John Cooper – Imperial Balls: An Art History of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean

Nautch dancing in Lucknow and Calcutta

The Anglo-Indian word nautch derives from the Urdu nach, the Sanskrit nritya and the Prakit nachcha, meaning ‘dance’. Rather than signifying a specific dance form, nautch points towards a social setting for dance in diplomatic, mercantile and social exchanges between Indian elites and the British Raj from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The visual culture of nautch dancing is rich. It was inflected by multiple traditions of image-making. It was one of the most repeatedly illustrated scenes of imperial experience and includes work by both Indian and colonial artists in a variety of media.

This part of the dissertation is an art history of nautch dancing and its performers: those who danced, those who watched, and those who made its visual records.

Colonial ballet in England

The ‘Classic’ or ‘Romantic’ ballet of the 1830s and 1840s was replete with what were then called ‘dances of national character’. These folk-based forms encompassed an international geography including the Caribbean, North Africa, Eastern Europe and India, with a special fixation on dances of Spanish origin. A new professionalized class of flexible dancers emerged to render these national idioms in step with audience demand and they were matched by a class of artists and printers who documented, amplified, and embroidered their travel in images.

This part of the dissertation follows the traces left in the archive by women dancers who passed not only across the boundaries of national habits but also across the stages of theatres, clubs, saloons, music halls, drawing rooms and streets in imperial London.

Social dancing in the Caribbean

The complex social fabric of Caribbean colonies gave rise in the early nineteenth century to a range of dance cultures. Plantations, colonial theatres, markets, ball rooms, barracks and streets were all sites of expressive physical movement in which a range of West African and European performance traditions were articulated under conditions of profound social change. These various dance worlds were represented by a range of artists who reflected- by turns indulgently, satirically, ambivalently, and critically- on the make up of Caribbean society.

In this section of the dissertation I document the process by which the social forces at work in the Caribbean were transformed into choreographic ornament borne in different ways on different performers’ bodies.

 

Lynda Paul – Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil

My current work addresses the role of music and sound in a particularly complex and significant subset of Cirque du Soleil’s output: its permanent Las Vegas shows. My study uses a performance-centered methodology, based on direct observations of Cirque’s Vegas shows as audience member and backstage guest (during performances and rehearsals); personal interviews with the shows’ musicians and directors; and analyses of the shows’ more “fixed” traces (CD recordings, “Making of ” DVDs, souvenir programs, and so on) in relation to their performances. Through this approach, I situate Cirque du Soleil’s resident Las Vegas shows within the culture of the Vegas Strip as well as in circus and theater history more broadly, and demonstrate the ways in which Cirque’s Vegas productions utilize interactive, part live and part technologically mediated musical soundtracks to structure and give meaning to their visual spectacle. By seeing how music is used toward such ends, we are able to reconceptualize music’s role in multimedia genres more generally, and to understand more deeply how music can be used to negotiate the relationship between the physical and the virtual in multimedia theater.

(Lynda Paul, “Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2012)

Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lecturer in Theater Studies

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in the Theater Studies Program at Yale University.  She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) from 2011 to 2013.

Her areas of research include:  20th century  theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.

Elise Morrison, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer in Theater Studies

elise.morrison@yale.edu
Elise received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011.  Her book project, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, looks at artists who strategically employ technologies of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance.

Elise has taught courses on this topic at Yale, Brown and as a Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, where she also worked as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction and Preceptor in Expository Writing.  She co-edited a special issue on “Digital Performance and Pedagogy” for theInternational Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media (Intellect), forthcoming in fall 2012.  At Yale she has also taught courses on Digital Media in Performance and expository writing.

As a practicing artist, Elise has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET, and, in collaboration with Molly Flynn and Michelle Carriger, created the live music-performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008).  She was a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence, RI from 2009-2011, where she taught acting, appeared in numerous productions, including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010), and developed original mixed media cabaret work.  Most recently she has developed and performed Through the Looking Glass: A Surveillance Cabaret with the support of Sleeping Weazel artist’s collective in Boston.

 Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) presents

WORKCENTER YALE RESIDENCY

February 20 – March 3, 2013

 This February, IPSY brings to New Haven the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards for a series of lively and wide-ranging events.  The program will feature performances, public meetings and a symposium exploring the poetics of encounter.  IPSY is partnering with the Eli Whitney Museum, InterCambio, Sound Hall, the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven, as well as local artists and activists, to create dialogue and exchange between diverse New Haven communities.

Open Program is directed by Mario Biagini, Associate Director of the Workcenter and longtime Grotowski collaborator.  Through performance, members of the Open Program —10 actors from around the world— investigate the moment of meaningful contact between individuals and the poetic word as a tool for human contact and action.  Currently, their performances take as their source material the complexity and richness of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry as well as traditional African American songs and shouts from the Southern United States to highlight the distinct relation between song and the poetic word.

