 Physically, emotionally, spiritually satisfying lunch time conversations. And we're going to launch into what has become a very exciting and consistent part of our conferences, which is hot topics. And so I'm going to pass the mic to Brian Moore and Dan Brewer, who are going to be your facilitators for this session. Good afternoon, everybody. Hi. Welcome back. My name is Brian Moore, pronouns he, him, his. I am with Concordia University in Nebraska. I just want to quickly thank you for being here. We're excited to share this with you, our annual event of Hot Topics. It's part of the University Caucus, which has been around for as long as LMDA has. And this has been one of those great opportunities for us to share many of the ideas, the thoughts, the projects, et cetera, that are taking place around academia and beyond. And it's always exciting to see what people are thinking, what people are doing, and to be able to share that with each other to inspire and spark more conversation and dialogue and practice from here on out. So if you are interested in doing this in the future, please don't hesitate to contact Diane or me. There's information about Hot Topics as well as the U-Caucus on the handout that has been around. If you do not have a handout, feel free to come and find us later and we can get you access to it, or at least information about Hot Topics in the future. I'm going to let you go ahead and read this, but for time's sake, I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to pass it on to Diane Brewer, who is the VP for University Relations, and she will let you know what we're going to be doing. Thank you. Okay, great. So very quickly, I'm just going to orient you to how we're going to do this. Those of you who are listening, you are going to practice what you do best, which is making connections between seemingly unconnected things. The people who are presenting are going to go in order on your list. The first person is live. The next two people are not behind me right now, but they will be, are Skyping in from off-site. Yasmin was not able to join us, so she's actually not on your list as you're going through and reading and keeping track of who's talking and what they're talking about. They are going to jump up and introduce themselves because time is so tight. And also, because we're giving them the opportunity to remember why they decided not to be actors, we are going to strictly time them. As soon as they open their mouths and say the first word, the timer is going to start. Then at four minutes, they're going to get a hand signal from Kathleen. And at five minutes, Kathleen will say thank you, and they will say thank you, and then the next person will come up. So it's going to work. It's prearranged. You don't need to be high anxiety about it as you see it happening. Here we go. Oh, yes, hello. There we go. Okay, so hello. I'm Hannah Slätne. I am a Swedish dramaturg who's been working in theatre in the UK and Ireland for 20 years, mainly in new writing, but also with a focus on interdisciplinarity and with a special interest in the sonic arts. I am not an academic, so when I talk about my research, it's purely a practice-based, sort of artist and project-based research. So my latest interest in research is creating a new approach within my practice that I'm calling sensory dramaturgy, but I am sure there are lots of people who can come up with a better name and have much more insight into this than possibly I have. The reason why I'm developing this is because I have been engaged to dramaturg three separate pieces lately. One is exploring the world as experienced by a brain changing because of Parkinson's disease and how sound and stories can put up some resistance. The second is a writer realizing that she's already halfway through a journey of losing her hearing. And she wants to use the sonic arts and storytelling to explore her changing relationship with the spoken word and with communication. The third one is a dancer who's registered blind and through her work is trying to understand how she watches dance, how she connects with movement both as an audience and as a blind dancer and how she can share her world with those sighted. My experience so far teaches me, in particularly the five years that I was working on a piece called Reassemble Slightly Escue that I will talk about later in the conference, that interdisciplinarity is key to this thing that I'm calling sensory dramaturgy. In the three very different processes, I aim to introduce ways of working with all the senses through multiple art forms in order to take pressure of the art form and the sense that we are actively investigating. I think if you're working with a brain that experiencing change or damage it's helpful to completely move away from trying to make that brain do what it used to do. So for me it's about devising a dramaturgical process that bypass the familiar and in some cases bypass the damaged area of the brain in order to invigorate other parts and to create new pathways. So as a dramaturge then I feel I need to not only understand what is changing in the word of the artist but also what kind of brain the artist had before the change started to happen. And this route of discovery is going to be circular, playful and with plenty of time for rest. I need to help them find the balance between the areas of expertise where excellence, skills, talent and craft means everything to them as artists and very important as part of their identity. And then we need to use other artistic expressions which are about research and exploration in which the brain can rebalance and rest where the stakes, artistic stakes are not so high. So it requires me to find genuinely innovative and bespoke approaches which is where I would love some communications with you guys and also a mindset where I tune into my own sensory perceptions as if I know nothing whilst keeping grounded in my years of experience of process and dramaturgy. So the benefits if we get it right is artistic innovation but of course we don't know what that is yet. And I hope we get three pieces of art which are excellent and beautiful in their own right with proud and satisfied artists. And as I believe in the plasticity of our brains and in its healing capacity, I am convinced the work will benefit both participants and audiences alike. So my research is therefore twofold. It's about how I facilitate and dramaturg each process to help that artist find their form and expression and the unique piece of work. And it's for myself as a dramaturg. How do I expand my own perceptions and sensory world to be a useful cog in the wheel on these collaborative journeys? The three processes will remain completely separate apart from me flying like a bumblebee from one flower to the other in cross-pollination. But then in November this year, I am bringing all the artists together for a workshop as part of the Being Human Festival in the UK which will hopefully open up the learning points. And I think that's when the big challenge will come because then we're starting to talk about access and inclusion across these three pieces. So I wanted to reach out to anyone here to come and chat to me about the experience in this area. Test, test, test. I'm working on the Dramaturgy of Memory. I apologize to some of you because I've been working on this for a