Come together

This ethnography of the Seattle Men’s Chorus (SMC) examined the culture of a highly successful chorus with particular attention to the members’ musical and social interactions in both rehearsals and gatherings outside of rehearsals. The shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of the SMC, the largest community chorus in North America and the largest gay men’s chorus in the world, were explored. Overarching themes that emerged were the chorus as a “chosen family” and the artistic director as a servant leader who takes care of his “family.” More importantly, the presence of all three types of social capital (bonding, linking, and bridging) in the SMC is the crux of this study’s examination into why it is so successful. The SMC’s indicators of social capital are discussed, as well as how they manifest in relationships among the chorus members, artistic director, and the community, which has implications for community ensemble practices at large.

What Can Be Said: The Jenő Janovics Archive in Cluj

"This paper focuses on the documents kept in archive of Jenő Janovics, an artistic director in Hungary and Romania for 30 years. The rich archival materials, kept in Cluj, of this important public figure reflect the turbulent times of history of Hungarian Theater in Cluj in the first half of the 20th century. The study presents a possible approach to this material, also introducing Janovics’s diary’s hermeneutical problems. Keywords: Jenő Janovics, Hungarian Theater Cluj, diary, Hungarian theater history, Jewish "

Presenting: Michael Nimbley

The following is the working script from Montreal-based artist Michael Nimbley’s presentation about his professional career. The script was co-created with his creative ally Catherine Bourgeois, the founder and artistic director of Montreal-based theatre group, Joe Jack & John. Joe Jack & John is a theatre company that produces original, bilingual, multidisciplinary shows combining video, dance, and the spoken word. Their artistic approach is deeply humanistic and inclusive; their creations represent a social microcosm by integrating professional actors with an intellectual disability or from diverse cultural backgrounds. During the time of VIBE, Nimbley was an artist-in-residence with the company. In establishing artistic residencies, Joe Jack & John are fulfilling their mission in a new way by inviting an artist living with a disability to initiate and direct a creation of their own. These residencies demonstrate a unique political stance. By handing power to an artist with an intellectual disability, they are furthering their research on marginalized aesthetics and voices. Their goal is to develop interdependent creative models and practices, promoting the emergence of underrepresented voices that have not been part of the dominant artistic trends. In doing so, they are disrupting aesthetic hierarchies and continuing to dismantle biases against artists who evolve outside the artistic establishment.

Performing while Black: Disrupting Gender and Sexuality from Trinidad to Norway—The Artivism of Thomas Prestø

In this interview, artistic director and choreographer Thomas Prestø speaks with cultural studies scholar Dr. Gladys M. Francis about his personal journey as a hyper visible Black boy growing up in a Norwegian region known as a hub for neo-Nazi groups. Subjected to various forms of torture, Prestø discusses how his experiences shaped his politics of arts when he founded the Tabanka Dance Company to promote “a sustainable Black identity” that converges both Caribbean and African movement esthetics to tell the stories of Blacks in Norway. Prestø presents how his body of work informs Black diaspora studies in terms of art and culture through issues of minority identities, body-memory, body-politics, and political and cultural agency relating to Black performances and cultures in Norway. He discusses principles on “Caribfuturism” and corporealities within what he calls “the uniqueness of the Afropean, the Afro-Scandinavian and the poly-Diasporan.” His insights on the prejudiced mechanisms of representation and segmentation of cultures visible in Norway also convey how his artistic productions offer challenging esthetics and representations of gender and sexuality for performing Brown and Black artists. The following segments were gathered during his 2018 dance fellowship in Dakar, Senegal, my scholar appointment in Norway in 2019, and follow up discussions in spring 2021.

