 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2020 Prelude Festival hosted by the Martini Segal Theater Center. I'm David Bruin, my pronouns are he, him, and I'm recording live from Brooklyn, New York on the unseed land of the Lenape and Cronasi peoples. Along with Miranda Heyman, I'm one of the festival's co-curators. The theme of this year's festival is Sights of Revolution and tonight's panel, Appeals in Language, four critics on words they never want to see again, explores the changes taking place in the context of theater and performance criticism by zeroing in on its most basic element, the word. As the title of this panel suggests, Miranda and I asked four writers to reflect on a word or phrase circulating within theater and performance criticism that they find particularly useless, misunderstood, or harmful. In the hopes that these remarks would serve as a point of departure to think about the role of the critic and the responsibility of criticism in this revolutionary moment. Certainly theater and performance criticism has been the site of several overlapping revolutions and recognizings in the past and recent past. Needless to say, digital and social media have given a platform to seemingly anyone who wants to make public their views on a production, artist, or aspect of the profession. At the same time, print media and publishing have attenuated. These developments have taken place in the context of a profession, industry, and world, wrecked by white supremacy and racial capitalism, and white men in particular continue to occupy an outsized position in theater and performance criticism in the press and the academy. And yet, despite the seemingly intractable injustices and dire economic conditions, new initiatives and publications have emerged even in the past six months, such as Jose Siles's BIPOC Critics Lab and the Flash Paper spearheaded by Mark Blankenship. So theater and performance criticism seems, on the one hand, totally fraught, and on the other hand, filled with promise, both entrenched in inequity and deeply committed to participating in this struggle to dismantle longstanding systems of oppression. I'm so grateful to the four panelists who have joined us tonight, every one of whom, in my opinion, represents the best that the profession and the academy have to offer, and who have committed their time and labor to thinking about the perils and possibilities of theater and performance criticism now. We're going to hear from each one of the panelists and individually, and then we're going to all come together for a conversation at the end. So without further ado, it's my great pleasure to turn it over to Deep Tran. Journalist and critic based in Queens, New York, the land of the Moonsie people who are the sub-trib of the Lenape people and also the Canarsie tribe. And I used to work for American Theater Magazine and Broadway.com, and then COVID happened. And so I now no longer work at any publication. I now work for myself. And I recently co-founded a media company with colleague Jose Solis, where we have a podcast and we do videos and rewrite about theater that's happening now and the concerns that the industry is thinking about now, because as we like to say, theater is not dead. It's very much alive, and it is happening everywhere still, and that's a beautiful thing. And so for my part of this evening, I wanted to just talk about a word that I very much dislike in the style of if I was doing it for the Token Theater Friends podcast, where recently I had discovered that as soon as I turned on microphone, I can just talk for 10 minutes without stopping. I never had that talent before, and that's been, that's made me feel very proud of myself as someone who had a stutter growing up. The word today that I would like to never see again is the word canon or subword adjective canonical, because well, first of all, who decides what is canonical? It's usually men, and it's usually white men. And what kind of men are these? It's usually white critics, white professors, white thinkers coming at work from their very limited, privileged perspective, and then deciding for everyone in academia and within the culture and back in the 1800s, the only people who were allowed to be part of those very high cultures were also other white men. So it was white men who were deciding that the work of other white men were so much better than the work of everybody else. And that is incredibly frustrating to me because we are still using that word today to describe work that was prescribed by a very non-diverse group of people as great. And it made me also think about how if we're trying to talk about diversity and trying to get more diverse writers into entertainment, that means that we also need to look back and realize that the works that are being created now, like women and people of color did not just magically crop up in the 1980s. They had been writing, and fortunately, like most of history, like their writing was just forgotten about, or it was considered not great because they weren't, like Louisa May Alcott called, they did not write with a male pseudonym. And so, like, it's, and so when we think about what it is that we consider great, we should also think about, like, what were we told was great. You know, like, growing up, here's a list of things that I read in school in California that I was told was great and that I really hated, uh, the catch in the right, a fair world to arms, the scarlet letter, trellis and crescita. Actually, in college, I had not one, but two classes on Shakespeare. And this was not because I majored in theater. I actually did not major in theater. I majored in English. But, but like most of my English curriculum was devoted to works written by white men. And I was trying to think of, like, did I