showed Israel calculating the amount of food that Gazans needed to avoid malnutrition and would let that amount alone enter Gaza.

    For more than a decade, when analysts described the strategy utilized by Israel against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, they used a metaphor. Israeli forces were “mowing the grass.” The phrase implies that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are weeds that need to be cut back.

    Nabra: Here is a very brief and incomplete history of the bombings in Gaza. In 2008 to 2009, there was a twenty-three day bombardment with about fourteen hundred Palestinians killed. In 2012, for eight days they were bombed with 174 Palestinians killed. In 2014, fifty days of bombing with twenty-one hundred Palestinians killed in Gaza. 2021, for eleven days of bombing, at least 260 people were killed. And all of these murder statistics are often underreported or folks who are missing that are not accounted for. Right now, The Guardian reported, quote, “Gaza’s Ministry of Health says that at least 22,835 Palestinians had been killed by January 7th,” which is two days prior to when we’re recording, with another 58,416 reportedly injured. That figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but an estimated 70 percent are women and children. About seven thousand more are reportedly missing and most likely dead. The 22,835 dead represent about one in a hundred of Gaza’s total population. They have been killed at a rate of just under 250 a day.

    Marina: So let’s begin by talking about the solidarity performance that most people are probably familiar with, The Gaza Monologues. The Gaza Monologues were written by youth in Gaza after the 2008-2009 bombardment. In 2010, Iman Aoun, artistic director and co-founder of ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah, who we’ve had on the podcast before, contacted Ali Abu Yasine who would work with the group and help them write and tell their stories.

    ASHTAR Theatre asked that people read these monologues in November as an act of solidarity with Gaza and with all Palestinian people. The two of us participated in one with Golden Thread and Aviva Arts, which is archived on HowlRound. We’ll link it in the episode transcript. I also want to highlight an anthology of plays that my advisor Samer Al-Saber edited. The book is called To the Good People of Gaza, and they’re plays by Jackie Lubeck and Palestinian children. This is the first anthology of youth plays from Gaza and the wider Palestinian region, and it ties together nineteen plays produced by Theater Day Productions, one of the foremost community theatres in the Middle East. Written by playwright Jackie Lubeck, this collection responds to the siege on Gaza and the Israeli military operations from 2009 to 2014, reflecting how Gazan youth deal with trauma, loss, and urban destruction.

    Nabra: In the nineteen plays within this anthology, the reader and theatrical producer witnesses experiences of a forgotten youth besieged by a silent international community and a brutal wall. The plays are arranged into five different thematic series, which include family entanglements, loss, and the fundamental goodness and resourcefulness of human beings. If you haven’t seen them, they’re very much worth checking out, not only if you do theatre with youth but for everyone.

    Marina: I also wanted to mention a piece that I actually don’t know much about right now, but it was a piece that several friends of mine were working on with The Freedom Theatre when I was last in Palestine and Jeries who we’re having on our episode today was part of for a while before he went to Prague for his masters. But it’s called Gaza Metro and it actually performed in Jordan yesterday. One of my friends there went to see it and it’s being performed in Baghdad next. So what I know of it and why I wanted to spotlight it now is just that it’s a very distinct theatrical work which is looking at stories and conversations of passengers on a fictional subway train in a fictional underground area in the Gaza Strip. And so this sort of speculative fiction realm is something that perhaps people aren’t used to thinking about when they’re thinking of Palestinian performance and it’s a piece that I hope that we can all see at some point in the future.

    I also wanted to mention just quickly, and Nabra and I, I’m sure can talk about this on our next season as well, but something that we’ve talked about throughout especially our first season of Kunafa and Shay is that in the United States post 9/11, a lot of the theatre that people were making in the States was, MENA and SWANA theatre specifically, was trying to prove to the world that they were human because there was so much dehumanization happening to brown people after that time. And it’s been really kind of wild to see the reporting and things happening in Gaza for so many reasons but also because we literally see Gazans and other Palestinians saying “we’re humans” and it’s because they’ve been called human animals. It’s because of these things.

    But again, we’re seeing this dehumanization and it just feels so much reminiscent of other things we’ve talked about where now in the States we were really hoping to be past that narrative of now people who write Middle Eastern, MENA, SWANA, plays are expanding to different things than the human narrative. But it feels like because of what’s happening in Gaza, in many ways, we’ve circled back to this having to prove Palestinian humanity and a lot of brown people in the United States who’ve been targeted in hate crimes, Muslim and Palestinian folks. So it’s just something that I wanted to mention as a thought now and then hopefully we’ll continue to be able to discuss and analyze this, but it’s worth seeing these patterns, especially as they repeat themselves and especially as we’re looking at how they repeat themselves in storytelling.

    So now let’s focus on our guest, Jeries AbuJaber. Jeries AbuJaber is an actor, scenographer, and stage manager. He specialized in scenography and stage management in park through Al-Harah Theater in Beit Jala, Bethlehem in Palestine. He has experienced performing through his work in theatre, over six years of training, workshops and working on professional projects in Palestine and abroad. After six years of working in the performing arts, he decided to pursue his master’s degree in directing of Devised and Object Theatre in the Academy of Performing Arts and Prague Theatre Faculty, DAMU Czech Republic. He’s also a professional medical clown in the RED NOSES International organization from 2014 until the present. In this organization, he works with children, parents, elderly, and medical staff. They provides outreach to people outside hospitals and work with other programs that allow them to have a broader reach as well. I, Marina, met Jeries in the summer of 2022 in Palestine. We first met in Nablus where we were both seeing a play and then we got coffee afterwards with two friends.

    The next time that I saw him was for a production that he wrote and was the scenographer for in Bethlehem, which is still one of my favorite plays. After that, we quickly became friends and I had the privilege of getting to learn about Jeries’s work in the theatre throughout that summer and last summer as well. He’s truly one of the most talented people I know and I’m so grateful he’s joining us here today. Jeries, it is so great to have you with us but also very sad as we cannot ignore the awful situation that is ongoing in Palestine.

    Jeries AbuJaber: Hello. Hello, Marina. Hi, Nabra. I’m really happy to be here with you and I’m really glad that you gave me this chance first to see you because it has been a bit long time or for me, it’s a long time to be here with you online, but let’s meet personally soon as we can. And yeah, we can’t ignore the situation and it’s really, really hard being really not able to move, not able to visit, not able to see people, and that’s really missing the family and the friends and everyone, and you never know what will happen and how bad can it reach, but it’s a thing that I believe that truth will win and really the positivity has to fill our hearts anyways. So I’m really happy to meet you.

    Marina: Yes, we are too. And I am so glad to get to hear you talk because you’re right, the positivity, we need that in our hearts. But also, we were exchanging voice messages maybe a month or so ago, and you said something that I thought was so very you because it’s poetic in the way that you speak that you said right now—“this is too much for our hearts and minds to carry.” And I was like, that’s such a good way to describe what’s happening because every day it feels like, how can we continue on carrying these things that are happening? I know that your family is in Palestine and also your friends and I can’t imagine how hard it is to be away from them right now while this is happening. How are they? Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on with them or anything you want to share about what’s happening in the West Bank?