February 22 & 23, 2013 – 8:00 PM

ELECTRIC PARTY SONGS  (Cabaret-style performance)

Calhoun Cabaret, 189 Elm Street, New Haven, CT 06511

 

February 28 & March 1, 2013 – 8:00 PM

I AM AMERICA (Performance) – with set built by children at the Eli Whitney Museum

Whitney Theater, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511

March 2, 2013  –  11 AM – 4 PM

SYMPOSIUM:  POETRY AS A PRACTICE OF ENCOUNTER

Whitney Theater, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511

March 3, 2013  –  4 PM

ELECTRIC PARTY SONGS (An experiment in the potentialities of a party as an art form)

BAR, 254 Crown Street, New Haven, CT 06511                   Special guest DJ:  Dave Coon

Events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited.  RSVP here.

ELECTRIC PARTY SONGS, created by the Workcenter’s Open Program under the direction of Mario Biagini, is a flow of songs and actions based on the poetry Allen Ginsberg.  Members of this international group elaborated and composed all of the songs, approaching the meanings, rhythms and sounds of the spoken texts as the seeds of musical and dramatic creation. Their varied backgrounds generate a stylistically diverse body of music, drawing inspiration from blues, rock, pop, punk and traditional sources. The team weaves into Electric Party Songs its investigation of traditional songs from the Southern United States.

I AM AMERICA brings the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to life in a performance with language culled from Ginsberg’s poetry as well as calls, shouts and traditional songs from the U.S. South.  Original compositions by members of the Workcenter’s Open Program, developed in intensive collaboration over a period of three years, are placed in dialogue with these sources. The performance unfolds around fragments of Ginsberg’s poem America.

Grotowski + Performance Research is a yearlong program pivoting around the work of Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most influential theatre directors of the 20th century.  The program is presented by Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) and the Theatre Studies program at Yale University. The events are part of the Poland-U.S. Campus Arts Project, a program of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, Poland, and supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

***

Grotowski and the Workcenter Course

Theater Studies | Fall 2012/Spring 2013 | THST424/THST425

This yearlong course offers students a unique opportunity to gain historical, theoretical and practical insight into the work of Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most important and influential theatre directors of the 20th century. The fall semester will be devoted to a substantial historical and theoretical examination of Grotowski’s work.  In addition to an in-depth study of key texts, students will have an opportunity to see rare archival film documentation from various phases of Grotowski’s research.

The spring semester will function as a laboratory of performance research in which students will conduct practical research examining several lines of inquiry, such as embodied memory and its transmission, vigilance, and Grotowski’s notion of verticality – among others.  This investigation will integrate theoretical discussions and embodied research. Under the direction of Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini, Grotowski’s designated heirs, students will work on ancient African and Afro-Haitian songs of tradition and elements of the physical training developed at the Workcenter over the past twenty-five years.  While a research agenda will hold primacy in this course, students will also learn essential elements of the acting craft such as: the relation of precision to ogranicity; body resonators and spatial resonance; awareness of space; resonance of the voice; improvisation within a structure; and developing precise vocal and physical performance scores.

The spring semester will be structured around the residency of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards at Yale University.  Students will be exposed to the current practical work of both Workcenter performance teams.  The lab component of the course will also include five different Workcenter performances, public meetings, symposia, film screenings and work demonstrations.

Jerzy Grotowski revolutionized the way in which Western theatre practitioners conceive of the audience-actor relationship, theatre staging and the craft of acting.  Perhaps best known for his notion of ‘poor theatre,’ Grotowski’s practice extends beyond the confines of conventional theatre assuming a long-term and systematic exploration of the possibilities of the human being in a performative context.  In practical terms, Grotowski’s work explores the ways in which specific performative techniques unlock forgotten potentialities in the human being.  This course will undertake an in-depth exploration and analysis of Grotowski’s work and particularly its last phases, which draw most significantly on the traditional songs and ritual movement of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and examine the ways in which these performative techniques are deployed as tools in the work on oneself.

Using Grotowski’s performance research and practice as an aperture, students will also investigate diverse textual material from the Christian Gnostic tradition, such as the Gospel of Thomas and “The Hymn of the Pearl,” a poem from the Gnostic Acts of Thomas; the work of 17th Century German mystic Johann Georg Gichtel; the tradition of Kabala; G.I. Gurdjieff; Allen Ginsberg; and the writings of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz.  Drawing on source materials from ethnomusicology, anthropology, religious and performance studies, students will explore transnational performative practices including Haitian songs and ritual movements, such as the yanvalou; Hindu practices associated with the concept of chakras; and Slavic practices of vigilance.  The course will consider the commonalities and divergences of these diverse texts and embodied practices, propelled forward by an active questioning of the ways in which these textual materials and traditional praxes can be relevant for the individual today.