while. So for some of you this will be reworking the Dramaturgy of Memory. Can you hear me all right, Janine? Okay. A family stands on the East Bank of the Missouri and Chamberlain, South Dakota. They're in the middle of everything. The parents are in their mid-40s, the children, a girl and a boy, 14 and 11, neither little kids nor adults. They're in the middle of the country, on the edge of the West, on the great plains of dinosaurs, of buffalo and prairie grasses, of the Lakota, of Lewis and Clark, a little house on the prairie, of Custer's Last Stand and Wounded Knee, of manifest destiny, and nuclear silos built for the war no one will win. They're so young, so full of possibility. The husband and wife are having a silly fight left over from the end of dinner. It's exact cause for gotten, something to do with whether or not to order one or two pieces of pie or dessert. They're trying to work out their grievances, but at the moment no one is talking and even though the coral is silly, the alienation is real, sharp and cold. At some level, the husband wishes it was just him on this journey, a motorcycle, and no commitment longer than a one night stand and a rundown motel. At some level, the wife knows that a deep part of herself, her dignity, her soul even is at stake, the part that makes living more than one long surrender. The children stand off to one side, silent, wary, maybe throwing rocks into the deep, swift water of the Great River, a pulsing, relentless vein flowing into the country's heart. The river is crucial, and so is the sky, the great arc of the horizon, sunset clouds super saturated with reds, oranges and yellows, a landscape that makes cynicism impossible. One might be written about each one of these elements and others unlisted, but it will emphasize only one. It was a profoundly unhappy scene, despite or maybe even because of its pettiness, although our antagonism was more or less resolved before we went to bed that night, and the next day's journey was one of the best days of family travel I can remember. Chamberlain was deeply unpleasant, and yet over 20 years later, I take pleasure in its recollection. Indeed, the scene on the river has, in part because of the multiple dramaturgies it supports, become the kind of sustaining memory one can carry into the night. Nostalgia plays an important role in all of this, a yearning for a time in which the ratio between energy and exhaustion was more on the side of energy for children who are still children, for the challenge of a new job in a new place, for the mystery of middles rather than the certainty of ends, even if the moment itself was unhappy. But I think another more powerful yearning is at work here, one no doubt also sentimental, the need, desire, necessity to be written, to have a story, a plot, in both senses of the word, a parcel of ground within a landscape, on a stage, in a cemetery, an ordering of events linked by time and causality, a journey from here to there. The four people on the river persist because they have a plot, a place, a story. For a moment they are standing on the top of the world, bound to water, earth and sky. For a few days they are nomads, travelers, homeless, not at rest physically, mentally or emotionally. They are unsettled, disrupted, uprooted, disturbed, awakened from the quiescence and death of being a happy family. For happy families are story less. We want to be this family because to be unhappy is bearable, to be plotless is not. I'm going to read to you and then I'm going to run out of time. I want to spend five minutes with you thinking about dramaturgy and invisibility. The invisibility of dramaturgs, the invisibility of dramaturgy and dramaturging the invisible. And I want to start with this, my favorite joke. What did the Zen student say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything. I want to talk to you for what's probably only four minutes remaining about dramaturgy and invisibility. And before I really start, I want to share with you a pithy maxim in honor of Adam and Joan and art from the index card file of one of our teachers, Richard Gilman, who's quoting the Russian philosopher Nikolay Burdiyev. The bourgeois mind invariably prefers the visible to the invisible. So the litany of the assessing educator is, show me, because more is more. How do I know you went to the rehearsals by your notes on each one? How do I know you were paying attention by the copiousness of those notes? How can I be sure that you communicated with the director by the volume of your emails? How do I assess your research, et cetera, by the volume of work product that you have churned out? By the massive pile I can tell my colleagues that I still need to read. And we puff up our own selves to ourselves, to our peers and our colleagues, to our tenure reviewers by advertising our professional deliverables in the terms that we have borrowed from the bourgeoisie, immeasurables, number of scripts, piles of images, pages, articles, graduates, productions, et cetera. In this, we and our CVs are like the condiments and the salad on the frank of my joke. The explanation of a joke, as Freud says, is never funny. But what's funny about my joke falls not so much on the double meaning of making me one as it does on the function of everything. For the Zen student, becoming one with everything involves an effacement of the self that allows him or her to disappear into the richness of the cosmic landscape. But for the consumer of the hot dog, everything is a lot. We can consume it, but we don't become it. It's a bellyache. It's the complete opposite of transcendence. Three years ago, I began to work with the director and choreographer David Brick, who's my colleague in headlong, on what we've called then subliminal dances. These performances are made in public spaces for an unsuspecting public of passersby who never know, if all goes well, that they've witnessed a work of art. The goal was to give folks a feeling of the specialness of the everyday, the sensation that as David wrote to me, the day is entirely as usual, but somehow everything glows. These subliminal dances have evolved to become the part of a larger piece which is now called the Quiet Circus. Details and photos at thequietcircus.com, which occurs weekly in a public space on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. The visible section of the piece, referred to among collaborators as the luminous world, is an ongoing dramaturgical challenge as we seek to utilize the bodies and actions of our performers, the landscape, and the history of the public peer that we're working on, which was a point of entry for immigrants to the city of Philadelphia in the 19th century and a site where Africans were delivered to America to become slaves in the earlier moments of our city's long life. Because the luminous world is meant to be experienced without the screen of official cultural offering, free of the smell of art, there's no plot or story. Images are unframed by prosceniums and we assume that our audience may see only a fragment of the large network of performing bodies that occupy the space. This work is hard and ongoing. I don't think we've mastered yet the dramaturgy of the invisible, but I've learned something about the invisibility of dramaturgy that I want to think more about. More is not more. My deliverables fall into the