    Jeries: Yes, yes. It’s like the thing when you are really far away, you just feel that you want to help and you want to be beside them and you want to support them psychologically, mentally, and just talk to them and feel that you can be part of the suffering that they’re passing through because unfortunately it’s not happening only in Gaza, but they’re also murdering people in the West Bank. And the West Bank is really getting really so much pain and so much more tears and people are losing their houses also and people are losing their kids and their families and there’s so many people are becoming prisoners inside the Israeli jails because of nothing and they don’t have any reason to take them. And unfortunately, it’s becoming very, very dramatic and very, very unbearable because I’m just seeing all of this and I have never experienced this extreme of how they are dealing with humans or I would say the “animal humans” that they’re really describing us, unfortunately.

    So I am really psychologically not really able to be stable anyways. Since the last semester, I have been trying really my best to give to the university and to work and be Jeries, the one that everyone knows, but everyone is seeing that I am trying to be productive, but there is a limit always and there is something that’s stopping me from being myself. It’s not normal to see a genocide that is happening and it’s not normal to act like everything is fine, everything is okay, and I can’t be in this duality of being really, life is okay and people here are also enjoying their life, living their life normal and I’m like just living into this hard situation to express myself. And sometimes or most of the time I’m preparing to be alone and to be at my room and just spending my time alone and, okay, this is making me more connected to the internet and to see people, but this is the only way that I have.

    There is some Palestinians here and some people who are supporting, but also it feels like you can see people every time, and we are not used to live like this in Palestine. You came and you experienced and the Arab countries is different. We are always getting out, always meeting each other, always supporting each other, always understand what we are passing through because we are passing through in the same thing, so we feel each other more. So that’s why it’s really psychologically not really relaxing at all. So until now, I’m not really able to really imagine that it’s really normal at all. So yeah, I always call my family, taking care that everything is fine. I’m checking on them. They are calling me more because they need also this courage and this support from me to always be around them and to feel that, “Okay, Jeries, our oldest son who is really have always the responsibility, and he is responsible,” so they want to feel this and I am always there for them.

    But yeah, they are really sad. They are not really also able to live their life normal. So yeah, it’s really crazy. Yeah.

    Nabra: Of course. Yeah. And can you tell us where are you right now and what have you been doing, whether that’s advocacy or artistry or just taking care of yourself and your family from where you are?

    Jeries: Yes. So I am from Bethlehem, Palestine originally and I decided to come to Prague, to Czech Republic in last year. Not last year. It was like 2022. Oh, the time. Oh my God. Time is running really crazy. So in 2022, in November I reached here and I started my master’s degree in Directing of Devised and Object Theatre and it’s like contemporary theatre directing and devising. So it’s really a very true thing that I really wanted to do since a long time and I’m really happy that I have chose this field of work, because it is a part of my artistic work is that, I don’t like so much of limits and so much of conditions that you have to make art because art can be really powerful and there is so much ways that you can really express yourself. And this is part of my way of how I can be a director and how I can be a creative creator.

    So I’m here since one year and two months and I will finish here in June, the two years master, and I can’t imagine how time is passing really crazy, but I will have another one year here to write my thesis because it can be a good possibility for me to use the facilities that the university gives, like library, books. And also there is a tutor that they will help us during writing the master’s thesis. So it is really good to be here and also making connections. I would say that this university has people, educational team that they are really very caring and they’re really very supportive and that makes me really happy because also part of what I’m dealing through is there is these people who are really giving me the chance to express myself as much as I can through my art. And at the same time, they’re really supportive and they understand what is happening. So I think this is really a nice gesture from them to go on with what I’m passing through politically and mentally and at the same time artistically. So yeah, that’s me.

    Nabra: And what are you planning on doing after your master’s?

    Jeries: I don’t know really. It’s blurry. And I really believe that building up a career not only in Palestine, many places, and let’s be more logical that our theatre in the world—if you don’t have connection, if you don’t have people that you know, if you don’t spread your artistic work and knowing people, that will be really only limited place that you can do your own stuff. But if you are really spreading the word and knowing people and making relations, it really builds a good thing for your career. So that’s what I’m truly trying to do. But I will not give up on Palestine ever, and I will not feel that I have to go out because I’m really shocked. I think this is a time that everything is very clear for Palestinians and very clear for what is happening as war and genocide. That is really how they’re dealing with us. Even though, they had to close my bank account because I am Palestinian. It’s really a very crazy way of how they are dealing with the stuff.

    And this is what I want, to spread a word for people and for people who are in Palestine, not for the people around the world, especially Palestinians don’t live into the lie of “this is the heaven.” It’s not heaven. Western countries is not heaven. It’s not really different from anywhere. And Palestine is so beautiful and Palestine has a lot of beautiful human connections.

    There is always this feeling that you are belonging to the place, belonging to people. There is this something that always take you, grabs you and brings you back because your memories, your people, okay, there is always I would say bad sides of everything and the bad side of Palestine—we know occupation, we know sometimes the society pressure us of how we are living, but at the same time, I am not feeling safe as a Palestinian. I’m not feeling safe here and I’m not feeling safe in Palestine, but I’m not feeling safe in Palestine because the issue that is bigger than me and this issue is if it’s existing there, but there is my family and the people who gives me love that makes me safe anyways, I don’t know. I miss this so much.

    Marina: Yeah. Well, and as you know, Bethlehem is my favorite place in the world. I think that Palestine is beautiful. But yeah, walking through Bethlehem with you is some of my favorite memories. It’s just the most gorgeous place. And you’re right that there’s a different feeling, it’s a feeling of being with community, a feeling like everyone is looking out for each other in a different way. Even for me, a foreigner who the people were like, “No, of course you are part of this community now in different ways,” which is a very loving approach that doesn’t always exist in the Western world, which is very individualistic, which is very, I mean, a different kind of mindset.

    Before we talk more about that, I just want to flag for people who are listening that I was with you when you were waiting for your visa to go to Prague. And when you’re describing the work you’re doing, it’s so amazing, but it’s even more amazing to me because I know that you had to fight so hard to get to where you are because you really had to go to lengths to get the visa and to be able to travel and to do the things you’re doing. So whenever you talk about it, I’m like, “This is incredible.” But also because you are so strong in really working to get to where you are because it’s not an easy thing to actually be able to pick up and go to do this.

    Jeries: Yeah, it’s part of our also resistance of making stuff because we are always… Since I was a kid until now, I have never got anything easy and I had all the time to fight for my things in order to get it and to be… Sometimes I ask myself, “Do they really see us as humans?” because it describes so much what they are really doing now. And I don’t understand the support of the world to this crazy genocide that is happening. And I had to go to Jordan to apply for my visa to come to Czech Republic because we don’t have an embassy that I can apply for a long-term visa, and I had to go to Jordan and I had to bring so much papers and these so much papers, all of them, you have to pay for them a lot and you have to pay for the stamps and you have to translate it to Czech because they don’t accept English.

    And then I had to go and they didn’t accept my form. And then I came by the application and then I had to come back to Palestine. And that’s all expenses and money and tiredness because also passing through the bridge from Palestine to Jordan is really very, very hard and very bad. And you never know if you pass or not, and you never know if they close it or not and from what time to what time and you have to wait. And for sure you have to be treated very bad and not as a human because you always have to believe that you are under occupation and it’s really very, very hard. So I had to come back to Palestine, prepare the papers again, then go back and apply for the visa again and come back to Palestine and go back and take my visa and come back and take my stuff and go back and go to Prague.