read any work by women or people of color, like in the, from middle school to high school to college. And then I realized, I think it only happened maybe twice. And I think one of them was, I think, and I think one of them was English patient by Michael Odachi, which I actually really did not like. And, and the only time I actually got to read works by people like Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, I didn't read Toni Morrison until I was 26 years old because I happened, because it was recommended to me by, by my friends in New York. And it's not to say that these works are bad. I don't actually think there's such thing as good art or bad art. But it, it was limiting. And the reason it was limiting because these professors were just going through a list of what was, what was considered great. And no one ever questioned why they were great. And they weren't, they were very rarely veering off of that list. And for me, as a young person growing up, it made me think, Oh, well, these are great. And if I don't like them, then that must mean that there is a problem with me. And there's a problem with my taste. If I don't think that Doris Dorefsky or Shakespeare are anything to write home about. Troilus and Cressida is a play. I don't know why I had to spend two semesters reading Shakespeare, I could just have read the best of Shakespeare in one semester. Like, and why am I spending the entirety of my adult life just trying to catch up on things that I should have gotten at UCLA? Why did I read, why did I not get to read Langston Hughes at UCLA? And, and so when we think about, and the reason I really don't want to use Canon anymore is be, is because it, it lets, it makes people think that there is there, like, there is a barometer of what makes good art, like there are some things that are just 100% good and great. And we should never question that, except art is more malleable than that. Most art falls somewhere in the middle. And most, and the thing about art is it's all also up to the interpretation of the people who are viewing it. And recently I was, I was talking to some theater artists and they were talking about this initiative that they were doing called Expand the Canon. It's from Hedge Pig Theater Ensemble. You can look them up at Mason Brooklyn. And they were trying to do a list of plays by women and by women of color that more people should read. And they create this, they assemble 600 scripts. They put, they put it up. And I mean, they put up 10 scripts. And I was asking, like a professor, a theater professor, had you ever read, read any of these artists before, besides Alice Childress, who was also on the list, who actually I've never read before? And that offends me. And I've never seen her work on stage before either. Like, why is that? And he, and that professor was telling me she hadn't read any of those scripts before, but she wants to use them in her curriculum now to teach young people now in 2020 that what is considered canonical is, is just a construct to make it seem like only works by certain group of people are great. And in my opinion, what is great work is work that touches a large amount of people. Yes. But also it's work that touches you intimately and moves you. And so what I consider great now may not, may not be what you consider great. And that is okay. And we should have a conversation and make all of these works available publicly for discussion instead of just like passing value judgment based on whether or not they made some lists like 100 years ago, that bunch of men made. And so that is why I don't really like the term cannon. And I wish that it, that people don't use it anymore. And I want to introduce my the next speaker in the evening, Brian Herrera. Hello. And thanks, Deep. Thanks, Deep, for introducing my name is Brian Herrera. I am a historian. I'm also a professor. I teach at Princeton University. My area of research specialization is I'm a historian of U.S. popular entertainment and performance. And I'm particularly interested in the way that U.S. popular entertainment and performance sort of helps us see the shifting, shifting notions of what race, gender, sexuality, etc. mean as it changes over time. My areas of specialization are the presence and absence of the people we would today call Latinx. And I'm particularly interested in the 20th century. All of that is I am coming to you from Princeton, New Jersey, which is the unceded traditional territory of the Lenny Lenape, the Nantikoke Lenny Lenape folks. And I am also here to as a person who is identified primarily as a scholarly historian, but as somebody who is very much interested in how my tools, the tools I have as a trained historian might bear on sort of building a history of the contemporary moment. And to that end, I sort of in addition to writing in a scholarly idiom, I occasionally have a podcast called Stinky Lulu says, and I also run a newsletter called the theater click newsletter. I may mention those again later in our conversation. The the word I'm here to talk about today relates to my current one of my current book projects. I'm currently writing a book project on the history of casting, and particularly the history of the material practices of casting. Where I think about the history of where do we get ideas and practices like the audition or the headshot or the callback or the breakdown, etc. But a big and that informs that the word I'd like to propose that we I would say I don't know if we can ban it or we can never stop using it I just wish people would use it in a different way but also that whenever we see it we should we should ask why it's being used and that word is nontraditional. Part of the reason I'm interested in us being skeptical of the word nontraditional especially as it often modifies