category of less is more very often. Not the notebook of research, but the salient point delivered at the right moment, not to prove my own intelligence, but to feed the process and not even the information when a question can be posed in its stead. And I'm happy to talk more with anybody at any time. Thanks. Past year I was the dramaturge for a production of Angels in America at the University of Arkansas. When we began our dramaturgy work last August, our production team knew we had some challenges ahead of us. Most of our audiences and a majority of the actors working on the play would be undergraduate students who were too young to remember the AIDS epidemic, plus most Arkansas high schools lack comprehensive sex education programming. So we knew that there would be a wide range of information, ideas, and misconceptions that our students might have about HIV and AIDS. How could we begin a dialogue that would be specific to the community that we were working with? HIV medicine has come so far over the past 30 years with proper healthcare, a person with HIV can live a normal, healthy life. Medications can lower a person's viral load to the point of being undetectable in the bloodstream. But it's important that we continue educating people about treatment and prevention. Arkansas still has a high rate of infection and as a region, the south accounts for more than 50% of new AIDS diagnosis each year. According to the CDC, people in southern states are less likely to know their HIV positive and less likely to be linked to the medical treatments that can improve health and reduce the risk of transmission. In Arkansas and many other places in the south, there is also still a stigma about HIV. Because of misinformation, cultural or religious biases, maybe shame or fear, HIV isn't something people talk about very much in Arkansas. But not talking about it only intensifies the stigma and stigma is the fuel of discrimination. Our production team decided that we wanted to create a community conversation about HIV. We partnered with local organizations like HIV Arkansas, a non-profit support and advocacy group for people living with HIV and AIDS. I asked the president of HIV Arkansas to help me put into words why having conversations about HIV was so important. His answer was, to reduce the stigma, reduce health disparities, reduce discrimination and dispel fear. Starting a dialogue gave us the opportunity to explore a wide range of tactics. We wanted the information we provided our audiences to be interactive. The goal of dramaturgy is not to proselytize the answers, but to ask a community what it needs. To connect our audiences to resources we enlisted groups like PFLAG, Campus Pride and SafeZone Allies to build lobby displays outside our theater. These displays provided information like where to get a free HIV test, how to reach out for support and what it means to be an ally. The director of millennium approaches hosted a panel discussion featuring activists and medical professionals. The director of Parastroika organized a documentary film series. As the project went on the dramaturgy became increasingly collaborative. By the end of the project the actors became leaders and our dialogue with the community. The same students who just months earlier knew very little about AIDS were now empowered to actively share information and fight the stigma of HIV. Producing a play is not a solution to any problem. When it comes to discrimination the amount of work still left for us to do is infinite. And like any great piece of theater Angels in America leaves us with more questions than it does answers. But that makes it the perfect jumping off point for a conversation that will extend beyond the theater. Thank you. Because we don't give up we're going to try again. I'm from Florida I'm an early career geographer and during the pandemic we talked about the shape of bodies a complex form through a story telling. Stories are what connect us the favorite of the most versatile form in which to achieve this. So it should be different nature for the stories that produces to be as varied and complex as the people we represent. However there is still a considerable amount of group exclusion especially in regards to those with disabilities. As individuals with disabilities are fully able to take part in the world of theater without being subjected to negative portrayals and stigma the favorite and the art of performance will be effectively re-imagined to showcase the experiences and talents of the disabled community and by chance. First let's talk about disability theory. Disability theory incorporates two different models. The social model states that society forms a disability through its ideologies by adhering to the needs of the able-bodied and ignoring the needs of the disabled. The medical model claims that disability is an impairment or a manipulation that must be fixed if you wish in some ways so that almost can be achieved. This is where common misconceptions and stereotypes come from and where it belongs in the end. Theater has already utilized the disability in the past but many depictions reinforce the same stereotypes that we want in the future or focus on disability for a person to be home. Inclusively everybody has to start with stories and should be getting with disabled writers. Once their plays are written, produced and performed they will become a model for how all playwrights should approach disability in terms of and learn how to go about it in a way that's beneficial. In regards to able-bodied playwrights writing about the disability I consider a research to be conducted by a playwright under the same blood pressure. If this is impossible for a person or person with a disability that is being explored as a one-on-one mentor to the playwright moving us to the disabled actors or cast to play disabled characters nor overcast the play characters that aren't specified to everybody. I need to do both because I want to be visible. Doing so brings inclusion to the forefront normalizing disability on stage so audiences could have a disability and evaluate them as a person and have a diverse range of experiences. We all have a few important roles to take on all of the roles in this area. As a starting point disabled cast actors are supposed to show that they're quite into disability and all that but having a disability for that and while that's your favorite it may be difficult and not too long but also it's a song. Yes. So Madison we're having really technical difficulties on our end so we're having some difficulty hearing what you're saying. Is there any way that you could email me the text? Okay. So we're going to distribute the text of your presentation because we're just not making it work here and I'm really sorry. I'm sorry. It's about the internet connection here. It's just not stable. That's okay. But I promise we'll distribute it. Thank you. I think we will try and see if the connection between Magda and here is a little bit better and we'll make a decision about whether or not it's actually working because Magda also has some really exciting stuff to share with us so no matter what we will make sure that we all have access to it. So let's give it a go. The presentation people okay. Yeah. Oh no it's different. Never mind. You're fine. Tweet away. Today I want to talk about the project