BITEF Before and After 1989: Representation to Deconstruction of Social and Cultural Paradigms

Ivan Medenica here analyzes the cultural shift that the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) experienced after 1989. From its beginnings in the late 1960s until the end of the1980s, BITEF was a representation of the dominant multicultural, modernist, and progressive paradigm of Yugoslavia’s cultural policy. This was not an unambiguous position. On the one hand, modernist values were imposed by Tito’s authoritarian regime and, on the other, they were confronted with the conservative tendencies both in politics and the arts. As a multicultural and progressive platform, BITEF was one of the biggest victims in the field of the arts of Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist regime in the 1990s and the wars in former Yugoslavia. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, a complex period of tension started between the ‘reborn’ urge for democratization and internationalization, on the one hand, and persistent nationalism and conservatism, on the other. Due to its tradition, reinforced artistic ambitions, and international reputation, BITEF regained its fame. Its position today, however, is quite paradoxical. It is an anti-traditionalist and multicultural festival – within a culture and society that are becoming traditional and rather claustrophobic. Ivan Medenica is a Professor of Theatre at the University of the Arts in Belgrade in Serbia and has received the national award for theatre criticism six times. His publications include The Tragedy of Initiation, or the Inconstant Prince: The Classics and Their Masks. Medenica is also the artistic director of BITEF.

A Stage for the Outsiders of Neoliberal Capitalism: Dublin’s Gate Theatre, European Austerity and #WakingTheFeminists

This essay analyses Selina Cartmell’s first season as artistic director of Dublin’s Gate theatre, in 2018 in relation to the development of neoliberalism in Ireland and the part played by the European Union in this process. Key social and political contexts are identified in order to frame this analysis, including the concentration of power in the upper-classes distinctive of neoliberalism; the relevance of historical memory in Irish culture; the restructuring of the Irish Arts Council in consequence of post-2008 austerity; and, the influence of #WakingTheFeminists’ protests against the marginalisation of women in the Irish theatre. It is argued that Selina Cartmell successfully fostered the reception of a grassroots movement (#WakingTheFeminists) into a mainstream institution (the Gate, Dublin). However, attention is brought to a pattern of homologation to neoliberal hegemony within such reception, determined by the influences of national (Irish) and supranational (EU) interventions. The article concludes with a reflection on the possibility of counter-performances resistant to neoliberal hegemony within the current Irish and European cultural industry and in the new contexts of the Covid 19 pandemic. Keywords: Gate Theatre Dublin; Irish Theatre; #WakingTheFeminists; European austerity; Celtic Tiger.

Time Folding • Folding Time

Lisa Cay Miller is a pianist/composer/improviser and Artistic Director of the NOW Society. In this piece, she offers a poetic description of the technological challenges associated with a large-scale sequential improvisation project in which thirty-six musicians and two sound engineers collaborated with one another to produce a total of thirty-eight videos of improvised musical performances.

The Rallying Call to Decolonize

When Okwui Enwezor gained world renown as artistic director of Documenta11 in 2002, his accomplishments as curator of contemporary African art were already well established. His In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, exhibition (1996) had the temerity to describe the intentional ways in which Africans shaped their own photographic representation in a medium whose history was as long and distinguished in Africa as in Europe. Enwezor’s 2001 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a revelatory journey through the long process of colonial resistance and independence no less revolutionary for its astonishing range of content far beyond that of art objects, including film, music, theater, literature, and literature. In helming Documenta11, Enwezor not only included a historic number of non-white, non-European artists but also redefined the exhibition, before its opening in Kassel, by conceiving it as a final installment of several “platforms” staged worldwide. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions engineered to globalize the art world, and they effectively amounted to acts of art-historical decolonization. Enwezor’s legacy is instructive. Achieving an inclusive and equitable art history that is sustainable requires decentralizing white, Eurocentric, male, cisgender, and heterosexual hegemony. In two of his final projects, large-scale solo shows of Frank Bowling and El Anatsui, exhibiting these artists on their own terms did just that. It is through his curatorial practice of art-world decolonization that Enwezor has issued a rallying cry. He has shown us the way forward.

A Theater of Documentation

In this critical introduction, Lily Climenhaga offers an overview of the work and career of director Milo Rau. Climenhaga looks at Rau’s work across his career, beginning with early projects as a playwright working with director Simone Eisenring, through the creation of his company, the International Institute of Political Murder (iipm), and on to his work at ntgent where Rau has served as artistic director since 2018. Climenhaga identifies many of Rau’s collaborators and artistic inspirations, as well as the criticism of his practices. While all of Rau’s work is political, Climenhaga places the pieces into four distinct categories—reenactment, recollection, reactment, and reclassification—each of which allows for a kind of questioning of and engagement with history and the present.