    So it was very, very, very bad and the bureaucracy is really crazy. And now I have to do it every year. I have to do it every year. But what is easier here is you are in the country. So okay, you apply for it through office here, but I can say it’s easier. But the first time was really horrible. And this is not only for Prague, Czech Republic, it’s also for mostly all of the European countries and the US and we have to apply for visas and it’s really very bureaucratic and you have to pay money and you have to get to put in your bank account a lot of money that you don’t want to be a refugee or something. So they have to know that you are not running away or something. So yeah.

    Marina: No, thanks for sharing those logistics. It’s something that a lot of people in the US, if they’re born with a US passport, don’t have to think about because we don’t have to apply for visas to most places. So I think people listening will find what you just said very enlightening but also shocking.

    Nabra: And to add to that, I mean, getting visas and immigrating and everything is difficult under any circumstances unless you have a US or probably UK or most European passports. But in addition to that, doing that in an occupied country is, as you’ve talked about briefly, even more incredibly difficult. It’s something hard on top of something difficult.

    Jeries: Yeah. Because if I want to talk about the details of the bridge and passing through and all of the checkpoints and all of the armies and all of the weapons that are existing on our way to go to there, it will take another episode, I think. It’s really crazy. Yeah.

    Marina: Well, and so I want to talk about what’s happening in Gaza of course, and it’s interesting because I was with you… I’m forgetting which summer now. I guess it wasn’t 2023, but the summer of 2022. You and I, we had seen a show at Bethlehem live festival, that we’d seen a performance. And Jeries was really great. My Arabic for listening to very quick performances, especially at the time, was not fantastic. And so occasionally he would turn and be like, “And this is what he just meant.” And I was like, “Great, thank you.” But we left and we were going to go see a comedian who is performing and they suddenly told us that the comedian was canceled and it was because Gaza was being bombed. And when people talk about the bombings in Gaza, that one’s not even mentioned because it was so short relative to other bombings that have happened in Gaza, which is crazy.

    But when that happens, things in the West Bank really shut down in solidarity what’s happening. There aren’t parties, there aren’t things that are happening in the same way because people of course in the West Bank have family in Gaza, life is very connected. And the Palestinian struggle is, just because you’re separated by some small distance, It’s still very much interwoven. And so I continue to think about that moment. But then also now we’ve seen this genocide continuing for more than ninety days, I think longer than any of us thought could be bearable. I mean, none of it’s bearable, but it’s continued for so long.

    So I guess I would love to talk about the fact I don’t think you’ve ever gotten to perform in real life in Gaza because of the blockade that started in 2007, but I do know that you performed virtually in Gaza, which I think is a really interesting thing and it segues into talking about one of my other favorite things to talk about with you, which is your clowning. So you’ve worked as a clown with RED NOSES International. Let’s start by talking about that. So what is RED NOSES? You’ve been involved with them since 2014 and you have a really cool clown that you embody. So let’s start there.

    Jeries: So in 2014 I applied for an audition and it was clowning from the RED NOSES International because they have an office in Palestine, now it’s in Ramallah and there is another one in Jordan and there is another ten European countries who are in this organization. So I applied for it and I got accepted in January 2014. And from that time, I have been working on a character, which is very interesting for this work that this organization doesn’t ask you to do much. Only give us time and your art and be there.

    And then it becomes an educational system that you can pass through. And at the same time, you are working, so you get money. So that was really a cool idea and starting with it was making me much stable psychologically and mentally, because being in the RED NOSES, it means that you are doing something very human and you are receiving from it a lot because people when they are just changing to from this suffering mood and pain, they just go with you and they become very happy and they’re very, very passionated and dancing and all of the hospital and all of the elderly houses, they become very… A lot of positivity and they’re just singing and they want to talk about their stories and they want to talk about their lives and it becomes very human and very beautiful.

    Marina: Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say, so when you go in, you are not a doctor, but you go in as a clown and you go into work and you talk with sick children or with elderly people, as you mentioned. I only say this because I recently was talking to people in the US about it and they thought that I was talking about doctors who were also clowns. And I was like, “No, they’re clown doctors,” like you’re a performer. So I just wanted to add that sentence in.

    Jeries: Yes, yes, great. It’s because as an artist, you are building your own character through your talents. My clown is a heavy clown, but at the same time he gets crazy and he’s called Dr. Shalaby Foustuk Halaby, which means pistachio. And it’s a clown that is a singer and plays music. And what is really interesting about clowning is that, as an artist, you have to be really good in improvisation, and at the same time, you have to be really good in listening and to scanning all of the atmosphere around you, all of the space. Because without this and you are not sensitive to people what they are doing and what is happening on spot, then you can’t create your improvisation. You are using the material that is around you, a phone and door is knocking, someone is coughing. I don’t know what. You can create your own stories through this.



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  • A Day With Milo Rau

    A Day With Milo Rau

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    Book Talk: Milo Rau’s “Reclaiming the Future” 4:30 – 5:30 pm EST

    The future is bleak. What can we do, what must we do? Milo Rau about standstill, protest and commitment.

    Milo Rau will discuss his latest book, Reclaiming the Future, a republished essay from the Zurich Poetry Lecture, 2022. In our age of the “total present,” the world is only perceived as something that can be criticized, but no longer as something that can be changed. Which cross-border forms of protest still seem justified when the reality is that there is no alternative anyway? In his new book, Milo Rau shows how we can combat the perceived mood of doom. Drawing on his experiences as a director and activist, he talks about how to reclaim the future. In his radical essay he sets out to search for new forms of thinking, feeling and collective action. One thing is clear: the existing order must be disrupted, sustainably, persistently, again and again.

    Moderated by Frank Hentschker.

    Beyond the 2 Percent—A Manifesto: Raising the Bar for Womxn Composers 6:30 – 7:45 pm EST

    See event for more details.

    Screening: Milo Rau’s The New Gospel 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST

    Join us for an excerpt screening of a selection from director and writer Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2020), followed by a conversation with Frank Hentschker.

    What would Jesus preach in the 21st century? Who would his disciples be? And how would today’s bearers of secular and spiritual power respond to the return and provocations of the most influential prophet and social revolutionary in human history? With The New Gospel, Milo Rau is staging a “Revolt of Dignity.” Led by political activist Yvan Sagnet, the movement is fighting for the rights of migrants who came to Europe across the Mediterranean to be enslaved on the tomato fields in Italy.

    BIO:

    Milo Rau, born 1977 in Bern, is director, writer and artist in residence at NTGent. Rau studied sociology, German and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich with Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Critics call him the “most influential” (Die Zeit), “most awarded­” (Le Soir), “most interesting” (De Standaard), “most controversial” (La Repubblica), “most scandalous” (New York Times) or “most ambitious” (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002 he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions.