that we have started. Let's go. And the link to it you have in the schedule I believe it's called the data time and the big premise is that people across the world their own local get particularly focusing on the actual touch co-works. The premise is a little bit different from what typically has been done previously. The previous model was that the western scholars would travel to various locales and then about the particular theater and common report on those theater to their western audiences. Most of the world was not really involved in that kind of collaboration and typically the research or the articles that came out of it would be closed up behind the paywall. So you had to have access to e-site libraries to access them. The model which we're proposing for those of you who have a computer or cell phones can open the website. The model which we're proposing is trying to undermine this model and both the creators and the audience is diverse and and we are publishing. So it is not specifically done for the western eye and it's not meant specifically for those scholars and other theater people. The way we work I'm really, really, really sorry but we're still experiencing some difficulty. Can you email the text and we'll distribute it? Did we get frozen? So you guys are starting our in your program in your program you have the website address and you can go to the website and check it out. It is kind of bad ass cool. It's pretty great. I highly, highly recommend it. Okay. Great. So I guess the internet is not working well as we see. But we have over 20 semantics sections and we have over 30 editors writing from over 60 countries. The stories are posted daily. So it's pretty self-explanatory launching in November. We published around 800 articles from 64 countries about their local theater culture. So you can check it out and in the next few months we'll be developing additional features. This is a good resource for your students to diversify your syllabus as well. Hello. I'm Joan Robbins and I'm here to talk a little bit about the dramaturgy of international theater. First I thought I should provide you with a little bit of context which as an audience of dramaturgs I know you can appreciate. I would like you to imagine yourselves for a moment in Northwest Ohio. You are surrounded by endless fields of corn and soybeans and by endless numbers of Trump yard signs which Trump's supporters continue to steadfastly and loyally display. That's the context. A little bit about the origins of the International Play Festival that I work on which might also be relevant to the themes of this year's festival. In the fall of 2001 when the United States was trying to recover from the events of 9-11 Ohio Northern University a small liberal arts institution launched plans for a festival of new international plays. What could we do we wondered to counter the tide of xenophobia that had gripped the country and open ourselves and our students to cultural perspectives other than our own. Now in its 12th year Ohio Northern's International Play Festival has staged world premieres of plays from around the globe. International theater artists have come to Ohio and joined with undergraduates to produce theater from no less than 16 countries and no less than 7 different languages. I co-founded the festival with our then chair and producer Nils Reese and for the last 7 years or so I have provided the primary artistic leadership for the festival in addition to serving as production dramaturg although I have employed students in that capacity recently as well. The design of each festival is unique and tries to address the content of that particular festival whether that be textual, cultural or personnel. This is, this flexibility is exciting and wonderful and it's also very challenging. To give you just briefly an idea of that kind of variety I'll describe in a hurry a few years. In the early years of the festival we commissioned new plays one act plays from around the world and tended to produce them 2 or 3 at a time. Another year we took a more concerted thematic approach and invited 2 writers from either side of the US Mexico border to write plays specifically about immigration creating a pre-production framework that brought the 2 writers together during the creative process. It's a very interesting year. Another example would be a year in which we focused on Native American theater bringing a native director and native professional actors to Ohio to work with our students and form a company. We commissioned 2 new plays that year from the Native community that was really exciting. In recent years we've focused more fully on the translation process commissioning new translations of newish plays that have been produced successfully in their home and host country and focusing on the translation process commissioning the translation and bringing the translators to Ohio as part of the rehearsal process. So that's what we do and now the challenges I face in how we do it. I'm interested in assessing how the festival goes in every way what has worked and what has not worked and why. I've learned a lot over the years through lots of successes but especially through many many failures and I'm really talking here about the dramaturgy of curating a festival and the plethora of choices that go into the creation of such a festival throughout this variety the primary goals of the festival have remained constant and they are two fold first to promote new work for the international stage and second to provide an innovative intercultural theater experience for our students and our staff and our community. One challenge that I face is to strike the right balance between those two objectives which often live quite happily together but sometimes can be and live in tension with one another and by that I mean feeling the very real need to create full productions of new works. There are lots of reading opportunities. There aren't as many opportunities for full productions and yet creating a full production can also sometimes compromise the time and energy one puts into process and that is a very classic tension that we as dramaturgs have a special sensitivity to lastly a very separate challenge the challenge of creating cultural authenticity with predominantly Hello, I'm Angela Latham and I too am coming to you from a university context education educational theater I'm at Governor State University which is in the south suburbs of Chicago and I teach mostly the theater history courses and any dramaturgy we're still building that area but the dramaturgy courses and as any of you know from teaching and programs where you have maybe more a lot of other interests among your students exposing them getting them to understand dramaturgy is a challenge and I'm going to be very focused in scope which if you knew me you would know is not very much like me but I'm going to focus on an assignment that I have developed that perhaps those of you in educational theater who are trying to groom future dramaturgs and also just create a greater sense of understanding will perhaps find useful and when I if I run out of time this is an assignment that will appear in the next edition of source book so we'll be there and if anyone's interested in any copies of anything I'm happy for you to email me as well at alatham at governorstate govst.edu check