Book Review: Redefining Theatre Communities

A Book Review of Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making. Edited by Marco Galea and Szabolcs Musca (2019)

Restaging Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Curriculum in the Performing Arts

In this article I will discuss "Performance-As-Research," as a method of pedagogy, an approach to learning and problem solving, as a practice of inquiry and of making meaning in the performing arts, and as a conduit for students to develop physical, cognitive and affective proficiencies; in the context of a first year undergraduate dance repertory course. Over the past academic year, I have begun to collaborate with entering Bachelor of Fine Arts Dance majors at Temple University (where I am an assistant professor) to restage and perform Les Noces, (French; English: The Wedding; Russian: Свадебка, Svadebka), a ballet and orchestral concert work composed by Igor Stravinsky for percussion, pianists, chorus, and vocal soloists. Stravinsky subtitled the work "Choreographed Scenes with Music and Voices." The ballet, commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska and premiered in Paris in 1923. In my Repertory I course, the students and I have worked together to collaboratively craft a creative reimagining of the original work. This article will describe that process, and demonstrate the multiple avenues for teaching and learning that Performance-As-Research opens up in the pedagogical context of the higher education performing arts curriculum.

Performance Review: Coronavirus Time Capsule Project

The Coronavirus Time Capsule features the voices and experiences of over 3,000 teenagers from all over the world. Through weekly themes young people from youth theaters and youth organisations film themselves and their lives, documenting the trials and tribulations of life in lockdown. All material is edited and presented on Company Three’s website, alongside a Best Bits compilation video. This review considers the context in which this piece of performance art was created; during a global pandemic in which the voices of young people are rarely heard. As the title of the project suggests, its aim was to create a way, i.e., a time capsule, for teenagers to record and remind themselves about how and what they felt during the pandemic in years to come. However, this review argues the potential wider impact a virtual project of this scale can have and what we as theater-makers can learn from it.

‘Beware The Word'

This paper considers the potential of utilizing ethnotheatre methods to investigate the experiences of butoh artists and practitioners as they struggle to verbalize the dance of the ineffable. While an unlikely approach, ethnotheatre-based research may offer an alternative methodology for grappling with the ineffable and the inarticulate in performance as an intermediary research process capable of not only attending to but foregrounding both language and the places where language fails through and of the body, utilizing language to foreground its limits. Through the labor of creating a script for performance, it offers a method of textual engagement within movement practice, one that gives data a body through which to ‘speak’ or express meaning. For the purposes of butoh research, its formal processes allow us to bring the silences and struggles with language into greater relief, spotlighting them, in a performance context. As an arts-based research methodological thought experiment, this paper seeks to demonstrate how taking an ethnotheatre approach to butoh research may provide captivating insight into the art of butoh, as well as yield a different kind of evidence of or living testimony to the operative force of language and the creative possibilities of failure.

Book Review: Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University edited by Kim Solga

Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University: Responses to an Academy in Crisis practically examines the utilization of performance methodology within the university setting. This edited collection combines diverse expertise to demonstrate effective strategies for navigating our art, scholarship, and teaching while working at a neoliberal university. Intending to operate alongside, rather than within, Kim Solga presents research and case studies utilizing performance as both a methodology for research and a tool to improve pedagogy and community relationships. Providing hope to scholar-artists working in theatre and performance studies, Solga’s work inspires creativity and provides a form of collaboration to strengthen our field and ensure its continuance.

“Not Writing New Rules, Merely Rat-ifying”: Musical Theatre Goes Digital in Ratatouille: The Musical

On TikTok, #RatatouilleTheMusical was the pandemic daydream and collaborative creation of dozens of amateur and out-of-work theatre artists. The January 1 benefit performance of Ratatouille: The Musical ratified the work of its creators by bringing it to a broader audience, but did not always honor its tone and intent. Regardless of the product itself, however, Ratatouille: The Musical offers hope for the resilience and adaptibility of the rising generation of musical theatremakers.

Disruptions of [In](ter)dependence as Methods for Choreographic Praxis

This article studies how different forms of disruption of creative exchanges between music and dance can be conceptualised. These explorations are the results of two editions of the choreographic research project Estancias Coreográficas (Spain, 2017 and 2018). The sources of these explorations are varied: from participants’ questionnaires to a symposium on music and dance. The article proposes a conceptualisation of the possible collaborations between contemporary forms of music and dance, and, at the same time, discusses the conceptual practice which is constituted in this collaboration in itself. Exploring the documentation of two intensive research processes in which music and dance were put in relation—something which is common in choreography but perhaps not so often systematically studied in practical environments—the article proposes that through the conceptualisation of the many forms, concepts, and possibilities that these collaborations offer, the moment of exchange in itself emerges as a conceptual practice. This, of course, makes the conceptualisation somewhat vague and complicates the exploration. In this context, the concept of disruption becomes more enticing as an understanding of artistic exchanges. There is a sense in which the interactions between choreographers, composers, researchers and practitioners can be understood as a form of “disordering”.

Interactive Performance and Simulation Learning

Over the course of 2018 - 2019, interactive experience design company, (ix)plore Lab, created three simulation-based learning programs for the Travis County Reentry Employment Services (RES) training in Austin, Texas. Participants, most of whom were from organizations that assist formerly incarcerated individuals during the reentry process, attended workshops focused on client-based practices. Specifically, they learned techniques for better conducting informal assessments and motivational interviewing methods they could utilize in their work. Each workshop culminated in an interview with a fictional client, played by an actor. The team wished to improve upon existing live simulation models in several ways. First, by creating a method to provide immediate feedback to learners. Second, by increasing the simulations adaptability so it could adjust to each individual learner. Lastly, the simulation needed to have a high degree of emotional fidelity. To achieve these, (ix)plore Lab designed the programs by integrating techniques from interactive theater performance with existing simulation practices to effectively target specific skills for development. This article provides an overview of the techniques involved and adjustments made to focus on soft skill development, and documents three simulation-based learning programs that took place over the course of 2018 - 2019, highlighting developments made with each iteration. The training program documented in this paper was created without monetary compensation. In lieu of payment, the organizers of RES allowed (ix)plore Lab to collect feedback from learners and to use the training as a laboratory for workshopping this simulation-based learning model.

Not Strictly STEAM

“That which We Call A Rose,” (“Rose”) is a multi-media performance-as-research project, with puppets and robots, that I devised with a diverse ensemble of undergraduates and professionals to explore questions about planetary nomenclature, climate change, and colonization. “Rose” explicitly challenges andro-and euro-centric hegemonies embedded in 21st century space exploration and invites its audiences to do the same. STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) has become a popular pedagogy for K-12 education. Many K-12 STEAM programs claim to put art at the heart of STEM, but often prioritize science content over creative process, falling short of the potential that STEAM holds to foster lifelong learners and innovators who are curious, skilled, and literate across a variety of disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), on the other hand, promotes a K-20 STEAM pedagogy that acknowledges the importance of facilitating young learners’ creative inquiry as well as the potential for mature artists to become equally-valued culture creators across arts, science, and social domains. In this article, I use “Rose” as a case study to query the possibilities of implementing performance-as-research as an essential component of STEAM pedagogies. I examine the ways that artists can invite audiences across multiple social identities to join in processes of performance creation as a means of critical inquiry of STEM fields. The performance-as-research process encourages participant audiences to authentically engage in arts practices as a means of actively combatting social issues such as climate change, professional gender and racial inequity, and the colonialist traditions implicit to contemporary space exploration.