the word casting in critical commentary or other commentary on contemporary performance is I feel that the word nontraditional has come to be a way a placeholder of sorts, a way a word that works as a way of noting something without actually noticing what it is a way of demarcating a kind of performance sort of marking something about the performance without actually describing what's happening and indeed part of what I am suspicious and weary of in the use of nontraditional and a lot of our critical and other commentary discourse is the way that it comes in and is though just by saying it's a nontraditional it's a nontraditional approach or a nontraditional cast it's as though that says something and when in fact it is a way of sort of skipping past what is actually going on on stage. Part of the other reason is that the word nontraditional as it circulates today is in some way so startlingly divorced from how it was introduced nearly 50 years ago when in the 70s and especially the early 80s when it was introduced as an advocacy term an umbrella term that was introduced as a term of advocacy that would operate as an umbrella of sorts that would gather a variety of ways that casting could be used as sort of a artistic artistic methodology in transforming how we saw canonical words and non-canonical works alike and so nontraditional was a was a sort of a wedge word that opened up a sort opened out into a series of other words including words like colorblind casting color conscious casting societal casting conceptual casting the list goes on of all the particular techniques of how the of how the creative interpretive act of casting might be understood as a way to sort of reinvigorate how plays arrive to the stage and of course in the later 1970s in the early 1980s when nontraditional arrived as a sort of a term a preferred term this was up here an ecosystem which even though it's only a few decades ago it was very different in some ways than our own in that it was a theatrical ecosystem that was really over determined in certain ways by memetic notions of one-to-one congruence between actor and role there was a lot of more like a lot of reliance on sort of family resemblance or sort of do you look the part all these things and not to say that any of this has gone away but the hegemony of it in the 1970s in the early 1980s was in a slightly different place than it is now in 2020 so nontraditional was a way to wedge into that convention wedge into the hegemony of one-to-one congruent casting and it was a way to advocate that there were other ways to do it it wasn't the only way the way that was the normative indolent practice in a lot of circuits of contemporary performance circa 1980 didn't have to be that way and here's this collection of techniques underneath the umbrella of nontraditional that might be useful now as much as as much as has changed since 1980 and especially in terms of the styles of plays and musicals that are arriving to stages around the country as much has changed since 1980 much has remained the same and one of the things that has become peculiarly ossified in my estimation is the way that a term of advocacy a term of intervention a term of this nontraditional term now names what I sometimes call an incoherent tradition of nontraditional casting it is a way to sort of a shorthand a simple label to apply to a set of practices without actually asking what is being done here or what is going on without actually describing how casting is operating or why this choice of casting in ways that might seem that might have caught the commentator unawares how like instead of going a little bit deeper nontraditional steps in as almost a placeholder saying like now you know what I'm saying nontraditional like it's a way it's a way that has stopped thought stopped interrogation and in some way stopped critical engagement and so for that way I am so I think what this so nontraditional for me has become a shorthand a simple label for anything that departs from the banal casual expectations of the viewer and so for me I think nontraditional cease to mean anything and it's in some ways now become a term of a term that is a warning term a red flag term a term of something to be mistrusted as being unthoughtful and so in some ways both to recuperate the original value of the word but then also to get us out of the bad habits we have in our use of it I humbly submit that we seriously consider removing nontraditional from our critical vocabulary as we seek to more actively and proactively describe the work as we see it arriving to our stages so that's my submission for today's for today's proposals and with that I will turn to my colleague so you Colbert thank you Brian good evening and thank you for having me my name is Sawika Colbert I am the Vice Dean and Idol Family Professor in African American Studies and Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University my pronouns are she her hers I acknowledge that I in the university reside on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and in a constant peoples the word I have chosen chosen today is repetition and my comments consider otherwise possibilities more so than canceling this term the pandemic has exposed the structural and systematic racism that underpins American society from health care to the arts and for theater it has accelerated a reckoning with white spectatorship that has troubled black theater from the 19th century to the present in bodies and descent Daphne Brooks theorizes Afroalienation as black 19th century performers ability to craft the enliven position of looking at being looked atness calling attention to the hypervisibility and cultural construction of blackness in transatlantic culture the historical agents in her book rehearsed ways to render