with me for the address if you need it the questions I'm working with in the assignment to frame what I'm trying to do I'm asking questions of this sort how do we expose more theater students to the practice and principles of dramaturgy and how might that kind of exposure on a practical curricular basis increase the number of students who are interested in the work we do and also increase the understanding among all students of theater to better learn to collaborate with and appreciate the work of dramaturgy the assignment I give and I'll come back to those broad strokes ideas and as I close out with some sense of where I think the outcomes lay in this assignment the basic assignment is I call it dramaturgy for a day and I most commonly use it in my history the general history course that most theater mages have to take we have two and you may have more but in the history courses where we assign a lot of plays to read I have the students each sign up early in the semester for a play that they will become the dramaturgy for and they take an active role in presenting a dramaturgy structured lesson of 20 to 25 minutes to the class I'm very structured with the assignment because in my context at least most of the students who enter my classroom do not know what a dramaturgy is how to pronounce it, how to spell it any of that so I give them a very clear set of the kinds of questions to pursue I give them a rubric that I will use to evaluate the quality of their work which is of course based on the effectiveness of the kind of discussion they are able to generate with the class and they are to treat it essentially as though they are a dramaturgy visiting a rehearsal I do use this by the way in a much simplified as a simplified option even in my intro to theater appreciation class which may seem a stretch but if you are interested that would be another way to again expose more people to the notion of practical assignments that my students can take they allow them to take an imaginative approach to a type of theater work and create a portfolio so this is one of the options in that group too anyway the details of the assignment as I say will be forthcoming I'm not going to go into everything here for sake of time and I will just say that as far as I can tell the outcomes include exposure to critical, historical and aesthetic considerations in a more applied way than is often possible through reading a play for class discussion it's a more engaging approach and it certainly teaches students a little bit about how to create discussion in a context of peers and it exposes all majors to methods for deep reading a play regardless of what track they plan to pursue and my hope is of course that those who may have come in thinking assuming they were going to act or what have you those nerds among the group secret nerds like me at least may find their way to dramaturgy as a better place for their particular skill set in some cases but also they learn how to I think it helps the costumers all of the folks in the classes who work with dramaturgs to know better how to do so hi I'm Allison Ruth what is the relationship between structure and anger are dominant structures more primed to facilitate certain types of rage more than others there is now and it's not new a type of prohibition on forthright expressions of women's anger and I'm curious about this reality is relationship with theater being a dramaturge someone frilled by structure and its possibilities I wonder if there are expressive limitations to Aristotelian structure specifically in its ability to impact the way women communicate their anger the endurance and prevalence of Aristotelian structure in white European and American theater certainly suggests that Aristotle was describing something intrinsic about the way drama works and the way humans experience story what makes Aristotelian structure so ripe for feminist upending is its sanctioned dominance over western drama when structure dramatic or societal becomes identified as a source of oppression then the subversion of its structure becomes an act of revolution in the context of living under patriarchal structures and systems of oppression the form of the story resides at the very heart of the art making so over the past year I've become fascinated with plays by women that explore anger in formally exciting ways and my dramaturgy colleague Lucas who will speak next we became really interested in Sarah Kane and how she's using violence and anger in her work and what we found was a fascinating dramaturgy that's unignorable in its chaotic structure we know that form was of great interest to Kane besides its commanding presence in her work in interviews about blasted which we'll talk about the first of her plays she states as an explicit goal that she wanted to create a form for which there was no obvious direct precedent a form that had never been created before so one of the most striking ways that she subverts traditional structure is in crafting a plot that does not progress in steps that show a cause and effect progression and this structure I argue is a way to amplify the absence of attention paid to Kate's anger in the story and I visualize the play like a pond and you drop a rock in the pond and you expect to see a ripple but the ripple shows up over here where the rock was not dropped and so we're left to wonder about the first rocks effect what's the reaction to that event the play if you might know it a character abusing another character and by the end of the play that their relationship has switched but the way that we get from A to B from action to action mocks a type of traditional dramatic arc in a faux sort of climactic moment a bomb mocks explodes outside the hotel room mimicking the type of random nonsensical violent event that occurs in war time but also perhaps jazz at the false cleanness of this type of climactic event in a recital form and just as the physical structure on the stage is demolished and the characters must deal with it so too does the structure of the storytelling disorient the audience so these curiosities about what's going on between anger and structure are messy the terms I'm using are really too broad to have much meaning there's of course no monolithic example of female anger there's no one type of rage that a unified sisterhood experiences and I'm also interested in exploring this word anger not purely in a domestic sense but in a larger historical sense as a broad word to describe responses to oppression in particular I became very interested in asking these questions this year as I felt everyone's anger build up but especially from women in response to mistreatments on a national level so I invite all of us to continue thinking about the relationship between anger and the structures that cause it thank you I am a dramaturg and a violence designer many plays have violence far fewer have fights violence encompasses all acts of physical aggression fighting, by contrast is when two combatants engage in a violent altercation most often with mutual agreement upon the course of action the fighters being trained and fairly evenly matched in skill Hotspur Hall, Edmund Edgar, Mechbeth, Mechduf et cetera however, going back to Sarah Kane the soldier sucking out Ian's eyes in blasted could hardly be said to be a fight nor would it be fair to say that when tinker