Meeting days and times:

THST 424 Fall 2012 – Fridays, 1:30-3:20 PM

THST 425 Spring 2013 – Fridays, 12:00-3:00 PM

Students will have additional lab hours during the Workcenter Yale Residency (February and March of 2013).

Course limited to 12 students.

Admission via interview/audition.  Acting experience not required.  Please contact instructor for more information about admission to the course:  dominika.laster@yale.edu

Joseph Roach, IPSY Principal Investigator, Sterling Professor of Theater and English

joseph.roach@yale.edu

A theater historian, stage director, and performance studies scholar, Joseph Roach is the author of The Player’s Passion:  Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), Cities of the Dead:  Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and It (2007).  He is the editor (with Janelle Reinelt) of Critical Theory and Performance (2nd edition, revised 2007) and Changing the Subject:  Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (2009).  His publications have been recognized by the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and the Joe E. Calloway Prize for Drama.  Before coming to Yale, he chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of Arts at NYU.

He is the recipient of a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funds the World Performance Project at Yale. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Warwick (UK) and the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship from the Huntington Library.

Dominika Laster

Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in Theater Studies at Yale University.  IPSY Postdoctoral Associate (2011-2013).

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is a native of Wrocław, Poland.  Her areas of research include:  20th century    theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.

Elise Morrison

Elise Morrison, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer

moreliserose@gmail.com

Elise received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011.

Her book project, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance, Feminism, Performance, looks at artists who strategically employ technologies of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance.

Elise has taught courses on this topic as a Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, where she also worked as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction and Preceptor in Expository Writing.  She is co-editing a special issue on “Digital Performance and Pedagogy” for theInternational Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media (Intellect), forthcoming in fall 2012.

As a practicing artist, Elise has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET, and, in collaboration with Molly Flynn and Michelle Carriger, created the live music-performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008).  She was a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence, RI from 2009-2011, where she taught acting, appeared in numerous productions, including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010), and developed original mixed media cabaret work.  She is currently developing a ‘Surveillance Cabaret’ in collaboration with Sleeping Weazel artist’s collective in Boston.  Elise is thrilled to be joining the Interdisciplinary Performance Studies program at Yale!

Lynda Paul – Postdoctoral Associate in the Integrated Humanities at Yale

lynda.paul@yale.edu

Lynda Paul is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Integrated Humanities at Yale. Her work examines the intersections between multimedia and performance, with a focus on the role of sound in genres from theater and opera to film and digital media. Her current book project comprises an interdisciplinary study of the live-but-technologized music and soundscapes of the Las Vegas Strip and its Cirque du Soleil shows. More broadly, her research centers on music in theater, performance studies, media theory, and popular culture, and raises questions about aesthetics, ideologies, and representations of fantasy, history, myth, and culture as they are manifested through the act and experience of musical performance in diverse societies and historical periods. She has presented her work at national and international conferences, and recently published a review of a Balinese production of Oedipus Rex (William Maranda’s Raja Edepus), a project that drew upon her practical experience with Balinese music, dance, and drama. Beyond Bali, she is a conservatory-trained instrumentalist and vocalist, and has been an avid practitioner of theater in diverse capacities for over two decades. As a vocalist, she is an enthusiastic performer of Baroque opera, American musical theater, and classical Western song, as well as the ensemble repertoires of Bulgaria, Corsica, Georgia, and the Sacred Harp. In addition to her research and performance pursuits, Lynda holds a keen interest in teaching, especially in the areas of interdisciplinary pedagogy and academic writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Cooper, Mellon Fellow in the History of Art Department, Graduate Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art

In 2006 John Cooper graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University where he read English. In 2008 he received an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and later that year took up a Mellon Fellowship in the History of Art department at Yale. John is currently a research assistant to Joe Roach at the Yale Center for British Art for the project ‘Art and the Stage in Britain: Inigo Jones to David Hockney’.

His dissertation is entitled Imperial Balls: An Art History of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England and the Caribbean, 1800-1850. It is a formal study of the aesthetics of movement across the worlds affected by British imperialism. It deals with nautch dancing in India, colonial ballet in England, and social dancing in the Caribbean. Treating dance performances as symbolic expressions of the social and political orders in which they take place, the dissertation examines the colonial translation of dances into images and objects for reproduction, circulation and possession. This leads to a critique of the ways British imperialism made expressions of itself in dance and dealt with the dancing of others.