racial and gender categories strange and thus disturb cultural perceptions of identity formation in the African American theatrical body I examine how 20th century black theater artists challenge the intertwining of blackness with being on display and the association of whiteness with value and evaluation which is often intimately tied to renumeration as August Wilson notes in a speech delivered at the as the keynote address of the theater communications group 1996 conference the common values of the American theater that we share are plot dialogue characterization design how we both make use of them will be determined by who we are what ground we are standing on and what our cultural values are Wilson notes that black theater artists gain value by demonstrating their ability to fashion plot dialogue characterization and design that are similar to white western ideals he critiques the white american theater stating their gods their manners their being are the only true and correct representations of humankind they refuse to recognize black conduct in manners as part of a system that is fueled by its own philosophy mythology history creative motif social organization and ethos wilson's speech provides a useful prehistory for the calls from a coalition of theater makers who are black indigenous and people of color under the name we see you white american theater the statement offers sets of best practices in all operations of american theater from the composition of boards to audience cultivation to season planning to press the document offers concrete anti-racist steps american theater can take to transform the artistic and professional landscapes the the accounting that we see you white american theater demands also requires a conceptual reframing of theater and performance studies as wilson suggests in his tcg speech value adheres through cultural and economic systems as the us faces a reckoning with a past shaped by democratic ideals and racial capitalism theater and performance studies scholars must rethink how we define the central terms of our analysis and the parameters of our work because how we conceptualize conduct and manners relates to the value we ascribe to them while performance studies theorists in the late 20th century most notably judith butler questioned the understanding of gender as an essence and argued instead that gender is a performance a concept that accrues meaning through behavior less flexibility has adhered to racial categories as i argue with douglas a jones junior and chain vocal in the introduction to race and performance after repetition performance studies focuses on the idea of repetition as the central mode of identity production as genders key epistemology we contend that repetition is axiomatic and performance studies has much to do with the term centrality in the field's founding theories and documents among the most influential is richard schekner's definition of performance itself performance is never for the first time it means for the second to the nth time performance is twice behaved behavior the simultaneity of sameness and difference that marks repetition that is repetition's mark is thus constitutive of performance making performance an esteemed domain for the entrenchment of social social cultural norms as well as the production and articulation of critique because scholarly consensus regards it as the action that makes the conditions of performances aesthetics and meanings possible repetition is a god term in performance theory butler warns that gender and race do not and should not function as corollaries given their distinct histories blackness specifically has not only maintained its material cling its history as and for capital in the late 20th century it also became aligned with recuperation in the late 20th century women of color feminists shaped the fields of black ethnic literary and women's and gender studies through acts of recuperations as mode of attempt modes of attention and care these moments also leave a less visible impression on theater and performance studies alice walker's discovery of zora no herston as described in the essay in search of our mother's garden epitomizes the recuperation at the heart of women of color feminist practice in the late 20th century walker's active recuperation disrupts the linearity of repetition through return it also challenges understandings of blackness's value being rooted in its use rather than its relational quality in this case to the past blackness has been conceptualized as more bond and therefore not having historical value and black and blur fredmont deposits how does something come from nothing how can something how can some things be in and out of nothing be in and out of nothing the disposability of black people within the western world see george floyd produces the conceptual framing of blackness as nothing which molten challenges by considering how absence produces and reorganizes aesthetics similarly the work of women of color feminist demonstrates how projects of recuperation and restoration shape not only black performance but performances temporality in general the temporal frame of black performance does not align solely with the lot it's a repetition but instead offers a way to rethink again the relationship between performance and accumulation and race and performance after repetition we contend performance every day or otherwise is a crucial site of analysis here because on the one hand it has the capacity to to perpetuate the familiar and dominant through repetitions that have consolidated into a seemingly consistent state of being or state of nature on the other hand it also has the capacity to warp or subvert the familiar and dominant through restorations as repair or mending of what has been forgotten overlooked