    Rau’s theatre productions have been shown at all major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d’Avignon, the Venice Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and have been touring in over 30 countries worldwide. Milo Rau has received many awards, including the 3sat Prize 2017, the Saarbrücken Poetics Lectureship for Drama 2017 and, as the youngest artist after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch, the renowned ITI Prize of the World Theatre Day in 2016. In 2017, Milo Rau was voted Director of the Year in a survey conducted by Deutsche Bühne, in 2018 he received the European Theatre Prize for his life’s work and in 2019 he was the first artist ever to be appointed Associated Artist of the European Association of Theatre and­ Performance – EASTAP. In 2020 he received the renowned Münster Poetry Lectureship for his complete artistic oeuvre. His plays were voted “Best of the Year” in critics’ surveys in over 10 countries. In 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden, in 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ghent University.

    Since 1 July 2023 Milo is Intendant of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen).

    About HowlRound TV

    HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.



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  • Pinkwashing Islamophobia in Performance | HowlRound Theatre Commons

    Pinkwashing Islamophobia in Performance | HowlRound Theatre Commons

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    Each landmark is written on the upstage wall as the performance progresses, showing the map liberal society followed as the West moved into a cultural environment where defending sexual freedom means one is a racist. The timeline begins with the case of the headteacher Ray Honeyford who was heavily criticized for publishing an article in the Salisbury Review lambasting Asian families for not integrating into British society, describing his students as “bi-cultural children.”

    A performer quotes from the article whilst hopping from foot to foot. Several other performers join the performer and mirror his movements as they channel Honeyford talking about the need for the Pakistani community to get “English jobs” and to learn about what it means to live in a “free society.” The movement evokes the frantic energy of children playing with what DV8 considers a herd mentality common in the left which paralyzes independence of thought. The marriage of the choreography and the verbatim script also embodies what DV8 sees as Honeyford’s attempts to address the complexities of multiculturalism by looking at all the issues in the round.

    The “problem” with Muslims not integrating into mainstream British culture is a refrain running throughout the performance, using events such as the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the British government’s refusal to let the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders screen his Islamophobic film Fitna to argue that progressive tolerance is acquiring a distinctly authoritarian character. At no point does the performance ask if “tolerance” of otherness is a sufficient form of liberation.

    Nowhere in the performance is there space given for voices who may express legitimate criticisms of the West’s treatment of Muslims (particularly after 9/11) and deeper structures of racism permeating British society. Nowhere does DV8 acknowledge the historical context of phrases such as “western values,” which in many parts of the world does not mean universal suffrage or humanitarianism, but colonial violence and capitalist exploitation. But most importantly, Can We Talk About This? never considers how the marginalization of Muslims may provide some sections of the Islamic community with a perspective that is neither homophobic nor convinced that the liberal-conservative understanding of freedom is as tolerant of Otherness as DV8 claims it is.

    DV8 aligns anti-racism with censorship to disavow the effects of multiculturalism on free speech. This is not a new phenomenon. As long ago as 1987, the sociologist Paul Gilroy observed that anti-racism was being redefined as an attack on British identity: “The right to be prejudiced is claimed as the heritage of the freeborn Briton and articulated with the discourses of freedom, patriotism, and democracy while despotic anti-racism is associated with authoritarianism, statism, and censorship.” The brand of tolerance that DV8 espouses is racialized in Can We Talk About This? by situating Muslims as outsiders who threaten mainstream culture. The mainstream culture the performance defends uses the social gains made by gay and lesbian people as a hallmark of western society’s superiority over Islam.

    This is not to say that religious belief ever justifies the hatred and persecution of gay and lesbian people or that challenging such bigotry is inherently racist. Indeed, DV8’s earlier performance in 2008, To Be Straight With You, effectively shows the ways politicians and the police cite grounds of religious freedom and cultural expression as an alibi for ignoring homophobia within Christian and Afro-Caribbean communities. Verbatim acts as a powerful form for gay and lesbian people from those communities to share their experiences of institutionalized prejudice masquerading as equality.

    Yet Jasbir Puar’s theory of “homonationalism” complicates the narrative of gay rights being immune to absorption into reactionary right-wing politics. Puar makes the vital point that not all LGBTQI+ equality movements believe the nation state can expand to include all marginalized peoples and so exclusion of an other is an inevitable part of neoliberalism. The forms this exclusion takes are not confined to the overt racism one sees on the far right. 

    Can We Talk About This? is a good indication that Newson sees the performance of freedom for gay and lesbian people as being analogous to that enjoyed by straight couples. And so it is, but only for as long as those rightwing politicians and cultural actors who set the terms of debate in most western societies deem tolerance of homosexuality to be compatible with their interests in upholding the cisheteronormative status quo. At a more fundamental level, Can We Talk About This? represents the leveraging of gay rights by the right to control how freedom is measured and represented in popular culture.

    Weaponizing Camp

    “Gender ideology” and “critical race theory” have become trigger words for conservatives, representing the degeneration of western civilization. The all-out assault by Republicans on bodies of work concerning the LGBTQI+ community and artists and thinkers of color in the United States has been targeted at library collections and school and university curriculums. In the United Kingdom, the far-right regularly protest outside Drag Queen Story Time events while right-wing politicians and commentators argue such events are indoctrinating children. Conservatives have turned the so-called right to be offensive into the apotheosis of liberal freedom rather than a means of criticizing the powerful and defending the marginalized. Certain forms of free speech, such as TheDangerous Faggot Tour, are performed to exclude, degrade, and ultimately erase targeted minorities from public discourse. 

    Milo Yiannopoulos showed how the performances of “camp” can be mobilized to support oppressive structures. TheDangerous Faggot Tour represents the moment when the online alt-right communities became a political force in the United States. It was billed as a celebration of American greatness and free speech in defiance of the left who, Yiannopoulos claimed, control university campuses, media organizations, and every branch of government.

    What makes Yiannopoulos distinct from more contemporary figures of this reactionary ilk such as Jordan Peterson is his gay identity and camp persona. He would often appear in flamboyant and elaborate costumes to reinforce the stereotype of an “outrageous” gay provocateur. Sometimes he would dress as a construction worker or in sequined blazers or in a prep school uniform with a sparkly Make America Great Again cap. At several talks he wore police uniforms, on one occasion going so far as donning a stab vest.



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  • The River in the Room

    The River in the Room

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    AeJay: Aww, I love that river imagery! Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. I think for an artist to be able to do their best and most brave work, they need to have full access to all of themselves and not feel a necessity to break themselves into pieces—to negotiate what parts of themselves they must leave outside.

    Something that I crave when I’m working as an actor is a place where I can freely be in dialogue with all the creative members of the team, a place that is basking in the fountains of knowledge and geysers of experience in the room—to continue your water theme—that can lead to collaborative and dynamic works of art.

    As to my experience with Josephine’s Feast, in particular, I was able to enter as a contractor, not beholden to the board or the company in a way that prioritizes hierarchical chains of command. I am not there to make sure that the company comes out on top—in ways that Human Resources (HR) can be at times. I am there as a visual reminder of a room’s commitment to each individual artist’s dreams, skills, and humanity.

    Yeah, so a lot of my work is sitting with and listening to an artist’s verbal and non-verbal needs in space. There would be times, during a lunch break, where a team member would come to me and ask, “Can we just talk for a second or take a walk?” During those moments, more often than not, we did not talk about what was happening in the rehearsal room, but things that are weighing on them personally, or joys in which they were currently experiencing. At times, they wanted me to be a sounding board for an idea they were trying to work out for the project or to join them in nervous system regulation exercises.