the soldier's tongue in cleansed and then forces him to swallow a ring that Karl and tinker are fighting the characters here are not trained in any combative discipline and the violence is far more one sided the role of aggressor and victim do not change whereas in a Shakespearean fight we may see shifts in which dualist has the upper hand such a fluidity of perpetration is not present in Sarah Kane's violence the presentation of stage violence exists on a spectrum the Bard's narrative clarity all the way to Kane's total rejection of cause and effect in the works of William Shakespeare and Sarah Kane we see two radically different approaches to the presentation of stage violence both equally powerful and innovative Shakespeare uses violence and fighting as an explicitly plot based tool often terrifying but always safely under the blanket of a forward driving narrative comprehensible in its use and effect Kane on the other hand pushes her violence outside the realm purely narrative to the point where the audience's personal safety is questioned Kane's violence encompasses many aspects not found in Shakespeare it is inexplicable, unfounded and exists in a realm of perpetual instability it could arise for no identifiable reason it subject the audience to a barrage of horrors in the interest of enlarging their sense of the world's suffering it is sensory and visual while Shakespeare's is functional and auditory Shakespeare relishes in cause and effect while Kane dismisses it outright Shakespeare's orthodox methods serve to ideally highlight the thoughtful revolutions Kane employs in her dramaturgy and her departure from traditional modes of violent representation is best juxtaposed with Shakespeare's observable functional combative depictions while Shakespeare finds power in fighting's ability to change and alter people Kane's violence often traffics in the sheer meaninglessness of the event limbs will be removed, tongues extracted will be chopped off and barbecued and we will still be left with the question has anything changed at all? this is not to say Kane's violent strategies are careless or arbitrary on the contrary their placements and functions cunningly subvert narrative norms by not being placed in ordinarily consequential points in the story therefore not allowing the audience the traditional catharsis we might expect from such acts Kane will take such events that seem consequential and not put them in structurally momentous places instead she will take unexpected threads of narrative and bestow them with uncommon import Kane's plays wreak havoc with what is or is not a major plot point blasted the most inblasted the most traditionally trackable through line is food beginning with Ian's gin guzzling and champagne devouring moving through the room serviced English breakfast which then get devoured by the soldier who proceeds to suck out Ian's eyes we witness a devolution of edibles Kane's hunger eventually drives him to the climactic eating of the dead baby a recognition of cannibalism that is immediately reversed by Kate bringing in liquor and sausage normally in a play which deals with such enormous topics as blasted does who has food and when would not be the most foundational narrative recurrence but if one were to find the fry tags pyramid of the play food would be the intrusion the emotional midpoint and the final crisis despite the presence of abominations Kane's interest lies beyond the sensational in fact to have blasted major violent acts Ian's rape of Kate and the suicide of the soldier are not even seen by the audience Kane seems to be shifting our focus away from areas towards which our attention would normally gravitate into the direction of places where we might not ordinarily look she's asking us not to view horrors simply as things that are bad but as events that demand more thought and scrutiny than we have previously realized she's not asking us to take a bath in awful if properly directed we should come away from blasted stunned by our ability to overcome our usual passivity to witnessing violent crimes in entertainment Brecht like she is making the familiar strange arousing our capacity for action and making us privy to sufferings that appall us because they are unnecessary unlike Shakespeare whose placement of stage combat serves to illuminate the moment at hand to crystallize characters intentions and move the plot forward Kane's directions provide a deepening of the play's sensory landscape a questioning of the motives that caused the violence and emotional brutality stunning in its power regardless of its political implications Shakespeare's stage directions are practical while Kane's provided Hi I'm Jessica Rizzo and today I'm going to be talking about aspects of a play I'm directing in New York in the fall Alfreda Yellenek's Shadow you ready to see says Yellenek won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004 for quote her musical flow of voices and counter voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary whistic zeal revealed the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power that's the Swedish Academy's justification so far however she's only received one major production in the US her play Jackie about Jackie Kennedy had a run at the women's project in New York in 2013 I hope I'll be able to spark some interest in her work here at LMDA for those of you who haven't heard of her because if there was ever a dramaturg's playwright it's Yellenek she writes texts for speaking or language planes rather than plays performance texts that unfold in long unbroken digressive and associative monologues that might go on for hundreds of pages often foregoing characters and stage directions all together Yellenek's frequently confounding texts require muscular intervention from directors and dramaturgs in order to render them stageable at all which might offer one explanation for her conspicuous absence from stages in the English speaking world where stricter fatality of the text is something we tend to value more than directors do in say Yellenek's native Austria or the other German speaking countries. Shadow Eurydice says continues Yellenek's ongoing project of interrogating and rewriting canonical western myths from a feminist perspective. She combines the story of Orpheus in Eurydice, Adelbeer von Camisso's novella Peter Schlemmel the shadowless man and Freud on morning in melancholia and the death drive to create a very contemporary feeling piece about gender and age so all of Yellenek's texts that have yet to receive their North American premieres this one suggested itself to me as being particularly relevant when I realized that Yellenek is almost exactly the same age as Hillary Clinton whose failed presidential bid last November suggested that we as a culture still have a difficult time knowing what to do with older women who presume to speak with authority in Yellenek's version of this story Eurydice rejects of her own volition the masculine world of the woman in order to remain in the underworld which becomes a fluidly feminine negative space of non-identity and non-existence. The text reflects on the ways in which access to language continues to be treated differently for men and women with language often functioning as an instrument of reason and power for men and as symptom of hysteria for women. Orpheus the singer