misremembered suppressed dormant or denied restorative performances might disrupt exploitative systems by making material repairs or amends however fleeting to be exploited that is they can challenge the historical negation of populations and other and offer cultural workers in the present a useful past the study of blackness as a study in performance connects to the long history of black radical thought black performance shifts the horizon for being and for being free to one located aside the subjectivities chattel slavery and frames centering the work of women of color feminist calls forth modes of production that disrupt the hegemony of repetition and all modes of theatrical production from season planning to audience engagement a challenge the conceptual frame of repetition allows a rethinking of how and for who we work if the multiple crises of 2020 had any lasting lessons perhaps we will realize that perpetual modes of extraction have limits hopefully we will also learn that reservoirs of affirmative manners and behavior wait to be restored if we have the courage to embrace the work that awaits us thank you and I will now turn things over to Miriam Felton Dansky thank you and thank you to my fellow panelists I'm Miriam Felton Dansky I use she her pronouns I am coming to you from Rhineback New York which is the traditional and ancestral lands of the Mohican and the Muncie Lenape peoples I am a critic and scholar of contemporary performance I teach at Bard college I am a proud alum of the village voice RIP and I wrote a book called viral performance contagious theaters from modernism to the digital age I'm gonna actually give you three words for the price of one and like a couple of my other panelists I'm responding more to the idea of upheavals in language than to the idea of words that I never want to see again I'm I'm asking really critics to think about the use of the words stylized and its bffs which for me are surreal and absurd as words that and and what Ryan said really resonated with me words that pretend to describe something but that actually cover something up or fail to do the work of describing so I'm gonna actually share my screen so that you can see a little of the research that I did thinking about these words maybe someone can let me know if this screen share is actually working I'm gonna assume that it is so here's a stylized version of the word stylized and when we think about stylization we really are thinking about almost nothing here's the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary of stylized to conform an artistic representation to the rules of a conventional style to conventionalize when we use the word stylized we are simply saying that something exists in a style but I would submit that we almost never use the word stylized to talk about naturalistic Stanislavski inherited contemporary realistic acting when we use the word stylized we are using it to remove ourselves from whatever it is that we're seeing on stage and or to apply that as a descriptor to forms of theater and performance that we don't necessarily understand it's a word that stands in for something more specific and it's a word that also is typically exoticizing and racializing whatever it is describing here are a few sub words that come under stylized stylization which I was interested to find out it contained examples of the progressive degeneration and stylization of the heads of horses goats deer and oxen stylization is now generally admitted to be a sort of degeneration though some consider it only as a stage in the evolution of art to a higher plane and there are a couple of other examples under stylized these are from the early 20th century and they describe an anthropological approach to thinking about what stylization is that is Europe thinking Europe or America thinking in relationship to other parts of the world specifically in an anthropological and colonial mode so when we use the word stylized we are often using that as a way of placing whatever we're seeing in opposition to some notion of the real that remains undefined we are saying the thing that is stylized is not real but we have never considered whether the thing that is stylized might actually be more real or what it is that's real in the first place I'm going to move on so that I have time to talk about all three words I looked up the three words that I was interested in in Google books and Graham so this is 200 years of these words existence in the English language just in a corpus of books so this doesn't cover critical reviews newspaper articles etc but it was interesting for me to note that we have been far more absurd for far longer than we have been surreal or stylized that surreal and stylized are bffs they emerge in the 20th century and surreal as I'll talk about next really takes off only after the existence of surrealism in art it's the one word that I'm talking about that actually emerges out of a set of artistic practices from the early 20th century in Europe and there there is little usage of the word surreal in the English language before the use of surrealism so when we describe something as surreal even though we may not be saying that it's surrealist we are invoking the history of surrealism and that of course was a history of white European artists who were deeply inspired and deeply appropriative of the work of Asian and African artists so there is a racial history a racist history embedded within surreal this is the Google and Graham just for the word surreal and what was particularly interesting to me was to see how in the 20th century really in the second half of the 20th century the usage of this word in books shoots way up suddenly things are surreal suddenly lots of things are surreal and my suggestion because I find surreal