    I would often say that I am the person in the room whose job is to focus on everyone’s needs as humans first. I hold no expectations or asks of one’s artistry. I don’t need you to learn lines or have a concept. I don’t need you to write cues or set props backstage. I don’t need a budget update or a front of house report. I simply need to know that everyone has access to creating from a mindset of abundance—that whispering voice in the room asking have you eaten, are you hydrated, are you good, have you had fresh air, are you thriving in this room, do you need a walk and talk, are we in need of a non-scheduled breath break as humans, are you, the individual, okay? There is no glory in worn down artists.

    Star: I recall you bringing food on multiple occasions, or offering the invitation: “Does anybody want to go outside with me?” And it was just… I guess you reminded me how rare it is to have someone show up for you as another human being outside of a friendship or a romantic relationship. Gentle attentiveness is hard to come by once you age out of childhood. And it’s extremely unlikely for adults to engage from that angle within a pressured work environment; to say, “I’m here to center your humanity with my humanity” is a beautiful thing.

    We are exhausted because conversations around EDI often position the caring of artists as this impossible task, a series of slow changes that will take as long as species evolution itself—thousands of years! What a bore. 

    AeJay: Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I have been in artistic situations where everyone’s in isolation and everyone’s choking and drowning and being smothered by the expectations of whatever that work was. And no one was coming in just to say, “Do you need to take a break? Do you need something? Can I get you something? Here is something.” We are just expected to know how to regulate because we are adults, as though we are not water, flesh, bones, and blood—easily broken.

    To go back to our agreed upon feelings of “ick” when we hear the phrase EDI initiative for a moment—I believe folks of historically and intentionally excluded voices and identities are exhausted by the think tanks and the statements of baseless solidarity and the twelve-point policies towards the future in which one day we shall all be free, hallelujah! We are exhausted because conversations around EDI often position the caring of artists as this impossible task, a series of slow changes that will take as long as species evolution itself—thousands of years! What a bore. I feel, and perhaps you agree, there are really clear, accessible routes to making people feel at home and seen in a space, and that first route is mostly asking what they need, while providing examples of what can be offered.

    It seems so intuitive. Yeah, just ask people what they need, but there’s so many moments when folks are talking about EDI and it’s so full of verbose language—“we are committed wholeheartedly to blah, blah, blah.” However, the question becomes how are these intentions being held in this space right now?

    My voice in the room is an active and open challenge to “business as usual” practices that do not serve the voiced needs in a space. And if someone’s not feeling great, how do I help get the resources they need to move forward?

    We are trying to drag EDI out of the theoretical. I believe the theatre can be a model for a world in which everyone’s needs are met.

    Star: We both half joke/half dream about a fully funded theatre world where there could be a team of therapists on staff to provide mental health services for audiences and actors who might be in crisis. I’m curious about what other visions you hold around the possible functions for theatre spaces within community—specifically in a new world that we desperately want to manifest?



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  • A Twelve-Foot Robotic Arm, Like Chekhov Would Have Wanted 

    A Twelve-Foot Robotic Arm, Like Chekhov Would Have Wanted 

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    Igor Golyak: Good question of what is real and what is not real, whether virtual theatre is real.

    Tjaša Ferme: Yes. Well, whether theatre is real anyways. It’s such an effervescent medium. You’re creating realities that are not really there. I feel like as an actor and as a director, that’s why I can never actually wake up in my dream. That’s why I can never have a lucid dream, because what I do with my life is creating plays, is creating false realities and brainwashing myself that they’re real, that they’re the realities. When you dream, I’m doing the same thing. How do I differentiate one from the other?

    Igor: Well, especially with virtual theatre where… Whatever that means, virtual theatre, I don’t know. Theatre is theatre. But anyway, with a virtual medium, I think I know you’re there, I think I know you exist, but I don’t know. I’m making an assumption. The idea of somebody influencing your life, or actually, I don’t know, making you feel something and you think that they’re real in real time right now talking to you, but at the same time, performing something. And then the conversation is about performing. How do you know if they’re performing? You actually don’t know because you don’t see a stage. You don’t know if it’s a performance or not.

    Tjaša: Correct, but also everything that we perceive is an internal experience anyway. You are talking to me, but you are somewhat in my reality, through my screen. I see you and I hear you really in my head. Nothing’s really out there. Everything is condensed and combined into an image subjectively inside of my own head. We don’t know the discrepancy between the real world and the world that we perceive in our heads.

    Igor: Yeah. It’s just based on experience.

    Tjaša: Welcome to Theatre Tech Talks: AI, Science, and Bio Media in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide.

    Igor Golyak is the founder and producing artistic director of Arlekin Players Theater and Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab in Boston. During the pandemic, he conceived and directed Witness, chekhovOS /an experimental game/, and State vs. Natasha Banina. He received a 2022 special citation from the Boston Critics Association for pushing the boundaries of digital space to create a new genre of theatre.

    I feel like you’re doing something that’s really technical and with a twelve-foot robotic arm, oh my god. That’s almost bombastic, but the experience that I’m getting as an audience member is really intimate. It’s kind of magical. It draws me into an inner world. It doesn’t feel gimmicky or superficial at all. I want to compliment you on achieving this, which seems impossible. And I know how much work it requires to create worlds in which tech is so integrated that it doesn’t feel othered, right?

    Igor: Yeah.

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    Tjaša: So how did you get here? What happened?

    Igor: So what happened was at the start, our theatre company is based outside of Boston in a small town called Needham. Needham, Massachusetts. We have a studio with about fifty-seat theatre and we invited the director from Czech Republic. He came here and directed the play, and this was 2019, and then the pandemic hit. And so we had to close down the show. It ran only for a week or so. We had to close it down, and then we had to figure out what to do. Just so you know, in Needham, Massachusetts we’re rated on TripAdvisor number two after a gas station. There’s a gas station in terms of things to do in Needham, Massachusetts, and then there’s us. We’re trailing—

    Tjaša: Congrats.

    Igor: Thank you. It’s not by far, but trailing the gas station.

    Tjaša: But you’re in front of a restaurant.

    Igor: No, no. Restaurants have their own category. It’s under a category, things to do in Needham, Massachusetts. It’s like, get gas and maybe see a show. We’re doing well. Actually, we are—

    Tjaša: That means you’re a necessity. Imagine that you’re as necessary and as essential as gas.

    Igor: You’re so positive. You’re so positive. Let me be bashful on myself a little bit. But it’s a good story because it starts with that and then it ends with two New York Times critics’ picks. It’s a good start. As a director, start from something, that Cinderella story.

    Tjaša: From rags to riches.

    Igor: There’s no riches. But anyway, so pandemic hit, we had to close down the show, and then we had to figure out what to do with our lives, how to pay for the studio that we are renting and so forth. We had a show called Natasha’s Dream. A couple of years before that we went to festivals with overseas. It’s a one woman show, and we decided, let’s figure out a way to play it to the audience. We were stuck at home, and this was my partner at the time, so we decided to put it up to see what happens if we experiment with it. I went on a hacking spree and researched a ton of, I don’t know, different types of software, put them in conversation with each other and figured out a way to get this up, to get State vs. Natasha.

