Spring 2013
January 15 – Margaret Olin: Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv
January 22 – Carolee Klimchock: Humor Hung Like a Horse: Coachmen and Coaches as Satirical Sites for Discussions of Class and Power in the Gilded Age
January 29 – Joey Plaster: Vanguard Revisited: Co-Performing Queer Histories in San Francisco’s Tenderloin
February 5 – Discussion of the film John Frum: He Will Come with guests Cevin Soling and director David Guinan. Moderated by Elinor Fuchs.
February 12 – Session cancelled due to inclement weather
February 19 – Kathy Foley: Tangible Intangibles: Heritage and Performance in Bordered Worlds
February 26 – Meeting with Mario Biagini, Director of the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. Discussion of Open Program’s Electric Party Songs and other performance events.
March 5 – Kee-Yoon Nahm: “This Solidity and Compound Mass:” Material Objects and Authenticity in The Wooster Group’s Hamlet
March 26 – Willa Fitzgerald: Playing at Representation, Playing at War: An Examination of the Wooster Group and The Royal Shakespeare’s Company’s Triolus and Cressida
April 2 – Discussion of Masrah Ensemble (Lebanon) Yale Event Series on Middle-Eastern Theatre (March 27-29)
April 9 – Magda Romańska: Of Drammatology: Form and Content in Performative Exchange
April 16 – Joint session with Yale School of Art
April 23 – Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale: Past, Present and Future
Fall 2012
September 11 – Elise Morrison – Performing Citizen Arrest: Surveillance Art and the Passerby
September 18 – John Copper – Art / Performance / History
September 25 – No meeting this week.
October 2 – Elizabeth Wiet — Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, and the Objects of Camp
October 9 – Joseph Clarke – Sound of Architecture
October 16 – Discussion of Richard Montoya’s American Night: The Ballad of Juan José (Yale Rep)
October 30 – Cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy
November 6 – Andrew Hannon — The San Francisco Diggers and Performance and Everyday Life
November 13 – Lynda Paul — Las Vegas and Virtual Tourism: Sonic Shaping of Simulated Worlds
November 27 – Discussion of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette (Yale Rep)
December 4 – Discussion of Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth (Yale Rep)
2011-2012
May 1, 2012: Alexandra Ripp (Dramaturgy MFA Candidate, Drama School) will present her paper entitled: Remembering Atrocity On Site and Onstage: The Performance of Memory in Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi and Guillermo Calderón’s Villa.
April 24, 2012: Sara Shneiderman (Assistant Professor of Anthropology) will present her research on ritual performances and ethnic identity in the Himalaya regions of Nepal, Tibet, and China.
April 17, 2012: Carol Martin (Associate Professor of Drama, New York University) TBA
April 10, 2012: Brian Valencia (DFA Candidate, Drama School) will present a talk entitled “Musiturgy.”:
April 3, 2012: Madison Moore (Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies) will present new research on bass and American music and dance.
March 27, 2012: We will discuss the WPP production of The Rehearsal by Cuqui Jerez.
March 20, 2012: Alice Moore (Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies) will lead a discussion on the the first chapter of Rebecca Schneider’s recent book, Performing Remains.
February 28, 2012: Tanya Dean (DFA Candidate at the Drama School) will present her work-in-progress “Piano Guts and Other Mothers: Distance, Deconstruction and the Fantastic in David Greenspan and Stephen Merritt’s Coraline.”
February 21, 2012: Lucian Ghita (Ph.d. Candidate in Comp. Lit.) will lead a discussion on “presence” and explore issues related to current conceptualizations of performance opened up by Amelia Jones’ recent TDR article “The Artist is Present:” Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. Please read Jones’ article in preparation for our discussion.
February 14, 2012: We will discuss the WPP production of Spectral Scriabin, designed by YSD professor Jennifer Tipton.
February 7, 2012: Anna Gawboy (Assistant Professor, Ohio State University School of Music) will discuss her 2010 collaboration with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and lighting designer Justin Townsend on a new staging of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire based on her dissertation research.
January 31, 2012: Carolee Klimchock (Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies) will share her research on the nineteenth-century coachman craze.
January 24, 2012: Ilinca Todorut (Yale Drama School) will share her work-in-progress: a stage adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Click to download the play and Ilinca’s accompanying analysis/explanation.
January 10, 2012: Paige McGinley (Asst. Prof. in Theater Studies and American Studies) will present her research on variety theater in the South in the teens and twenties and blues singing on the popular stage.
December 6, 2011: In our last meeting of the semester, Lucian Ghita (Comparative Literature) will present his mock job talk on Shakespearean adaptations.
November 29, 2011: Lynda Paul (Musicology Ph.D. Candidate) will present her research on musical performance practice, technology, and aesthetics in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas shows.
November 15, 2011: Daniel Larlham (Lecturer in Theater Studies) will present his job talk, entitled “The Meaning in Mimesis.”
November 8, 2011: Discussion of World Performance Project’s performance Engagement Féminin: An Evening of West African Contemporary Dance and symposium, “Think Jam: Improvisation across Disciplines.” Engagement Feminin is a work created and performed by Art’ Dév/Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue, based in Burkina Faso, West Africa [Performances November 3-5]. Think Jam [November 5 at 2 pm] is “an improvised jam session with dancers, musicians, poets, and scholars, in which artistic and scholarly disciplines commingle. More information about the performance and symposium is available at the website of the World Performance Project.
November 1, 2011: Matt Cornish (Drama School D.F.A. Candidate) will present an article-in-progress entitled “Stop Just Going Along: The Dysfunctional Theatrics of René Pollesch,” available for download here.
October 25, 2011: We will discuss an article-in-progress by James O’Leary (Musicology Ph.D. Candidate), entitled “Oklahoma!’s ‘Lousy Publicity’: The Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater.”
October 18, 2011 – We’ll be reading and discussing Robin Bernstein‘s award-winning article, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” adapted from her recent book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2011). Robin, a graduate of the Yale American Studies program and a fellow explorer in interdisciplinary performance studies at Yale, is now a professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her article is accessible here.
October 11, 2011 – Julia Fawcett will lead a discussion on the use of the first person in performance studies texts and the problems it presents to the theater historian trying to negotiate the objective stance of the traditional historian with performance theorists’ critique of presumed objectivity.
October 4, 2011 – Dominika Laster will give a talk on Embodied Memory in the work of Jerzy Grotowski in conjunction with Thomas Richard’s and Workcenter Focused Research Team’s visit to Yale and their performance of The Living Room.