to be a word that is often used when we don't quite know how to describe what we're seeing when what we're seeing is maybe not immediately comprehensible when it doesn't match our idea of what's realistic or believable when it doesn't match our lived experience when we don't have a cultural connection to it we may say that it's surreal and so there is a lot of people saying that a lot of things are surreal this is another dimension of surrealism that deserves to be thought about when we are using a word like surreal and this is just a little snapshot from Maurice Nadeau's 1965 the history of surrealism my dad's copy and this is a text from 1925 that offers a couple of important ideas about the history of the surrealist movement from which we get the word surreal that are often forgotten when we describe imagery or theater or performance or art of any kind as surreal and I'm just going to read a couple of the items on this seven point list we have nothing to do with literature but we are quite capable if need be of making use of it like everyone else that's point one point three we are determined to create a revolution point four we have bracketed the word surrealism with the word revolution solely to show the disinterested detached and even quite desperate character of this revolution point seven we are specialists in revolt there is no means of action we are not capable of using if the need arises surrealism is not a poetic form it is a cry of the mind turning toward itself and determined in desperation to crush its fetters and if need be by material hammers that last phrasing might remind us that the history of surrealism was deeply embedded with the history of communism and that the surrealists in Europe were constantly joining rejoining quitting and rejoining again the communist party and that they saw surrealism as a means towards revolution or at the very least in dialogue with a worldwide class conscious revolution surrealism is political and when we call something surreal because we just don't know quite how else to describe it we are not remembering that dimension of its history I was interested by this little tidbit that that came up when I was researching the word surreal the Merriam-Webster dictionary says that surreal was their 2016 word of the year surreal is Merriam Webster's 2016 word of the year because it was looked up significantly more frequently by users in 2016 than it was in previous years and because there were multiple occasions on which this word was the one clearly driving people to their dictionary our largest spike in lookups for surreal followed the US presidential election in November this is a continuation of the same article surreal had three major spikes in interest that were higher in volume and that were sustained for longer periods of time than in past years in march the word was used in coverage of excuse me I'm just having a little bit of computer trouble in March the word was used in in coverage of the Brussels I need help I can't read this quote because the zoom is covering it up I'm going to let you all read it to yourself it was used in March it was used in July and the largest spike in lookups of the word surreal followed the US election in November in this week that we are all in now I couldn't help but think that surreal is deeply dangerous deeply political and deeply related to the real in ways that we often ignore when we use it to describe things that look silly or weird this is the word absurd in the font that my computer called wingdings absurd is very old it is it means a lot of things this is the first meaning of a thing against or without reason or propriety incongruous unreasonable illogical my contention at this moment is that we often call things absurd when we don't recognize them or when they're incongruous or seem unreasonable to us when they do not seem logical to us or when they do not seem proper to us that we dismiss things as absurd because absurd sits adjacent to silly and wacky and weird and quirky and it is often a way of dismissing the work of women artists transgender artists gender nonconforming artists artists of color this is a reason why if we are a white male critic we might want to be careful about using the word absurd in a review of for instance alisha harris's play is god is this is from ben brantley's review of the play he writes is god is maybe pitched in a key of absurd of exaggeration absurd to who and exaggerated to who i wanted to bring this up as perhaps my final point which is something that falls under the subheadings of absurd if you keep looking through the oxford english dictionary and you find all the meanings that this word has and they are variations on a theme but if you keep looking you come to this interesting little tidbit definition b.2 an unreasonable thing act or statement an absurdity okay we kind of already said that but if we then look at the history of usage under this definition the first instance that we find is from 1610 and it is from a text called historyomastics what is historyomastics historyomastics is probably the most famous puritan text written to try to get the theater eliminated in the early 20th century during the time of elizabethan jacobian caroline theater as well as the time of the rising puritan movement that resulted eventually in the indiregnum and the english revolution and civil war in historyomastics william prin who was one of the most famous of the anti theatrical puritans uses the word absurd numerous times and these are these what i'm showing you on the screen at the moment is a series of reasons why the theater is absurd the last of which i will just point out he says the third is the apparent vanity follyty and fantastic lightness which appears in those ridiculous antique mimical foolish gestures