    As soon as we were about to open, I understood that none of this works because it’s no different than a film. Why would somebody come and watch that show if they can do something on Netflix, if they can watch something on Netflix? And so I realized that there has to be an approach that is different, that incorporates theatre, incorporates film because it’s on a two-dimensional screen, and also incorporates maybe some type of gaming where there’s some sort of agency in what you’re doing.

    In going into State vs. Natasha, just like going into a new theatre space, physical space, I ask myself, what is the advantages and disadvantages of this space? And in trying to answer that question with a virtual space, there’s a advantage, for example, is that there’s direct communication, everyone is seated on the front row, anyone can watch it from anywhere, there is a parallel narrative that can happen in the chat and people can respond to things immediately, and I can get that feedback immediately as a director/an actor. In light of all of those things, two days before the opening, we scrapped everything and designed this interactive version and experimented with that, and people responded. We went to international festivals with it out of our living room. We had people from forty different countries visit, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht and other celebrities. Then New York Times came. So my little theatre in Needham would never have had these guests as this virtual piece, for the lack of better word.

    Tjaša: This is fantastic. I love that you’re telling me all about the little town, Massachusetts gas station, and all of a sudden the New York Times review. Yay. That’s how it works. I’m curious, it feels like something was invented here. The way you worked with the space, the way you actually had live animations over-posed a live stream of a live performance. How did that work? How did you make that happen?

    Igor: It’s just layers of video. It’s just technology that wasn’t used. I mean, it’s very well-known technology, just it was never used for live performance or theatre performance because there was no need. I don’t feel like I invented anything. I was just following what I was taught. You get into a new space, like if you’re directing something at a gas station, you’re going to incorporate a gas station, or you’re directing something at a train. For me, any space, be it real or fictional or virtual or whatever it is, is a site-specific space for a production. Any space is site-specific. Any theatre is always site specific because it depends on what the shape of the theatre is, depends on how you’re going to impact the audience. Is it the more direct impact or is it an architecture where the energy is contained, more round architecture and so forth? When I design a show, I design for that specific space just like I did with this virtual space. So for me, it wasn’t anything that I invented. It was just what I was taught at theatre school.

    Tjaša: Fantastic. Great teachers. Did you say that you actually had a screen that you were projecting on?

    Igor: No, no. It was just layers of video. It was just layers of video that were triggered. Basically it was like five different pieces of software and she didn’t see them. She saw them on a monitor outside, but it was like couple of layers on top of her video and that’s where the animations… That’s where they came from.

    Tjaša: Fantastic. And you figure this out, you put all the softwares together?

    Igor: Mm-hm. Yeah, it was me, my dog, the actor, actress, and my sister, because we were isolating. That was our pod, so that was it. My sister ran the show because I was pacing back and forth. So she ran the show by clicking spacebar and the actor performed and the dog was locked in the bedroom.

    Tjaša: But how did the dog contribute to the development and layering of the software?

    Igor: Very importantly, because the thing is that the dog, when she sips, it’s very, very loud. It was something we either had to incorporate in the show and make it a part of the show or not. So by having a negative space of the dog, we came to this production.

    Tjaša: Negative space of the dog. Yes. Okay, I love it. Let’s just give the audience a little bit of context, what Natasha’s really about. In State vs. Natasha Banina, a girl tells the story of her life in a small town orphanage. When she meets a journalist who takes an interest in covering her hardships, she becomes infatuated with him, then obsessed until she’s driven to commit a crime of passion. At the end, the audience votes on her fate, guilty or not guilty? Look, I will just tell you my personal experience while watching Natasha Banina. I haven’t had this kind of a profound experience in live theatre. Certainly never in any kind of virtual experience. Like I said, I dreamt about you the entire night, even though obviously I was watching the actress, not even you. But I guess there was almost like a little encoded stamp of you coming through the screen, which was… I don’t know.

    That’s never happened to me, but it was a very deep emotional experience. And I found myself just completely enamored and just thinking about how human story and human questions are so important in theatre. Not really the gimmicks that just bring them to us, right?

    Igor: Yeah.

    Tjaša: And make it more innovative and interesting. But what you really take away is the emotional experience. With this girl, you just find yourself routing for her so much. Then you ask yourself, which is also a big question, even in neuroscience, et cetera, are people really responsible for what they do? What does it mean for their responsibility? Let’s say they have a temporary disease or a tumor that comes up. Then also, on the other hand, society’s response to just locking people away and not having a conversation and a process of integrating people in society with any kind of problems. So, I’m your fan. You got me in.

    Igor: Thank you.

    Tjaša: Thank you so much.

    Igor: For me, the other question that really interests me as an immigrant, something that has kind of stayed with me for a while, is people coming from different worlds and different worlds colliding. Her reality or her world, her universe in the universe that she exists in, is completely different from the universe that everyone else exists, like the normal world exists in. It’s difficult to try somebody, that has their own way of living in their own universe, in their own world, by the standards of our world and vice versa. So for an immigrant, I’m sure you have felt these situations as well, where it’s just completely different. And something that is completely unacceptable in our world and universe and culture is completely acceptable here and vice versa.

    Tjaša: Absolutely.

    Igor: What if you take that to the extreme? And that’s what happens.

    Tjaša: But that is one of the problems of globalization, that everybody’s looking at one mold of what’s correct and trying to, among cultures and traditions, perpetuate it and judge other people, and even impose judicial systems on different cultures through their own lens.

    Igor: Or just judge, in general. On the street we judge people, but then what do you do if you don’t judge? You have to have some sort of a protection layer. So it’s a question and it’s what I like to do, is try to figure out those questions. I don’t have an answer, unfortunately.

    Tjaša: Tell us a little bit about your journey. Now, you’re the hotshot director, next show’s going to be at BAM, it’s a part of Under the Radar. But you actually immigrated to the States when you were nine from Ukraine, and you kind of felt a little bit unseen by the mainstream media when you were really looking for a space to work in the States. Then you created your own community, you created Arlekin Players. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

    Igor: I left at nine, I came here at ten and I was trying to figure out my life, went to school here and I didn’t really fit in. Those two worlds colliding that I was talking about is something that these are the roots of the problem. Then I decided to go to school in Russia. I applied to school there, I went to an acting school, an acting program at the Vakhtangov Theatre Institute. Then I went to get my directing degree, which was a master’s degree at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. Then I came back here, and in 2010, I created this studio, this theatre where basically I just taught actors.

    I taught people that wanted to figure out… Partly it was figure out who they are, but partly it was they wanted to perform. These were not professional actors. They were refugees that have come, mostly in the same wave of immigration as I have, from the former Soviet Union to the United States that have figured out their lives in terms of financial stability, in terms of job and life. But something was missing, and what was missing is, why are they here? Once they got the financial stability, why are they here and what are we doing? What are we living for? What’s the purpose? So they came to me and that’s where our conversation started, and I asked them for a nine-month commitment. And I said, “Maybe at the end of the nine-month commitment, we’ll have something born,” and we did. We had the theatre born.

    Tjaša: Bravo. That’s awesome. Do you still work with them?

    Igor: Yeah.

    Tjaša: Or are they still the majority of your actors and collaborators?

    Igor: Absolutely.

