April 19, 2016: Claire Solomon, Michael Garber, Katherine Hollander, Debra Caplan, and Alisa Sniderman

Collaborative Scholarship

What Can Theater Scholarship Learn from Theater? Methodology and a Collaborative Turn

In spite of seismic shifts in how scholars conduct and conceive of their research in the digital age, humanists still tend to research in isolation, publish single-author articles in journals, and rarely collaborate on peer-reviewed publications. For theater scholars, there is thus a massive disjuncture between how we produce our scholarship and how the works we study are created. Theater studies considers the cultural, historical, and literary dimensions of events that are intensely collaborative by definition; yet we rarely discuss or reenact this collective dimension in our scholarly writing. At the same time, collaborative forms and strategies are frequent topics of conversation among theater artists, since collaborative currents, and the obstacles that get in their way, are crucial elements of the production process. While there may not always be a relationship between methods and objects of study, we believe that collaboration is important both as a topic for theater scholarship and also in the methodologies we employ. The Working Group for the Study of Collaboration in Theater is committed to bridging the gap between theatrical practices and scholarly perceptions by theorizing scholarly collaboration. In this informal round table, we discuss our process and preliminary findings.

Michael G. Garber, PhD in Theatre, is an interdisciplinary teacher, historian, theorist, critic, and artist in drama, dance, music, film, and media. His book-in-progress is about the complex collective authorship of early twentieth-century American Broadway songs.

Debra Caplan is Assistant Professor of Theater at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on Yiddish theater and global artistic networks, and her work has appeared in Theatre SurveyTheatre JournalModern DramaNew England Theatre Journal, and Comparative Drama.

Katherine Hollander holds a PhD in modern European history from Boston University. Her work focuses on collaborative practices among a small group of German-speaking theater professionals in the 1930. Also a poet and librettist, she teaches at Simmons College.

Alisa Sniderman is Assistant Professor / Faculty Fellow in Drama at NYU Tisch. Her research centers on the intersection of theatre studies and economics, and her work has appeared in Modern Drama and Theatre Journal.

Claire Solomon is associate professor of Hispanic studies and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. Her book Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature 1880-2010 explores how the literary prostitute of the late nineteenth century incarnated racial, ethnic, and sexual tensions in tropes that have persisted into the twenty-first century. Her current research focuses on how the popular and the avant-garde overlap in “minoritarian” theater of the 1920s-40s in North and South America.

April 12, 2016: Vivian Huang

Inscrutability, Hospitality, and the Parasitic Performance of Laurel Nakadate

Notorious for staging scenarios that maximize awkwardness, Laurel Nakadate might be thought of as a contemporary artist who sculpts loneliness and discomfort as her materials of choice. As she once stated in an interview, Nakadate has a penchant for putting herself in places she does not belong, with people she seemingly does not belong with. The artist’s costars and subjects predominantly fall into one of two groups: the first, people whom one critic describes as “beer-bellied, awkward loners who seem remarkable mainly for how unremarkable they are,” and the second, pretty and bored teenage girls in domestic and rural spaces. Whether Laurel is accompanied or alone, however, the challenge and urge to belong remain recurrent themes in her work. While critics have described some of her co-stars as being pathetic and the activities practiced in her videos as exploitative, Nakadate has insisted that her work is optimistic and collaborative.

This talk will focus on Nakadate’s three-channel video installation Oops! (2000) in order to discuss the relationship among Asian/American femininity, inscrutability, and hospitality in her filmed encounters dancing alongside male strangers to Britney Spears’s 2000 smash hit. I will turn to writings on hospitality and the parasite by Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres to ask: if Orientalist discourse produces and eroticizes an affinity among Asianness, femininity, inscrutability, and hospitality, then can attunements to hospitality and inscrutability perform Asian femininity otherwise? How and when is inscrutability a useful aesthetic mode for minoritarian subjects, and can performances of inscrutability enact ethical modes of being?

Vivian L. Huang is currently the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She completed her doctoral work in performance studies at New York University and is working on her book manuscript entitled Some Island Unknown to the Rest of the World: Inscrutability and Asian American Performance. Huang’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies and Criticism: A Journal for Literature and the Arts.

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