compliments embracement smiles nods of the eyes motions of the eyes head feet hands and whole entire body which players use of purpose to provoke their spectators to profuse inordinate laughter which absurd irrational unchristian if not unhumane gestures and actions more fit for skittish goats than men or sober christians so when we use the word absurd we are actually using a word that is deeply embedded in the history the long history of efforts to stamp out the theater itself i will end there um and i think everyone um all the panelists will come back um excellent thank you so much everyone um i'll let mary there we go um i'm just waiting for deep excellent um thank you all so much uh that that was so inspiring also to see the the breath of work the breath of thought um combining personal and professional and political analysis on this i've committed the cardinal sin of any good curator which is that i have attenuated and contracted our time for discussion but i want to pose a question to the group um so many of you foregrounded as the prompt asked you to a mode of critique you know maybe applying a certain hermeneux of suspicion into your thinking so i'd like to maybe switch gears a little bit in terms of mode and ask you all you know in the past six seven months um what has given you hope or inspiration uh what what has changed your thinking in a way that has kept you going nourished you help you survive and it could be from from the context of criticism or theater or the academy or something just much more broader in the world so i i will say that um i've been doing a lot of i'm writing or finishing a book on lorraine handsbury um and what i've learned by reading her work is how deeply her black radicalism was informed by the fact that she had um mentors who are from an older generation and that she was constantly thinking about women's labor and the reason why i think that's pertinence moment is because during the civil rights movement period um lots of women's labor was um informed the infrastructural work and the day-to-day work then allowed for major changes to happen and so handsbury was constantly thinking about how previous generations work enabled the classical phase of the civil rights movement and she was thinking about how the day-to-day work of women's labor laid the foundation for the movement and so when i think about our current moment i don't think of it as a dormant period i think of it as a period in the theater and the arts um in political context where foundations are being laid or the day-to-day labor and infrastructure of the next possibilities are being created and how the rehearsals that we're having either via zoom theater or otherwise will produce the next sense of possibilities that we'll be able to enjoy together um when we're not in a moment of crisis i'm going to hop in to sort of um tag on to that in some ways because i do think part of what i really appreciate about uh so you can sort of offering that sort of very specific a tangible context for uh handsbury's uh handsbury's story in relation to what are the times of building foundation because i do feel there's something um i've been really alert to the ways that uh the idea of relationality in the theater has really sort of emerged as as we're sort of trying to figure out what i tend to call remote theater of the theater that ends up uh like how do we understand our relationship to each other with this arbitrary uh distance so instead of going stay audience performer distance we're negotiating all kinds of other questions of distance and what is ethical relationality when we do gather in space and time and and so i do think that there is um i'm seeing that just coming up in so many different ways of people really investigating what place does performance have in activating ethical relations with each other and i do think that if there is something that is to come forward from this it might be some foundational transformation in what does it mean when we use a theater space to come together as a community to reflect to breathe to respond um and sort of opening up new questions about what the what the what the black box can hold what the proscenium can hold what the foyer can hold and activate and that is something i just feel some deep thinking and across laterally uh disrupting hierarchies as we know them in the theater sort of different kinds of conversations all engaging this foundational work of reflecting on what does it mean to be in relationship to each other in performance space yeah i'll pick it back both on what surika and brian were saying about this this new creative period that that we seem to be a part of and there's been a lot of criticisms of zoom theater and i don't like it i don't like the criticisms because i feel like we are at the beginning of a new kind of theater a new medium of theater and to expect it to sound and look and feel like theater in a room actually together is irrational and with any medium there is a time of experimentation of things looking ugly of things not feeling right and all the preemptive criticisms from a lot of outlets about how theater is dead because it is not in a live space and the zoom theater is not good enough like that i feel like that is a deterrence to evolution rather than a rather than inspiring more and i'm really inspired by the artist not listening to people who say that and continuing to figure out how to use this new medium to best tell new stories not just stories that were told before but new kinds of stories and new ways of audience interaction and what's especially inspiring to me is new ways of access where people from around the world can access a show that was created in Oregon like that that is inspiring and i hope that we don't lose that that access and that connection with people