    Tjaša: Amazing. Amazing. Let’s talk a little bit about The Orchard and the technicalities of it. Why is there a big robotic arm on stage serving coffee, sweeping, and basically zooming between different people in different shots?

    Igor: I thought that that’s what Chekhov would’ve wanted.

    Tjaša: Tell me more. Did you get that through a dream?

    Igor: No, no, I didn’t. Why is there a robot? Again, Cherry Orchard had a long journey. Not a long, long one, but there was a journey. After Natasha and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Micha reached out and we met and we were thinking about what to do. And also Jessica Hecht came to see Natasha, and we spoke. And then we had an idea of, why don’t we do a reading of The Cherry Orchard? Because it seemed like during the pandemic, there was a loss of agency. People felt like there was a loss of agency. There was life, and they knew what was happening, they knew what was going on, they knew everything that was set up, and then everything was taken away. It doesn’t matter how rich you were or how poor you were, it’s just a loss of agency.

    Now the world is different, and there’s nothing that you could have done to prepare for it. It just is. And so we decided to have a reading, and we did have the reading, and it sounded very much about the time of the pandemic. Then we decided, why don’t we do a virtual piece? So we filmed for six days. No, we filmed for three days and rehearsed for three days at the Baryshnikov Art Center. And we made a virtual piece called chekhovOS, Chekhov Operating System. That was the first part of this journey of The Cherry Orchard, which at that point was called chekhovOS. That got a New York Times Critics Pick. That was our second one. Then we decided, since we’ve done that already, let’s do a full production. Let’s have a hybrid production, an in-person and virtual production with different experiences of audiences experiencing one thing in real life in the theatre, and virtual audience at the same time having a different role to play.

    So in thinking about what could be on stage in The Cherry Orchard, my thinking was again about the pandemic, about the time that we were in and how fragile people are in general. How fragile our life is, how fragile our desires are, and that we almost have very little choice. It’s a presumption of choice that we have. We assume, we presume that we make decisions, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s laid out, or not laid out, but even worse, random. Randomness is much worse than any sort of order because it means that nothing matters—

    Tjaša: That you have no control.

    Igor: Yeah, there’s no control, there’s no structure to anything, and there’s no way to make any conclusions of anything because it’s just randomness. And people live in this randomness. And opposed to that is a robot that lives in a very specific structure, that lives by a program. What was interesting for me in The Cherry Orchard is the study of this randomness of existence and randomness of existence in the humans by something that’s very structured. That’s why he’s looking at them. It’s like a toy, because the play starts in a nursery. Starts almost like a big toy, but also it’s a way of looking at humans and looking at their choices. Why can’t she sell the cherry orchard? Just sell the cherry orchard. There’s some reason that she can’t, and this robot is trying to understand.

    Tjaša: Was there somebody manipulating the movement of the robot, where the robot looks?

    Igor: Those movements were all pre-programmed. It was choreographed and then we used 3D animation software to program what happens with the head of the robot, where he looks, what he does, and so forth. So all of those movements, of course, were pre-programmed because otherwise it has a, we called it, circle of death. Because it doesn’t know that it can hit somebody and it doesn’t know that it killed somebody. It builds cars, it can lift tons and tons of weight, so it had to be very, very well-structured and programmed so that there is no randomness.

    Tjaša: Sometimes it would show the stage direction of something that happened on stage, and there was a little icon of the robot next to it. I almost imagine that the robot is sometimes like a narrator.

    Igor: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Basically, that projection was like the terminal window. It’s the internal analysis of what’s happening for the robot.

    Tjaša: So for the virtual experience, there are six different virtual rooms, and each time you visit, you can only see three. Cool. Why did you decide that your guide is Chekhov himself, not one of the characters?

    Igor: Because it’s Chekhov’s world, Chekhov’s operating system. That virtual environment that people come in and the rooms that they see are the rooms of the lost world, beautiful rooms that are lost. I don’t know, I never asked myself that question, why him? Because the thing is that one character would be a point of view, almost. With the author leading through his worldview, it’s not necessarily my worldview, but it’s Chekhov’s worldview. This idea, he was writing this play as he was dying, and again, it’s the same idea of loss of agency. Him being a doctor, and at the same time, dying from a disease feeling like there’s no way to turn anything around and losing these worlds. This play is just one of the worlds that is being lost/sold, like the cherry orchard. The audience were able to bid on the cherry orchard as people that came into an auction.

    One of the things that I thought about when I was doing Natasha and chekhovOS was, what is the role of the audience? It’s very important in a virtual theatre or virtual production like this to figure out something active for them to do. Otherwise, they’re just passively watching a movie. What is their role? In Natasha, they’re playing judges, and actually they have all the agency because they decide what happens to Natasha. And in Cherry Orchard and chekhovOS, they presume that they have agency, but at the end it turns out that they don’t.

    Tjaša: Are they bidding with their actual money or some imaginary currency?

    Igor: So this is what we did, they were bidding on an NFT of the Baryshnikov Art Center, which was the house in The Cherry Orchard. The virtual version of it was actually a copy of the Baryshnikov Art Center. So he was going through his own center as Chekhov. So yeah, some people decided to pay money for it, and they did pay. It wasn’t a lot, it was like fifty bucks or something, but it was an actual minted NFT for that show, and that’s what they got.

    Tjaša: That’s awesome. I knew that the audience was voting for Natasha, guilty or not guilty, but I guess I just so powerfully felt that she was innocent. And when I saw guilty, I was like, “Ah.” I just felt like for a moment I was like, “This is rigged. In the actual play or in the actual real life she was found guilty, but this is not the actual poll from the actual audience members—”

    Igor: It was absolutely—

    Tjaša: Are you telling me… who are those people?

    Igor: It’s a funny story. So all of the shows we did in the United States, she was found guilty, and couple of the shows we did at International Festivals, she was found not guilty, but they were outside the US. Same show.

    Tjaša: What does technology mean to you?

    Igor: It’s just a tool to make it feel more acute, with technology. One of the productions we did was called Witness. It was about a ship in 1939 that traveled after Kristallnacht. By the way, today is the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht. In 1939, it traveled from Hamburg to Cuba with nine-hundred and something passengers on board. All of them were Jews trying to escape Germany and Nazis, and they couldn’t. Cuba didn’t accept them, nobody accept them. They all ended up going back and a lot of them perished in the Holocaust, of course. But the play was about that. It was set in a virtual world. We created a virtual version of the ship, and we partnered with the Holocaust Museum on this production. And we found out that according to the archives in the Holocaust Museum, it was interesting what these people did on this boat escaping Holocaust and escaping Nazism. And because some of them were already in concentration camps, they had talent shows every day.

    Tjaša: Wow.

    Igor: So there were talent shows in our production of people basically saying their journals that survived through a talent show number. But anyway, the point is at the end there’s a sound of Yom HaShoah, which is the commemoration of the Holocaust in Israel, and it’s built up emotionally that ship becomes about today, and it actually is very much about today. I see on Zoom, because I could see people’s cameras, and I can see that when the sounds, people start getting up from their seat. I see some of the old ladies just trying to get up and barely…

    And this is what we started with, and this broke my heart because they don’t see each other. They see the main character. Sometimes they see themselves on the screens as part of the show, but this is something virtual that is happening right now, and they feel like it’s so important that they stand up. And ultimately, it’s about that. It’s this virtual connection that we created, and technology lets me do that and lets me remove some of the borders that are put up by space and time. In the end, it turns out that technology, because we are breaking time and space, helps break Aristotle way of theatre.