is characterized as a dangerously charismatic rock star in the style of Elvis Presley able to whip throngs of pubescent girls up into erotic frenzies with the most modest warble. Eurydice is strongly identified with the presence of the author herself. She describes herself as a writer but in extremely self-deprecating terms. I write should anyone be interested, she says and goes on to catalog her own alleged excesses as a stylist. The monotony of her texts, their repetitiveness their incomprehensibility. She describes her writing process as something she has little control over. Her language leaks out of her like so much discharge she says in one of several erotically revolting feminine images that recur in the text. This account of writing as a fundamentally passive process is not unrelated to yelling ex-theory of acting. She calls for performers in her plays to function as speaking machines rather than as actors and body and characters in any deep nuanced psychological way. Viewing the luxuriousness of individual personality as a distraction, she's more interested in underscoring the oppressive limitations of the roles society makes available to us. And she does this by adopting what I think of as an industrialized approach to performance. In a yelling ex-play, the character's language speaks them rather than the other way around. They are the results of an ideological system and a process of production that does not take individual differences into account except as new facets of the market to be captured. yelling ex-critique of capitalism is that it is a system that on some level reduces us all to some version of this creativity. Where near infinite choice, opportunity and creativity are tattered as the system's virtues, in reality this capitalist individual is generally relegated to the role of consumer whose identity is determined more by the brands she identifies with than with any desires that can be said to have authentically originated within her. So yelling gives us speaking machines that have no within within. The components of their existence that resist quantification and monetization are simply excluded by theatrical representations of the world creating a reductio ad absurdum. These figures are insistently shallow all surface with no interior lives that we could productively abandon. When they seek, when they cease to speak they cease to exist. I actually think that this is a compelling strategy to use in performance because it is bound to fail. What I hope to achieve by taking Yellenek at her word here is to produce a theatrical situation that does do a kind of violence to performers by asking them to suppress important, interesting or distinctive qualities of an individual, her agency, her subject. Thank you. Everyone Gavin Witt he, him, her, his. Baltimore Center stage, Dini Valone could not be here, she's in Sofia, Bulgaria, but since her best she gets equal credit though for what I'm about to share. At the New York City conference a couple years ago some of you may have heard me talk about or even had a chance to experience a project we've been doing for several years now, right, right now which Kat Rodriguez helped launch. This puts local playwrights both emerging and established in our lobbies at special events outside on the street at food trucks wherever we can imagine and put them to take immediate custom patron commissions and letting them into the sausage making process create a play for them on the spot which gets sent out. It's been a huge popular success, it's created dozens sorry featured dozens of playwrights and created hundreds of new plays over the last couple years and helped make the process a bit more transparent and dare I say accessible and inclusive but it has its limits in all of those. It has no performance component the most essential element of what I think makes a play a play. It gets written it gets sent out and it's a very singular exchange between the playwright and maybe one maybe two commissioners and it's limited to local playwrights so this year as you can see we devised a new project. It's called Right Now Play Later with an idea increasing three aspects to expand to nationally or internationally based playwrights to add the live performance element and to expand participation and make it even more inclusive using social media and various online platforms and also in light of the previous presentation to add the dramaturg for a day component in which you by participating got to go through the process of kind of curating your own new play festival from start to finish. One week each month for four months from September through January we identified three playwrights or playwright teams in one case had a small rep company of five to six actors and a theme transportation, revolution, collection restoration if you scroll down you'll see them at the website it's got a nice little vanity URL it's got a nice little page .org slash WNPL if you want to check out more themes and then chose a civic site we did a public carousel the Amtrak station a library what have you we post a theme at the beginning of the week and call for prompts we would take public prompts over Twitter and Facebook the playwrights then had overnight at minimum three short plays from those. The next morning we distilled those into taglines posted those taglines on social media people would then vote on their favorite of the taglines one favorite for each of the three playwrights or playwright teams we then sent those to the actors the next morning they gathered they had 90 minutes to rehearse and that culminated in about a 30 minute pop up site specific script in hand live streamed reading performance of those works over Facebook live and Periscope I would say we got anywhere from 20 to 60 prompts each time and probably had anywhere from 100 to upwards of 200 viewers so we considered it a moderate success in terms of its access inclusion and participation you can track back hashtag WNPL which also I think is a lady's soccer league some other things but we're in there amongst that or check out the website as I say you can see the drop downs here have headshots and bios of the playwrights they have all the plays that got created there's also a wonderful little like two and a half minute sizzle reel you can watch two Marcus Gardley plays they're excerpted we had great participation so I'm sharing this now briefly for two main reasons one is we're really eager to open source this eager to get as many brilliant ideas as possible this had many for parents and it's based on anything from watch me work to the tiny desktop concerts to caricaturists at county fairs but I'm sure everyone has more good ideas and we'd love to make it better the brainchild of many parents can always use more parents but we're also eager to franchise to metastasize to just grow in size and I'm really thrilled if people want to steal the idea renew recycle expand I can imagine this on college campuses and graduate theater programs with playwright actor teams take it out to resident theater companies whatever so talk to us more we or just do it on your own I'd love to see it grow and expand and to talk more about it thank you very much good afternoon I'm Robin quick Marvin Lusky president emerita of towson university ask the following of our graduates at each year's commencement how will the world