outside of our immediate city um i'll add just a little bit um deep when you said the word live one of the things that resonated with me is that a word i was considering taking up in this panel was live because this moment has really the liveness debates are very old and yet it has taken this moment in a sense to to truly erase the meaning of or rather the the predominance or the hierarchy that we give to the idea of something being live because live has no longer a single meaning it means a whole bunch of different things that are all contextual um and that is as it should be i don't want to cancel the word i want to i want to envision it with its full multiplicity um and so we no longer talk about live theater versus digital theater we're talking about a whole bunch of things that fall under the heading of live um and we are talking about them so that's the other thing um and i'm really really resistant to the idea of um of saying that anything is hopeful right now um or or that anything is an opportunity right now um but i um agree with my fellow panelists that this is a space of conversation and that conversations um that the the the um as maybe to respond to some of what shahika said um the turning wheel of repetition does not allow to happen that capitalism doesn't allow to happen some of those conversations um in the worst of circumstances are are happening right now um and so that gives me some hope i'm also struck by the um by i i my uh i appreciate uh deep naming this sort of the frustration with the the la the way that folks are choosing to describe what's happening you know and so and doing this sort of genre policing of i don't like blank theater right and as somebody who who often teaches and is uh i i keep thinking about how many folks say i don't like musical theater and then they name the musical they do like and this way of this sort of and so that makes me think we're in this moment of genre discovery and perhaps practice innovation that it might not be for everybody that's fine but i think it is we are we are in a space where artists and thinkers and folks invested in community transformation are using things that for lack of a better word we might call performance to activate something and i think we need to be very acute in our attention to description and response rather than comparison to existing templates or standards and so that's i get think with this question of canonicity and repetition and and the the hackneyed words that mariam and i raised is i think what what we have in this opportunity if we're a documentarian or a critic or a scholar is really being alert to the ways in which our habits of language are not serving the moment in which we are living and to sort of really try to lift what we see is happening and to lift the voices and the work that is being done under the umbrella perhaps of performance but not necessarily in any way that we would have seen before anyone else we've got a couple minutes so i just want to open the floor if people have have thoughts about what they heard or continue this line of thinking and the only thing i'll add and this is just piggybacking on what brian just said which i found really evocative is performance studies emerged as a response to reinvigorate theater as a mode and in so doing expand what we understood as theatrical and to include traditions that were not historically western in a proscenium stage and so to the extent that we understand lots of different modes of theatrical production or performance having emerged over long histories it's interesting to see how genre functions to police and in order to create commodities right and so the outcome of policing certain modes of genres is to produce a commodity culture but it's not necessarily in the service of creating better art and so it'll be fascinating to see how within the constraints of our current moment those conversations continue to elaborate themselves but i also think it's useful to tie them to other conversations and histories that we've had for many years both in the industry as well as in the academy i just want to say you know i have already spoken too much probably this event but a word that i've been thinking of and hearing you all talk and also thinking about your careers that i'd like to rethink or pull away from from commodity or privatization extraction is entrepreneurship because i've been so inspired by just the people on the skull the way that you've entered into podcasting into so you kind of know you've taken on a position at the Shakespeare Center and forgive me if i've gotten the name wrong but you know i mean the ways that people have kept the charge of criticism and you know launched it into new fields twitter has in some ways become like the new lobby sometimes i mean if someone attended a performance of circle jerk i love the new form of live tweeting sarah paulson live tweeting circle jerk live was an amazing moment in the history of your criticism so i've been really inspired by that and deep in particular you know we have not met before this panel but i've seen your career from afar i've had the utmost admiration for the changes you've made at eats institution and working on your spearhead in your own project so i wanted to thank you in particular for that example i think we have to wrap up but i want to thank you all again feel free to turn your microphone to the last time to say something but please i hope people go and and seek out the work of these thinkers and writers and entrepreneurs and learn more about what they have to offer so thank you all so much thank you thank you so much for this invitation thank you thank you thank you watch circle jerk online until like november 7 i believe yes everyone go see it part of prelude 2019 all right thank you all until next time