    Tjaša: That’s good. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up. What’s going to BAM, what’s going to be performing at Under the Radar?

    Igor: Well, I’m super excited about this production. It’s called Our Class, written by a Polish playwright in 2009, I believe, his name is Tadeusz Slobodzianek, and it’s about ten classmates. It’s partly inspired by, if you remember, the Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class. It’s about ten classmates that live in a small town in Poland called Jedwabne. This is completely based on true events. Eight out of the ten characters were actually real people, and some of them you can find online, there’s interviews with them. So classmates, it starts in around 1926, and by the time of the… This little town has about 3,200 people living in it. Half of them are Jews, half of them are Catholics. And during the German occupation, starts with Soviet occupation, then German occupation, then again, Soviet occupation.

    During the German occupation, the citizens of this village gather all the Jews in a barn and burn it down. Some of the people escape, some of the Jews escape, and then it tracks their lives. The Catholics and the Jews that had survived, tracks their lives to 2000s. It’s a story of these classmates. It’s not a black and white story, it’s a different story. The reason why it is different, or one of the reasons why it’s different, is that it was always actually told by the Catholics, by the Poles, that it was the Nazis that had done this. In 2000, there was a book that came out with big research by Yan Gross. He’s Polish American, I think he taught at Princeton, and he came out with a book called Neighbors, based on testimonies, and he dug up that it was actually the Poles that did it, the Catholics. And then it stirred up huge commotion in the way that Polish people, kind of, what their narrative is about what happened.

    Based on this research, there was more research done, and it actually was proven that the Nazis had nothing to do with it. That’s the story, and I’m really looking forward to it. We have a beautiful team from all over the world, including Ukraine, Russia, America, Israel. We have our designer from Germany, his name is Jan Pappelbaum, he’s from Schönbrunn Theatre. Incredible, incredible designer. When we went on this trip to Poland to see this town and to do some research there, and Jan came also to do some research in that place, and it was interesting. It was like a Jew, a Pole, and a German walking around.

    Tjaša: Oh boy. What kind of technology are you using? What are you bringing in for this production?

    Igor: That’s still being designed. That’s a secret.

    Tjaša: Okay, I love that. That was one of my questions. What’s your secret or what’s your secret obsession?

    Igor: What’s my secret obsession? My secret obsession is people, is humans. It’s trying to figure them out and connecting with humans, connecting these different worlds with different histories, different cultures, and trying to see what is common and what is not.

    Tjaša: You can catch Our Class January 12th through February 4 at BAM Fisher as part of Under the Radar. Igor, thank you so much. This was amazing. Bye.

    This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. If you love this podcast, I sure hope you did, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. If you’re looking for more progressive and disruptive content, visit howlround.com.



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  • Aristotle Thinks Again | HowlRound Theatre Commons

    Aristotle Thinks Again | HowlRound Theatre Commons

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    This work continues a company June 2020 online workshop performance with Safer. GJR members are joined by guest performer Marcus McGregor to explore Greek tragedies, post apocalyptic possibilities, how awful people are, and how awesome it can be to exist on the planet.

    Performed, co-created, and co-choreographed by maura nguyen donohue, John Maria Gutierrez, Valois Mickens, Kim Savarino and Guest Artist Marcus McGregor
    Directed/choreographed by Dan Safer
    Text by Chuck Mee
    Original Music by Julia Kent
    Lights by Jay Ryan
    Set by Sara Brown
    Costumes by Alicia Austin
    Sound Design by Attilio Rigotti

    GREAT JONES REPERTORY is an Obie-winning company known for their experimental productions of Greek tragedies and contemporary work that employ classical elements, unique visual design, performance styles, world music, and movement. Started in 1972 by Ellen Stewart, Andrei Serban, and Elizabeth Swados. Great Jones Rep is an inter-generational, culturally-diverse ensemble of artists, performers, designers, and musicians.

    Dan Safer (choreographer/ director/ co-creator) is the Artistic Director of WR and has choreographed/ directed all of their shows, all over the place, from the back rooms of bars in NYC to Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris to a giant leaky warehouse at a dance festival in Poland where a light fell off the grid halfway thru a show and almost killed him. Dan recently choreographed Jedermann, starring Lars Eidinger, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and Ashley Tata’s Dom Juan at Bard SummerScape. His work has been at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace, Les Subsistances (Lyon, France), and many other places. In 2011, he choreographed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for Philadelphia Orchestra with Obie-winners Ridge Theater. Artforum Magazine called him “pure expressionistic danger” and Time Out NY called him “a purveyor of lo-fi mayhem.” He has choreographed fashion shows, music videos, and films, got kicked out of high school for a year, used to be a go-go dancer, was a member of Anhoni’s Blacklips Performance Cult in the 1990s, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party. Dan taught at NYU for many years and is currently Dance faculty at MIT Theater Arts.

    Chuck Mee (text) grew up in Illinois, headed east, and graduated from Harvard College. Collaborations with Witness Relocation include Heaven On Earth, Eterniday, and Daily Life Everlasting, all of which had their world premieres at La MaMa. He has collaborated extensively with the SITI company, and has also written Vienna: Lusthaus, A Perfect Wedding, and a number of other plays in addition to his work inspired by Greek plays: Big Love, True Love, Trojan Women: A Love Story, and others. Among other awards, he has received the lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His complete works are available on the internet at charlesmee.org. His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.

    Aristotle Thinks Again is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for La MaMa Great Jones Rep’s Humanismo: Ancient Futures Series.

    About HowlRound TV

    HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.



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  • Suzan-Lori Parks’ Watch Me Work with Special Guest Neil deGrasse Tyson

    Suzan-Lori Parks’ Watch Me Work with Special Guest Neil deGrasse Tyson

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    Watch Me Work is a communal work session for anyone eager to nurture and sustain their creative process. Facilitated by Public Theater Playwright-in-Residence Suzan-Lori Parks and the New Work Development department, Watch Me Work takes place via Zoom sessions and HowlRound livestreams that you can join at home, at school, or in a coffee shop from anywhere in the world!

    This week, special guest Neil deGrasse Tyson joins the conversation. 

    Neil deGrasse Tyson on stage.

    What Happens During Watch Me Work

    Each session will be one hour. During the first twenty minutes, Suzan-Lori Parks and participants engage in an individual creative working session on their own project. During the remaining forty minutes of class, participants are part of a real-time dialogue with Parks and each other about their process. Are you feeling stuck and can’t figure out how to move forward? Are you looking for encouragement or motivation for what you’re working on? Do you want to talk through an idea you have for a new artistic project? Watch Me Work is here to help!

    What Does Not Happen During Watch Me Work

    In alignment with the ethos of Watch Me Work, Parks and participants will not be sharing work and receiving critique. In addition, Parks will not be participating in a Q&A about her body of work. Watch Me Work is about hearing about your work and supporting you.

    How To Participate

    Sign up for Watch Me Work to receive the Zoom link for this session, or simply watch the live stream on the player on this HowlRound page.

    About HowlRound TV

    HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.



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