be better because you have been given a college education how will you make your life one of service to others and the world conditions students what will be better because of you Marvin in Florida to continue asking these questions of future students I believe her questions have become more urgent and challenging in the United States and the world I've contemplated a new my responsibility to provide our students with the education that will help them respond to Marvin's call for a better world I do not presume to have definitive answers to my hot topic I bring questions some possibilities to ponder and the desire for further conversation how are we preparing our students to attend to this deeply troubling moment in our nation and our world of the many productive paths to consider in pursuing this question I will pick up one very specific that relates to the work many of us do how might an education in the dramaturgical process the activities of research analysis and collaboration cultivate skills that translate to our tasks as citizens for inspiration about the function of education and a vision of citizenship in the United States I went back to the origins and studied principles articulated by our founding generation certainly their notions of who was included among the citizens to be educated was exclusionary in a way that we are still struggling to overcome but I wondered if there were ideals of what that education would do revolutionary in their time that could speak to our needs in our time as applied to everyone our founders saw education as crucial to the shift of the populace from subject to citizen in a bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge Thomas Jefferson warns that even under forms of government suited to protect the rights of individuals those entrusted with tyranny those entrusted with power have in time and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny his proposed solution with public education that would illuminate the minds of the people at large primarily through knowledge of the experience of other ages and countries as a result they might be enabled to know ambition under all its shape and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes throughout Jefferson's writing on education are insights about specific ways he hopes citizens would employ their knowledge and skills three that I believe speak to the urgency of now one historian James Carpenter notes Jefferson's belief in the ability of people to make wise choices in electing representatives was based on the notion that citizens could be educated to discern fact from fiction two Jefferson wanted all citizens to receive instructions that would allow them to discuss issues and make judgments at the bar of public reason three while he wanted citizens to be informed of their own rights he thought they should equally respect the rights of others he wrote that education would prepare each citizen to understand his duties to his neighbors and country and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either if we want to cultivate in our students the capacities to exert their natural powers to defeat ambition in all its shapes the transferable skills of the dramaturgical process seem right with possibility here are three thoughts one conducting dramaturgical research informs and enriches our understanding of the world of the play and the play right in ways that mirror just Jefferson's vision of an education that illuminates the minds of the people at large and enhances our ability to discern fact from fiction two Eleanor Fuchs says the dramaturgical analysis before making judgments we must ask questions what is this in process informed that of citizens who will make judgments at the bar of public reason and three the collaborative activities of dramaturgy provide an exercise in how each member of a community or nation might skillfully perform a function with and for others Jefferson saw the education of citizens as a corrective to what might go wrong in this nation wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice they may be relied upon to set them right perhaps a dramaturgical education okay we designed this so that we would have 15 minutes left for conversation I believe we have eight which is one reason that we did it the way we did it you also may have noticed that there were some incomplete sentences you can think of it that is our Brechtian technique to make you yearning for more and to make sure that you find the person who didn't complete the sentence and ask them to complete it the idea here is that we have lots of different ideas that can carry on I didn't know this before we started but I think what just happened is that we just dropped a whole lot of rocks and the response is going to appear in a lot of unexpected places I wonder if we could just as a community right now give a name to some of those rocks sort of like popcorn except for we're going to call them rocks and if there are any responses to the rocks that come up maybe we'll hear them now we have a bigger audience than just this room and in the interest of time I want to do this in a way that is a little bit of an experiment because we have to use the microphone but if we try to pass the mic while we're playing this little game I don't think that will work so impulsive idea that I have right now and maybe we can try it is for this room we can hear without the microphone but for that room we can't so if you guys drop the rocks in this room and I just repeat them in this room we might be able to accommodate both are we ready to try great yes okay any rocks yes Jessica where is the production in New York at the American theater for actors on 54th street yes do you have an electronic copy of the script she does incomplete senses right yes new ways new ways to look at structure from a female perspective and agreed yes I think we've moved beyond the women are circular and men are direct is that the only rock violence designer okay intriguing way to approach a script yes more things frame to steal this idea yes how do you measure the invisible right and also I would add how do you protect the invisible because I think that we as dramaturgs are obsessed with giving voice to the invisible and sometimes that's the most damaging thing we could do yeah pleasure and sadness purpose in unhappiness yes speaking to multiple generations at once yes okay so I'm going to do something now that I sometimes do as a teacher it's a secret but not for long okay so what Cindy just said I stopped listening because I started to worry about how I was going to encapsulate it in just a few words so I need someone who didn't have the microphone in their hand and didn't start having that anxiety who can help me out and give me just a few words to help like encapsulate it so I can say the thing I didn't hear say that again combat has rules rage dozens excellent before we go on I lost my timer is Kathleen still here yeah okay so two minutes okay when I have one minute will you give me a hand okay great yes what is the dramaturgs role in facilitating the rage of marginalized communities yes is it yelling next definition of a play or is it of an actor as a speaking machine texts for speaking spoken by speaking machines okay I'm about to get cut off she is welcoming muscular intervention of dramaturgs and directors thank you thank you