Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Do we Get More Points if we Take Bigger Risks? Modeling Boundary-Setting in Devised Performance with Undergraduate Actors.” Journal of Consent-Based Performance, vol. 2, no. 1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.46787/jcbp.v2i1.3498
ABSTRACT
Building from the ideas and practices of Theatrical Intimacy Education which provide guidance on how to set and communicate boundaries, this essay outlines some tools that may help educators and directors facilitate frank and open conversations about the decision-making processes that go into boundary-setting and giving informed consent. The article lays out how Theatrical Intimacy Education’s work around consent and boundaries may be put into productive conversation with applied theatre’s work around risk. The author describes the ways that they have engaged in conversations with their own undergraduate acting students about risk and boundary-setting in the context of devised performance. Finally, combining concepts from intimacy direction, applied theatre, and trial-and-error pedagogical praxis, they propose a framework and tool that theatre educators and directors might use to facilitate conversations about risk, boundaries, and consent in their own classrooms.
Risk-Boundary-Support Tool Handout
“Queer(er) Approaches to The Laramie Project, an Autoethnographic Account.” Theatre Topics, vol. 31, no. 3, 2021. DOI: 10.1353/tt.2021.0046
ABSTRACT
As one of the most-produced plays in the country, the Tectonic Theater Project’s 2000 docudrama, The Laramie Project, has become a staple of theatre curricula and educational production at the high school and collegiate level in the United States. The play’s inclusion in our seasons and classrooms becomes even more significant when we consider that it is the first—and often only—representation of LGBTQ people and issues that the vast majority of our students encounter in an academic setting. As such, is vital that we create opportunities for students to engage with the content to the fullest capacity, with a critical eye, and with explicit connections to the world we inhabit together. My critique here is not intended to discredit the valuable work that the Tectonic Theater Project has done with Laramie, but rather to hold my own community of theatre educators and practitioners to a more rigorous standard in our conversations with our students about the piece. I advocate a shift in questioning away from “could this happen here?”. Instead, I propose broader alternatives such as “what can we do to create a culture and systems equipped to stop homophobic violence? How are heteronormativity and homophobia operating culturally and systemically within the world presented in Laramie, and how can we recognize this in our own communities? Informed by theories and pedagogies developed by Jasbir Puar, bell hooks, Cathy Cohen, and Sarah Ahmed, this essay will provide an autoethnographic account of the pedagogical strategies I have developed over the course of four semesters to engage my own students in a queer-feminist examination of The Laramie Project and our own midwestern community.
“Cripped Visuality: Shifting Visual Culture of Disability in One-Woman Shows.” Texas Theatre Journal, vol. 16, 2019.
ABSTRACT: Performers like Hollander—and as I will describe later, Kristina Wong—use disability aesthetics and cripped performance practices to intervene into dominant cultural visual narratives which shape the collective imagination of what disability is and what it looks like in order to offer their audiences alternative visual narratives which complicate or completely subvert preconceived notions. When disability aesthetics and cripped performance practices converge in the intimate setting of live solo performance, disabled theatre artists and their audiences enter into a space where normative understandings of bodies, impairment, and disability become unstable. In that moment of confrontation, cultural interrogation, and challenge to visual expectations, the performer and the audience can co-construct new disability visualities. This encounter between the audience and the disabled performer produces what I call cripped visuality.
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Dissertation
Queer Legacies: Tracing the Roots of Contemporary Transgender Performance
ABSTRACT: While the past decade has seen a rapid increase in media visibility for transgender celebrities, it has not necessarily led to greater inclusion of transgender people within the United States’ major performing arts institutions. The resulting increased awareness among the general public has reinforced the prevailing cultural narrative that the transgender community is a newly emerging population. The theatre has contributed to this perception, framing trans narratives as novel and “trending,” which perpetuates what ethnographer Andre Calvacante calls the ideology of transgender impossibility. This dissertation challenges the theatre industry’s ideology of transgender impossibility by tracing the artistic and political origins of contemporary transgender performance and by illuminating the ways in which such an ideology obscures the history and distinct aesthetics of trans artists. Using interviews and what LGBTQ theatre historian Sean F. Edgecomb terms lateral historiography, this project locates transgender performance and aesthetic practices within communities practicing queer solo performance, the theatrical jazz aesthetic, and spoken word poetry. Building upon these varied queer legacies, transgender performers have developed a particular set of aesthetic practices and dramaturgical strategies based in embodied experience, queer time/transtemporality, disidentification, and community-building. The exploration of trans aesthetics here examines performance strategies which trouble the actor-spectator relationship through the lenses of Rebecca Schneider’s explicit body performance, Jack Halberstam’s transgender gaze, and accountable audience participation. The project closes with an illustration of how the ideology of transgender impossibility—as a function of the cis white gaze—operates within theatrical spaces, perpetuating a cycle of marginalization and delegitimization of trans aesthetics, histories, voices, and experiences.